One Alien Per Second: “5002 Space Aliens” Invades Streaming August 10

Let me explain what the first one actually was, because the concept is the whole pitch and it is genuinely deranged in the best possible way.

5000 Space Aliens consists of five thousand animated shots. Each shot lasts one second. The film therefore runs five thousand seconds, which works out to roughly eighty-three minutes. A narrator, in the persona of something called the Space Alien Commission, informs you at the outset that these aliens are living among us, that you should memorize all five thousand of them, and that you should then dispose of the evidence by eating the film.

That is the movie. There is no plot. There is no protagonist. There is a man in Beacon, New York, who decided the world needed this and then built it himself.

The sequel, 5002 Space Aliens, arrives on Apple, Amazon, and Google TV on August 10.

A One-Man Cottage Industry of Cosmic Nonsense

Here is the part that turns a novelty into an actual achievement. Scott Bateman did not direct 5000 Space Aliens in the conventional sense of overseeing a team. He animated every shot. He edited every shot. He composed and performed the entire score. Alone. From his house.

Getting there took about two and a half years of trawling the internet for raw material, and the sourcing list is where this tips from impressive into obsessive. He pulled home movies stretching from the 1920s to the present, television commercials spanning the sixties through the nineties, fashion films, dance videos, portraits from old photo studios in Venezuela, Bulgaria, and Romania, and scraps from a century-old psychology textbook. Then he animated, rotoscoped, distorted, and collaged the whole haul into five thousand discrete one-second creatures.

He also built a short film first, 600 Space Aliens, essentially as a proof of concept to see whether the idea held up in front of an audience. It did, and some of that footage and music carried over into the feature. That is a working artist testing a hypothesis, not a stunt.

It Is Secretly a Music Film

The reason it works, and it does work, is the score.

Watching five thousand unrelated images at one-second intervals should be an assault. Instead it becomes hypnotic, because Bateman’s electronic soundtrack imposes a rhythm the visuals lock into. More than one viewer has reached for the Koyaanisqatsi comparison, and it is apt in structure if not in tone. Philip Glass and Godfrey Reggio built a non-narrative film where music and image drove each other. Bateman does the same thing with vintage Bulgarian portrait photography and aliens.

Critics who caught it flagged the Terry Gilliam lineage in the cutout animation, particularly in the black-and-white photographic pieces, and that reference will tell you more about the experience than any synopsis. If you loved the interstitial animations in Monty Python and wondered what would happen if someone made an entire feature out of that impulse and scored it like a synth record, congratulations, that film exists.

The Weird Movie Circuit Adopted It Immediately

The reception was exactly what you would predict for something this specific. 5000 Space Aliens took Best Picture at the Medusa Underground Film Festival and landed at number seven on 366 Weird Movies’ list of the ten weirdest films of 2023, sharing that list with Beau Is Afraid and Infinity Pool. For a crowdfunded solo project from upstate New York, sitting on a year-end list alongside an Ari Aster picture is a genuinely funny outcome.

I should be honest about the viewing experience, though. This is a demanding watch, and reactions split accordingly. Some viewers describe being pulled back in every time their attention started to drift. Others admit they needed considerable chemical assistance to make it to the end. A film built from five thousand one-second images is going to work beautifully on some brains and bounce clean off others, and there is no point pretending otherwise. This is not a movie you put on for company.

But that is precisely what makes it worth championing. We have made the case before, most recently around Russ Meyer’s Up!, that a genuinely original artistic voice deserves preservation and serious attention even when the work is emphatically not for everyone. Outsider art is not a lesser category. It is often where the actual invention happens, because nobody is standing over the artist asking for the notes to be addressed.

Round Two, Same Signature

The sequel promises more of the same and more of it, expanding the population and the threat level while keeping Bateman’s hand-drawn oddities, deadpan narration, and general air of an apocalypse arriving during someone’s lunch break. His broader body of work has turned up on IFC and MTV and in newspapers, always with that same blend of satire and existential shrug.

Producer Lucas A. Ferrara deserves a mention too, if only because his career is its own oddity. He is a working New York attorney who has, since 2020, produced upwards of 175 independent projects. Bankrolling a one-man alien collage film is not the obvious use of a law practice, and the indie world is better for it.

August 10

5002 Space Aliens lands on Apple, Amazon, and Google TV on August 10. The original is still floating around streaming if you want to calibrate your tolerance first, and I would recommend doing exactly that.

Five thousand aliens was already an unreasonable number. Two more feels like escalation. Bring snacks, and remember the Commission’s instructions about what to do with the film when you are finished.