Did Steven Spielberg plagiarise Satyajit Ray’s ‘The Alien’?
Throughout his career, Steven Spielberg has created several movies that have been eternally burned into the global cultural consciousness. While the likes of Saving Private Ryan and Jaws will always be remembered as pinnacles of American cinema, as far as science fiction and Spielberg goes, it’s hard to look beyond his iconic 1982 film E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial.
A tale of friendship that generates a sense of awe-inspiring wonder in its audiences even today, E.T. explores the magnificent bond between a young boy and a meek alien stranded on Earth, and together, they make it their personal mission to find the strange little creature a way back home.
There are several iconic moments in Spielberg’s film that could have only come from the mind of the master director, but upon closer inspection, there seems to be a potential for plagiarism that surrounds the legendary Indian director Satyajit Ray and his unproduced science fiction film The Alien.
Allegations against Spielberg concerning Ray’s film have caused much controversy around the legendary Hollywood director. The Alien was written by Ray in the 1960s but never actually made its way into production because of financial and logistical issues, but when E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial arrived in 1982, those in the know about Ray’s work noticed some striking similarities.
The Alien was looks based on Bankubabur Bandhu, a story Ray had written for his family’s magazine, Sandesh, in 1962. It told of a spaceship crashing into rural Bengal and the alien that emerges from its wreckage, who befriends a young boy and proceeds to play a series of pranks on the local village’s inhabitants. Sound familiar?
For starters, there is a remarkable resemblance between E.T. and The Alien in that both films feature an extra-terrestrial being that crash lands on Earth and forms a friendship with a young boy. Equally, in both films, that very alien is chased down by the authorities, who want to study it from a scientific perspective, but the young protagonist seeks to protect his new space-faring friend.
In addition, both aliens are depicted as being kind and benevolent, with childlike innocence and curiosity for the world it has landed on, while interactions with human beings lead to instances of personal growth and understanding. Most remarkably, though, there seem to be instances within Ray’s screenplay that correlate with Spielberg’s movie, like its main characters riding through the air on bicycles to evade the authorities – undoubtedly one of E.T.’s most memorable moments.
When Ray saw E.T., he claimed that Spielberg’s film “would not have been possible without my script of The Alien being available throughout America in mimeographed copies,” but Spielberg denied the claims of plagiarism, noting, “I was a kid in high school when his script was circulating in Hollywood.”
It’s never been fully confirmed whether or not Spielberg indeed ripped off Ray’s film, but considering its potential, it’s important to consider the fact that Spielberg had indeed named Ray as an influence. In that light, it’s likely that Spielberg had been inspired by The Alien when writing E.T., rather than completely plagiarising it.
The idea of an alien visiting Earth is also pretty common in the science fiction genre, so Spielberg was merely contributing to the genre and adding to its rich tradition and not just taking another artist’s work as his own. Both films, therefore, comprise the legacy of science fiction cinema and detail the human interest in worlds far beyond our own.