First Contact / Film

• A major element of the B-plot in Star Trek: First Contact. It serves as the event that the crew of the Enterprise must prevent the Borg from sabotaging, since it was more or less what led to the creation of the United Federation of Planets. Zefram Cochrane, the inventor of Humanity's first warp drive gets cold feet when Riker and his fellow crew stranded on the surface tell him that it will happen because of him, but they eventually get him to come around, and the actual warp flight leaves him a man changed for the better, prepared to be how history remembers him in the event. For the record, Humanity's First Contact is with the Vulcans.
• The movie E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial takes a very Disney approach to this theme.
• Approached in a relatively similar vein to E.T. The Cat from Outer Space has humans make first contact with alien... cats.
• In Alien, First Contact takes place between a crew of space truckers who are more interested in a percentage than diplomacy, and an H.R. Giger-designed horror from the beyond the stars that just wants to share a Face Full of Alien Wing-Wong with them. They get along about as well as you'd expect^note  There are some subtle indications in the film that this might not be the first contact with alien life for humans, just the first contact with this particular alien species.
• In Independence Day, the aliens never make a formal First Contact other than trying to Kill All Humans. The closest it comes to a dialogue is when a captured alien takes telepathic control of a half-dead scientist for a pleasant chat with the President. The President asks if peace is possible; the alien curtly answers "no peace." When the President asks what they would like us to do, the alien simply responds, "Die."
• Close Encounters of the Third Kind: The various close encounters throughout the film are building up to this (the eponymous CE3K being actual contact with extraterrestrial life). It happens at the climax of the film starting with the sequence where the scientists try to communicate with the UFOs (through music).
• Mars Attacks!, the First Contact seemingly goes bad when the Martian ambassador mistakes a dove for an act of aggression and starts shooting up the American greeting party with his Death Ray. The alien expert tries for a more peaceful second contact and invites the ambassador to Congress, where he pulls out his Death Ray again and kills everyone. It turns out the Martians are just dicks.
• The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951): A flying saucer lands on the Mall in Washington DC. When the ominous humanoid alien comes out and approaches the military representatives that come to meet him with some sort of device in his hand the soldiers get spooked and shoot him. Turns out the device was not a weapon but held a formal message and the alien is just a Human Alien wearing a helmet.
• The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008), where the alien craft is initially thought to be a world-ending meteorite before it slows down and lands in Central Park. The craft is surrounded by US military only for all electronic equipment to shut down, when the craft emits an EMP wave. A humanoid figure comes out, but one of the soldiers freaks out and shoots at it. A huge humanoid robot comes out to protect the alien, only for the wounded alien to stop it from attacking the humans. The alien is taken to a secret government facility, where the bullet is removed and the wound treated. To the doctors' surprise, the alien's internal structure is identical to a human's. It turns out that the aliens specifically grew a body that would be able to survive on Earth. After awakening, the alien (named Klaatu) expresses his wish to speak with the UN, but the US Government has no intention of letting him leave the facility.
• The film Transformers has a sort-of First Contact when the explorer Archibald Witwicky discovers a slumbering Megatron in the early 20th century. Though Megatron is kept insensate, humanity gets a technological jump start from what they learn of his workings. More commonly seen first contacts take place later, when the Decepticon Blackout and his little friend Skorponok flatten a US military base in the Middle East, and the Autobots track down Archibald's descendant, Sam, and ask for an artifact from his ancestor. They learned their command of English from the Internet. Despite battling with the Decepticons in public, the Autobots are presumably covered up by the government, and they remain on Earth, in disguise, watching and protecting and waiting for their fellows to join them.
• District 9 handles this in a very interesting manner. Unusually for a mainstream film, it's the humans who oppress the aliens.
• In the Soviet cult classic Moscow — Cassiopeia, humanity receives a signal from a faraway star. The Soviet government builds a nuclear-powered relativistic spacecraft and crews it with high school kids, realizing that they would be adults by the time the ship arrives. However, a stowaway sits on the engine controls and somehow accelerates the ship beyond the speed of light. Long story short, they arrive to their destination in the blink of an eye (for them, at least) and encounter an alien ship. The Captain gets into a transparent dome on the hull and tries to communicate with the Human Aliens with hand gestures. They appear to understand and reply in kind. Later, the teens use a Universal Translator they brought to teach the aliens Russian in a matter of seconds. They find out that the aliens they met are the last of their race due to a robot revolt some time ago. Only those who were in space at the time escaped. The rest were "enhanced" by the machines by having their emotions removed, thus stopping procreation (apparently, love is a prerequisite for sex). The humans offer to help the aliens retake their homeworld.
  • Meanwhile, the same guy who sat on the controls (who is also Wrong Genre Savvy about aliens) ends up being a part of the landing party on the alien planet. While exploring a strange white column, he finds himself face-to-face with a pair of strange-looking Human Aliens with antennae and black jumpsuits. He also uses a Universal Translator to translate their whistles into Russian. He further tries to use math to communicate, but gets the formula wrong. One of the aliens corrects him and tells him "It happens to everyone." It's later revealed that these are actually Ridiculously Human Robots.
• Thor and The Avengers (2012) for the Marvel Cinematic Universe, since the Asgardians are revealed to be Sufficiently Advanced Aliens. The former is a rather low-key event which is covered up rather neatly by the agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.. The latter is a massive city-scale invasion that lets the entire world know they are not alone.
  • Captain Marvel (2019), which is a prequel to Thor and The Avengers, reveals that first contact with an alien civilization by modern-day humanity was actually with the warring Kree and the Skrulls in the 1990s. Like with the Asgardians, however, this incident was largely unnoticed and covered up, as only a few S.H.I.E.L.D. agents bore witness to the details.
• Oblivion: What the "Odyssey" mission was meant to be (meeting an unexplained space object near Titan). To say that it Went Horribly Wrong is a massive understatement.
• Man of Steel greatly deconstructs not only the concept of a superhero appearing for the first time, but humanity finding out that they're not alone and not even close to a match for their competition.
• In Prometheus the main characters' goal is to make first contact with the Engineers that created humanity. After waking the last surviving one up, he immediately attacks them and tries to wipe out humanity with the Engineers' bioweapon.
• In Pixels, humans attempt to make first contact with aliens. It goes catastrophically wrong when the aliens misinterpret the message of peace as a declaration of war.
• Arrival: around a dozen alien spaceships touch down on various places around Earth and then just... sit there. The story mainly revolves around humanity's attempts to work out some way to communicate with the aliens aboard the ships, and find out why exactly they've come to Earth.
• Ultraman Cosmos: The First Contact is set in an alternate universe where humans have not met any aliens or Ultramen before, until the events of the movie had extraterrestrial life (Ultras and Baltans in this case) revealing themselves to humans for the first time in-universe. The title is pretty much Exactly What It Says on the Tin.

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