What would happen if the alien encounters that befall so many comedic characters actually happened in real life? Answer: It wouldn’t be a comedy anymore.

The comic potential of the UFO contact subculture depends on its nuttiness. If there were a real experience of aliens, the nuts would have in some degree to cease being nuts — and, therefore, to cease being funny.

Barry Strugatz, the director of “From Other Worlds,” has cited influences like “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” “Cat People,” and “Rosemary’s Baby” for his new film, but I suspect he was really thinking of Dean Parisot’s “Galaxy Quest” (1999), in which a race of aliens at war with an evil, intergalactic warlord come to Earth to ask for help from the cast of a “Star Trek”-like TV show they think is real.

But “Galaxy Quest” was about heroism and pretense — and how the pretense of heroism can lead to the real thing. The film’s lightness of touch was its saving grace and was entirely owing to this anchor in the real world.

In other words, it didn’t matter whether the aliens were aliens or just any foreigners who didn’t understand what American TV culture was about. The point was that, out of their naiveté, they took something seriously that the TV show didn’t — and so made it serious again.

There’s nothing like that in “From Other Worlds.” The movie depends on the aliens being aliens — though there is only one of them onscreen. Not only does this give a sudden quasi-legitimacy to the cranks and nut-jobs who had been believing before there was any reason for them to believe, it leaves the movie with nowhere to go but into dull literalism.

Perhaps realizing that the contact group has so quickly exhausted its comic potential, Mr Strugatz pretty much lets it fall by the wayside and concentrates instead on the feeble quest story involving his two main characters, bored housewife Joanne Schwartzbaum (Cara Buono) and an immigrant cab driver from the Ivory Coast called Abraham (Isaach De Bankolé).

The MacGuffin here is the recently discovered and sole surviving scroll of the famous library at Alexandria, Egypt, burned with all its contents in the year 640. The scroll is supposed to be an alien artifact and is now in the possession of the Brooklyn Museum. When it is deciphered, the alien (Joel de la Fuente) informs them, its contents will “unlock the secrets of nature” and so create a destructive force that will “make the Dark Ages look like Disney World.”

Their mission, then, is to steal the scroll from the museum and substitute for it one that has “corrected our [the aliens’] great error.” The new information “will take the whole human race to the next evolutionary level.”

Yeah, I’m afraid they really mean that. Such adolescent portentousness out-Star Treks “Star Trek.” It’s one thing to make fun of cheesy science fiction. It’s another to become cheesy science fiction.

So, you see, this handsome couple is really out to (yawn) save the planet. The lameness of the plot is increased rather than diminished by sub-plots of ever more irritating irrelevancy having to do with keeping Joanne’s husband (David Lansbury) from finding out what they are doing and fending off an art thief posing as a federal agent (Robert Peters).

Up until the time when, two-thirds of the way into the picture, the dubious alien appears, supposedly looking like familiar TV and movie prototypes so that people can recognize him, nothing requires us to believe in real aliens or a real mission. But from that point on, any chance for seriousness or comedy goes whooshing out of it like air from a balloon.

Mr. Strugatz must have been relying on that all-important lifeline to reality for the now-familiar story of female frustration with domesticity summed up Joanne’s telling her shrink that “there’s something missing” in her life and she feels she’s “just going through the motions.” She’s “feeling lonely, unconnected, like I don’t belong there … like life is a cruel hoax.”

This, by the way, gives rise to the one sort-of funny line of the movie when the shrink prescribes some pills and says: “Don’t worry. Soon you will be happy. Or at least minimally functional.”

Of course, what lifts her out of her depression is not the medication but the excitement of the mission to save the human race with the new man in her life. Alas, real women who feel that “there’s something missing” are unlikely to feel much comfort in the hope of being contacted by aliens.

jbowman@nysun.com