Richard Carlson is the scientist to whom the aliens - who are “body snatchers” and at first appear malevolent - reach out as they try to repair a ship that crash-landed in the desert. It’s closely connected to The Day the Earth Stood Still, although on a smaller scale. Will the aliens be driven to destroy mankind? Alas, we’re not ready for him or his amazing giant robot, Gort. Klaatu (Michael Rennie) is an advanced being who wants to save the Earth from itself. The Day the Earth Stood Still is the most poetic exemplar of liberal sci-fi.
(Were they Commie dupes? So said some!) And there were militaristic xenophobes who saw aliens as representing the Commie menace. There were liberals with a longing for a utopian world who saw the principal threat as mankind’s warmongering and its new atomic technology.
Now it’s the dad who has to be a dad, in one devastating scene forced to kill a man (Tim Robbins) who has lost his own family and is bent on mindless retaliation.īroadly speaking, ‘50s sci-fi filmmakers could be split into two political camps. It’s a reversal of Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, in which the aliens are welcoming, beatific, and harmoniously musical - like ideal parents. (In this case, of course, it’s a tiny germ.)Īs good - though very flawed, with a botched ending - is Steven Spielberg’s terrifying, post-9/11 reimagining from 2005, the attack seen from the vantage of a father (one of Tom Cruise’s best performances) determined to protect his children from both aliens and the social chaos in the wake of the invasion. Wells’s connection between these aliens and us - i.e., murderous colonialists destined to be defeated by elements of the native population they can’t foresee. No one can forget the implacable cruelty of its alien rays, which instantly reduce soldiers and bystanders (and even a praying priest) to outlines of ash on the ground. Clunky though it is, the 1953 George Pal film remains a stunning achievement. Wells’s classic novel in the popular imagination - although subsequent investigations suggest that the broadcast did not create the kind of mass hysteria that became central to its legend. Orson Welles’s 1938 Mercury Theater of the Air broadcast cemented H.G. They are all must-sees! (Surprise: The first Independence Day didn’t make the list.)ġ4. I’d intended these films to be in chronological order, but it made more sense to consider remakes side by side with originals and to make connections between themes. And who can forget all the encounters between aliens and multiple incarnations of Dr. Nonetheless, the alien-invasion genre has been enriched by Star Trek’s Borg collective, even if they’ve never reached Earth the post-invasion civil liberties dramas of the second coming of Battlestar Galactica and the various alien mythologies hinted at in The X-Files, though they owe an unacknowledged debt to Nigel Kneale’s Quatermass series, particularly the 1967 Quatermass and the Pit.
#OLD MARTIAN MOVIE TV#
(Though any list of this sort should by rights include TV shows, they’re outside my purview. because even with its ship and its extraterrestrials it’s too exquisite to bruise with a genre label. The criteria are that they have to center on an attack or perceived attack and that the aliens can’t be repelled by Godzilla (as in Destroy All Monsters!) or Marvel superheroes. In the interest of pretending it doesn’t exist, let’s direct our attention to something more fun: an admittedly idiosyncratic list of the best alien-invasion movies. Independence Day: Resurgence opened to just over $40 million this weekend, which is roughly how much you’d have to pay me to watch it again. Photo: MGM, Warner Bros., Paramount Pictures
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