It was a great directional achievement by Don Siegal and it was ahead of its time in many ways. Dr Miles Bennett is the protagonist and he recognises that the people in his small Californian town are being cloned by an alien species of emotionless human duplicates. Invasion of the Body Snatchers is the ultimate paranoid sci-fi thriller. The special effects were groundbreaking at the time and it has influenced a number of films through the decades. These aliens don’t take any prisoners, as any human that stands in their way is instantly disintegrated. The protagonist Clayton Forrester searches for a way to stop them taking over the world. The Martians in the original are old-school and attack from the sky. In The War of the Worlds, Earth is invaded by Martians, but unlike the 2005 remake, they don’t rise out of the ground in tripods. It’s an intelligent film – a direct allegory for the real nuclear threats at the time – yet it still manages to be suspenseful and fun. There are some aliens that really do come in peace! Klaatu, an alien that looks human travels to Earth from a faraway planet in The Day The Earth Stood Still. He doesn’t want to hurt anyone, he’s friendly and has come to give humanity an important message. John Carpenter’s 1982 remake is just as effective and in that version, the ‘thing’ takes the form of other crew members. It’s also a clever study of Cold War fears, which was the driving force behind most of the 1950s sci-fi films. We don’t see the alien for a large chunk of the film, which keeps you in an unnerved state of mind. It excellently builds suspense through the unknown. When I watched it, I didn’t find it as cheesy as I thought it would be. ![]() The Thing From Another World (1951)Ĭhristian Nyby and Howard Hawkes (uncredited) directed The Thing From Another World, a B-movie about a US Airforce crew and a team of scientists, who are terrorised by a humanoid, plant-based alien. It’s all a matter of opinion, but the below five films are recognised as classics. That’s exactly why I’ve put together this list of alien invasion films, most of which I watched at uni. If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you’ll know I love bringing attention to old films. I have restricted the following list to films about aliens on Earth. And I’m not surprised either: how can anyone resist the lure of escapist spectacle and the chance to reflect on the unknown? Let’s talk sci-fi, specifically the alien invasion sub-genre! Ever since the 1950s – the decade which saw the sci-fi genre really take off – audiences and mainstream filmmakers have been mad about the idea of aliens invading Earth.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |