The question of whether or not we’re alone in the universe probably won’t be answered in my lifetime, but that doesn’t stop Hollywood from posing various possibilities to the inevitable alien-human showdown. Although I hope it will go smooth and we’ll all get along swimmingly, chances are better that it would be an all out war. For the purpose of this list, I chose to ignore the heroes and science-fiction weaponry in the films and pretend that only the aliens are real.
So with that in mind, here are a list of ten movie aliens I hope we don’t have to face off with during an alien invasion.
10. E.T. – Sure, he seems sweet and innocent, but remember that humans never really had a showdown with him and the dude can heal flowers. Which means he and his ilk can probably heal themselves, which is going to make killing them hard, or at the very least, time consuming.
9. Stitch from LILO AND STITCH – Is it possible for an alien species to invade and just annoy humans to death? If so, then I think that would be the strategy Stitch would take. The little blue alien that Disney probably regrets was feisty and obnoxious, but if he invaded with a million of his friends, I think Earth would be in trouble.
8. The Thing – Again, this is one that we would need some serious numbers in order to take seriously. One Thing isn’t going to do much more than piss a lot of happy dog owners off. But imagine a spaceship dropping off a million Things into NYC? I’m not sure how we deal with that.
7. The aliens from SKYLINE – SKYLINE is a horrible movie, but it makes this list because this is how I think an alien invasion would actually go down. It would take a week or two and we’d launch a couple of missiles, but at the end of the day, if you have the capability to invade a planet, you’re going to beat us. At least the SKYLINE aliens made it quick.
6. The Decepticons from TRANSFORMERS – Face it; without the Autobots, Earth wouldn’t stand a chance against the Decepticons. The thing that separates them from, say the aliens in SKYLINE, is that we as earthlings would probably think we’d have a chance and would put up a long, drawn out fight. That makes their invasion worse and more terrifying. And without Michael Bay to make everything feel patriotic and epic, it just seems depressing.
5. Predator – I wrestled with this one for a while because the Predators are a mean, ruthless bunch. But their hankering for sport makes them weak in my eyes, especially if we’re talking invasion. I’m also not sure how many of them there are, since we’ve never seen more than a handful at a time. If it’s 100 of them versus the entire earth, then I like our chances. But if it’s a million of them versus earth, then we’d be in trouble.
4. The Tripods from WAR OF THE WORLDS – This is another tough one because technically (Spoiler Alert), the aliens can’t breathe earth’s air and therefore aren’t interested in staying, but how much damage would they really do before they realize that? And that’s just one possible outcome. My guess is that the aliens do some research beforehand, figure out some breathing apparatus and invade anyway. I don’t really like our chances against them.
3. The body snatchers from INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS – Maybe this one is a personal fear of mine, but the aliens in this film do more psychological damage than physical. I’d like to believe that we’d be able to come up with some sort of scanner that would detect when they take over a body, but how long would that take? And how are we going to make something like that if we’re too scared to go to sleep?
2. Alien – I question the intelligence of the aliens from the ALIEN franchise, but what scares me about them is the sheer numbers and how fast they procreate. That could be a problem for humans. The good news is that we have weapons that can kill them, which is a plus. The bad news is that they have big spaceships.
1. General Zod, Non and Ursa from SUPERMAN II – I know this might seem like an odd choice, but hear me out; without Superman, we’d be screwed because we’re basically facing off against three Supermans. And remember, for the sake of this article, I’m imagining a world where the aliens are real, but the heroes and weapons in the films are not. With that in mind, we’d have no chance against these three. Numbers don’t come into play here because they would even that out pretty quickly. I guess if there’s a bright side, it’s that they probably wouldn’t destroy the earth and the humans, they’d just make us all their slaves. So there’s that.
