And that message was "swing away" baby!
Posted on 04/14/2018 2:13:23 PM PDT by Rummyfan
What is the first thing you think of when you think of an alien movie? Does Sigourney Weaver's bald head pop into your mind as you picture her battling extraterrestrials in Alien 3? Or do you think of something unconventional, like Cloverfield or District 9? The alien genre is one that has certainly evolved over the years as special effects and computer-generated images have improved far beyond anyone's wildest dreams. But the fact of the matter is that for an alien movie to be good (actually, for any movie to be good), it has to tell a really good story, have character development, and be entertaining. Even the most beautiful film can be terrible if you just don't care about the people (or aliens) that you're watching.
Here are my picks for the best alien movies—for various reasons—dating back to 1982. I don't believe that older necessarily means better, but I also don't believe that higher budget means better either. See what you think.
(Excerpt) Read more at pjmedia.com ...
“What Planet are you From?” starring Gary Shandling.
IMO
10. They Live
09. The Fourth Kind
08. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1970s version)
07. Predator
06. Aliens (2nd movie of 3)
05. Independence Day
04. The Thing (Kurt Russel)
03. E.T.
02. Contact
01. Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Where’s The Mysterians?
‘The Invaders’ was good, but I was a little you when it was on. wish ME or H&I would pick it up, I like the Original ‘V’ and the original ‘Battlestar Galactic’ better than the remakes
I’m not a Tom Cruise fan, but I kind of liked his version of “The War of the Worlds.” It had kind of a 9/11 feel to it. I also liked the original Gene Barry version.
Wow. You’re a tough audience.
Well, it the lame movie Galaxy Quest makes the cut, then Mars Attacks should as well.
Ice Pirates
I have The Invaders on DVD; I was in high school when it originally aired.
And that message was "swing away" baby!
Sold a lot of records for Slim Whitman...People putting them away for the invasion...LOL
Martinis. Delicious.
Almost forgot, Sean Connery in
‘Outland’
OK, I’ll check it out.
The original TV series was quite good for the first few episodes, then went really badly downhill.
The feature film? When I bought my first DVD player, Magnavox had a surprise DVD included in the box, and it was “Lost in Space,” with Mimi Rogers and Matt LaBlanc. Somebody owes me money for the hour and a half I wasted trying to watch that horrible movie.
But I’ll check out the Netflix version, based on Freeper recommendations.
Mark
AlienS absolutely. The second in the series, but the best one.
Avatar was amazing to watch, the story, not so much.
I LOVE Galaxy Quest. I just watched it again the other day. Sigourney Weaver is HOT as a blonde!
Contact, great acting, weak ending.
Arrival (2016) is an excellent SF film that didn’t do well at the box office. Despite scoring 94% with film critics and 82% with audiences at Rotten Tomatoes, its long length (2 hours), a non-sexy female lead (Amy Adams as a frumpy linguistics professor), and its cerebral theme (understanding an alien language) put this film well outside the Star Wars / Guardians of the Galaxy popcorn film demographic. Both this film and Blade Runner 2049 (another underappreciated SF film) were directed by Denis Villeneuve.
The structure of the film is similar to Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse Five (1969) in that the entire story takes place from a single POV (the linguistics professor Dr. Louise Banks) in non-linear order. The theme is simple: How do you communicate with aliens? Where do you even begin? Start with math you say? Fine, but what about concepts? Ideas? Pronouns? Verbs? Where do you even start?
A good hour of the film is spent on this language learning process, which I found to be absolutely fascinating (and would probably bore the popcorn crowd to tears). The filmmakers worked out a complete and logically consistent vocabulary for the weirdest language I’ve ever seen.
Louise, who is brought in by the US military as the best civilian linguist/translator available, explains to Colonel Weber that the word ‘kangaroo’ comes from a historical misinterpretation that actually means “I don’t understand you”, the response given by the aboriginals in Australia to explorer James Cook when he asked the natives what the big hopping animal with the pouch was called. (The story is actually apocryphal and Louise admits it, but the point was well made.) She later dubs the two primary aliens ‘Abbot’ and ‘Costello’ after the comic duo and their famous “Who’s on first?” comedy routine as an ironic reminder to herself about the dangers of miscommunication.
Louise explains that learning another language can change the way you actually think. This happens to Louise in the final act, where she learns to think like the aliens do, resulting in a nice plot twist and a poignant ending.
I was a bit annoyed at how the military was caricatured with the usual Hollywood cliched shoot-first-ask-questions-later mentality (particularly with one dumb action scene), but it didn’t detract from the main story.
This a great film if you like thoughtful/hard SF, and I highly recommend it.
Jerry lewis and “Visit to a Small Planet”
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