10 Alien Invasion Movies Where Humanity Loses
You see them on the street. You watch them on TV. You might even vote for one this fall.
The alien invasion movie is a time-honoured genre classic, spanning sci-fi, horror, drama, and even romance. While in its early years, the invasion movie reflected pop culture’s most prevalent images - the flying saucer, the little green men - over the course of the past half century, directors like James Gunn, Alex Garland, and John Carpenter have overhauled and redefined our expectations.
Whether aliens arrive overhead with ships and tractor beams, piggy-back on meteors, or are found buried in the ground or already living among us, they are here to stay. And there are more than a few films where that ain’t such a good thing.
These are the films where aliens arrive on Earth and manage to meet their ends, taking over either overtly or subtly, laying waste to us, or finding ways to slip detection and assimilate humanity. Sometimes it’s all-out warfare and a grand defeat, losses big and small, in total destruction and hostile takeover; sometimes it is a last-minute stinger that shows we're doomed after all, with presumed-dead aliens surreptitiously entering our society and continuing to procreate or subsume the planet.
Here are the 10 weird and woeful ways alien invasion movies have made sure humanity is on the wrong side of the struggle.
10. The Host (2013)
Right at the tail-end of Twilight fever, film execs jumped on the chance to keep the cash flowing by bringing Twil-author Stephenie Meyer’s 2008 YA novel The Host to the big screen. What the film lacks in plot and character, it doesn’t make up for with anything, but at least it minimally compensates for our wasted time with a bold new approach to the alien invasion narrative.
A romance sci-fi thriller, The Host stars Saoirse Ronan as Mel Stryder, a young adult who is captured and infused with an alien parasite creatively called a “Soul”, which imbues her with a second personality: Wanda the Wanderer. The action proceeds with Mel fighting for control of her own body, and while this potent opportunity for social commentary is sadly lost in the mishmash of a screenplay that follows, one thing is for sure: invading aliens have never had it so good.
All in all, the human race is taken over - almost to a man - by the parasitic Souls, which aside from Mel tend to do a factory reset on the bodies they occupy, erasing the human consciousness but retaining the memories. Although the film offers some hope at its conclusion, once Mel has joined up with a small resistance of unassimilated humans and discovered there are a handful of Souls willing to share their headspace, there is no denying humanity has taken a big ol’ L.