The makers of alien-invasion movies tend to have a low opinion of human military prowess. Sometimes the space invaders are so completely invincible that our only options are to heed their demands or perish utterly. (The Day the Earth Stood Still remains the archetypal example of this genre.) Sometimes they’re so invincible that mankind can be saved only by a bacterium ex machina, as in the endless adaptations of H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds. (M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs took this conceit to its illogical conclusion, by positing an alien race that invades our blue planet despite being mortally allergic to water.) And on the rare occasions when humanity’s armed forces actually figure out a way to defeat the alien menace, it nearly always involves some sort of ridiculous Hollywood conceit (think of the computer virus that Jeff Goldblum cobbles together to save humanity in Independence Day), rather than the grueling labor of an actual military campaign.
This means that nearly every flying-saucer movie comes with a major third-act problem. One minute the aliens seem all-conquering and invincible, and the next they’re being completely wiped out by Will Smith, or the common cold, or a glass of water to the face. The result is a genre that consistently teases, and just as consistently disappoints. Even Steven Spielberg’s recent take on War of the Worlds, which demonstrated that a well-crafted invasion story can harrow as well as thrill, squandered this achievement by recapitulating Wells’s cop-out of an ending.
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