Re: What about Chocky?
Triffids weren't aliens. We made them.
Earlier this week, alien hunters donned their tinfoil hats for World UFO day and with Yanks celebrating Independence Day today, the topic of extra-terrestrial takeover lingers in the air. The public has even been debating who would be best equipped to tackle an alien invasion. Whether that's Mr. Obama, his political opponent or …
The Kraken Wakes is one of the best alien invasion stories ever written. Not purely for the well-thought out attack or for the acknowledgement that the aliens may actually have different environmental needs than us, but for humanity's inability to operate on the time-scales necessary to counter the alien threat. There's a conversation in it where the viewpoint characters who are journalists, interview a scientist (Professor Brock?) who completely fails to understand how the general public aren't alarmed by the same things he is alarmed by. Quite chilling and far too believable.
+1. Spot on. John Wyndham has long been among my favourite sci-fi writers because his scenarios are so far beyond the obvious straight-on battlefleets-in-the-sky idea most folks seem to favour. I have to admit a weakness for the slightly twee characters as well, but they're proper characters with believable voices.
I'm not sure whether to be relieved or disappointed that nobody's done a movie of The Kraken Wakes. If it were done well it could be spectacular (the night of the sea-tanks?) but some idiot would ruin it with 3-d effects (tentacles whipping out at the viewer... Yawn...) and flying monsters. If it watched like it read, I'd go see it...
The Alien Invasion episode was Quatermass II, where the aliens descend in aerodynamic capsules and take over the population of a small village 6 miles from Carlisle ( actually Hemel Hempstead )
The only acceptable version of War of the Worlds was the 1953 version by George Pal, the 2005 remake had the wrong story, the wrong location and the wrong cast, I'm still waiting for somebody to film this true to the original book.
How you can describe any remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers magnificientis a huge fail, nothing comes close to the original Don Siegel version.
and some you missed, on the basis of actual invasion by aliens...
Village of the Damned
Plan 9 from Outer space
and... To Serve Man by Damon Knight ( Twiglet Zone 1962 )
In 1953, when the first movie version of 'War of the Worlds' was made, it had the distinction of being the Only Film in the History of Hollywood in which US Marines were defeated.
But what I'm more upset about missing from this list is daleks and cybermen...
Cybermen don't qualify. They're not aliens, they're technologically-created zombies.
Daleks really should be on the list, though. Any Dr. Who saves Earth from Daleks sequence beats "Independance Day" on every front, including plot intelligence and plot believability.
Doctor Who has had an alien invasion of Earth pretty much every week - Daleks trundling across Westminster Bridge, Yetis in the Underground, Krynoids lurking round Mick Jagger's mansion, mummies lurching around the same mansion, Julian Glover pulling his face off in Paris, and Cybermen (yes they are aliens) stomping around St. Pauls just being some of the better ones.
The original was pretty good. The remake, with Keanu Reeves planking the lead role, is sort-of-OK too, though Jennifer Connelly is wasted (i.e. not a cleavage-lifting satin dress in sight). It begins with the old staple of a sudden rush to gather experts together in secret because, as everyone knows, whenever a culture meets a technologically superior culture the inferior one is always completely wiped out. Which if you actually stop to think about it is a distinctly american-centric paranoid-power-mad point of view, that doesn't actually pan out when you consider worldwide history; or just listen to Paul Simon's 'Graceland' album.
Come back when you've gained a couple of PhDs (back when that was hard), been an advisor to a US president on SDI and other stuff, been Barry Goldwater's campaign manager, started the world's first blog (before the word "blog" existed and which is still going strong today), written a shed load of successful novels in your own right, edited Survivalist magazine, been a contributing editor/columnist for Byte (which you're probably too young to remember) and a shed load more that I can't be bothered to type and say that.
We'll still think that you're an idiot.
It's "leeching" not "leaching", unless you're claiming that JP has a business extracting metals by converting them into soluble salts in an aqueous media contained in Niven's cellular membranes.
Which would be technologically impressive, I'll grant, but is probably not what you were trying to say..
District 9 has basically the same premise as Alien Nation: Aliens are stranded on Earth and become a new lower class.
As for War of the World adaptations, I quite like the Marvel comic book series that shows Earth under Martian rule after a 2nd invasion. It started out being called "War of the Worlds" but was later named after its lead character "Killraven". A similar premise is used in John Cristopher's Tripod series. So it would be fairly safe to say that WotW has been the inspiration of quite a few alien invasion stories.
I recommend the graphic novel adaptation by Ian Edginton and D'Israeli
http://www.darkhorse.com/Books/13-190/H-G-Wells-The-War-of-the-Worlds-HC
plus they did two sequels which showed the effect Martian Technology had on the British Empire - excellent stuff!
Not forgetting Volume II of The league of Extraordinary Gentlemen...
Kubrick only read Childhood's End in the latter stages of 2001 production - and so liked it, he wanted to change the ending.
But fortunately this was downvoted by AC.Clarke. These days 2001 is presented as being written "during the filmmaking" but at the time 2001 was a development of "The Sentinel" short story and the book was (chicken-and-egg) written prior to the film.
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