The Best Alien Invasion Movies Of The 21st Century
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Steven Spielberg helped to reinvent the extraterrestrial visitor genre by making movies in which the aliens were friendly and enjoyed things like synth music and beer.
Almost 50 years later, the legendary filmmaker returns to the genre this summer with Disclosure Day, a movie in which Emily Blunt stars as a weather reporter alongside a group of UFO whistleblowers played by Josh O’Connor, Colman Domingo, and Colin Firth. What's more, Spielberg basically invented the summer blockbuster with Jaws but he hasn't had a summer release since The BFG, which was ten years ago.
All of which got us thinking: if we put aside the era of those early Spielberg classics for a moment, what have been the best alien invasion movies of this century so far? The list below, I’ve rounded up a selection that includes comedy, horror, a found footage masterpiece, some of the biggest blockbusters of their time, and two low-budget indies.
It might not be the sharpest or most thought-provoking knife in the drawer, but if you’re looking for a hearty dose of action, Battleship is kind of an underappreciated gem. It doesn't quite make it into the top ten alien invasion movies of the century, but it's close.
When the film was released in 2012, it was quickly dismissed as an IP cash grab by critics who’d grown tired of Michael Bay’s OTT Transformers movies; but seen today, the film’s straight-faced delivery and practical effects (up to and including shooting on real aircraft carriers) make it feel like a throwback to an earlier action age.
The story follows a group of Navy vessels and their rogue commander as they go to battle against a swarm of hostile aliens in the Pacific. Alexander Skarsgård, Liam Neeson, Jesse Plemons, and Rihanna make up the seriously overqualified cast.
Sixteen years after breaking out with Monsters (which was made with a budget of only $500,000), Garth Edwards remains a bit of a mystery to most critics — a director with an unmatched ability to communicate scale in his movies (just think of the final battle in Rogue One or those sky lasers in The Creator) but who also struggles a bit when it comes to writing compelling characters.
Like Edwards’ best work, however, there is just too much intelligent filmmaking going on in Monsters for this to matter. The story follows a man and a woman as they navigate the so-called “infected zone” where tentacled aliens have been quarantined around the border of the U.S. and Mexico.
Around the end of the ‘00s, as CGI became more available and affordable, we started to see a great run of sci-fi and alien movies coming from lower budget filmmakers. In the UK alone, there was Gareth Edwards' Monsters in 2010 (more on that in a moment) as well as the comedy movie Attack the Block — a movie that follows a group of London teenagers fending off an alien invasion in their council estate — the following year.
The movie was written and directed by Joe Cornish (from The Adam and Joe Show) but it arrived very much on the back of Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. Wright would do his own alien invasion comedy with The World’s End two years later, but this one still trumps it in my opinion. It also was the breakout moment for John Boyega, who went on to land a dream role in Star Wars: The Force Awakens four years later.
M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs, like a few of the director’s movies (think Trap, Old), falters a bit when it comes to explaining itself, but everything up to that moment is a knockout.
There are also wonderful performances from Joaquin Phoenix, Abigail Breslin, and Rory Culkin to enjoy, which is not something we should take for granted in an alien movie. The birthday party sequence, in which we get our first glance of what the movie has been masterfully teasing all along, is still one of the most shocking moments in any alien invasion movie.
Given the inherent potential for creepiness, it’s surprising how few horror movie directors have gone down the alien invasion route in the last 25 years or so. One of the best and most recent was No One Will Save You, a 2023 movie starring the great Kaitlyn Dever that was a bit of an elevated horror (a la Hereditary) take on the genre — and yes, that means capital-T trauma very much plays a role.
The movie (which has almost no dialogue) follows Dever’s reclusive character Brynn as she fends off a slew of alien intruders while her neighbours get their bodies snatched.
If you’re looking for something closer to the early Spielberg model of alien encounter movies, Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival should be right up your alley — it’s a film full of wonder, suspense, and incredible images, but with a benevolent message at its core. This is the director who went on to make Dune and Dune: Part Two, and if you’re a fan of those movies and their doom metal aesthetic, you’ll likely vibe with this one, too.
Adapted from Ted Chiang’s wonderful short novella, Story of Your Life, the movie follows a celebrated linguist (played by Amy Adams) as she and a small team attempt to communicate with a group of heptapod aliens who have just arrived on our planet in their shell-like spaceships.
The second low-budget movie on our list is The Vast of Night, an indie gem that premiered in Slamdance in 2019 before being picked up by Amazon a few months later. The movie takes place in New Mexico in the 1950s, where a radio DJ and a switchboard operator both start to pick up a strange frequency.
This one is based loosely on some unusual occurrences that happened around that time, so if you like a little real-world conspiracy thrown into the mix with your alien stories, this could be the one for you. It’s also a great example of the kind of wonder and excitement that can be created without the need for expensive visual effects.
We basically learn nothing about the aliens in Edge of Tomorrow, or how they got to earth, or what they want — but, of course, it doesn’t matter. The movie, in which a soldier played by Tom Cruise is able to continuously die and reset using time travel, a bit like in a video game, is an all-out action stomper that’s also smart and inventive in its own ways.
This one also saw the first big blockbuster role for Emily Blunt, so if you can’t wait to see her in Disclosure Day, this one should keep you going at least until June 12th.
With Close Encounters, Spielberg made the best Alien movie of the 1970s, then he did the same for the ‘1980s with E.T. After that, he largely took a break from other worlds to focus on our own, before returning to science fiction with a bang in the early ‘00s with A.I., Minority Report and War of the Worlds —the latter being a 9/11-influenced invasion movie that boasts some of the most incredible sequences and images of the director’s long career.
The movie was just the second big screen adaptation of H.G. Wells’ story (the less said about the most recent, the better), and while it loses a bit of steam in the third act and ends a bit abruptly, everything that comes before is truly astonishing.
With two movies and a prequel already released (and a trilogy closing third very much on the way), John Krasinski’s A Quiet Place franchise has been one of the great original IP success stories of the last ten years of movies. The premise is simple: what if an alien invasion happened but the intruders hunted with their ears instead of their eyes?
From this creepy seed, Krasinski has written and directed two movies that are as much about family (and yes, his wife Emily Blunt is in this one, too) as they are fine examples of nerve-shredding horror and dystopian science fiction. Michael Sarnoski’s prequel, Day One, starring Lupita Nyong'o, has even more action in it, but it also has things to say about grief. We look forward to the climax (which is set to feature the great Jack O’Connell) with much anticipation.
