Earth vs. the Flying Saucers Reviews

In light of Mars Attacks! it’s a bit difficult to watch Earth vs the Flying Saucers with a straight face, since Tim Burton’s homage/parody hybrid used it as the most obvious foundational subject. Still, once you get past that first batch of giggles, buckle up for a briskly paced piece of pulp science fiction in which death rays destroy D.C. and loads of military men. Please don’t come around here looking for brainy, politically-loaded science fiction around here, Earth vs the Flying Saucers merely wants to entertain and titillate with its steroidal B-movie charms.

 

While smarter contemporaries like Invasion of the Body Snatchers took Cold War paranoia (and good ol’ fashioned McCarthyism, which is making a disturbing resurgence of late) as a building block for a heavily symbolic nightmarish thrill-ride, Earth vs the Flying Saucers looks at that paranoia and imagines it ending in a parade of explosions and destruction. Rocket ships intended to collect information about the earth keep being knocked out of the atmosphere, and numerous locations around the world are reporting the appearance of UFOs hovering in the sky. Mounting dread and questions of “what if” lurk over these appearances as they’re quickly proven accurate and not the fevered imaginings of a hysterical public.

 

While prior Ray Harryhausen features played flirtatious with their monsters, keeping them hidden away until the money shots in the final reels, Earth vs the Flying Saucers lives up to its title by trotting them out within the opening minutes and routinely thereafter. From the knee-jerk military’s shoot-first reactions to the national monuments-go-boom finale, the flying saucers and aliens rain down death, destruction, and charm with their herky-jerky whirligig movements. The blueprints for future UFO invasion films like Independence Day is right here, although Harryhausen’s simplistic designs and creations are more memorable than many of those special-effects extravaganzas. 

Welcome back to Monsters Mash since the early days of science fiction UFOs has been the backbone of the genre either your a skeptic or a believer this is the UFO and this is the classic movie the plot is a blunt full scale alien invasion the stop motion effect were made by film legends Ray Harryhausen, Ray made the UFO to look like it tilts and give some chilling sound effect to give them and unearthly look, Harryhausen would have to paint the strings over and over like a chameleon today that would've been digitally removed but he had to do all the time. The final scene where the UFO attacks Washington D.C. is one of the most memorable scene in science-fiction cinema although no remakes has been made but there's two movies both made in 1996 that shared familiar plots the first one is Mars Attack by Tim Burton it's more of a monsters run em up film like Gremlins a bunch of silly goofy alien come down and attacks they even mocks the washington scene in Earth vs. the Flying Saucers it had an all-star cast Jack Nicholson, Danny Devito (whom the both work in in Tim Burton's Batman films) Glenn Close, Annette Bennning, and a young Natalie Portman. But the big one is Independence Day even though not a remake but it the closes thing the scene where the martians attack the white house is a memorable scene, it was also a in a line string of summer movies starring Will Smith. The Aliens look great not original but good anyway it just a dumb summer movie and if your is many about how we fought for our freedom lot of people complain it @$$ but if you want something more than the meaning of life your not gonna get but it shows that you can take an old idea and turn it new and that doesn't mean it's a remake.