
military and researchers across the globe investigate a sudden surge in UFO sightings and mysterious incidents. They leave him with a story no one believes and an inexplicable mental image of a mountain. The life of Roy Neary ( Richard Dreyfuss) is upended when UFOs fly over him in Muncie, Indiana. You can watch The War of the Worlds on Amazon Prime, HBO Max, or YouTube.Ĭlose Encounters of the Third Kind (1977).
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The film’s “ soul-chilling” special effects won an Oscar, and the American Film Institute ranked the Martians the twenty-seventh greatest movie villain of all time. At least moviegoers in 1953 knew that The War of the Worlds was fiction: When Orson Welles adapted Wells’s novel for radio in 1938, many listeners believed it was a real broadcast announcing a Martian invasion. The movie’s implicit theme is the Cold War fear of the “other” and of global conflict. Wells’s superb 1898 novel, director Byron Haskin follows a scientist and suburbanite, played by Gene Barry and Ann Robinson, as they frantically search for the Martians’ weakness.

World capitals are quickly overwhelmed, and defeat seems imminent. Rather, it is part of the first wave of a Martian invasion. It’s not, however, carrying friendly aliens. A UFO crashes in a small California town. You can watch it on Apple TV, Google Play, or YouTube. The Day the Earth Stood Still was awarded the now-retired Golden Globe for “ promoting international understanding.” The American Film Institute ranked it the fifth best sci-fi movie of all time. Producer Julian Blaustein said the movie advocated for a “stronger United Nations” as the nuclear arms race heated up.

Based on Harry Bates’s 1940 short story, “ Farewell to the Master,” and directed by Robert Wise, The Day the Earth Stood Still depicts benevolent aliens and heroic scientists, unlike 1951’s other popular sci-fi horror flicks, The Man from Planet X and The Thing from Another World. government rejects Klaatu’s demand to address world leaders, he escapes into Washington to learn about humans. He is carrying a message from an interplanetary organization: Humans cannot be trusted with nuclear weapons, and Earth must submit to the organization’s supervision or “face obliteration.” When the U.S. An alien named Klaatu ( Michael Rennie) lands behind the White House. We are also throwing in a bonus pick from a colleague. We do have five great movies to recommend about how UFOs and alien visitors could reshape the world as we know it. We don’t have a position on whether humanity has been visited by other residents of the universe. A recent Pew Research poll found that 51 percent of them believe that the military’s UFO/UAP sightings are likely evidence of extraterrestrial life. Regardless, most Americans look to have made up their minds on the matter.

The report, however, didn’t take a stand on whether aliens exist. Late last month, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a nine-page report revealing that, indeed, many flying objects can’t be explained. Second, UFOs-or if you prefer, Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP)-are in the news. First, filmmakers often use stories about UFOs and aliens as metaphors for personal and political relationships, showing how fear of the “other” can tear the world apart or bring it together.

Why start with films about UFOs and aliens? Two reasons. We’re kicking things off with a topic that has long captured the imagination of the public and Hollywood: unidentified flying objects (UFOs) and aliens. Third, each movie must be available to stream or rent online. So you won’t see 2016’s Arrival today because we recommended it last year. Second, we will only pick a movie for these summer lists once. But we won’t pretend to know what the best movies are in Italian, Japanese, or Spanish. Yes, many great foreign-policy movies have been made in languages other than English.
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The same rules from last summer’s series apply: First, we are limiting our choices to English-language films. We’ll post a new list every Friday until Labor Day. So we decided to revive the series of summer film recommendations we started last year. But even though we have more choices for what to do this summer than last, the heat and humidity of the season guarantee that most of us will still be spending plenty of time indoors. It’s possible-at least for now-to again eat at a restaurant, visit the movie theater, and go to the ballpark. At this time last year, most of us were hunkered down in our homes hoping that vaccines would arrive to save us from the COVID-19 pandemic. Summer is back! Thankfully, the United States is slowly reopening.
