Last year here at Movie Smackdown we got the idea to see what readers thought was the Best Alien Invasion Film of All Time. We thought that the genre really broke down into two sections — “Classic” and “Modern.” And so we did what we always do in these cases, we put it to our readers and let them weigh in.
We have two winners now, and we’re about to put them to the test against each other. For our purposes, we defined “Classic” as all the films that existed in the early 1950-1970 period (although all our candidates came from the 1950s), and “Modern” as everything that followed. Interestingly, fully half of our “modern” films were re-makes from the “classic” era. The “Classic” race was a close as hell, the “Modern” race yielded a clear winner. Here are our results:
So there you have it. The Ultimate Alien Invasion Smackdown pits Independence Day from 1996 against the original The War of the Worlds from 1953.
Of course, you could argue that we should submit the two winners into a final Smackdown but, the truth is, that’s a foregone conclusion. New will always beat out old because the majority of readers simply weren’t alive when The War of the Worlds came out originally and most haven’t even seen it. So, instead, we asked SmackRef Rodney Twelftree to bravely volunteer to step into the breach (defined as watching them both again back-to-back) and render us a final Smackdown verdict.
Check out our new Smackdown! of the Alien Invasion titans:
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