Watch Earth vs. the Flying Saucers For Free

Admirable film.

A waste of 90 minutes of my life

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

The first must-see film of the year.

I was just going to say "Screw this movie." and leave it at that but I can't. This crapfest is truly terrible on many levels. I watched this 3 times to make sure i saw it right,unfortunately I did. The main characters have gotten married without telling anyone.They tell the woman's dad(an army general) on the phone and then hang up on him. They apparently work for NASA or something,the movie is very unclear about that. Just like in a million other movies,aliens are invading. And just like in those other movies,they can speak every Earth language but can barely walk. Half of the movie is spent explaining why something stupid just happened,while the rest is spent sucking. The aliens send a message to the main character and he doesn't even know it.So they just attack. After the first attack they ask the general why the guy ignored their message. Then they give the earthlings months to organize a meeting but instead they build guns to fight the aliens. During the second attack,the people fake run in front of green screens and it's pathetic.They can't even run for real.A saucer hits the Washington Monument and as it falls it becomes a structure made from street bricks. The alien's guns usually make the target just disappear but sometimes they explode,awesome work. Ray Harryhausen should be ashamed of himself.

After his rockets (meant for exploration in space) are shot down ("Operation Sky Hook") and a flying saucer flies over his car while on the way to the factory/facility launching them, scientist, Russell Marvin (Hugh Marlowe) is actually "contacted" by an alien race escaping a solar system that disintegrated. While recording data regarding his rocket program onto audio tapes, the saucer actually communicates to Marvin about a meeting between their race and his own at Sky Hook, but their dialogue is little more than gibberish until the tapes are slowed down (due to slow battery death). Because of not being able to understand the dialogue, Sky Hook security fires upon the flying saucer that appears, with return retaliation resulting in a laser that obliterates them. Sky Hook also is lasered into incapacitation. Later, Marvin is able to communicate with the race (his father-in-law, General John Hanley (Morris Ankrum) is taken prisoner, with his brain "raped" of all knowledge it entailed), and a meeting arranged (which will include his secretary/wife (Joan Taylor), a military colleague (Donald Curtis), and a cop who follow behind him, hoping to stop him) who want him to get with all the world's leaders in order to let them understand why they are hovering all over the planet earth. With a timetable, Marvin prepares an "interference device", hoping that if they need to use a weapon, it will be one that can incapacitate the race's saucers. When "spying machines" are noticed in the building, studying Marvin and his team's work, this sets off a chain of events that could be irreparable, as a flying saucer overhead attacks them. A stern warning to all races that the aliens would cause atmospheric disturbances through the disruption of the sun, and in doing so, weather misbehaviors wreak havoc on the planet. Can Marvin and his scientific/military team design devices that can stop them before total takeover or annihilation? Simply plotted (but not dumb which is always nice) sci-fi "watch the skies" B-movie is one of the best of its kind thanks to superior Ray Harryhausen special effects. The saucers are iconically designed, and the movements of them are a thing of beauty, as are the little satellite-formed lasers that emit a powerful charge that explode or disintegrate. The descent upon Washington, and the destruction caused by the alien saucers and the interference devices created by Marvin and his team which down them, is pure razzle-dazzle movie magic. This is often mentioned in the same breath at War of the Worlds and The Day the Earth Stood Still…and should be. Although this eventually takes the familiar route of "stop them before they destroy us", there were signs in the beginning that the aliens might want peaceful co-existence (even if they use violence and drain brain knowledge without much thought of what these acts mean in terms of their inhumanity (although us shooting at them as soon as they land on Sky Hook could be viewed the same)) but once a destroyer is wiped out, planes are destroyed, and the wilderness and secret interference machine facility are leveled, the repercussions lead to all out war. While the plotting looks at the finale as a means to an end, the Harryhausen work sufficiently closes the film with quite the wow. There's the typical earnestness in the performances (these guys were professionals who realized how Hollywood generally snarled in snobbish fashion at these movies but all the same they were serious in their acting), and the characters are mostly suits and military, with scientists, no surprise, turning out to be the ultimate heroes.

Everything about this movie reeks.Its star, Hugh Marlowe, is typically a second-stringer in films and seriously lacks the acting chops to carry off the lead. Joan Taylor, who portrays his wife in what may have been an unconsummated marriage -- the action here takes place immediately following their wedding -- seems abjectly bored and tagging along strictly for the paycheck.Even the special effects here are anything but. I'm no artist but I could have designed better flying saucers and aliens in my sleep.Most grating of all is the movie's stultifying dialog. It is so wordy and wooden it would be funny if it weren't so tedious.I tried to watch this stinker till the end but gave up some 30 minutes before the credits. TCM, please can this!

At the time, spectacle of the scope of flying saucers tearing through the Capitol must have been stupendous to watch. Independence Day owes everything to it. It is still impressive to watch, we have Ray Harryhausen to thank for that. He did quite a bit of work, less on saucer design, which is simple and carried over from the lurid covers of pulp magazines of the day, and more on the seamless engineering together of different worlds.You have the fictional world of the story of an alien invasion, of Pentagon meetings and running around to prevent disaster. It is not the best acted you have seen, but works from a scenario that seems more credible than most of this ilk. It does the job of lowering you into a situation that for a sizable portion of 1950's North Americans, was a less distant threat than you may think.You have stock footage of real disaster; real ships and bombers blowing up, exploding V2 rockets and buildings, solar flares, floods. This registers in a powerful way. In fact, I am convinced that the majority of viewers when they celebrate Harryhausen's SFX work in the film, subliminally include these pieces into a single impression of havoc.And you have Harryhausen's vision of alien gizmo and destruction. The genius is not in any individual effect, though several are quite well done they stick - and others a bit corny. His envisioned interior of a saucer deserves mention, with a rose-petal shaped 'translator' and cinematic screen. As mentioned though, what really grabs you is the seamlessly choreographed blend of real and staged destruction. And while Emmerich's film is more visually pompous, this impresses me more because they couldn't construct everything on a computer in those days.It works to this day, as many will testify. It does, because overall it achieves a remarkable illusion, and cinematic vertigo is to this day the primary draw to movies, that dazed feeling of weightless escape into a second world.I have noted elsewhere that deep down we are psychotic beings - this is foremostly revealed in acts of love and war, as well as powerful cinema. Logic does not spin our world, though we have to pretend to that effect. In fact, logic is a (relatively) recent adoption - for millenia, we relied on extra-logical capacities for survival, and their denial in modern life is a main cause of anxiety.Anyway, I am collecting examples of this in film and this is a prime one - psychotic in both the making and viewing levels.You see, among the alien gizmos that intrigue here (fluid 'alien vision'!), are remote-controlled balls of fire, initially mistaken for St. Elmo's fire.Now, during WWII, among the most baffling news topics to reach back home from the front, was reports of strange balls of fire encountered by airmen on night missions. The ghostly apparitions would mysteriously appear and chase after the planes in a way that seemed they were under intelligent control.Initially thought to be superior German jet technology, hundreds of reported sightings of these UFOs poured in from ally aircrews all over Western Europe, usually seen by two or more people on the same bomber. British crews reported them, Canadian, and as it turned out after the war, the Germans did as well. US crews flying over the Pacific knew them as 'bakas' or 'robombs', and thought them Japanese.So this was the first massively reported (and at the time, credible-seeming) sighting of UFOs, the whole craze with flying saucers wasn't going to blow open until a few years after the war. Naturally, these floating fires were lumped in the same category when it did. So when this was made a decade later, filmmakers were tapping into fearful public knowledge of these things, not easy to appreciate now that they are things of parody. In a 1950 Gallup poll, more Americans professed knowledge of what a 'flying saucer' is than they did of a 'Cold War'.A similar notion of floating lights encountered by travelers at night goes back to more ancient times however, you will know it as will-o'-the-wisp or Jack-o-lantern. Folk story has its own explanation of these, as does science - that is its own debate. Whatever the thing really was, what travelers were responding to was a projection of fears, not simply a natural occurrence, but the devil's light (or spirits') out for mischief.And the most credible and likely explanation of the WWII version of these night lights, is aviation vertigo, pure optical illusion - not very well researched at the time.How is this psychotic? Natural phenomena occur around us, including in our field of perception, illusory mind images. We invent stories around them. We invent intelligent illusion. And with cinema, the magic of industrial light, we invent optical illusions to convincingly perpetuate optical illusions, and as viewers we pay to inhabit them for a while. It is a direct line from the medieval traveler's Jack-o-lantern to what those pilots experienced in flights, to what we do in our flights of seeking illusory sensations in the dark of the theater.And what do these balls of fire do in the film? They 'watch' us! I'm telling you, we are completely nuts.