Hollywood's Top Five Baddest & Most Destructive Sci-Fi Aliens

When British astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, author of ABrief History Of Time, and generally regarded as one of the most intellectually gifted humans revealed he's near certain aliens exist, people started debating whether such life is benign or not. Hawking himself takes a pessimistic view. He says races capable of the immense undertaking of interstellar travel, would probably be nomadic natural resource thieves, intent on bullying primitives like us out of water, precious metals, and minerals. Read about it here.

I submit that aliens capable of such mind blowing technological feats, would undoubtedly possess instrumentality, which could make such predatory pursuits unnecessary. These aliens could still zoom around in space warping starships, but more for the kind of exploration portrayed on Star Trek, than for plundering the gentle shores of our home world. Of course, I recognize there could be bad boy and girl aliens out there - or gender neutral - intent on exterminating our race or enslaving us into servitude. Keeping with that more pessimistic, glass is half empty spirit, here's five of the most entertainingly destructive aliens invading us from Hollywood movies and TV.

Shape Shifter - The Thing

Two movies - one directed by Howard Hawkes, the other from John Carpenter - were made based upon the short story, 'Who Goes There', written by John W. Campbell. Both versions showcase one of the baddest and deadliest aliens in all of cinema.

In Hawke's movie, the Thing is portrayed by actor James Arness. The vintage make-up and costume still provide a great, weird look, but Carpenter's version showcases the great Rob Bottin's latex freak show. The most frightening thing about Carpenter's (and Campbell's story) Thing is that it easily assumes most anyone's identity, or even takes on the shape of animals like a dog. Perhaps it is only a super long lived creature, who crash landed on Earth. It's now merely trying to survive, but instead of asking us for help, it proceeds to brutally slaughter all those it encounters.

Pod People - Invasions of the Body Snatchers

Before the sleep dangers caused by Freddy Kruegar in A Nightmare On Elm Street, this sci-fi film also warned against going to sleep. If you did slip into the dream world, you'd be copied by the pod people.

Both Kevin McCarthy in the original, and Donald Sutherland in the remake battle aliens from beyond the stars who don't arrive in gigantic ships, nor threaten us with awesome high tech weapons. They simply replicate our human form, through a form of perfect genetic cloning. It's really only near perfect, because though the physical and mental form are achieved flawlessly, the personality, or the 'soul' if you will isn't translated at all. The most chilling line from the original movie comes from a character, who comments on copying a baby by saying, "There will be no more tears."

The Borg - Cybernetic Zombies - Star Trek: First Contact

Resistance is futile. It's the cybernetic zombie catchphrase known to millions of Star Trek fans. It's their call to action, their marching song, their dark cultural motto. There are many truly bad things about the Borg. They're scary looking, and monotonously dull in speech and cadence. They have the worst kind of fashion sense (Gothic leather latex S&M chic), but perhaps the worst of all is that they're us. They're everyone - from everywhere.

Borg aren't one humanoid species, nor just one kind of creature or weird alien. The entire race, or as they like to call it collective, is composed of thousands of species, across thousands of worlds. Introduced in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode, Q-Who, Borg boldly go where no aliens have gone before by simply capturing those they find worthy of including in their vast collective of similarly assimilated comrades. The most destructive Borg of them all is the queen. Alice Krige originated the role in the feature film, and played it again in the finale of Star Trek: Voyager. The Borg Queen is so deadly because she uses mental persuasion and seduction to get what she wants. She tempts Data (Brent Spiner) with both sexuality, and the gift of real human skin for the synthetic android. For a brief time, she's nearly victorious in recruiting him into her collective.

Independence Day

These savage, predatory aliens are never given an actual name, but their combative intent towards us is plain - world domination.

Will Smith battles these ugly creatures valiantly, and though the creatures themselves aren't all that fascinating, Roland Emmerich's frenetic paced direction gives us more than a few thrills. The final solution to the alien invasion still gives most people the chuckles. That a highly advanced star spawned alien race wouldn't employ proper firewalls or computer virus cleaners is just a little too much to suspend disbelief over.

Martians - Invaders from Mars - Mars Attacks!

Martians often get a bad rap in Hollywood. Even Warner Brother's Loony Tunes has Marvin The Martian, who's forever trying to invade and conquer Earth. We're sent many probes to the red planet, and it's only a matter of time before discovering some type of life. Though the likelihood of life on Mars is more simple microbial lifeforms, than large creatures, it's always fun to speculate.

There's been more than only two movies concerning marauding Martians, but these two stand out as two of the most enjoyable. Invaders From Mars remains one of the more atmospheric, and a truly eerie exploration of bad Martians, while Tim Burton's comedic romp Mars Attacks, starring Jack Nicholson,offers up both chuckles and chills.

Honorable Mentions

Alien & Predator

These are certainly two of the baddest alien races around. Both love attacking us - one for territorial reasons - the other for sport. However they have never been depicted, as of yet anyway, as so bad they're going to subjecate our entire species. Hey, there's always more sequels!

Sources

www.imdb.com