The 25 Best Alien Movies of All Time, Ranked

It didn’t take long for stories about extraterrestrials to reach our cinemas. George Méliès “A Trip to the Moon” introduced weird, easily explodable aliens called Selenites that capture the first explorers in outer space, and from there, filmmakers let their imaginations continue to run rampant.

While science fiction wasn’t always a popular genre, eventually fantastic tales of space creatures, friendly or monstrous or anything in between, became more mainstream, and eventually became reliable blockbuster material. But for every crowdpleasing tale of interplanetary warfare or reassuring cuddle creatures from the stars, there are still smaller films with independent voices, approaching the subject of first contact and unknown biologies with bold creativity and mind-expanding intellect.

As we count down our picks for The 25 Best Alien Movies Ever Made, consider that we have to find some way to make these disparate movies comparable. So we developed a set of rules. The films on the list must include both humans and alien life (sorry, “Star Wars”), and the alien life must be alive, not a remnant of ancient alien technology. We are also, for the sake of variety, limiting ourselves to one film per sci-fi franchise, which includes sequels, prequels, spinoffs and remakes. Otherwise, there’d be a lot of “Alien” and “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” movies on here, and you don’t want to list all of them.

Now, let us begin our adventure into the unknown in three… two… one…

25. The Vast of Night (2019)

Writer/director Andrew Patterson’s debut is a small science-fiction movie that feels massive. In a small New Mexico town in the 1950s, while the entire community is distracted by a high school basketball game, the switchboard operator and local DJ get swept up in an extra-terrestrial mystery, investigating strange radio signals and interviewing community members whose lives have been ruined by aliens and UFOs. Patterson’s incredible visual panache, filming the entire town in long, floating takes that boggle the mind, paints a portrait of total isolation within a gigantic space, with an atmosphere of ever-encroaching horror. Whether the aliens are real or not, their impact is eerie and unnerving.

24. Enemy Mine (1985)

In the midst of an intergalactic war, a human and an alien soldier are marooned on a dangerous world, where they must learn to work together to survive. A simple premise, but Wolfgang Petersen’s “Enemy Mine” makes a lot out of it. Dennis Quaid and Louis Gossett Jr. bring a lot of empathy and understanding to their characters, and against a backdrop of strange beasts and bizarre production design, learn to essentially love each other. There are lots of ambitious sci-fi classics from the 1980s, and this often-overlooked gem has more heart than most of them.

23. Lilo & Stitch (2002)

An artificial alien life form designed to wreak total devastation crash-lands in Hawaii, where there’s almost nothing to destroy, and winds up finding unexpected fulfillment as a family pet. That’s the wonderful premise for “Lilo & Stitch,” a Disney animated classic which riffs on “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” but has its own voice, with distinctive characters and a strange sense of humor, and some of the studio’s most gorgeous late-era 2D animation. The live-action remake isn’t as bad as most of Disney’s other shameless retreads, but the original can’t be beat.

22. Invaders from Mars (1953)

He’s better known as a trailblazing production designer and visual effects artist, but William Cameron Menzies also directed trippy, classic genre films. His best, “Invaders from Mars,” is about a young boy who sees a spaceship land in his backyard. When he tells his parents, they investigate but come back… wrong. Menzies fills his paranoid film with bizarre sets that make the whole film play like a child’s nightmare, because aliens invading your hometown is bad enough, but when you’re a little kid, it’s a million times worse because nobody takes you seriously. An eerie, quirky classic with one of the best endings. Ever.

21. District 9 (2009)

When Neill Blomkamp adapted his 2005 short film “Alive in Joburg” to the big screen, it became an unlikely blockbuster and even unlikelier sci-fi Best Picture nominee. “District 9′ stars Sharlto Copley as Wikus, an apartheid pencil-pusher in South Africa, years after an alien spacecraft landed and the intergalactic refugees, insultingly called “Prawns,” became second-class citizens. When an accident splices Wikus’ DNA with a Prawn’s, he becomes an unlikely revolutionary. The commentary is blunt, but Blomkamp’s film earns it with an oppressive tone and remarkable visual effects, and a story that never lets Wikus off the hook.

20. Fire in the Sky (1993)

When people think about alien abductions, they think of “Fire in the Sky,” a modestly successful film that left an indelible impression. D.B. Sweeney stars as Travis Walton, an Arizona logger who goes missing for five days. His friends claim he was taken by a UFO, but of course, nobody believes them. When Walton returns, traumatized by his experiences, he experiences a horrifying flashback to his experiences as a guinea pig for cruel, inscrutable aliens. It’s that sequence that makes “Fire in the Sky,” famously, one of the scariest movies ever made. But the depiction of UFO hysteria – amplified by the real-life Walton’s insistence that this is a true story – paints a vivid picture of the fearful, incredulous late 20th-century alien zeitgeist.

19. Prey (2022)

The original “Predator” is an action movie classic, and a lot of the other sequels are pretty cool, but with every year that passes, it gets clearer that Dan Trachtenberg’s “Prey” is the best film in the franchise. (Except, perhaps, for Trachtenberg’s own “Predator: Badlands,” which has no humans in it and gets disqualified from this list on a technicality.) Amber Midthunder stars as a Naru, a Comanche woman in the early 18th century who wants to prove her prowess as a hunter, only to become the big game for an interplanetary poacher with unthinkable strength and advanced sci-fi weaponry. The stakes couldn’t be higher, the filmmaking couldn’t be better.

18. Under the Skin (2013)

Jonathan Glazer’s inscrutable arthouse sci-fi thriller stars Scarlett Johansson as an extra-terrestrial who impersonates a beautiful woman to lure horny men into an abstract void. Over the course of her mission, she becomes confused by human behavior and fascinated with her human disguise, eventually developing a sense of empathy for her test subjects and becoming a potential victim herself. Casting Scarlett Johansson as an entity using men’s sexual drives against them is ingenious, and she gives one of her best performances as an alien whose motives and identity are hard to comprehend, and always in flux.

17. Attack the Block (2011)

John Boyega stars as Moses, the leader of a British street gang that finds and kills an extra-terrestrial, which accidentally makes them targets for a carnivorous horde of alien creatures with blue, glowing fangs. Joe Cornish’s “Attack the Block” looks simplistic, like yet another sci-fi film about everyday people hunted by intergalactic critters (like, for example, “Critters”), but the film’s fierce intelligence and remarkable characters elevate the premise, and its message about the importance of community, even when your community is full of criminals and drug addicts, hits hard. Plus, it’s just cool as hell.

16. Contact (1997)

Carl Sagan’s 1985 novel “Contact” outlined, in fascinating scientific detail, what first contact with an alien intelligence might sound like, and Robert Zemeckis’s classy adaptation captures Sagan’s nerdy sense of wonder. Jodie Foster stars as an atheistic searching for extraterrestrial radio signals, but when she finds them, it sets off a media and political firestorm that threatens to ruin humanity’s best chance to expand their horizons. The ending can be polarizing – some critics find it anticlimactic, and they’ve got a bit of an argument – but it’s a powerful, emotional journey with a finale that leaves room for our imaginations to explore.

15. Nope (2022)

“Nope” defies easy categorization, but it’s got an alien in it, that’s for sure. Keke Palmer and Daniel Kaluuya play siblings who inherit their father’s horse ranch, but gradually realize there’s something wrong in the sky, and a UFO is sucking up the livestock. They become obsessed with capturing the entity on camera, and gradually discover it’s not what most people would think of as a UFO, but something far more beautiful and terrifying. “Nope” is a thrilling, scary, and darkly funny sci-fi film, and a fascinating exploration of filmmaking from the perspective of animal trainers, who the entertainment industry often takes for granted.

14. ‘Project Hail Mary’ (2026)

Ryan Gosling plays Ryland Grace, a science teacher who wakes up in outer space with no memories, and gradually pieces together that his mission is to save the whole human race from a mysterious infestation of tiny alien organisms that are threatening all life on Earth. But he’s not alone. Another sole surviving alien, a rocklike alien named Rocky (James Ortiz), is on a similar mission to save his species. The wonder of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s “Project Hail Mary,” adapted from the novel by Andy Weir, is that it uses good humor to tell an intense story, and transforms scientific curiosity into an engine for heartfelt drama. Rocky is one of the most lovable extraterrestrials ever filmed, and his friendship with Ryland is one for the ages.

13. Men in Black (1996)

Aliens landed on Earth decades ago, but they didn’t invade; they just moved in. Tommy Lee Jones plays one of the “Men in Black,” an organization that keeps the existence of extra-terrestrials secret and deals with all the complications that arise from their unique needs and technology. He needs a new partner and spends the whole film training a smart alec rookie, played by Will Smith, and revealing hidden truths that blow his mind and annoy him to no end. Barry Sonnenfeld’s dry sense of humor lets “Men in Black” play out like a boring procedural cop show, even when they’re doing the most exciting things in the world, and the fact that the Men in Black protect the alien immigrants from humans – and not just the other way around – makes them feel like actual heroes.

12. The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976)

If you need an actor to play an astoundingly beautiful, ethereal entity in the 1970s, there’s only one option. David Bowie stars in “The Man Who Fell to Earth” as an extraterrestrial who comes to Earth to bring water back to his dying planet, only to get distracted by Earth’s many vices and screwed over by human greed. Nicholas Roeg directs this dreamy character piece, and no filmmaker ever weaponized Bowie’s innate, entrancing persona to greater effect. He’s one of cinema’s most tragic, flawed figures, and “The Man Who Fell to Earth” is one of the best, and most melancholy, sci-fi films ever made.

11. Starship Troopers (1997)

Paul Verhoeven read Robert A. Heinlein’s classic sci-fi novel “Starship Troopers” and he didn’t fall for it, not one bit. His big-budget adaptation casts the so-called heroes as horrifying fascists whose prejudice against the alien “bugs” stems from shameful propaganda – and the movie we’re watching is that propaganda. “Starship Troopers” condemns American exceptionalism as nothing more than authoritarianism, and all the badass action movie beats Verhoeven’s movie hits are tainted by the connection. Those gross bugs are the victims, those handsome soldiers are the villains – and if we can’t tell the difference, then we’re the bad guys.

10. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)

Every adaptation of Jack Finney’s 1956 novel “The Body Snatchers” has something going for it, even the disastrous 2007 version “The Invasion” (which has piercing ideas about how misogyny fits into many utopian visions). But the original still stands out. Don Siegel’s sci-fi classic stars Kevin McCarthy as a small-town doctor who discovers his neighbors are being replaced by alien clones, who claim they’re out to fix our broken society through blissful conformity. Maybe it’s an anti-communist screed, maybe it’s a terrifying vision of 1950s American conservatism. Either way, it’s relevant in any era and continues to thrill 70 years later.

9. The Thing (1982)

John Carpenter‘s “The Thing” is a classic example of a remake outshining an already classic original. Christian Nyby’s “The Thing from Another World” is still scary and impressive, but Carpenter’s vision of an Antarctic base ravaged by a shapeshifting alien monster that impersonates the crew, and also transforms into unspeakably frightening beasts, is one of the most frightening movies ever made. Carpenter casts his film exclusively with men, which turns pent-up aggression and insecurity into a powder keg, and Rob Bottin’s practical-effects monsters are still, over 40 years later, the gold standard for goopy, gory creatures. Aliens have rarely been this unthinkably strange, and alien movies have rarely felt this apocalyptic (even when they’re actually about a worldwide apocalypse).

8. Fantastic Planet (1973)

René Laloux’s bizarre animated classic takes place on an alien world where gigantic blue beings treat human beings like hamster-sized pets. “Fantastic Planet” takes place so far into the future that nobody remembers a time before this cruel status quo, which is an unmistakable allegory for human rights violations, animal cruelty. Laloux’s world is just odd enough to be alien, and far too familiar to be a coincidence, and the stunning, surreal animation is disquieting and hypnotic.

7. They Live! (1988)

Earth comes pre-conquered in John Carpenter’s “They Live!”, a Reagan-era social commentary that depicts wealthy conservatives as literally another species. When a working-class nobody named Nada, played by “Rowdy” Roddy Piper, stumbles across sunglasses that let him see the world as it really is – where all the subtext is text, money literally reads “THIS IS YOUR GOD,” and the oppressors are revealed to be inhuman – he responds the only way that makes sense. He starts killing them all. Carpenter’s most overtly political film is still depressingly relevant, still darkly humorous, and still an all-time classic.

6. Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)

In Steven Spielberg’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” the increasingly secular world of the late 20th century left a void that only scientific wonder can fill. Alien life has begun to contact Earth, exciting the imagination of UFO witnesses like frustrated family man Roy (Richard Dreyfuss), single mother Jillian (Melinda Dillon) and French scientist LaCombe (Françoid Truffaut), who gradually converge on the site where life as we know it will change forever. “Close Encounters” rejects skepticism but acknowledges that faith, even without religion, can be a perilous journey. And holy cow, is John Williams’ score phenomenal.

5. Solaris (1972)

Stanislaw Lem’s novel “Solaris” is one of the great masterpieces in the science fiction genre, a heady and emotional story about a psychologist who travels to a space station orbiting a strange planet, where all the scientists have been visited by people from their past, and have fallen into scientific and emotional confusion. Perhaps no filmmaker could ever fully embody the complexities of Lem’s novel – Steven Soderbergh’s 2002 remake has its merits, but falls prey to a romanticism that the 1972 skillfully avoids – but Andrei Tarkovsky’s adaptation perfectly captures the pensive isolation. It’s a patient, introspective work that challenges Western narrative convention and rewards viewers who can give it their full attention.

4. The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)

The sci-fi genre was not considered “respectable” in the early 1950s, but Robert Wise’s incisive and fascinating “The Day the Earth Stood Still” helped change that perception. The film stars Michael Rennie as Klaatu, a visitor from another world who lands in Washington, D.C. and is immediately shot. How fitting, then, that he’s here to warn us about our propensity for violence and stockpile of nuclear weapons. “The Day the Earth Stood Still” evokes biblical notions of otherworldly beings desperately trying to save us from ourselves, and although when all is revealed, Klaatu’s message is more terrifying than reassuring, the sense that we’re not alone, we’re not important, and we’re doing everything wrong sticks with you.

3. Alien (1979)

There are many reasons to love, and be horrified by, Ridley Scott’s sci-fi classic. “Alien” speaks to the dehumanization of the workers by heartless corporations and the innate sexism underlying society at large. It is a powerful and skillfully crafted film on many levels. But it is also, as much as anything, one of the most incredible depictions of alien life. It’s easy to take for granted now that H.R. Giger’s creations have been turned into toys and plushies and Funko Pops, but the designs of the xenomorphs are distinct, organic, sensual, and gutturally evocative, and the horrors they inflict on the crew of the Nostromo deserve a special place in the pantheon of science fiction and horror. There’s a lot to recommend in (almost) all of the sequels, but the original, nearly 50 years later, remains the boldest – and the freakiest – “Alien” movie.

2. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982)

Steven Spielberg’s “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” takes the unknowable concept of alien life, a possibility that overwhelms and frequently frightens us, and doubles down on the wonder. Henry Thomas stars as Elliott, a young boy living with his brother, sister, and divorced mother, who befriends an alien who’s even more lost than he feels. E.T. is a weird-looking thing, but the fact that E.T. isn’t conventionally “cute” makes the bond with Elliott even more believable. E.T. is not a pet, E.T. has agency and feelings, and like all children, E.T. deserves to be loved and protected, and is capable of loving back. Spielberg’s film doesn’t merely humanize aliens, it also teaches people to empathize with beings unlike themselves. It’s a kind, magical film.

1. Arrival (2016)

Alien movies come in many forms. Strange, terrifying, reassuring, mind-blowing, familiar, epic and intimate. Denis Villeneuve’s modern classic “Arrival” embodies almost all of the possibilities, delivering a fully-formed, even-handed, intimidating and illuminating approach to science-fiction that deserves boundless acclaim. Amy Adams stars as a linguist enlisted to decipher alien language so unlike our own that it may force her to expand her whole consciousness. If she can’t do the impossible, in an unthinkably short amount of time, the consequences could be devastating. Adams gives an incredible performance, and Villeneuve’s impeccable direction instills an overwhelming sense of awe, until revealing the relatable, soulful, bittersweet undercurrent to the heady sci-fi story we once found so intimidating. When it comes to depictions of alien life, and humanity’s capacity to comprehend it, “Arrival” towers above the rest.