Love it, hate it, or shrug on their way to the parking garage, few viewers of this week's Independence Day: Resurgence are likely to leave marveling that they've never seen anything like it before. That's no crime. In many decades of movies about little green men hoping to conquer Planet Earth, surprisingly few have made the apocalypse memorable.
Which are the exceptions? See below for the best, but know in advance that we're talking about aliens-attack-Earth movies. That is to say, although they would handily top a humans vs. aliens list, Alien and Aliens do not qualify. Since war is only threatened in the one-of-a-kind Men in Black, that's out. Close Encounters represents a frightening but peaceful encounter; The Day the Earth Stood Still let Earthlings off with a warning; and humans still don't recognize the secret agents stalking them in Under the Skin. Finally, to preempt the complainers: Yeah, we saw Predator. It sucked.
