You’ve seen this movie even if you’ve never seen this movie: if you’ve watched any schlocky alien invasion SF documentary, there has to have been a shot from this cheesefest from 1956. So it came on free on Tubi, and I had chores to do, and I figured I had to give it a watch.

I think what flabbergasted me the most about this film was imply: it wasn’t that bad. In fact, what I was overwhelmingly reminded of was a film that I am now pretty sure had the writers desperately cribbing notes from it: Independence Day (ID4). Seriously, the parallels are fantastic, and in many ways, the 1950s version is even better. So, I’ve decided to do a rundown of each movie’s major plot points:

The Buildup:
ID4: Many, many introductions to Characters Who Will Be Important Later interspersed with shots of the Ominous Saucers coming nearer.
EvtFS: A typical narration alerting us to the fact that Many People Who Will Not Be Important, Ever have been seeing UFOs and that most of them are just stupid.
Winner: ID4

The Motive:
ID4: The aliens want to Kill All the Everyone and Steal All the Everything and move on, leaving Earth desolate. Which is really stupid, as they couldn’t possibly carry away more than a fraction of the Everything.
EvtFS: The aliens want to settle Earth and rule it, because their planet has been destroyed.
Winner: EvtFS

The Strategy:
ID4: The aliens hang around ominously, occasioning much panic and a little worship from the idiot humans, who TBF, have no way of knowing except for Smart Scientist Dude who runs a signal analysis and deduces 1) There’s a countdown to something, and 2) It will be bad. Which is a little stupid, because one would think that if you’d sent a whole fleet to another solar system, then literally ANYTHING you do will be on a countdown. If you’re Supreme Commander Zordakk about to offer Peace and Friendship to the humans, you don’t want to be upstaged by 2nd Lt. Squibliff accidentally not having his watch synchronized and opening the hatch of some other ship too early.
EvtFS: The aliens actually try to send a signal to Smart Scientist Dude to get him to Take Their Message To His Leaders so they can arrange humanity’s surrender. He doesn’t decode this because the aliens have forgotten they experience time at a different rate, so he only gets it by accident after his tape recorder starts running out of battery and slowing down.
Winner: EvtFS

The Attack:
ID4: The aliens let off the quivalent of 50 nukes off in humanity’s 50 biggest cities, but make little attempt to destroy anything else, such as dams, roads, ports, or military bases.
EvtFS: The aliens use lasers on a few people and fly away to give humanity time to consider surrendering
Winner: Tie

The Plan:
ID4: Smart Scientist Dude figures out how to hack the aliens’ computer systems, for which they have no firewall. This disables their shields, leaving them vulnerable to attack.
EvtFS: Smart Scientist Dude engineers an ultrasonic beam based on wreckage from a dead alien that will disable the aliens’ drives and shields, causing the Flying Saucers to lose control and crash.
Winner: EvtS

The Counterattack:
ID4: The humans disable the alien shield, which means that whereas the human weapons could previously not even scratch the paint on the alien ships, the human weapons now CAN scratch their paint. In the middle of battle, one drunk dude figures out where the aliens’ Secret Thermal Exhaust port is and manages to blow up the huge saucer. The mothership is blown up by a single nuclear weapon which should really only have scratched its paint.
EvtFS: The humans, mounting their weirding modules on technicals, have a firefight with the Flying saucers, which they eventually win after sustaining heavy casualties.
Winner: EvtFS.

Well, there you have it, folks. Earth vs. the Flying Saucers is a better movie.