{"id":1657,"date":"2016-06-24T12:00:57","date_gmt":"2016-06-24T16:00:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.avengingforce.com\/?p=1657"},"modified":"2016-06-24T11:36:20","modified_gmt":"2016-06-24T15:36:20","slug":"five-by-friday-top-five-alien-stories","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.avengingforce.com\/?p=1657","title":{"rendered":"Five by Friday: Top Five Alien Stories"},"content":{"rendered":"

Welcome to Five by Friday!\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Today marks a day that’s twenty years in the making! All three of us are enormous fans of Independence Day\u00a0<\/em>and alien films in general, and today Independence Day: Resurgence<\/em> is finally hitting theaters in the US. The original is in common rotation in all three of our households (we tip our hats to President Bill Pullman’s rousing speech) and it’s required viewing\u00a0every July 4th. Because we’re all in agreement that Independence Day<\/em> is a beacon of quality alien invasion filmmaking, we chose to exclude it from our individual lists of favorite alien media below, but do not be fooled: at Avenging Force, Independence Day<\/em> is our beloved favorite, and as a collective group, it is our number one alien movie.<\/p>\n

We decided not to limit ourselves to movies, so that television and video games could also be considered in our list creation. Keep scrolling for our top five alien stories!<\/p>\n

\"Five<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Join us in the comments or on your own blog\u2013we\u2019ve even provided a graphic for you, which you can either save to your own space or link from tinypic using the following HTML code:\u00a0<a href=\u201dhttp:\/\/avengingforce.com\u201d><<\/em>img src=\u201dhttp:\/\/i59.tinypic.com\/2d9318w.jpg\u201d><*\/a>\u00a0<\/em>Just remove the asterisks, and you\u2019re all set!<\/p>\n

Lauren<\/h2>\n

Once again,\u00a0making this list was incredibly difficult for me, since I have loved alien stories ever since I was a little kid wearing out our recorded-off-of-TV VHS taps of\u00a0E.T, The Last Starfighter, <\/em>and\u00a0Flight of the Navigator<\/em>. To help me narrow my list down, I tried to eliminate duplicates\u00a0with Sarah and Teija, and also considered factors such as how\u00a0much\u00a0<\/em>of the story revolves around aliens (for example, much as I love\u00a0The Abyss<\/em>, since the aliens don’t really come into play until the very end, it didn’t make the cut), and\u00a0general rewatchability. So while I love many of Sarah and Teija’s picks, along with many others not on our lists, the five I went with are all movies and shows\u00a0that I’ve rewatched so many times, I practically know them by heart.<\/p>\n

5) Doctor Who (2005-2013)<\/h4>\n

\"david-tennant-doctor-who-bbc-19\"<\/p>\n

4)\u00a0Guardians of the Galaxy<\/h4>\n

\"tumblr_n9sqffdT0E1s7mwvto4_500\"<\/p>\n

3) E.T.<\/h4>\n

\"ezgif-4188915785\"<\/p>\n

2) Star Trek: The Next Generation<\/h4>\n

\"ezgif.com-crop<\/p>\n

1) Galaxy Quest<\/h4>\n

\"DyXPwnM\"<\/p>\n

Sarah<\/h2>\n

In order to narrow down my very long list\u00a0of “Alien Movies I Love”\u00a0I decided to focus solely on stories where\u00a0“Aliens Invade Earth in some form (good or bad, overt or covert)”. This meant that as much as I love\u00a0Star Wars<\/em> (SO MUCH), Guardians of the Galaxy <\/em>(One of the best Marvel movies),\u00a0Flight of the Navigator <\/em>(re-watched an infinite number of times as a child),\u00a0<\/em>and Farscape <\/em>(Aliens AND muppets!),<\/em> they didn’t make the cut. Maybe next time! I even\u00a0briefly considered including the\u00a0Avengers<\/em>\u00a0which\u00a0absolutely contains an alien invasion (and actually, so does Thor<\/em>), but decided that it couldn’t count because it’s mostly a superhero movie.\u00a0And because we wanted to prevent overlap I left\u00a0off Galaxy Quest<\/em>, Stargate<\/em>, and Alien, <\/em>even though I love them so much.<\/p>\n

5) Close Encounters of the Third Kind<\/h4>\n

\"closeencounters\"<\/p>\n

4) Roswell<\/h4>\n

\"roswell\"<\/p>\n

3)\u00a0Men In Black<\/h4>\n

\"MiB\"<\/p>\n

2) Pacific Rim<\/h4>\n

\"Pacific<\/p>\n

1) The Fifth Element<\/h4>\n

\"Fifthelemtn\"<\/p>\n

Teija<\/h2>\n

I’ve been a fan of stories that take place in space since as long as I can remember. I have memories of my dad watching Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan<\/em> from so far back that I was essentially born this way. For the most part, if a movie has aliens in it, I’m bound to love it\u00a0and so it was actually exceptionally hard to nail down a list of five favorites. My top three choices are set in stone, but four and five… lets just say that even avoiding overlap with Sarah and Lauren, it was still a difficult choice. I ended up making the “how often have I rewatched it” factor a deciding vote.<\/p>\n

5) Stargate<\/h4>\n

\"aaastargate\"<\/p>\n

4) Alien<\/h4>\n

\"aaaripley\"<\/p>\n

3) Star Trek: Deep Space Nine<\/h4>\n

\"ds9\"<\/p>\n

2) Farscape<\/h4>\n

\"farscape\"<\/p>\n

1) Mass Effect<\/h4>\n

\"masseffect\"<\/p>\n

<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Welcome to Five by Friday!\u00a0 Today marks a day that’s twenty years in the making! All three of us are enormous fans of Independence Day\u00a0and alien films in general, and today Independence Day: Resurgence is finally hitting theaters in the US. The original is in common rotation in all three of our households (we tip […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1661,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"We're celebrating the release of Independence Day: Resurgence with our top 5 alien films!","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9],"tags":[385,380,34,378,222,379,55,91,382,184,381,386,328,384,383],"class_list":["post-1657","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-five-by-friday","tag-alien","tag-close-encounters-of-the-third-kind","tag-doctor-who","tag-e-t","tag-farscape","tag-galaxy-quest","tag-guardians-of-the-galaxy","tag-mass-effect","tag-men-in-black","tag-pacific-rim","tag-roswell","tag-star-trek-deep-space-nine","tag-star-trek-the-next-generation","tag-stargate","tag-the-fifth-element"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.avengingforce.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/ID4.jpg?fit=1000%2C500","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4Vfwz-qJ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.avengingforce.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1657","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.avengingforce.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.avengingforce.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.avengingforce.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.avengingforce.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1657"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/www.avengingforce.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1657\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1699,"href":"http:\/\/www.avengingforce.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1657\/revisions\/1699"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.avengingforce.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1661"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.avengingforce.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1657"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.avengingforce.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1657"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.avengingforce.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1657"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}