Alien Invasion - Television Tropes & Idioms

alt title(s): Alien Invaders

If you were going to take over the world, would you blow up the White House Independence Day-style, or sneak in through the back door?

— Casey, The Faculty

One of the oldest stories in Speculative Fiction: Beings from space come to Earth to conquer.

There are two main forms of this:

The All-Out Attack. Technologically superior forces aim their weapons of war and three legged walkers at Earth, which bravely fights back, driving them off through cunning, bravery, or just dumb luck.
The Infiltration. Aliens are replacing, brainwashing, or controlling humans in order to take over from within. Generally, the populace at large doesn't even know it's happening. May involve The Virus.
A combination of the above, with an infiltration paving the way for an all-out attack.

Sometimes, there are good aliens that help us against the invaders; unfortunately, they tend to be much weaker and/or less numerous, since if they were equally or more powerful, the focus would be taken off humanity. Then there's the Benevolent Alien Invasion, where the invaders are the good aliens.

Often an allegory for some Earth-based conflict, either one that's happened in the past or one that people fear may happen. The Infiltration is especially popular as a metaphor for Communism.

This trope, in its modern form, was created by HG Wells's novel War Of The Worlds. It was actually a variation on another theme popular at the time, the "invasion story", where another country's army, usually France or Germany, would try to conquer Britain. Then World War One happened. Today, similar themes are found in techno-thrillers.

A common Tomato Surprise nowadays is for the invaders to be human.

Examples:

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Literature

Animorphs is an Infiltration, with only five kids armed with alien technology and one helpful alien available to fight the threat.
Prophet's House is dark fantasy/steampunk, and the Big Bad is a flesh-eating angel from space. Yes. That's right.
Second Apocalypse is a fantasy series with an invasion by ray-gun wielding aliens in its backstory.
Robert A Heinlein's The Puppet Masters, a good novel made into several awful movies. Of course, one of the major problems with making it into a movie is that near the end everyone walks around naked all the time, as it is a defense against the aliens. The aliens use, if you haven't guessed, the infiltration method.
The 1985 Larry Niven/Jerry Pournelle novel Footfall has a hard science look at this trope; the elephant-like Fithp ruined their own planet and have come in a SleeperShip to claim ours.
- Somewhat now has also become a case of Alternate History, as it portrays a 1990s with the Soviet Union around.
The Posleen War Series by John Ringo. Initially presented as an invasion of the benevolent kind, but not too far into the first book of the series, hints start showing up that the Darhel, the putative leaders of the Galactic Federation, have other plans, which aren't terribly beneficial to mankind.
The WorldWar series by Harry Turtledove is a variation: the aliens invade during World War Two and this forces the warring sides to unite against them. Also, the aliens are deliberately given contemporary (at time of writing, i.e. 1994) levels of technology plus a little extra to allow them to travel between stars, rather than the usual insanely advanced aliens vs. present day humans. They are also really, really, reeeeeealy conservative. Like, they've been ruled by the same dynasty for tens of thousands of years and are surprised that humans have advanced from the medieval era to the present in only a few hundred years, conservative.
- To the point where an American character points out that even the most radical alien is still more conservative then the most devoted southern republican.
- As in, they react to discrimination blow "That's a human", mammalian reproduction, and any government that isn't a full blown monarchy with the same levels of horror.
Battlefield Earth has two: one a thousand years before the book takes place when the evil Psychlo took over the planet, and a combination of other races swooping in after humanity retakes Earth. Thought its more of an Alien Incursion or Alien Fracas than an all-out invasion in the second case... (The alien alliance doesn't want Earth per se, just the Psychlo technology left behind there.)
In Pamela Service's young-adult novel Under Alien Stars, the planet is annexed as a military base by magenta-skinned Humanoid Aliens who are fighting a Bug War. Although generally arrogant, callous, quite willing to wipe out whole neighborhoods, and by no means a Benevolent Alien Invasion, they're by far the lesser of evils compared to their foes. Not that humanity doesn't have to find that out the hard way before the two races finally team up against the common enemy...
The New Jedi Order novels show the extreme end of this - how can there be an alien invasion when the entire galaxy is populated and civilized? With aliens from another galaxy of course...
As noted above, The War Of The Worlds.

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Live Action TV

War of the Worlds, a television sequel to the 1953 film adaptation of the trope-making novel, showing heavy influence from Invasion of the Body Snatchers
V is about a Villain With Good Publicity form of The Infiltration, with familiar overtones.
Ironically, in Stargate SG-1, the protagonists spend all their time trying to stop aliens from destroying Earth (and the Galaxy in general), only to end up with a Goa'uld infiltration of the NID on their hands. Several characters comment on this, citing the low priority this infiltration has compared to more pressing matters, such as the building of the McKay-Carter Intergalactic Gatebridge.
Doctor Who, of course, has both. In some cases, it's not necessarily Earth that the aliens want to invade, nor is the species invaded human at all. In many future-based stories, humans are themselves the invaders. We're usually not outright malicious, but we're often quite destructive to native species, paralleling historical imperialism and colonization.
Star Trek Voyager shows the Borg launching the invasion of a planet with an armada of cubes ("Dark Frontier"). As one cube was enough for the Federation this change in tactics looked particularly chilling - already hinted at in "Hope and Fear".
"The outer colonies were the first to fall - 23 in a matter of hours. Our sentry vessels tossed aside, no defense against the storm. And by the time they had surrounded our star system - hundreds of cubes - we had already surrendered to our own...terror."
- The Borg invasions of Earth in Star Trek The Next Generation and Star Trek First Contact are arguably better examples, with lots of Shout Outs to The War Of The Worlds (e.g. one of the ships fighting the Borg is named Thunder Child).
First Wave presents a textbook infiltration. The Gua aren't quite sure what to expect from humans, and are trying to find ways to weaken Earth's defences and turn humans into slaves, in preparation for an all-out attack.
In the backstory to Babylon Five, the Minbari annihilated humanity's entire defense fleet—causing 250,000 casualties—but ultimately surrendered after reaching Earth orbit and did not invade or bomb the planet. The Minbari were expected to exterminate humanity but this was not foreshadowed by their tactics up to the point of their surrender.
The 2005 ABC show Invasion is a bizarre case of the infiltration type in which the main aliens are seen only as glowing orange lights in the water, but the infiltrating "hybrids" have the exact appearances (sans scars or other non-genetic marks) and memories of the dead humans they replace. This makes (most of) them unaware that they are are inflitrating aliens. It was cancelled after one season, so the actual goals of the invaders are never made clear.
The upcoming NBC series Day One appears to be the latest example.
The standard source of villains for Power Rangers, used in eight out of seventeen seasons. The others feature Demonic Invaders or something that has Turned Against Their Masters.

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Video Games

Halo follows the "All-Out Attack" example, with The Covenant attacking Earth colonies before finally taking the fight to Earth.
- In fact, in order to prevent an alien invasion, all ships that are losing a battle are commanded to wipe their memory banks and self-destruct, denying the aliens knowledge of human colony locations, as well as Earth. In the end the Covenent find Earth anyway though they were looking for something else, but this particular strategy allowed humanity to fight for years, when otherwise they would have been defeated in weeks or months.
Universe At War: Earth Assault features the first kind of this. In a subversion, humanity fails utterly at repelling the invading Hierarchy and are reduced to bit players, forced to watch as a race of mechanical Laser Guided Tykebombs arrive on Earth and the ancient Atlanteans awake, both species intent on bloody revenge against the Hierarchy for crimes committed against them in the past.
The Scrin from Command And Conquer are something of an odd example: although they do land an "All-Out Attack" in Command&Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars, they did so only because they mistakenly believed that their terraforming agent, Tiberium, had completed it task of eliminating the indigenous population.
The main plot Mario RPG game Mario and Luigi: Partners In Time has the Mario Bros. team up with their infant selves to thwart the invasion of the alien Shroobs.
- It, uh...makes sense. In context.
The first Half-Life is about aliens coming through a portal to Earth, albeit unintentionally (though given the chance, the Nihilanth was more than happy to conquer, or try it anyway). The second is set in a dystopia where different aliens came through and defeated Earth.
The second novel based on the Doom series, Doom: Hell on Earth, as the name implies, is about the aliens and their genetically-engineered-to-scare-humans creations attacking this planet.
The aliens in the first X-COM game go both ways. One of the alien missions is an Infiltration mission, in which they try to sign a peace treaty with one of your funding countries. If they succeed, that country no longer funds you. On the other end, if you're being successful in dealing with the threat, the aliens will try to scout for your base, and if they find it you can expect a battleship to come shortly, and they aren't coming to negotiate. Hope you've set your base up properly!
- In general, however, from the plot, the X-COM games are all of the first type. The aliens have little interest in peace with humanity: even if every single funding country signs a peace treaty, the aliens inevitably destroy human civilization. The second game is all aliens destroying humanity out of revenge, as is Interceptor. And Apocalypse is an entirely different alien species, also launching an invasion in an effort to wipe out humanity. No one's sure what humanity did to deserve this treatment.
Starcraft: the Terrans are facing two invasions: the Zerg and Protoss (who incidentally are not the Tyranids and Eldar. Just don't go there.) The Zerg favor infiltration (actually, infestation) as a way to soften up targets for the Swarm. The Protoss, on the other hand, employ a range of tactics, from "shoot missiles at it" through "shoot more missiles at it" past "throw in lasers for good measure" and on to "screw it, let's just sterilize the planet". Notable in all of this is the Battle of Tarsonis, where the Zerg, Protoss, and Terran rebels all try the All-Out Attack on the poor planet at the same time.
City Of Heroes takes place in the aftermath of an extradimensional alien invasion, which was hard-won and remnants of the Rikti forces still infest the world. And of course, it turns out that the Rikti are mutated humans. BUT, that leads into another possible future invasion by different aliens... The Rikti's weakness? Magic. Yeah.
- Of course once they figure this out they quickly hunt down magic-using heroes- as a result, the once-strong Midnight Squad was devastated.
- Also, the Shiva in Bloody Bay. Sort of: while the Shiva are aliens and they are invading, according to the fluff they're the remains of a planet-devouring entity that was destroyed in deep space but is now trying to rebuild itself.
This is more or less the main plot device of the first Megaman Star Force game, with interesting concepts to the invasion. In the story, alien life forms, called FM-ians, must fuse with humans who are very lonely thru manipulation in order to attack other people. This is because being energy waves, they have no physical form and thus can't harm physical beings under normal circumstances (They can't even be seen normally), fusing with humans allows the FM-ian to materialize and thus cause physical harm. They can also disrupt electronic devices or, if there is enough electromagnetic energy being emitted, turn people into energy waves to attack them.
- Kid Hero Geo Stelar and a renegade FM-ian, Omega-Xis, merge into Mega Man to defend the Earth from the FM-ians who, in turn, attempt to draw the pair out in order to defeat them and reclaim an item Omega-Xis has to unleash their Dooms Day Device on Earth.
Both Ecco The Dolphin storylines involve aliens. In the first game, the Vortex aliens have been content to just suck up critters from Earth's seas every 500 years, but after Ecco beats them, their Queen follows him back to Earth in the second game, where she and her children proceed to mess everything up. Eventually, she flees back in time to infiltrate Earth from there. Word Of God has it that it worked, but not the way she wanted it to; the Vortex lose their identity as a species and give rise to arthropods. The third game involves some completely different aliens called the Foe; their time travelling shenanigans actually work to change Earth's future, until Ecco stops them.
In Metal Slug 2, the Mars People arrive - War Of The Worlds-style aliens who attack using flying saucers. When they're driven off, one of them impersonates Morden and tries to use the Rebellion Army as a weapon in Metal Slug 3. Once that's uncovered, the heroes attack their mothership and destroy their leader, Rootmars. Properly chastised, the Mars People become a bit more peaceful, and serve as allies in the sixth game to fight an invasion from Beneath The Earth that considers them snack food.
Iji starts six months after the almost all-out attack has succeeded. Then looms the danger of a really all-out attack...
Gungrave has the "infiltration" method, in the games at least. A race of parasitic aliens called "Methuselah" came to the planet eons ago and just wanted to infect all living things with the substance that the main characters know as the designer drug called "Seed", which then turns humans/animals into mindless mutants subservient to the alien consciousness. It was these beings that manipulated and corrupted Harry in the original game, provided the technology that created the Necrolization Project, and gave Garino, the Big Bad of Overdose, power beyond imagination. Garino was even planning to leave the planet to continue spreading seed.
The Conduit starts off with an invasion by the Drudge, a race of Big Creepy Crawlies. Later, it is revealed that the invaders are actually human-created clones as part of a Government Conspiracy.

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Western Animation

The original Transformers cartoon and comic focused more on the giant robots, but newer stuff, like the IDW comics and the 2007 movie, take it from the invasion aspect. It's a rare case where the good aliens are equally powerful as the bad aliens.
- Most versions just give a nod to the Infiltration before discarding it, but the IDW series focuses on it. (In fact, Transformers: Infiltration was the name of their first miniseries.) "Robots in Disguise" takes on a much more sinister tone.
- From a presentation at BotCon '95, a rejected premise for the Beast Wars cartoon would have the Transformers use their animal and insect forms to infiltrate and influence the course of human history. What if the shooter at the grassy knoll was a Decepticon...?
The Grand Finale of Kim Possible had the previously once introduced Scary Dogmatic Aliens invade Earth, for rather no real reason at all. And all they did was send in Humongous Mechas while the 2 aliens just sat and relaxed.
- Rather than an "official" government-backed invasion, it appears that the whole attack was simply a private vendetta against Drakken/Earth on the part of Warmonga.
Used several times in Justice League and Justice League Unlimited.
- The very first story arc, "Secret Origins", sees the Justice League come together for the first time to combat shapeshifting aliens. Initially, the aliens infiltrate society to undermine Earth's defense systems, then they begin their All-Out Attack. The Good Alien role is filled by J'onn J'onnz, the sole survivor of a Martian civilization that these invaders had destroyed centuries ago.
- The Season Two Grand Finale "Starcrossed" sees the League nearly destroyed by another invasion. The Thanagarian infiltration was far more effective, because they had a Mole in the Justice League itself, providing them with the information to neutralize its members. These invaders initially present themselves as the Good Aliens, claiming that they're fortifying Earth to defend it from their enemies; the real Good Alien turns out to be their Mole, Hawkgirl, who learns of their true intentions for Earth and is unable to go through with it.
- The JLU episode "Dark Heart", in which the League faces Grey Goo from outer space.
- The JLU Grand Finale "Destroyer" has Darkseid leading the forces of Apokolips on an All-Out Attack on Earth. The League is forced to temporarily team up with the remaining members of the Legion of Doom in order to fight them off.
Happens from time to time on Futurama. To paraphrase a Futurama comic this troper has read:
Fry: So what, Earth gets invaded twice a week. It's how I remember to brush my teeth.