This does not look good...
"
Independence Day. That alien invasion movie. The first part, where the aliens come and they look up between the buildings and the sky is gone and, like, all they see is metal. Just as far as you can see, that steel ship looming up there. I remember thinking that’s what the end of the world will look like. It won’t be wars and tanks or a meteor. It’ll be something we never could have thought of..."
—
Jennifer Lopez,
John Dies at the End
Some aliens want to make a grand entrance. This trope marks the tendency for fleets of mile-long alien spaceships to ominously hover, several hundred feet over the world's cities without doing very much. It usually means the start of an
Alien Invasion but it can be subverted. Expect shots of shadows washing over cities like a tide, awe-stricken people looking upwards and
Jitter Cam footage of the ships over every major city.
Five Rounds Rapid against them will be useless while their
Wave Motion Gun will be devastating when they decide to use it. Absolutely no
Midair Bobbing ever. Quite inexplicable as not only would it expend vast amounts of power and present a big target but by Newton's Third Law,
crush everything underneath it. Perhaps it's because
Power Floats or because ships float in the sea and
Space Is an Ocean, but it also adds to the menace: how can something that big hang in the sky without making a furious amount of engine noise and disruption? Clearly, they must be fearsomely
advanced, and the
Puny Humans defenses will be nothing to them.
It nearly always occurs
Twenty Minutes In The Future by
Higher Tech Species and is never inverted. Probably because
humans are too
polite.
See also
Floating Continent and
Ominous Floating Castle.
Examples:
Advertising
- An advert for Doritos in the UK has a giant chip hovering above London in this manner.
Manga&Anime
- The Arume ships in the final episode of Blue Drop.
Films
Literature
- Arthur C. Clarke's novel Childhood's End (1953). The Overlords' ships mysteriously appear over the major cities of Earth. Many years all but one disappear, leading to speculation that the rest were illusions the whole time.
- The Vogon Fleet in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Live-Action TV
- The Visitors' ships in V, both versions. Likely the Trope Codifier.
- The Sycorax asteroid ship in the first Christmas Special of Doctor Who.
- Stargate SG-1 does this at least once a season. A few notable instances are:
- Inverted in "Thor's Chariot", where the titular Asgard's flagship Beliskner appears and performs a Gunship Rescue against Heru'ur.
- "Scorched Earth" plays it straight. The entire plot of the episode revolves around convincing the Ominous Floating Spaceship not to terraform a resettled civilization out of existence.
- Anubis's mothership over the capital of Kelowna on Jonas Quinn's homeworld of Langara. Less suspenseful for the viewers, as it is no doubt that Anubis wants to invade, but true for the people of Kelowna, who have never seen a Ha'tak before.
- Inverted in the episode "The Lost City", with the USS Prometheus floating over our heroes. In this case, defending them from Anubis's forces.
Video Games
Real Life
- Lenticular clouds have been mistaken for this trope and may have inspired it image here
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- The Phoenix Lights incident is an alleged real life example. On the night of March 13, 1997 thousands of Arizonians, including the governor of Arizona claimed they saw a massive mile-wide UFO fly over the Phoenix Metropolitan Area.
