Alien in This Summer’s Movies (2012)

It is a sure sign the summer movie season has arrived when aliens attack the box office. In Men In Black III Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones don their shades once again to keep Earth safe from the extraterrestrials that live among us.

However outer space visitors (in whatever size or form they take) are staples on the big screen. So whether you prefer your aliens to look like E.T. or Keanu Reeves in The Day the Earth Stood Still, we have a whole list of otherworldly tales to enjoy this summer.

Joaquin Phoenix plays the uncle of two children who make aluminum foil caps to keep aliens from reading their minds in Signs. Earthlings have to fend off Martian invaders in the sci-fi film Wars of the Worlds, based on the book by H.G. Wells. Tom Cruise stars in Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of the same story. Richard Dreyfuss plays a man with an unexplainable obsession for a certain shape after experiencing Close Encounters of a Third Kind. John Travolta gets dressed up as a 9-foot tall alien with dreadlocks in the movie Battlefield Earth. And in an odd mix of genres, Harrison Ford plays a sheriff in a town where Cowboys and Aliens face off in a Western with a spacey twist.

More kid-friendly encounters occur in the animated movies Monsters vs Aliens and Megamind. One family discovers they have some unusual houseguests in Aliens in the Attic.

And Earth’s most famous and helpful extraterrestrial (the one with the great big “S” on his chest) gets plenty of coverage in Superman: The Motion Picture Anthology.