When intergalactic creatures put their focus towards Earth and are hell-bent on eradicating the human race and depleting their resources, they always manage to have one overly simplistic fatal flaw that derails their entire plan to fulfill the mission.

With the release of a rebooted Godzilla film, it is hard to tell how the story will conclude. Based on the background of the long running legend, there are only a few ways the movie will end; Godzilla will either be killed by a nuclear weapon, take over the world with atomic breath and rage, or find a mutual enemy shared by humans that will create a temporary alliance.

Hopefully Hollywood will not deviate from the mega-monsters original story and the conclusion will be something spectacular for the viewers. But fans should justifiably have their reservations since there have been several examples where super creatures have been defeated through methods that were less than thrilling.

These are the five movies where human eradication was prevented when a super species completely overlooked their own blatantly obvious inadequacies.

5. War Of The Worlds

This alien species developed the technology needed to travel to Earth, achieve global dominance, and begin colonization. With all the preparation and knowledge needed to make the journey and come up with an effective eradication strategy of global proportions, it should be assumed that they would have considered the effects of this new environment on their bodies; but this was not the case. The Earth’s bacteria lead to the invaders demise and saved the planets life forms from being completely exterminated.

This shouldn’t be a huge surprise when you take a closer look at their other vulnerabilities throughout the attack. They had heat rays equipped on their tripod walkers that could disintegrate skin, bone, and organs; but apparently not textiles. Clothes, shoes, and video cameras were left unharmed as human bodies were turned to ash. This starts to get confusing when you see these war-machines destroy an entire Marine heavy armor unit – their weapons can destroy tanks, but are ineffective against a pair of loafers.

The tripod walkers make a huge impact offensively and can take a huge hit defensively, but their strength is limited to attack weapons, exterior armor, and force fields. Once someone penetrates the interior of the vehicle, its Achilles heel is exposed. After a couple carefully placed fragmentation grenades cripple this hulking death unit, viewers are left wondering how a design could have so much technological superiority but lack major fail-safe’s to a cabin breach.

This epic takeover ended with a fizzle, not a bang; leaving viewers a little disgusted rather than awestruck.

4. Battleship

Electronic threat recognition systems, vital infrastructure analysis, and calculated weapon deployment make these invaders highly effective. But despite preparing for nearly every planetary detail, they failed to develop technology that could support their greatest weakness: the sun.

Putting window tint on visors and vehicle shields seems like a half-assed attempt to supplement an inferior biological characteristic for the planet they were trying to conquer. It’s not like this issue was not clearly evident as they were traveling to a civilization closer to the sun than their own. Although they made an attempt to protect themselves from this obvious shortcoming, why weren’t more resources used to improve it? With advanced digital weapons system, did the invaders even need to visually see things? Why glass and not another material that could take an impact from an inferior human weapon? When compared with their other technological achievements, this issue leaves viewers scratching their heads.

The weakness to the intensity of the sun’s rays was used to defeat one of the invaders strongest attack crafts, but it was their dependency on the planets “long-range communication devices” that ultimately prevented them from accomplishing a full-scale takeover. It is a little hard to believe that with technology such as a force field designed to divide enemy forces by making a perimeter after bouncing off the ozone, that the entire mission’s success was contingent on a satellite designed by humans. This is particularly absurd because Landsat 7 is only capable of taking selfies of Earth from space, not send a deep space communication.

3. Battle: Los Angeles

This extraterrestrial army looks like it stumbled out of a scrap yard. The weapons, armor, and vehicles don’t have any consistency and the quality of the equipment looks like it came from the scratch-and-dent section of an intergalactic weapons depot.

Their ground walkers have very little armor leaving the operator almost completely exposed and infantry firepower seem to be projectile-based much like human weaponry. Yet the unmanned drones appear to be heavily protected on the exterior, use jet propulsion, and have energy based weapon systems. This inconsistency makes viewers wonder how much, if any, planning was put into the invasion.

One of the biggest flaws can be found in the command center. This semi mobile structure controls all drones through an enormous radio frequency transmitter. It burrows itself into the planet to be concealed, but it is required to be located in the middle of the war zone due to the relatively small range of the transmitter. If the command center is discovered, this hulking, slow-moving structure, can only take flight and towed away by the drones it controls.

The command center’s limited mobility, defenses, and range of control match the questionable quality of every other unit in the army. One well placed laser guided missile takes down this mammoth pile of metal, poor engineering, and lack of forethought; leading to this scrap-army’s defeat in just a few days from when the invasion began.

2. Independence Day

Humans breached the security of a mother ship, hacked alien technology, uploaded a string of code to disengage all attack ship shields, then launched a nuclear bomb into the core of the ship. All this was made possible through a Trojan-horse type strategy; using an alien ship that crash landed on earth 30 years prior to the attack to gain access to enemy territory.

Are viewers to believe that this alien species made no attempt to upgrade their technology in 30 years? Even if functionality was similar, a developing army would have at least made subtle changes to the appearance of their vehicles. For humans to jump in the cockpit of an attack vessel, cruise into a mother ship, bypass any security screenings for dissimilar life forms, and be guided right to the epicenter of the fleet is outrageous.

Possibly the most shocking occurrence is that a computer virus developed by a human with hardware from 1996 successfully compromised an entire alien defense system. This species had the technology to travel across the galaxy, identify the most important targets on the planet (including a secret military base secluded in the dessert), and had weapons that vaporized cities with one shot.

But all that technological superiority became a moot point when a string of code and an Apple Powerbook 5300 crippled their entire mainframe. These aliens might have put NASA to shame with interstellar travel, but their computing power was no match for Steve Jobs.

1. Mars Attacks

Although these Martians appear to be a little silly at times, they periodically illustrate a cultural understanding of Earth. They not only plan to invade the most populated areas of the globe, but they take the extra step to destroy some of the most beloved landmarks created by humans. They use the Easter Island Moais as bowling pins and recreate Mount Rushmore to have Martian forefathers.

This species has the knowledge to run a successful invasion, but they also have the cultural awareness to be incredibly insulting at the same time. Their extensive comprehension of human psychology and sociology can be seen when a Martian sneaks into the Press Secretary’s quarters by pretending to be a prostitute. It is obvious that they have researched the science of human interaction down to the fine details but it seems like they skipped over the music category.

Once country music singer Slim Whitman strikes a chord, these Martians realize they might have overlooked a big portion of American Culture when their heads start exploding. It doesn’t take long before this country music singer achieves global popularity and the frequency of his voice is played across every speaker in the world. These Martian invaders are defeated by a full scale, country music inducing aneurysm.