For those claiming the aliens are non-hostile

They crashed into a satellite which for all we know they could have thought it was a space mine.
They were hostile from the start.
They wanted our resources.

The simple answer is that the aliens are hostile, but they are simply the most retarded aliens in the universe.

The simple answer is that the aliens are hostile, but they are simply the most retarded aliens in the universe. Plot twist: this is a movie written by bottom-of-the-barrel screen writers.

Example:

Travel light years avoiding obstacles over billions of miles - crashes with earth satellite.

Actually there is a very real aspect to this movie, and all the movies that portray people like some of the posters on this board-the posters who want to believe that aliens are warm and fuzzy, the posters who believe that if aliens are smart enough to travel the cosmos, they're also benevolent and they will only come here to help us. That aspect can be summed up in SETI, which stands for the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence. Think about it. Since the middle of the twentieth century, the warm-and-fuzzy-aliens crowd, so amply represented on this board, has been spending millions of tax dollars in an attempt to contact alien life. Far be it from me to say that it would be wrong to someday participate in the larger civilization of the galaxy, if it's out there. But at this point in time? When we can't even get around our own solar system and we would have no realistic hope of defending ourselves against hostile intruders? This was a fun popcorn movie, but the humans barely beat a tiny recon force and even that victory was due mostly to luck. However silly the movie, the question is valid-should we be screaming to the heavens that we're here on a fat happy little planet with no way to defend ourselves and lots of nice resources? If the idea that of course technologically advanced aliens will be friendly was confined to IMDB posters with poor critical thinking skills, it wouldn't be so serious. Unfortunately, there are people with a lot of college degrees and credibility advertising our location and helplessness and using a lot of our money to do so. That is a valid topic of discussion, even on a message board for a silly popcorn movie. I would also point out that Stephen Hawking agrees with me. In his book A Brief History of Time, he suggests that alerting extraterrestrial intelligences to our existence is foolhardy, citing mankind's history of treating his fellow man harshly in meetings of civilizations with a significant technology gap. He suggests, in view of this history, that we "lay low".

http://thinkingoutloud-descartes.blogspot.com/

I think it's pretty clear, actually. I'll never understand the argument that the aliens didn't attack until they were attacked. They captured the Hawaiian Islands. There is no way to spin that as a non-hostile action. If they were just scared and hiding and waiting for help, they wouldn't have put up a giant force field around the indigenous life forms. If they needed to phone home for help and they were non-hostile, they would have tried to communicate with the indigenous life forms and asked for the phone-they wouldn't have wiped out a military base (which didn't attack them) and destroyed part of a freeway (killing everybody on that section of the freeway-also people who didn't attack them) and they wouldn't have killed the cops who didn't attack them on the mountain. We see lots of killing from the aliens, and they're not just killing people who attack them. They're killing non-combatants. Some posters have shrugged that off as collateral damage, like somehow that makes it less hostile. I mean, I agree that the movie could have lost the sympathetic alien at the satellite base, and skipped the part where the razor wheel didn't roll over the kid on the baseball field, but I don't think that it would have made a difference. Some people are determined to see aliens as the good guys no matter what and are incapable of realizing that advanced technology does not necessarily mean advanced benevolence.

http://thinkingoutloud-descartes.blogspot.com/

I know this conversation is old, but I just re-watched the movie. Frist we have no idea if the radio signal that we sent was in fact harmful to the aliens. Second we see that they are like predator by not attacking non-hostile people and objects.

However; we do seem then targeting infrastructure when they attack the island, which is a common tactic in invasions. We also see them attack the Marine base taking out all military aircraft.

I don't think they would have taken out the ships if they didn't attack them in the first place. To the Aliens, the ships were just in the way. Their main mission was sending back a call home.

But, if they are or are not hostile shouldn't be an issue. We saw via ID4 mind meld that they are hostile. Hopper saw them "taking" over planets or at least showing them a warring race.