As Ridley Scott’s Prometheus arrives in cinemas, returning to the world he first created in Alien, and with Agent J and K back for another Men in Black outing that is tearing up the box office right now, it’s time to look back at What Culture’s top ten Sci-fi films featuring aliens!
The only criteria for the list is that the movie features aliens somewhere. Enjoy!
10 – District 9
As well as being responsible for bringing Lord Of The Rings to the cinema screens, Peter Jackson was also half of the team behind one of the greatest aliens-living-on-our-planet films ever; District 9.
While the last ten years have given us more pieces of sci-fi pap than any genre geek can bring themselves to recall, District 9 is the notable exception, and in a time of constant remakes and reboots, it brought something new and fresh to cinemas and arrived with such little fanfare that it surprised practically everyone.
The plot sees racist bureaucrat Wikus van de Merwe being tasked with clearing out a zone where millions of insectoid aliens have lived for decades, and as with most sci-fi, there is a loose link to the real world and the problems being faced by humans every day.
Oh, and it involves huge robots. What more could you want? Huge robots, aliens and a fantastic script.
9 – The Thing
John Carpenter had already terrified the world with Halloween and The Fog when he decided to dip his fingers in the alien pool and create one of his most memorable films with The Thing.
A grotesque horror film, The Thing sees Kurt Russell as a scientist in the Antarctic discovering that you really can’t trust your friends and colleagues when a shape-shifting, body snatching alien is on the loose.
A cross between Alien and a murder whodunit, the film contains special effects that were mind-blowing at the time and still hold up pretty well today. How can anyone watch this film without winding back the spider-head moment a couple of times to see if that did really happen? I can tell you now, yes it did. Yes it did.
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5 Comments
Good article but I do think including Avatar is a mistake as is Star Trek because both of these films have many things wrong with them that are symptomatic of modern films. Mainly they offer large quantities of cliche and treat the audience like morons. Any of the previous Star Trek films would have been a better choice as they are genuinely intelligent films. Also Alien should have been number one and The Thing should have been much higher. And both original War of the Worlds and The Day the Earth Stood Still should have been included.
Great list! I was almost disappointed to see Star Wars at #1, or even on the list for that matter. It is pretty obvious, I guess, and I do love it immensely. I just think of it as more of a ‘space movie’ than an ‘alien movie.’ But I see why you chose your wording so carefully when you said ‘movies FEATURING aliens.’
To me space movies and alien movies are separate entities in most cases. If you are going to count Avatar and Star Wars than you might as well count Superman, The Avengers, Thor, and half the other superhero movies out there.
Also, The Passion Of The Christ could have made the list as well. If Jesus wasn’t an alien invader than I don’t know what is.
“The Thing”? Only at number nine? NUMBER NINE??? Have you actually seen the greatest horror film – actually, scratch that, THE greatest film of all time???
I think Kurt Russell played a helicopter pilot, no?
I stopped reading at number 9. The Thing at number 9 means that this article is written either by a kid or by a casual movie fan who likes movies, but doesn’t really understands them or knows much about movies in general.