10 Sci-Fi Movies Where The Humans Are The Bad Guys

Neill Blomkamp's 2009 film tells the story of an alternate version of Johannesburg, in which a shipful of fish-like aliens, discovered in the 1980s, is corralled into a refugee camp named District 9, where they have been contained for over twenty years.

These 'prawns', as the locals spitefully call them, are peaceful, yet are treated as second-class citizens by the South African government. During a mission to relocate them to another camp, a corporate employee named Wikus van de Merwe comes into contact with alien fuel, which gradually causes him to change into a prawn himself.

With all the sympathy you'd expect from a sci-fi corporation, the higher-ups want to capitalise on Wikus' ability to operate the aliens' tech before he becomes useless to them - which involves dissecting him. His body mutating at an alarming rate, Wikus escapes and allies himself with the alien refugees against his former colleagues.

It's pretty obvious that the humans are the bad guys here. The prawns are herded in squalid slums, despite being highly intelligent and clearly more advanced than their captors. And even Wikus, despite his change of heart, originally had just as much of a hand in the herding. If it hadn't been for his transformation, would he even have given the aliens a second thought?