However, when talking about some of the best science fiction films out there, the movies are actually trying to tell the audience that humanity is the real problem. There are times when people are the real villains. Whether they are being the bad guys to someone else, or just to themselves, there are plenty of really good flicks where viewers might find themselves rooting against mankind. It takes a special kind of storytelling to do that and it’s always a weird juxtaposition, but in the end, there are some movies where people find themselves cheering … the death of people. In fact, that particular outcome isn’t all that rare.
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Right at the top of the list of films that are all about telling the audience that people are bad, is Avatar. The movie, in fact, appears to be a kind of allegory about what really happened when the Europeans arrived on various “distant” lands back in the day. Certainly, Americans have heard the tales of what happened when explorers landed on North America and decided they wanted the land for themselves. The indigenous people were hunted and killed and eventually forced to live on reservations. While the reasons for humans coming to the planet of Pandora is slightly different, the goal for humans in Avatar is largely the same.
This time around, people are looking for a very special material that is called unobtanium and in order to get at it, they need to clear the people who live on the planet out of the way. While the film opens as if the humans are the heroes and are trying to save the earth, it quickly becomes obvious that they are in fact, the bad guys. That’s especially the case when one of the soldiers tasked with blending in with the N’avi realizes his fellow soldiers are nothing more than murderers, leading to the big battle for Pandora in the last third of the film. Having proven that the Earthers were the villains, it’s going to be interesting to see how they pull off Avatar 2.
This one might be a bit more of a stretch for some, but the fact of the matter is that humans really were the bad guys in this particular franchise. At the very least they were absolutely the villains in the first film in the series. Yes, once the Xenomorphs were set loose, they did quite a bit of killing, but it’s important to note that they weren’t really looking for the clash when the film takes place.
Instead, a massive corporation sent a team of scientists and explorers to a place it absolutely knew these alien creatures were inhabiting. The point was to collect the Xenomorphs in order to study them and perhaps even figure out a way to use them as living weapons. While the killer creatures kept upping the body count, it’s always important to note that the humans in the corporation were going to have plenty of blood on their hands, even if things didn’t go horribly wrong.
While there might be some people who still see the Xenomorphs as the villains in Alien (considering they killed some who weren’t in on the plot), there’s very little doubt that people were the humans in E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial. The film smacks audiences in the face over and over again that people are the baddies. However, there’s something to be said for how subtle it can be at times.
There are times when it’s clear that the human scientists really do believe they are helping Elliot by pulling him away from E.T. On the flip side, when Elliot and his friends stage the jailbreak that is now iconic in sci-fi movie lore, only the coldest of cold-hearted people weren’t cheering them on. It’s not a stretch to say this is one of those films where viewers knew humans were going to be the baddies almost from the very beginning.
Like Avatar, District 9 is much more than just a sci-fi film. While there’s plenty of weird technology and alien interactions, the film is clearly trying to tell a deeper story about the reality of human nature. In this movie, an alien race crash lands on earth, but instead of dominating humanity, or even really working alongside them in order to make the earth a better place, the aliens are basically forced into a kind of ghetto where they are absolutely treated as “less than human.”
Considering the film is inundated with South African settings and actors, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out what sort of allegory Neill Blomkamp is trying to tell. That becomes even more obvious when the main human in the story is “infected” by the aliens accidentally and begins getting treated like one himself. Spoiler alert for those who haven’t seen it: he’s not treated well.
The only movie on this list that doesn’t involve extraterrestrials, instead this sci-fi film is all about introducing an alien species into today’s world, though the aliens are more strange than from another planet. This is another film that doesn’t take a great deal of thought until viewers arrive at the humans being the villains. After all, none of the dinosaurs that run eventually run amok wanted to be there. They’d all died out millions of years ago. They’re also not any kind of evil. They’re just animals that are doing what animals do while being fenced in, shot at, rounded up and studied.
The fact of the matter is that all of the Jurassic Park and Jurassic World movies could make up this entire list. The story is always the same. People do and go where they shouldn’t and bad stuff happens. But the people are to blame for there even being a chance for the bad stuff to take place.
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