With District 9 heading to Blu-ray and DVD just in time for the holidays, we decided to celebrate with a walk through the Ten Best Alien Films ever made! It may be a bit early to tell, but we're standing by our assertion that District 9 holds its own in the rankings of these alien classics. Judge for yourself on December 22!
Predator
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Dutch (Arnold Schwarzenegger) is dropped with an elite special forces team into the deep Latin American jungles on a covert mission to rescue another group of U.S. forces, but quickly find themselves hunted by an extra-terrestrial being far bigger and badder than any of the meathead military boys in the jungle. Everyone they were sent to rescue has been killed in gruesome, inexplicable fashion, and soon Dutch's classic team of brutes are picked off one by one by a perfectly camouflaged hunter in their midst. With everyone else dead, Dutch must use his wits and sheer willpower to keep from falling victim to the Predator, "get to the choppa" and become the governor of California.
E.T.
Who doesn’t have great memories of this classic? Besides launching the career of a very young Drew Barrymore, Stephen Spielberg’s tearjerker tale of an alien who gets stranded on Earth and develops a symbiotic relationship with a boy named Elliot is one for the ages. Nevermind the updated versions with computer-generated enhancements; the original is where the magic is. Bring your Reese's Pieces.
Star Trek: First Contact
It's the 24th century and some of the universe's most fearsome beings, the Borg, have returned in another attempt to conquer Earth. Disregarding orders, Capt. Picard and the new Enterprise-E rush to save the Federation Home World, only to get sucked back in time to the 21st century, with the Borg, who are on a mission to disrupt the course of mankind's evolution. If Cochran, the inventor of warp drive, doesn't make his legendary first flight, a Vulcan mapping mission wouldn't detect the warp signature, and first contact would not be made according to future history. The Borg are perhaps the most terrifying villain to emerge from the Star Trek universe, and they'd do more than hold their own against any other aliens in this list.
District 9
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The last survivors of a race of aliens that look like man-sized cockroaches take refuge on Earth. Thankfully, total armageddon doesn't unfold, but tensions mount rapidly when mankind realizes that it takes alien DNA to use their badass hi-tech extra-terrestrial weapons. Confined to a specific area in South Africa and forced to work to earn their keep, there seems to be little that the aliens can actually offer mankind in exchange for sharing our planet - that is, until someone contracts a mysterious DNA-changing virus that could be the key to unlocking the alien technologies.
