Sci-Fi Movies That Made Censors Panic for Ridiculous Reasons

Added: 2026-05-21

[00:00:00]Science fiction is supposed to make people uncomfortable sometimes. That is part of the job. But every country seems to have its own breaking point.

[00:00:09]One accused a blockbuster of offending traditional views about the creation of humanity. Another kept its own nuclear war film away from television for 20 years. And somewhere else, even a family movie about a lost alien was considered too dangerous for children.

[00:00:26]So yes, that is probably where we should start.

[00:00:30]With the sweetest film on this list, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.

[00:00:37]When it came out in 1982, Spielberg's film melted hearts almost immediately.

[00:00:43]It screened out of competition at Cannes, where the audience gave it a 15-minute standing ovation.

[00:00:49]At a royal gala screening, Princess Diana was said to be so moved that she had to step away to fix her makeup.

[00:00:56]A lonely boy finds a stranded alien, hides him from the grownups, and tries to help him get home.

[00:01:03]Sweet.

[00:01:04]But in Scandinavia, censors were not completely convinced.

[00:01:09]In Sweden, kids under 11 were not allowed to see it, partly because the adults in the movie were shown as enemies of children.

[00:01:17]Norway effectively kept it away from children under 12, while Finland restricted it to audiences aged eight and above.

[00:01:25]And yes, from a child's point of view, the adults here are pretty creepy.

[00:01:30]But still, this is E.T.

[00:01:32]Not Alien. Not The Thing.

[00:01:35]A movie about a sad little alien who just wants to call home.

[00:01:41]The best part is that Swedish children did not exactly agree with being protected from it.

[00:01:46]According to reports from the time, some of them protested outside cinemas with signs asking to be allowed in.

[00:01:53]And apparently, some children under 11 tried to see the movie anyway by pretending they were old enough.

[00:02:00]And in the end, the ratings did not exactly stop the movie either.

[00:02:05]ET was hitting Europe like a tidal wave around the 1982 holiday season, and by January 1983, it had already made about $2 million in Sweden alone.

[00:02:19]With District 9, Neill Blomkamp's 2009 sci-fi film about aliens stranded in Johannesburg, the censorship story gets a little more complicated. On the surface, the idea is already provocative.

[00:02:34]A giant alien ship appears over South Africa, but instead of turning into a clean heroic invasion story, the aliens are pushed into a filthy segregated camp.

[00:02:44]They are treated as unwanted migrants, political problems, and cheap labor.

[00:02:51]The whole film is built around the ugly way people behave when they can convince themselves that another group is not fully human.

[00:02:59]So yes, District 9 was never going to be completely harmless.

[00:03:04]But in Nigeria, the controversy was much more specific.

[00:03:08]In the film, Nigerian characters play a large part in the life of the camp, and not in a flattering way.

[00:03:15]They are shown as gangsters, black market dealers, and figures tied to superstition and exploitation.

[00:03:22]Nigerian officials were not amused.

[00:03:25]They objected strongly to the portrayal, and cinemas were told to stop showing the film.

[00:03:31]The country's information minister also demanded an apology from Sony, saying the movie damaged Nigeria's image.

[00:03:40]It is probably fair to say that no country would be thrilled to see its people represented through crime, superstition, [music] and sleazy stereotypes.

[00:03:49]But District 9 is not really a film about good people and bad people.

[00:03:54]Almost everyone in it is ugly in some way.

[00:03:58]The officials, the corporation, the soldiers, the scientists, the civilians.

[00:04:04]The whole world of the movie is rotten.

[00:04:09]And now, let's go to Egypt.

[00:04:12]To be fair, the ban on The Matrix Reloaded was later appealed, but the first explanation is the part we need to talk about.

[00:04:20]Egypt censorship committee already had some questions about the first Matrix film, but the sequel apparently pushed things further. They watched The Matrix Reloaded and decided that its violent scenes could harm social peace.

[00:04:34]Already dramatic enough, but the bigger concern was religion.

[00:04:38]According to the statement, the film's story about the search for the creator and the control of the human race could cause crises.

[00:04:47]The board said, "The Matrix Reloaded dealt with existence, creation, free will, and the relationship between the creator and his creations, all issues connected to the three divine religions."

[00:05:00]Also calling the last human city Zion probably did not calm anyone down.

[00:05:06]By the way, >> [music] >> the same statement still found time to praise the movie's high technology and fabulous effects.

[00:05:13]So, thank God, at least flying Keanu Reeves in sunglasses worked for them.

[00:05:23]What country could possibly have a problem with Avatar? Correct. The country where it was breaking box office records in 2010. China.

[00:05:32]But this is a strange case because China did not exactly ban Avatar outright.

[00:05:37]The 3D version kept [music] playing. The IMAX version kept playing.

[00:05:42]What got pulled from many screens was the 2D version.

[00:05:47]Officially, the explanation was commercial. The 2D screenings were being cleared to make room for other films, including the Chinese historical epic Confucius.

[00:05:58]Chinese officials denied that politics had anything to do with it.

[00:06:03]But of course, people started reading between the lines.

[00:06:06]The film's native population faces eviction from its forest home, while real people in China were vulnerable to displacement by predatory property developers.

[00:06:16]So yes, maybe watching such a technically ambitious movie in 2D is a crime in itself.

[00:06:23]But apparently, Avatar was a little too hot a property for Chinese censors.

[00:06:32]Now we have a slightly different case.

[00:06:34]Self-censorship.

[00:06:36]Well, almost.

[00:06:38]The War Game is Peter Watkins' 1965 film made for the BBC.

[00:06:43]No aliens, no robots, no distant planets.

[00:06:48]The film imagines a nuclear attack on Britain, shot in a dry documentary style that makes everything feel disturbingly ordinary.

[00:06:56]The BBC commissioned it.

[00:06:59]The BBC made it.

[00:07:01]Then the BBC decided not to show it.

[00:07:04]Officially, the explanation was that The War Game was too horrifying for television.

[00:07:10]Behind the scenes, government pressure was part of the story, too.

[00:07:14]So British TV audiences could not see it.

[00:07:17]But the Academy could.

[00:07:19]And in 1967, The War Game won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature.

[00:07:28]Akira came out in 1988 and went on to influence almost everything that came after it. Cyberpunk, animation, action cinema, music videos, you name it.

[00:07:40]For decades, none of that seemed to cause this kind of legal problem in Russia.

[00:07:45]And then, in 2021, during a broader wave of court actions against anime titles, Akira was reportedly banned from distribution there.

[00:07:55]The reason was possible harm to children's mental health and moral development.

[00:08:00]That is the key phrase, harm to children.

[00:08:04]Because Akira is many things, but a children's cartoon is not one of them.

[00:08:09]It is violent, dense, political, and full of body horror.

[00:08:14]It is about state power, psychic trauma, youth rage.

[00:08:18]So, treating it mainly as something that needs to be judged by whether children should watch it is, to say the [music] least, strange.

[00:08:29]In 1979, before Mad Max became a giant post-apocalyptic franchise, before Fury Road, before all the flame guitars, the first film was much smaller and nastier.

[00:08:42]It takes place in a collapsing near-future Australia, where society has not fully ended yet, but the roads already belong to violent gangs.

[00:08:51]Max is a police officer trying to hold on to some kind of order.

[00:08:56]The film made over $100 million worldwide, but that success did not include New Zealand and Sweden at the time. Both countries banned [music] it because of the goose scene, where a road attack ends with a burning car.

[00:09:09]In New Zealand, the [music] timing made it even worse.

[00:09:13]The scene was considered uncomfortably close to a real gang incident that had happened shortly before the film's release.

[00:09:20]After the success of the sequel, the first Mad Max finally got another chance in New Zealand and was released there with an 18 certificate.

[00:09:29]Sweden was much less forgiving. It kept the ban until 2005.

[00:09:36]And let's finish today with A Clockwork Orange.

[00:09:40]Stanley Kubrick's dystopian crime film built [music] a serious cult following over the years. Of course, it was never exactly easy viewing.

[00:09:48]It deals with violence, psychiatry, and [clears throat] juvenile delinquency.

[00:09:53]The famous story is that A Clockwork Orange was banned in the UK.

[00:09:57]But the strange part is that it was not banned by the British censor board.

[00:10:01]It was released. People saw it.

[00:10:04]And then came the moral panic. The press outrage, the arguments about copycat violence, and eventually >> [music] >> threats against Kubrick and his family.

[00:10:15]After that, Kubrick himself asked Warner Brothers to withdraw the film from circulation in the United Kingdom.

[00:10:21]And that was [music] that.

[00:10:23]The film only returned after Kubrick's death. It was classified again in 1999, re-released in UK cinemas in 2000, and came out on VHS and DVD later that same year.