The 50 Best Sci-Fi Movies of All Time
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Science Fiction and cinema have gone hand in hand since the birth of moving pictures. Georges Melies’s A Trip to the Moon was made all the way back in 1902. And since then, sci-fi movies have continued to hold a mirror to our most utopian dreams and most dystopian nightmares. With big, knotty “what if” scenarios that mix speculative, brave-new-world storytelling and envelope-pushing visual imagery, no movie genre packs the same allegorical power as sci-fi. From 2001: A Space Odyssey to Star Wars, it’s a medium where anything goes and nothing is off limits. Now, with the release of Dune: Part Two, the canon of classic sci-fi films has a new member. But where does Denis Villeneuve’s blockbuster sequel rank on Esquire’s list of The 50 Greatest Sci-Fi Movies of all time? Read on to find out…
A Trip to the Moon (1902)
This is where it all begins, folks. Back when the movies were still learning how to walk, cinema’s greatest magician, George Melies, took us to the Moon. A group of wiggy astronomers pack themselves into a spaceship that looks like a two-man bobsled and land right smack dab in the animated Moon’s eye. It’s a great sight gag that hinted at the comic and creative possibilities of the new art form. A hundred and twenty years later, those possibilities still seem limitless.
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Happy Accidents (2000)
I saw this indie at the Sundance Film Festival in 2000, fell in love with it, then never heard another word about it again. I know a sci-fi rom-com mindbender isn’t exactly an easy sell, but the fact that this early film from Brad Anderson hasn’t been seen by more people is a crime. Single strangers Vincent D’Onofrio and Marisa Tomei meet, fall in love, then quickly fall into their first argument. The cause? He claims to be time-travelling back from the year 2470. Is he telling the truth or is he mentally unbalanced? Or is this his way of trying scare her off? When a love story is this strange and beautiful, does it really even matter?
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Dark City (1998)
There was a time, shortly after Dark City came out, that I was convinced that its director, Alex Proyas, would be the greatest filmmaker of his generation. Obviously, I was wrong. But you’ll forgive me after watching this stylish-as-hell nightmare noir. Proyas’s intoxicating visual palette borrows liberally from Kafka, German Expressionism, and the dark, rain-slicked alleyways of film noir to weave a story about a cabal of pasty-faced aliens that look like they just walked off the set of Hellraiser and who put humans to sleep at night, freezing them in the middle of whatever they were doing, to study them. Rufus Sewell plays the lone man who knows what’s going on, and Kiefer Sutherland goes full Method sinister and will make your blood freeze. If Clive Barker was making movies for MTV in 1998, this feels like what he might have come up with.
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The Brother from Another Planet (1984)
When most folks think of indie director John Sayles, they usually think of exquisitely humane dramas about overlooked people, not sci-fi. But The Brother from Another Planet blends those two genres with confidence and cool assuredness. An excellent Joe Morton (who you may recall from Terminator 2: Judgment Day) plays an alien whose spaceship crash lands on Ellis Island. From there, this fish out of water finds himself in Harlem, where Sayles mines ‘80s New York and the neighborhood’s vibrant community to show us how it may appear to an outsider.
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Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)
Proving that the MCU didn’t have a monopoly on toying around in the multiverse, the Daniels (writer-director team Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert) transformed the story of an Chinese-American family falling apart at the seams into an inventive, Dadaist flight of fancy about alternate realities, world-skipping, and fingers made out of hot dogs. For two hours, EEAAO is a wonderfully bizarre vacation from the real world.
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WALL-E (2008)
When I mentioned to a friend that I was making a list of the 50 greatest sci-fi films, his first and only question was: Where are you putting WALL-E? Well, here’s your answer. Made during Pixar’s miraculous run in the 2000s, Andrew Stanton’s WALL-E is, at its heart, an ecological wake-up call about how we’re destroying the planet, but it coats that alarming message in a sweet candy shell for the kiddies. The film’s transcendent opening 10 minutes are absolute perfection and a master class in narrative table setting. No notes.
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District 9 (2009)
Although it’s an acknowledged sci-fi classic today, Neill Blomkamp’s future-shock Apartheid allegory seemed to arrive from out of absolutely nowhere 15 years ago. (It wound up going all the way to the Oscars.) Sharlto Copley gives a stunning, star-is-born performance as a craven South African bureaucrat assigned to evict a race of segregated alien “prawn” people from their Johannesburg shantytown. The political and racial subtext is inescapable, but District 9 is also a bonkers feat of sci-fi imagination that will make you swear off shrimp forever.
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Moon (2009)
Get ready for one hell of a solo. Sam Rockwell is incredible as a scientist riding out a three-year assignment on a lunar mining outpost all by himself. The forced isolation is making him slowly lose his marbles. With thematic nods to both the snowed-in claustrophobia of The Shining and the soothing, emotionless computerized companionship of HAL from 2001, Duncan Jones’s directorial debut is a spellbinding one-hander that saves its best surprise for the end. In a just world, Moon would have led to an Oscar nomination for Rockwell.
Children of Men (2006)
Much has been written about Children of Men’s breathtaking one-take shot of Clive Owen in a car as all hell breaks loose, and justifiably so, it’s stunning. But Alfonso Cuarón's harrowingly bleak look at a recognizable future, where humanity has become (mostly) infertile and has spiraled into chaos, is so much more than that one bravura moment. Owen is tasked with helping a miraculously pregnant woman (Clare-Hope Ashitey) reach safety—all hope for the future weighing on his shoulders. As gravy, Michael Caine pops by to do his always-awesome Michael Caine thing.
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Akira (1988)
Katsuhiro Otomo’s cyberpunk anime epic makes for a perfect initiation into the world of Japanimation. Set in the lawless Neo-Tokyo 30 years after an explosion leveled the original city, the story revolves around two best friends who are pitted against one another after a freak accident gives one of them destructive powers he has every intention of using. If you think anime isn’t for you, get back to me after giving this a spin.
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Ex Machina (2014)
After penning two very good sci-fi scripts (28 Days Later and Sunshine), Alex Garland stepped behind the camera for this wonderfully creepy tale. About a reclusive tech-bro inventor (Oscar Isaac) who invites one of his employee (Domhnall Gleeson) to his modernist lair to put his latest AI creation (Alicia Vikander) to the test, Ex Machina is a terrifically atmospheric Frankenstein story with some truly dazzling special effects and a sting-in-the-tail ending that will haunt you.
Escape from New York (1981)
The premise: In the near future, America’s crime rate explodes. The solution: Turn the island of Manhattan into a maximum-security Alcatraz and ship all of the worst criminals there to fend for themselves (not a huge stretch—New York City already felt that way at the time). The inciting incident: The U.S. president (Donald Pleasance) has been taken hostage and is now MIA in that New York hellhole. John Carpenter, in the middle of one of the most impossibly great runs that a genre director has ever had, turns this dystopian set-up into a swaggering showcase for Kurt Russell’s eyepatch-wearing antihero Snake Plissken, who, in exchange for a pardon for robbing the Federal Reserve, is strong-armed into going in and rescuing the commander in chief. The catch: He has 24 hours…and the clock starts now. There is literally no part of Escape from New York that is not 100 percent perfection.
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Edge of Tomorrow (2014)
I can only imagine that this must have been the easiest pitch in Hollywood history: “It’s Groundhog Day, but as a Tom Cruise sci-fi action movie!” Sold! Cruise plays a military PR man who finds himself thrown into the shit, battling alien armies only to get killed again and again, learning in increments as he goes along (mainly from badass soldier Emily Blunt). Director Doug Liman takes this live-die-repeat video-game premise and turns it into a wild pretzel-logic action workout. Cruise, for his part, seems to be almost visibly relieved at not having to play the invincible hero for the umpteenth time.
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They Live (1988)
There’s nothing subtle about John Carpenter’s delightfully daffy screed against shiny, happy ‘80s consumerism and crypto-fascism. But why should there be? The ‘80s weren’t a very subtle decade. Wrestler Rowdy Roddy Piper plays an everyday palooka who has come to L.A. to chew bubblegum and kick ass…and he’s all out of bubblegum. After putting on a special pair of sunglasses, the subliminal world becomes visible to him—a world festooned with black-and-white signs and slogans instructing the braindead masses to buy, reproduce, and obey (the last of which would later be the inspiration for Shepard Fairey’s famous street art).
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)
Philip Kaufman’s update of one of the most famous sci-fi movies of the ‘50s replaces the original’s paranoid, stranger-among-us Red Menace subtext and gives it a decidedly Me Decade ‘70s twist. Aliens are replacing the population of San Francisco with glassy-eyed pod people. Conformity and post-Watergate distrust are the targets here, and Donald Sutherland, Brooke Adams, and a truly amazing Leonard Nimoy seem to be the only sane people left to sound the alarm. Come for the ‘70s turtlenecks, stay for the icy cold terror.
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Predator (1987)
Pitched somewhere between a sci-fi invasion film and a red-meat Reagan-era action hoedown, John McTiernan’s insanely satisfying Predator is a delirious slab of Schwarzeneggerian beefcake. Along with a team of macho mercenaries, Ahnuld’s perfectly named Dutch matches wits and pumped-up muscles with an invisible heat-seeking alien hunter in the jungles of Central America. The he-man one-liners fly and the Vietnam parallels are unavoidable. Except, to quote another ‘80s action hero, John Rambo, this time we get to win. As for the sequels and spin-offs: Predator 2 is better than you’ve heard, but the rest are better avoided.
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The Iron Giant (1999)
At the exact moment when Pixar had taken over animation, Brad Bird takes a step back in time and uses the old-school, hand-drawn variety for this throwback to the sci-fi films of the ‘50s. A young Maine boy befriends a towering gentle giant robot (voiced by Vin Diesel) and tries to hide him and make him his own secret pal. That is until the military finds out about the giant metal man and decides to hunt him down and make him part of its weapons arsenal. There’s more than a whiff of E.T. at work here, but Bird’s nod to the Cold War era is a touching piece of artisanal nostalgia.
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Snowpiercer (2013)
Bong Joon-ho takes a page from the off-kilter Terry Gilliam playbook and transforms it into something that’s infinitely better than anything Gilliam could come up with. After earth’s climate goes into a deep freeze and becomes uninhabitable, what is left of humanity populates a speeding train that continuously circumnavigates the globe. The rich reside in luxury in the train’s front cars while the grimy plebes are crowded into steerage. Chris Evans is the messiah figure who rises up and brawls his way to the front while a bizarro, bucktoothed Tilda Swinton tries to keep the lower classes in their place. There’s a lot going on here—action-flick mayhem, class warfare commentary, you name it. But mostly it’s just a giddy, propulsive blast.
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Avatar (2009)
A.K.A. the movie that foolishly made Hollywood believe that 3-D was the next big thing. (Problem was, none of those movies following Avatar’s lead were directed by James Cameron.) Essentially a sci-fi Dances with Wolves, Cameron once again proved that he was a razzle dazzle confectioner two steps ahead of the curve. His Pandora is bioluminescent, blue-hued wonder. And like the best films in the genre, he gives us a brave new world that’s bold and breathtaking in its originality. Is it my favorite of Cameron’s movies? Not by a long shot. But there’s no disputing Avatar’s place in the sci-fi pantheon…not to mention the box-office record books.
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Starship Troopers (1997)
Paul Verhoeven adds his signature satirical topspin to Robert A. Heinlein’s classic 1959 novel about humanity fighting an alien race of killer bugs from the Klendathu System. The result is a little bit Triumph of the Will and a lot Beverly Hills 90210. The fresh-faced actors (Casper van Dien, Denise Richards, etc.) are as wooden as a log cabin, but that’s kind of the point. These are indistinguishable young heroes blindly marching into the jingoistic meat grinder. “Would you like to know more?”
Godzilla (1954)
Out of the ashes of the atomic bomb comes…a guy in a rubber lizard suit stomping a miniature dollhouse version of Tokyo. But here’s the thing: if you’re paying attention to the zippers and artifice in Ishiro Honda’s monster opus, you’re missing the point. Sci-fi has always been cinema’s greatest vessel for allegory and Godzilla remains a chilling metaphor about the horrors unleashed by mankind’s destructive power. This is the moment when the kaiju movie was born.
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Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982)
After the big-budget snoozefest of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, the rousing return of Ricardo Montalban’s avenging cult leader Khan Noonien Singh (“From hell’s heart I stab at thee!”) singlehandedly saved Gene Roddenberry’s franchise from a premature death. Fact. This is the greatest voyage of the Starship Enterprise and it is unlikely to ever be bested.
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RoboCop (1987)
During the ten-year span between 1987 and 1997, Paul Verhoeven was on a full-tilt bender of amazing sci-fi films: RoboCop, Total Recall, and Starship Troopers. He was like Spielberg with a sweet tooth for kink and satirizing capitalism. Verhoeven loves to have his cake and eat it too, both condemning and fetishizing American culture in the same breath. And RoboCop has a field day trafficking in that duality as a fallen Detroit police officer (Peter Weller) is brought back to life as the cybernetic future of law enforcement. Seen now, RoboCop may be the most pointed cinematic commentary on the Reagan years ever made.
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Strange Days (1995)
Kathryn Bigelow’s Y2K techno-noir should have been a way bigger deal when it arrived near the dawn of the new millennium. Not only is it a drum-tight thriller with fly futuristic gizmos, it also features my favorite Ralph Fiennes performance. There’s nothing better than Fiennes in seedy hustler mode. Here he plays Lenny Nero, a debauched low life who sells black-market VR tapes that cater to clients’ sickest fantasies. He’s a dealer, but he also gets high on his own supply, obsessively playing and replaying videos of his ex (Juliette Lewis) like a lonelyheart junkie. Then he unwittingly stumbles onto a snuff video of a prostitute being murdered, leading to a wider conspiracy which he tries to unravel while a seemingly endless string of goons hunt him. Bigelow’s futuristic flourishes are spot on, the storyline is loaded with twists and switchbacks, and Fiennes is a sleezy, skeezy revelation.
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Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)
How did no one die making this film? Seriously, I need to know.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
This gonzo romantic riddle may be the most unexpectedly lovely entry on this list. Like Total Recall, Eternal Sunshine is all about messing with people’s memories. But instead of Martian intrigue, Michel Gondry and Charlie Kaufman are interested in broken hearts. In short, what if we could erase the pain of our busted relationships from our minds forever? After learning that his ex (Kate Winslet’s Clementine) has undergone such a procedure to forget him, Jim Carrey flirts with the idea of following suit. The first two-thirds of Eternal Sunshine play like one of Kaufman’s typically convoluted narrative high-wire stunts. But the final third is an absolute knockout that leaves us hopeful about the idea of romantic destiny.
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Total Recall (1990)
It may be an unpopular choice, but this is easily my favorite Arnold Schwarzenegger movie. I’ve probably seen it 50 times and I could watch it again right now. Based on yet another Philip K. Dick short story (1966’s “We Can Remember it for You Wholesale”), Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall takes the tongue-in-cheek, over-the-top violence that the Dutch director first trotted out in RoboCop and gooses it up to its hard-R breaking point. Generally, when we think of Ahnuld shoot-em-ups, the word “brainy” doesn’t get tossed around much. But Total Recall’s plot is the ultimate mindfuck—a regular-Joe construction worker who suspects that there’s more to life (even though he’s “married” to Sharon Stone) pays a visit to a hi-tech travel company that implants memory chips that make your wildest vacation fantasies feel completely real. Problem is, Schwarzenegger quickly discovers that he’s not a regular joe at all, but rather a secret agent out to stop some shady political shenanigans on Mars. The special effects are cheesily delicious, the bullet-riddled bodycount is gratuitously high, and Verhoeven seems to be having a field day seeing how much he can get away with. God, I love this movie.
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Back to the Future (1985)
Yes, this is a mainstream blockbuster comedy, but if you squint just a little, it’s easy to see that that it’s a mainstream, blockbuster comedy with some really interesting sci-fi ideas simmering just beneath its slick, populist surface. Anyone who’s seen a single episode of the original Star Trek will be hip to its message about the dangers of time travel and how messing with the past can adversely affect the future. But director Robert Zemeckis and star Michael J. Fox sell the shit out of the premise, turning the movie into one giant, perfectly engineered Rube Goldberg contraption with punchlines and Huey Lewis needle-drops.
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The Fly (1986)
A gooey remake of 1958’s Vincent Price chiller, David Cronenberg’s most accessible slice of body horror is a classic cautionary tale about scientific hubris—a fertile sci-fi subgenre unto itself. Jeff Goldblum stars as charismatic brainiac Seth Brundle, who devises a teleportation device. But when he tries it out on himself, he unwittingly allows a fly into the teleportation pod and their DNA strands get knotted together, turning him into the monstrous, stomach-churning Brundlefly, much to Geena Davis’s horror. The Fly is a parable about the dangers of playing God, but mostly it’s just a gross-out gas.
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A Clockwork Orange (1971)
Viddy well, my brothers. Stanley Kubrick’s ambitious social satire about youthful nihilism, ultraviolence, and government oppression may be nasty and brutish. It’s also a flat-out masterpiece thanks to a sadistic-yet-charming performance from Malcolm McDowell as an amoral hooligan and the clinically chilly direction of its merry prankster auteur, Kubrick. Seen at the right age, this brilliant and disturbing adaptation of Anthony Burgess’ novel will brand certain scenes onto your brainpan forever. (It may also put you off “Singin’ in the Rain” forever.) A Clockwork Orange was such a controversial, third-rail movie upon its released that Kubrick ended up pulling it from theaters in the U.K. rather than deal with all of the agita.
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Stalker (1979)
Like cilantro, Andrei Tarkovsky’s films can be a bit of an acquired taste. But if you’re in the right frame of mind, this heady Soviet import is the sort of meditative, otherworldly experience that pays dividends in the end. Three men enter a mysterious and forbidden area called “The Zone” that’s been compromised by alien incursion on a quest to find a special room where wishes are granted. This is one of those glacial-paced thumbsuckers where the journey is greater than the destination, but you’ll never go on another ride like it. (See also: Tarkovsky’s 1972 classic Solaris, based on a Stanislaw Lem novel. George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh would later remake that brainteaser and completely whiff on it.)
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Minority Report (2002)
In the years between 2001 and 2005, Steven Spielberg entered his “Sci-Fi Blue Period,” cranking out a trio of films that returned him to the genre of Close Encounters and E.T. This time around, though, they all had a darker, more pessimistic palette: 2001’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence, 2002’s Minority Report, and 2005’s War of the Worlds. Adapted from a Philip K. Dick story, Minority Report is by far the stand out. Tom Cruise as a future cop in the pre-crime division chasing bad guys before they commit their transgressions. Along with Munich, this is Spielberg’s most under-appreciated movie.
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Dune: Part One (2021)/Dune: Part Two (2024)
Long before David Lynch tackled Dune in 1984, Frank Herbert’s thickety spiceworld saga was considered unfilmable. Lynch’s attempt didn’t change any minds. Then along came Denis Villeneuve, the sci-fi savant behind Arrival and Blade Runner 2049, to pull off the previously impossible. His visionary Dune: Part One was the eye-candy appetizer, an intoxicating world-building introduction that immersed and prepared us for the feast that he’s now laid out so brilliantly in Part Two. I’m not lumping these two chapters together as some sort of cheap way out (well, mostly). They really are two parts of a wonderfully weird fever-dream whole. So why are they all the way down at No. 18, you ask? Fair question. They’re still so fresh in our minds that it seems reasonable to let them marinate here for a bit. Check back in a couple of years, and see if they’ve been bumped up or knocked down.
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Jurassic Park (1993)
Steven Spielberg’s “When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth” blockbuster is just that—a blockbuster. And while the director “spared no expense,” giving us the ultimate E-ticket ride, my favorite bit in the film isn’t the rampaging T-Rex chase or the raptors-in-the-kitchen set piece. Rather, it's that brief little movie-within-a-movie narrated by the expository cartoon, Mr. DNA. That little throwaway scene about mosquitoes feeding on dino blood and then getting embalmed in amber contains more sci-fi smarts than most films in the genre manage to stuff into their entire run times. The most intelligent movie to ever make a billion dollars at the box office.
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The Road Warrior (1982)
Long before he went toxic, Mel Gibson rose to stardom as Max Rockatansky, a post-apocalyptic avenger speeding across the Aussie outback looking for petrol, hellbent on vengeance, and tangling with a ragtag army of mohawked marauders in bondage gear. George Miller’s high-octane, heavy metal action flick is a harrowing vision of the near future, when law and order spirals into chaos as our once plentiful natural resources dry up. Seeing this on the big screen belongs on the bucket list of every cinephile as Miller’s overcranked daredevil camera seems to zip and zoom mere inches above the asphalt. Fury Road would amp up everything that worked like gangbusters here, but I’ll take the brutal, nasty intensity of this earlier masterpiece every time.
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The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)
Fun fact: Robert Wise, the director of The Day the Earth Stood Still, would, three decades later, helm Star Trek: The Motion Picture. But since that movie is awful, let’s focus on this Atomic Age cautionary tale that tapped into America’s deepest Cold War anxieties. A UFO lands in Washington, D.C. An alien named Klaatu emerges with his groovy robot, Gort. They carry a message of peace for Earth’s leaders that falls on deaf ears. I’m a sucker for a great ‘50s Red Menace allegory and this, along with The Thing from Another World (also 1951), is the best of that breed. With the way things are going with Putin, it’s also sadly as timely as ever. Oh, and whatever you do, skip the 2008 Keanu Reeves remake. “Klaatu barada nikto!”
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The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
From the opening scenes on the ice planet Hoth to Han Solo being frozen in carbonite and then right on through to Luke’s climactic lightsaber duel with Darth “Call me Dad” Vader, this is as insanely satisfying as a middle installment in a trilogy can possibly be. So why is it sitting back here at No. 14? See No. 3.
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E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982)
Here’s one for the kiddies. Who am I kidding? It doesn’t matter how old you are, E.T. will get the waterworks going. When Spielberg works in the key of wonder, no one can touch him. And this is probably the most bittersweet fairy tale in his filmography. Somehow he manages to take the loneliness of growing up in a family of divorce and turn it into a universal balm that never loses sight of the sci-fi of it all (shout out to creature creator Carlo Rambaldi!). I used to be one of those people who’d say, “Oh, I loved E.T. as a kid, but it’s corny now.” Then I actually went back and watched it. Nope. This is pretty much a perfect film.
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Inception (2010)
Christopher Nolan’s Big Ideas can occasionally overwhelm him (see: Tenet), but when he’s operating on all cylinders there’s no better sci-fi director in Hollywood. Inception is Exhibit A. Why? Nolan’s four-dimensional architecture that looks like a Mad magazine fold-in drawn by M.C. Escher; a byzantine heist plot that messes with dream logic and the laws of gravity; and an absolutely note-perfect cast (Leonardo DiCaprio, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Elliot Page, Ken Watanabe, Michael Caine, Cillian Murphy, and a never-better Tom Hardy). Sure, Oppenheimer is about to win Best Picture at the Oscars, but this is still Nolan’s best movie.
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Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)
OK, a bit of a cheat here. With your indulgence, I’m claiming this slot for both James Cameron’s kick-ass shock-and-awe T2 and its making-more-out-of-less 1984 predecessor, The Terminator. If I’ve got a plasma rifle pointed at my head, well, I’ll go with T2 all day, every day. I remember seeing this one on opening day at the McClurg Court Cinema in Chicago with my brother. I don’t think either of us blinked once. The supersized action, Linda Hamilton’s ripped heroine, the bleeding-edge f/x of Robert Patrick’s liquid metal T-1000, Ahnuld’s sacrificial lump-in-your-throat ending—this is what Event Films should be, but so rarely are. If the original is a badass Harley, T2 is the Grave Digger—a monster truck that steamrolls over everything in its path.
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The Planet of the Apes (1968)
“You maniacs! You blew it up! God damn you! God damn you all to hell!” Thank you, Rod Serling, for the greatest twist ending of all time.
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Aliens (1986)
On any given day, I can be persuaded that James Cameron’s action-flick follow-up to Alien is better than Ridley Scott’s original. Today is not one of those days. As much as I love Cameron’s rah-rah macho mayhem—and the fact that Sigourney Weaver (in her power loader) is the most macho of the space-marine posse—Aliens isn’t all that interested in appealing to your mind so much as it is sucker-punching you in the gut. Cameron steeps us in sweat, sensation, and some pretty sweet scares. And even though it is down at number nine, Aliens is easily the most fun movie anywhere on this list.
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The Thing (1982)
John Carpenter’s claustrophobic, splattery remake of Christian Nyby and Howard Hawks’s The Thing from Another World was released in theaters the same day as Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. Both were reviled by critics and both were largely ignored by ticket buyers. The mind reels. But in the appellate court of time, The Thing is now rightly regarded as a sci-fi classic. Kurt Russell does his best John Wayne riff as MacReady, the bearded alpha among an all-male group of Antarctic scientists who discover an alien spaceship buried in the ice. Its thawed, shape-shifting inhabitant has fled and is now finding warm places to hide inside the bodies of the South Pole crew. But which of them is not who they seem? A master class is sub-zero paranoia, The Thing features some of the greatest (and gooiest) practical make-up f/x ever conjured thanks to wunderkind Rob Bottin and one of the most memorable open-ended final scenes ever filmed.
Metropolis (1927)
Nearly a century after it was made, Fritz Lang’s black-and-white marvel has lost none of its arresting and intoxicating power. If anything, it seems all the more astounding. The city-of-the-future world building feels years ahead of its time. Strike that, decades ahead of its time. And its political themes couldn’t be more timely, as the wealthy one-percent live in skyscrapers high up in the clouds above the proletarian workers sweating and laboring underground (out of sight, out of mind). A truly visionary film in every way.
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Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
One of Steven Spielberg’s greatest gifts as a storyteller is his ability to put an Everyman into extraordinary circumstances. And with CE3K, he finds the perfect Everyman stand-in in Richard Dreyfuss’s Roy Neary—a Midwestern family man plunged into obsession at the expense of those he loves. Released only months after Star Wars, Close Encounters had its work cut out for it in the spectacle department, but Spielberg’s Lite Brite UFOs still look (and sound) out of this world. Like an underground river, running beneath all of the visual splendor is a sincere warmth and humanity that make this a film that pulls your heartstrings as much as it dazzles your retinas.
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The Matrix (1999)
The first of Keanu Reeves’s many comebacks, the Wachowskis’ down-the-rabbit-hole sci-fi puzzlebox works as both a twisty philosophical möbius strip and a giddy kung fu-and-bullet time techno action ballet. In a year stacked with bold and daring cinematic statements, this was the movie that hit the hardest…and the deepest. I mean, how often do blockbusters come along that make us question the nature of reality? Just when audiences thought they had seen it all, The Matrix ripped the sci-fi envelope to shreds and tossed it in the air like confetti. Always take the red pill.
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Alien (1979)
I’ve heard some folks describe the first act of Alien as “slow.” Baloney! It’s paced exactly as it should be. After all, this is designed less as a sci-fi thrillride (although it does become that) than an Old Dark House chiller in space. Ridley Scott masterfully sets a psychological trap, introducing us to the Nostromo’s working-class crew and drawing us in so that when the shit finally does hit the fan in the form of a slimy H.R. Giger alien exploding out of John Hurt’s chest like the world’s sickest jack in the box, the white-knuckle terror is immediately dialed up to 11. At the time, the star-free cast kept audiences guessing over who would make it to the end. And when it turned out to be Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley, a star was immediately born. It’s mind-boggling to think that this was only Scott’s second feature.
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Star Wars (1977)
Ahead of The Empire Strikes Back?! I know, I know. But before you start firing off your hate mail, consider that this was the film that first transported us to George Lucas’ galaxy far, far away. The level of difficulty here was just so much higher. If A New Hope wasn’t the rousing, rollicking, revolutionary call to adventure that it was, we never would have been given a sequel. I was eight when I saw this in the theater during its first run and when I think back on my initial encounter with Darth Vader, the Death Star, Chewie, lightsabers, and the wretched hive of scum and villainy that is Mos Eisley spaceport, I still get goosebumps. This was millions of people’s gateway drug into sci-fi cinema and, as such, deserves its slot here.
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Blade Runner (1982)
As hard as it may be to believe today, Blade Runner was a critical and commercial disappointment upon its release in the summer of 1982. But thanks to a belated director’s cut that tweaked the theatrical version and ditched Harrison Ford’s somnambulant, monotone voiceover, Ridley Scott’s hardboiled future-noir adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? ultimately took its rightful place atop the sci-fi canon. As the conflicted replicant Roy Batty, Rutger Hauer delivers one of the genre’s all-time great soliloquies with his “tears in the rain” speech.
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2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
With a not-insignificant assist from the fertile imagination of Arthur C. Clarke, Stanley Kubrick’s cosmic brainteaser was, is, and will likely always be the greatest sci-fi film ever made. Released during the peak of the mind-expanding ‘60s counterculture movement, 2001 was a dazzlingly chilly eye-candy headtrip that pushed the boundaries of what was technically possible in the pre-CGI era. The miracle of it today is that it still seems as jam-packed with heavy, prescient ideas and gee-whiz visual miracles as it was more than a half century ago.
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