Somewhere, in a galaxy far, far away, Georges Méliès never sends a bunch of folks on a trip to the moon. The adventures of space explorers and time travelers, androids and alien races don’t thrill a generation of kids chomping popcorn at Saturday matinees. The name Luke Skywalker means nothing to anyone; neither does Marty McFly, “Mad” Max Rockatansky, or Godzilla. Giant prehistoric monsters aren’t awakened from centuries-long slumbers and don’t wreck a single metropolis. E.T. never makes it to Earth, so he never has to go home. Thomas “Neo” Anderson is just another computer programmer. HAL 9000 is just a calculator.
How boring the movies would be — and how robbed we audiences would be — if science fiction never existed, or never made it past the that’s-just-for-academics stage of evolution. Ever since that bullet-like rocket gave the Moon a black eye in 1902 and added an element of fantasy into a very young art form, those speculative and imaginative stories set in the far reaches of space and/or on our own scorched earth have been an integral part of a well-balanced cinematic diet. These films have given us visions of utopias and dystopias, asked deep questions about the human experience and the pros and cons of artificial intelligence, thrilled us and made us think. Once upon a time, sci-fi was considered nothing more than a niche for nerds. Now it’s a genre wide enough to encompass everything from Ad Astra to Zardoz.
So when it came time to rank the greatest sci-fi movies of all time, we couldn’t stop at 100. Instead, we went bigger and bulked it up with an extra 50 entries, all the better to pay lip service to more of the pulpy, the poppy and the perverse entries — not to mention some of our personal favorites — that don’t normally get shout-outs in these kinds of lists. There were more than a few arguments when it came to the picks. (It was also decided early on that superhero movies as a whole usually fall out the parameters of science fiction, so you won’t the MCU, et al., canon on this list — with one very notable exception.) Here are our picks for the best the genre has to offer. Live long and prosper. May the force be with you.
‘Tank Girl’ (1995)
What would the post-apocalyptic world look like if the hero was a riot grrrl and the soundtrack was curated by Courtney Love? Behold the adventures of Tank Girl (Lorri Petty), as our hero roams through the decimated Outback, years after a comet hit earth and an evil corporation seized control. It’s got some of the hallmarks of a traditional sci-fi adventure — a jet-flying sidekick played by Naomi Watts; an army of half-kangaroo, half-man beings, including one played by Ice-T — but Rachel Talalay’s adaptation of the cult British comic diverges from the typical dystopia formula by layering everything over a very 1990s alt aesthetic, all bright colors and snappy, sexualized wisecracks. “No celebrities, no cable TV, no water — it hasn’t rained in 11 years,” Tank Girl explains early on in the film. “Now 20 people gotta squeeze inside the same bathtub — so it ain’t all bad.” —Elisabeth Garber-Paul
‘The Omega Man’ (1971)
Los Angeles, 1975: Biological warfare has wiped out the human race, leaving one man standing. Charlton Heston is the lone survivor from the plague, fighting off a cult of killer mutants in the deserted streets of Southern California. This extremely Me Decade adaptation of Richard Matheson’s landmark 1954 novel I Am Legend is a paranoid pandemic nightmare that turned out to be way too prophetic — for some of us, it was the movie we couldn’t stop watching in lockdown. Director Boris Sagal gives it an authentically scuzzy vibe, where Seventies L.A. is a sun-washed wasteland. At one point, Heston hides out in an empty theater showing the Woodstock documentary. He watches the hippies dance, reciting the dialogue word-for-word as a flower child gushes, “If we all can’t live together and be happy… what kind of way is that to go through life?” Heston just snickers, “They sure don’t make pictures like that any more.” In the 2020s, we’ve all been there. —Rob Sheffield
‘Demolition Man’ (1993)
Eight years from right now, we’ll all be eating only Taco Bell, having contactless virtual sex, and cursing a whole lot less. Welcome to the year 2032, as imagined by this 1993 amusem*nt-park ride of a movie starring Sylvester Stallone and Wesley Snipes. Sly is an unvarnished lawman from the Nineties thawed out of cryogenic stasis to capture Snipes’ supervillain, with help from Sandra Bullock’s overly earnest peace officer. But it’s the set pieces (a “Hall of Violence” at a museum of the 20th century, a lounge singer crooning “The Jolly Green Giant” jingle) and in-jokes (“The Schwarzenegger Presidential Library,” mysterious bathroom etiquette) that makeDemolition Mana reliable source of joy-joy feelings to this day. Some say it even accurately predicted our current reality — self-driving cars and Zoom meetings anyone? —Joseph Hudak
‘Species’ (1995)
Natasha Henstridge catwalked so that Scarlett Johansson could run. It was the allure of the Canadian model’s bared flesh — and the torn flesh of her drooling male victims — that drew big crowds to Roger Donaldson’s kinky potboiler, a kind of proto Under the Skin about a half-alien seductress on the loose in Los Angeles, with eccentric scientists in hot pursuit. (Emphasis on the hot.) Traces of Alien DNA can be found in both the H.R. Giger effects and the probing of male anxieties; like its extraterrestrial menace, the movie exploits libido, using T&A as the bait of a satirical honeytrap and clowning on prey too horny to recognize the predator sizing it up. The humor puts tongue in cheek — and then sends it out the back of the head. —A.A. Dowd
‘The Running Man’ (1987)
Arnold Schwarzenegger followed up Predator with this adaptation of a Stephen King novella (written under the pseudonym Richard Bachman) a mere four months later, giving fans a double blast of sci-fi thrills that year. The Running Man imagines a future that isn’t far off from our reality-show, influencer, and veering-toward-authoritarian moment, with Schwarzenegger playing a disgraced police pilot accused of slaughtering civilians. There’s a way he can win his freedom, however: by competing in a reality-show contest televised on state TV. The catch? He has to survive encounters with WWE-style mercenaries named Subzero, Fireball, and Buzzsaw. It’s The Hunger Games meets Escape From New York, hosted by the ultimate game-show emcee, Family Feud’s Richard Dawson. Survey Says….dystopia! —JH
‘The Last Starfighter’ (1984)
Teenage video-game ace Alex Rogan (Lance Guest) is recruited by a peaceful alien civilization to help them win an intergalactic war. Meanwhile, Robert Preston is a scream as the kid’s E.T. guide Centauri, and the early computerized special effects put you in the middle of the deep-space dogfights. But it’s the underdog spirit of the plot — a kid in a trailer park, desperate to make something out of his life — that proved more irresistible than a tractor beam. In the end, Alex even got the girl…to join him in outer space. —JH
‘The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ (2005)
Let’s be real: Bureaucracy sucks. And this adaptation of Douglas Adams’ insanely popular sci-fi novel proves that even fantastical worlds aren’t exempt. Starring a post U.K. Office, pre-Hobbit Martin Freeman Arthur Dent, as the sole survivor of a destroyed Earth, director Garth Jennings’ movie uses inspiration from previous takes (not just the novel, but also the radio show and BBC TV series) to wage an absurdist take on the concept of hopping around the universe, one ride at a time. Featuring Sam Rockwell as everyone’s favorite two-headed intergalactic president Zaphod Beeblebrox and Alan Rickman voicing the depressed and anxious robot named Marvin, this sci-fi comedy leaves the bells and whistles of the medium behind for a slapdash and highly literal world, where even the smartest of artificial intelligences can’t give a satisfactory answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. —CT Jones
‘Men in Black’ (1997)
Barry Sonnenfeld’s adaptation of the comic book series about a secret government agency keeping the universe safe will be forever remembered for giving us the exuberant pairing of Will “I look good!” Smith and straight-faced Tommy Lee Jones. But it’s the way that turns New York City into a literal out-of-this-world freak show of alien creatures, from Frank the Pug (actually an extraterrestrial who just looks like a pug) to Tony Shaloub’s head-regenerating pawn shop owner. It’s a perfectly paced sci-fi buddy comedy that riffs off a host of conspiracy theories about visitors living among us. Strip it down to its elements, however, and Men in Black is basically about how NYC is the greatest place in the world — whether you’re from outer space or right here on Earth. —Esther Zuckerman
‘Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai’ (1984)
“Laugh while you can, monkey boy!” W.D. Richter’s alt sci-fi New Wave wonderment is a loony masterclass in world-building overload, as neurosurgeon-physicist-rocker/part-time test pilot Buckaroo Banzai (Peter Weller) faces off against demented Dr. Emilio Lizardo (John Lithgow). The Jamaican-accented Black Lectroids of Planet 10 help defend Banzai and his rag-tag team, the Kong Hong Cavaliers, from the Red Lectroids and their search for his matter-penetrating oscillation overthruster. Ok, but: how to explain the Orson Welles cover-up? Or Penny Priddy (Ellen Barkin), the secret twin sister of a dead wife? Comic-book irreverence and pervasive side-mouth commentary are why this straight-faced whatzit endures as a vital antidote to fatuous stories of interstellar adventure. To paraphrase the film’s Italo-fascistmadman: In the miserable annals of the earth, it will be duly enshrined. —Stephen Garrett
‘Idiocracy’ (2006)
For years, many sci-fi stories took place in distant futures in which mankind’s intelligence had reached previously unimaginable heights, technology made lives vastly easier, and many of the problems that have plagued us had been solved. Mike Judge’s addition to the genre imagines a slightly different world that awaits us: A world in which most people — well, ok, most Americans — have devolved to the point of being dumber than f*ck. Once Luke Wilson’s Army librarian and Maya Rudolph’s streetwalker wake up in the year 2505 after a centuries-long cryogenic nap, they discover a landscape in which the anti-intellectual boneheads have become the dominant species, commercialism has run amuck, everything is both hypercomputerized and constantly broken, and President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho (god bless you, Terry Crews) shuts down hecklers at his State of the Union with a machine gun. Once upon a time, this was considered a satire, with Judge turning science-fiction conventions inside out in the name of belly laughs. Now? You worry that we’ve caught up to his Idiots-Rule vision and the “fiction” part applies less and less. —David Fear
‘Dune’ (1984)
Author Frank Herbert, who published the multilayered 1965 novel about an intergalactic war to control the production of “the spice” on a planet called Dune, approved of David Lynch’s adaptation. “The story is there,” he said. It still bombed nevertheless, and Lynch doesn’t want to talk about it to this day. But his version’s unwieldiness is its greatest virtue: the sweaty sleaziness of Kenneth McMillan’s sickening Baron Harkonen, the wild-haired Eraserhead-iness of Brad Dourif’s Mentat, the spiciness of Kyle MacLachlan’s blue eyes as he leads his troops. The movie has sandworms, blocky forcefield duels, and Sting with a knife. It captures the surreal aspects of the source material in a way that makes you feel high on spice as you watch it. —Kory Grow
‘Independence Day’ (1996)
It’s a disaster film, a conspiracy-minded sci-fi adventure, a rousing battle in space, and patriotic propaganda bar none, all delivered with smart-mouthed smarm and juggernaut spectacle. It’s an ode to star power courtesy of Will Smith, at the peak of his powers, and the decade’s favorite Cassandra, Jeff Goldblum. It’s a ’50s alien invasion B movie blown up to A-list summer-movie proportions. By the time Bill Pullman delivers his famous speech (“Perhaps it’s fate that today is the 4th of July, and you will once again be fighting for our freedom”), the audience is ready to get some payback for having the White House blown to smithereens. Cynics might say that this is all formulaic button-pushing from director Roland Emmerich. But when the buttons are so expertly crafted, it’s a testament what well-worn genre conventions, a little popcorn and a lot of dopamine can accomplish. —Katie Rife
‘Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure’ (1989)
Seven hundred years in the future, mankind lives in complete peace and harmony because of the music created by a couple of California stoners (Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter) in the late 20th century. When a rift in the timeline causes them to split up while still in high school, an emissary from the future (George Carlin) travels back in time to keep them together, which involves helping them pass a high school history test with help from Napoleon, Abraham Lincoln, Genghis Khan, Joan of Arc, Sigmund Freud, and Billy The Kid. Written by Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure added its own signature, slightly baked take on the time-travel movie, as well as paving the way for Beavis and Butthead and Wayne’s World. Neither of those franchises, however, created lines as timeless as “strange things are afoot at the Circle K.” —Andy Greene
‘Zardoz’ (1974)
Sean Connery is a mutant Brute from the Outlands clad in a red loincloth. He stows away on a massive floating stone head floating towards the Vortex, a land where bourgeois Eternals suppress themselves with hypnosis and meditation. His journey of knowledge and eventual revolution is illustrated through multiple flashbacks that come perilously close to devolving into psychedelic dreck. (Spoiler alert: “Zard Oz” is a play on The Wizard of Oz.) John Boorman’s cult epic is redolent of adult science-fiction in the pre-Star Wars Seventies: kitschy and weird, laden with sex and violence, yet undeniably literary and inventive. —Mosi Reeves
‘Tron’ (1982)
The Dude alights. Jeff Bridges was the picture of illuminated-cool in this early-Eighties Disney film about a video-game creator who ends up inside a computer, where he and his colleagues become avatars forced to compete in a series of Olympic-type contests. Fortunately for Clu (Bridges), his real-world counterpart designed one of the games, a moto-race called Light Cycle, and he makes a break for it, fighting a bunch of goons along the way — including his IRL boss. It’s all a lot to, ahem, process, but in 1982 it looked super cool and engaged an audience fascinated by video games. —JH
‘Repo Man’ (1984)
One of the rites of passage for being a cool kid in the ‘80s was getting deeply into Alex Cox’s freewheeling social satire (and its bitchin’ L.A. punk soundtrack, naturally). Emilio Estevez plays a rootless rebel who stumbles into a job repossessing vehicles, where he finds mentors (including a philosophical old grump played by Harry Dean Stanton) and gets drawn into a conspiracy involving aliens, government agents and a radioactive car. As wonderfully bizarre as the film is, it’s actually a fairly accurate document of life in Ronald Reagan’s America in 1984, where even the most anarchic youths were in constant danger of getting absorbed into the mass conformity. —Noel Murray
‘Born in Flames’ (1983)
Lizzie Borden’s gloriously D.I.Y. clarion call from the underground reimagines Reagan-era NYC as a dystopia already in progress, casting the present day Gotham as a “futuristic” cesspool of mass unemployment, rampant misogyny, racial tensions and riots in the streets. (Plus ça change.) Thankfully, not one but two Women’s Armies are taking action, keeping women safe from scumbags and broadcasting calls for revolution over pirate radio stations. They’ll eventually combine forces to enact genuine social change by any — and every — means necessary. The movie’s climactic bombing of World Trade Center (!) plays much differently today then it did in the No Wave ’80s, to say the least. But then again, so does Born in Flames‘ f*ck you to the patriarchy, keen understanding of intersectionality, and rage against a machine that views everyone but the One-Percent as expendable. The fact that Borden integrated actual footage of uprisings and police violence only adds to urgency of its agitprop storytelling. It’s a sci-fi movie that’s as radical as its politics, and twice as incendiary. —DF
‘District 9’ (2009)
In Neill Blomkamp’s grimy sci-fi fantasy, the aliens aren’t deadly invaders. They’re persecuted prawn people, herded into South African shanty towns by a private military firm, exploited by Nigerian warlords, and shunted into a generally miserable existence. Then a hapless bureaucrat (Sharlto Copley) who’s been tasked with relocating them is forced to walk a mile in their exoskeletons. One of the bleakest, nastiest film to ever get an Oscar nomination for Best Picture, this sci-fi take on Apartheid and other social ills uses a mockumentary format to pull the viewer in — you half expect Michael Scott to pop out from around a corner and start shooting — then grinds away at the ugliness of humanity. It’s easy to admire, even when it makes you want to take a shower. —Chris Vognar
‘2046’ (2004)
Wong Kar-wai’s sequel to the rapturously romantic In the Mood for Love goes back to the future, examining the emotional fallout of journalist Chow Mo Wan (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai), who’s exorcising his unrequited love, in part, by writing a sci-fi novel. 2046 ambitiously shifts between timelines and genres, going from the 1960s to the fictional world of Chow’s book, which is set in a sleek, dystopian mid-21st-century landscape where the characters’ ennui mirrors that of their heartbroken author. Although not commonly found on lists like this, the movie reflects what’s best about science fiction: recalibrating how we see the world thanks to its groundbreaking vision of the fluidity of the past and the present — and the fragility of our hold on reality. —Tim Grierson
‘Ad Astra’ (2019)
Emo astronaut Brad Pitt, heart-hardened from intergalactic daddy issues, finally gets word from his absentee father (Tommy Lee Jones) who’s been MIA after 29 years on a trip to the edge of the solar system. So mission-focused Pitt rock-hops, first to the moon and then Mars, before venturing to Jupiter and beyond in order to save the world and have one last talk with his Pops, not in that order. Director James Gray merges Heart of Darkness with 2001: A Space Odyssey to create the blazing cold fusion of this chilling trip into the unknown. It’s got everything from the horror of a zero-gravity baboon attack to a lunar Doubletree Hotel — but the real scream you’ll never hear in space is the one you make confronting the metaphysical maelstrom of your own flesh and blood. —SG
‘The Fifth Element’ (1997)
Put aside, for a moment, any feelings you may currently have about director Luc Besson and journey back to 1997, when our minds were blown by his irrepressibly zany sci-fi odyssey. Bruce Willis is your typical 23rd century cabbie and ex-military guy named Korben Dallas who unexpectedly finds himself the caretaker of Milla Jovovich’s Leeloo. She is, despite her human body, the titular fifth element, i.e. the last piece of a weapon that can defeat an ancient evil, and suddenly Korben is thrust into an adventure with the future of the world at stake. Everything in The Fifth Element is over the top — from the technicolor costumes to the delirious performances from Gary Oldman as the bad guy and Chris Tucker as intergalactic emcee Ruby Rhod. It’s a completely campy sci-fi overload. —EZ
‘Never Let Me Go (2010)
Based on Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel, this is science fiction rendered in a deeply melancholy key, a story of looming mortality and youth tossed away for an allegedly higher cause. It’s also a smoldering love triangle, featuring Andrew Garfield, Keira Knightley and Carey Mulligan as a trio of “donors” that come to realize they’re not quite human, despite how much they hurt. Music video maestro Mark Romanek shoots in muted greys, giving the film’s rural English settings an elegiac texture appropriate for a tale of time passing by before it runs out entirely. —CV
‘Time After Time’ (1979)
It’s such an ingenious idea that you wonder why someone didn’t think of it sooner: In 1893, H.G. Wells (Malcolm McDowell) has not just come up with the basis of his novel The Time Machine — he’s actually invented one. Unfortunately, he happens to mention this to an acquaintance of his, a surgeon whose off-hours activities have earned him the nickname Jack the Ripper (David Warner). The serial killer transports himself to present-day San Francisco, in search of new prey; Wells soon follows him, determined to stop this Victorian-era madman once and for all. Based off an unfinished novel by Karl Alexander, writer-director Nicholas Meyer’s speculative-history romp makes the most of its fish-out-of-water gags — Wells is beguiled by this thing called a “McDonalds” — as well as the chilling notion that London’s most notorious 19th century boogeyman would be outclassed in the world of 1979. (“Back then, I was a freak… here, I’m an amateur.”) Throw in a romance between Wells and Mary Steenburgen’s bank teller-slash-potential Ripper victim, and you have a truly great what-if time-travel story. —DF
‘World on a Wire’ (1979)
More than two decades before The Matrix popularized the notion of simulation theory, director Rainer Werner Fassbinder took the concept for a test drive. Originally aired over two nights on German television, his epic-length paranoid thriller follows a researcher (Klaus Löwitsch) overseeing a computer project involving, essentially, NPCs that don’t know they’re NPCs. Gradually, he begins to wonder how real his world is. Fassbinder updated ancient questions of perception and reality to a new age of rapidly advancing computer technology. When the film was rediscovered in 2010, it suddenly looked even more relevant — an ur-text inspiration for the nesting-doll mindbenders of the Wachowskis and Christopher Nolan, as well as a cautionary tale for a species too buried in Second Life to question the nature of their first one. —AAD
‘God Told Me To’ (1976)
A sniper is picking off passerbys in New York City; when police detective Anthony Lo Bianco asks him why he did it, the killer replies, “God told me to.” Soon, a number of average citizens begin turning into psychopaths without the slightest provocation, each calmly claiming the same divine motive as that original perpetrator. Writer-director Larry Cohen’s odd, unsettling thriller starts off as your typical Horror-City urban nightmare, reiterating the idea of NYC as a dangerous cesspool to Middle America’s drive-in crowd. Then it takes a serious turn toward the weird, and starts introducing notions of alien abductions, Chariots of the Gods-style conspiracy theories, psychic powers and faith-vs.-science arguments into the mix. It’s a vastly underrated stealth sci-fi movie, one of those scuffed-up ’70s gems that smuggles a lot of mind-blowing ideas under the cover of a grotty grindhouse flick. —D.F.
‘Things to Come’ (1936)
H.G. Wells himself wrote the script for this dystopian epic, which predicts the course of history from 1940 to 2036. Prestige producer Alexander Korda spared no expense in turning one of an all-time great science-fiction author’s words into pictures, and he hired the visionary fantasy director/production designer William Cameron Menzies to bring a sense of grandeur to the sprawling saga of an ordinary Englishman (Raymond Massey) who watches the world slide from devastating wars into hyper-controlling fascism. Eventually, he — and we — observe society settle into a kind of wary techno-utopia. Like many of the best movies about the future, this one is really about the past, converting the lingering anxieties of the Great Depression — along with some haunting memories of World War I — into a provocative cautionary tale. —NM
‘Attack the Block’ (2011)
Evil extraterrestrials versus British hood rats — guess who wins? This funny, fast-paced sci-fi comedy (featuring future Force Awakens hero John Boyega and future female-Doctor-Who Jodie Whittaker) pits a bunch of neighborhood kids in a rough section of South London against an otherworldly invasion. And damned if their street smarts aren’t the only thing that stands between our species and total annihilation. The fact that it flips the script and makes the so-called underclass the heroes was reason enough to embrace this scrappy take on Eighties blockbusters, but it also brings its action and alien-scares A-game (those glowing teeth!) as well. —DF
‘Phase IV’ (1974)
Graphic designer Saul Bass had become well-known throughout Hollywood for his modernist, abstract and extremely innovative credit sequences. When he directed his only feature film, however, he steered away from the stylish and straight into the creepy-crawly. A mysterious event causes ants to evolve at a highly rapid rate. When a colony constructs seven geometrically similar towers in Arizona for reasons unknown, two scientists (Nigel Davenport and Michael Moriarty) set up a base camp to study and communicate with them. It quickly becomes apparent that these tiny creatures have a much larger agenda in mind than simply talking to curious hom*o sapiens. Let’s just say it’s called Phase IV for a reason, and by the time you find out what their ultimate plan is, you may never want to go on a picnic again. Should any ants be reading this blurb, let me just go on the record as saying that I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords! —DF
‘Time Bandits’ (1981)
What would you do if a group of fugitive little people burst through your wardrobe in the middle of the night, claiming that they can travel through time? You’d join them, of course. In Terry Gilliam’s fantastical masterpiece, a prepubescent named Kevin (Craig Warnock) and his new mates encounter Napoleon (Ian Holm), Robin Hood (John Cleese), King Agamemnon (Sean Connery), the Minotaur, and everyone on the Titanic before a final, terrifyingly surrealistic battle with the Supreme Being (Sir Ralph Richardson at his most menacing). It’s like Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure but funnier, more middlebrow, and a lot more madcap, thanks to Gilliam and cowriter Michael Palin’s roots in Monty Python. Its visuals laid the groundwork (pipework?) for Gilliam’s brilliant Brazil four years later. —KG
‘Pi’ (1998)
Darren Aronofsky’s cyberpunk debut not only fuses elements of David Lynch and David Cronenberg into an impressively realized whole, but also previews the kind of visual excesses that made the future Requiem for a Dream auteur one of the most controversial directors of the Aughts. The film centers on Sean Gullette’s brilliantly tortured number theorist and his futile quest to find a perfect number that encompasses the theory of life. A Wall Street management firm and a cabal of Hasidic Jews try to exploit him as he winds his way through New York’s subway system while suffering from hallucinations, headaches, and the effects of psychotropic medications. The late Mark Margolis of Better Call Saul fame lends crucial support as a mentor who tries Gullette away from the edge of madness. —MR
‘Dark City’ (1998)
Even in a decade stuffed to the gills with virtual reality sci-fi (The Matrix, Strange Days, eXistenZ, etc.), Alex Proyas’ strange nocturnal brew of Edward Hopper, German Expressionism and American detective fiction stands out. An alien race creates a nocturnal city that they use to observe humans in hopes of learning their ways, putting the inhabitants of the city to sleep every night and switching their identities. One man (Rufus Sewell) has the power to set humanity free. In its own way, the city of the title is every bit as New York as the Gotham of Batman and Co. Yet in the hands of Proyas it becomes a wonderful synthesis, an always-dark land of automats and murder and group memories of a beach that never existed. It’s the city that always sleeps. —CV
‘The Time Machine’ (1954)
Victorian-era tinkerer George (Rod Taylor) tempts the laws of providence by leaping into the future — first a dozen or so years, then a few decades, and finally to the year 802,701. There he finds humanity bifurcated into two species: the simpleton Eloi, fair-skinned and blonde-haired naifs; and the monstrous Morlocks, an underground ruling class who control and feed on the Eloi. H.G. Wells’ 19th century inequality parable got an Atomic Age tweak with director George Pal folding in the repercussions of an imagined soon-to-be nuclear war. He also pioneered the cinematic language of back-to-the-future visits with Oscar-winning special effects, including time-lapse photography, miniature sets, and makeup design that included the melting potato-face visage of the story’s stringy-haired oppressors. Wells first conjured up this classic O.G. time-travel cautionary tale featuring the title’s proto-steampunk device in 1895, but it’s this handsome ’50s movie adaptation that made it timeless. —SG
‘The Beast from 2000 Fathoms’ (1953)
Before there was Cloverfield — before there was even Godzilla — director Eugène Lourié’s adaptation of a Ray Bradbury short story gave birth to one of sci-fi cinema’s grand traditions: the spectacle of a towering reptilian beast wreaking havoc and leaving destruction in its wake. A scientist (Paul Christian) working at the North Pole, executing atomic-weapon tests that awaken a ferocious dinosaur that had laid dormant in the ice for millennia. Soon, the creature makes its way south, ready to release its rage upon Manhattan. You can feel the Nuclear Age anxieties of the 1950s pulsing through this epochal monster movie, and effects wizard Ray Harryhausen brings the beast to giddy, frightening life. —TG
‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ (2014)
You can find a lot of sci-fi flotsam and jetsam floating around Marvel movies, from technologically advanced supersuits to gamma-ray-generated monsters. James Gunn’s additions to the MCU, however, are arguably the only ones that are straight-up science fiction — and this initial entry in his trilogy of movies about a cosmos-hopping band of outlaws has both a sense of humor about and a keen understanding of the genre in the best possible ways. Led by the legendary (or rather, “legendary”) interstellar thief Jason Quill, a.k.a. Star-Lord, these misfits ended up becoming a sort of all-purpose comic relief for this cinematic universe’s connected story lines. But the original GotG takes its cues as much from the last 40 years’ worth of sci-fi movies as it does from the group’s comic books, with everything from Chris Pratt’s goof on the square-jawed anti-hero to the chemistry between a walking tree branch and a talking racoon somehow delivering a rock-’em sock-’em space adventure while also affectionately sending it up. We are all Groot now. —DF
‘The Vast of Night’ (2019)
Welcome to Cayuga, New Mexico, your typical 1950s Smalltown, U.S.A. hamlet likely located a stone’s throw from Roswell. Two alpha-nerd A.V.-club teens — Everett (Jake Horowitz), a tech whiz and late-night disc jockey, and Fey (Sierra McCormick), who connects folks at the local switchboard — find themselves dealing with an odd blast of sound coming over the airwaves. Fey fields a panicked phone call about … something that may or may not be of this Earth. The military seems to be involved as well. Then things get weird. The debut of writer-director-editor Andrew Patterson is chock full of virtuoso filmmaking (those long, serpentine tracking shots!) and enough sustained Spielbergasms that it technically qualifies as a close encounter of the fourth kind. But all of those chops and retro Twilight Zone stylings — down to a fake TV show paying homage to Rod Serlings’ landmark series — are put into the service of a slow-burn dread that lingers with you. Watch the skies, people. Watch the skies. —DF
‘Rogue One’ (2016)
The most somber of the Star Wars chapters, this spinoff builds a riveting adventure out of a throwaway line from the 1977 original — a brief mention of some rebel spies who stole the plans for the fearsome Darth Star, including the key to how to destroy it. Monsters director Gareth Edwards and Oscar-nominee Felicity Jones took it from there, dramatizing the spies’ dangerous mission and, in the process, crafting a Star Wars film that’s part heist picture and part legitimate war movie. A stellar international cast — including Diego Luna, Ben Mendelsohn, Donnie Yen, Mads Mikkelsen, Alan Tudyk, Jiang Wen and Forest Whitaker — adds to the movie’s gravitas and grit, leading to an epic ending that both acknowledges that some heroes’ sacrifices go uncelebrated and that the allure of George Lucas’ mythic franchise remains sterling no matter how many underwhelming sequels and TV series Disney keeps pumping out. —TG
‘Them!’ (1954)
The Manhattan Project might have left a hole in J. Robert Oppenheimer’s soul, but that’s nothing compared to its effect on the ants of the surrounding desert area. They’re big. Like, really big. And loud. Among the oddest things about this sci-fi B movie is just how much science is crammed into it — if you have a question about Formicidae behavior, there’s a good chance Them! has the answer. An Oscar nominee for special effects, Gordon Douglas’ creepy-crawly cautionary tale is one of those atomic-age spectacles that takes an indirect approach to the threat of post-Los Alamos extinction. If the bombs don’t get you, the insects surely will. —CV
‘Death Race 2000’ (1975)
This low-budget wonder from the Roger Corman factory is set in the then-distant year of 2000, after “the world crash of ’79.” It concerns the 20th annual Transcontinental Road Race, in which five teams of flamboyant drivers and navigators roar from coast to coast while racking up points for every pedestrian they mow down along the way. (Points are staggered based on age and mobility, resulting in dialogue like, “it’s euthanasia day at the local geriatric hospital!”) Director Paul “Eating Raoul” Bartel’s ‘70s kitsch vision of the future — all sterile interiors and delightfully fake matte paintings — is a hoot, the kills are gloriously grotesque, and you can hear the echoes of its cackling nihilism in everything from Robocop to The Hunger Games to the WWE.—Jason Bailey
‘Gattaca’ (1997)
The best thing about Gattaca is its quietly inquisitive tone, even as it navigates potentially controversial ideas. In a future where genetic makeup determines one’s station in life, Ethan Hawke toils as a janitor and nurtures dreams of joining the Gattaca Aerospace Corporation. He gets a break when Jude Law gives him enough genetic material to sneak into the Gattaca program, where he befriends and eventually romances Uma Thurman. As various antagonists attempt to unravel Hawke’s scheme, director Andrew Niccol explores how eugenics nurtures bigotry and whether human will can trump hereditary destiny. It’s set in a sci-fi landscape that may seem too uncomfortably white to some viewers, leading them to wonder if they’ll be genetically suppressed in the future, too. —MR
‘Serenity’ (2005)
Following the cancellation of the Fox series Firefly after a single season, folks assumed that Joss Whedon’s show about a ragtag group of space explorers — led by Nathan Fillion’s charming rogue of a captain, Mal Reynolds — would simply be relegated to the fondly remembered one-and-done wing of TV’s sci-fi canon. Thanks to the popularity of the series’ DVD release, however, the writer-director got to do a theatrical feature that reunited Fillion, Gina Torres, Alan Rudyk and the rest of Firefly‘s cast, proving to fanboys everywhere that if you complain long and loud enough, people will eventually listen. (As to whether that was ultimately a good thing… let’s say the jury is still out.) Luckily, this “final” adventure of the crew of the spaceship Serenity is one hell of a romp, with Mal & co. protecting Summer Glau’s fugitive psychic assassin from Chiwetel Ejiofor’s “operative,” tying up a lot of narratuve loose ends and scoring some genuine points about found family along the way. “We’ve done the impossible,” Mal says, “and that makes us mighty.” Truer words were never spoken. —CTJ
‘Existenz’ (1999)
“Death to the demoness, Allegra Geller!” In a classic case of movie-crushing bad Hollywood timing, David Cronenberg’s mind-bending, gloriously grimy, virtual-reality-themed low-budget micro-epic hit theaters just weeks afterThe Matrix— which delivered a far sleeker and more action-y take on the same “whatisreal”/plugging-your-spine-into-a-computer theme. But the dizzying worlds-within-worlds ofExistenz —which offers an enjoyable pairing of leads Jennifer Jason Leigh (as superstar video-game designer Allegra Geller) and Jude Law (as her young employee) — offer a more cerebral and haunting brand of thrills that make it one of the most under-rated sci-films of its decade, echoing themes and new-flesh body-horror imagery from Cronenberg’s 1983 classicVideodromealong the way. The film deserves a slot on this list just for the bonkers-even-by-Cronenberg-standards scene where Law’s character assembles the slimy bones of his mutant dinner into a tooth-shooting gun and promptly murders a waiter. (“Just a little misunderstanding over the check,” he tells the other customers.) —Brian Hiatt
‘Barbarella’ (1968)
From the moment that a coquettish Jane Fonda does a zero-gravity striptease over the opening credits, Roger Vadim’s take on French writer-illustrator Jean-Claude Forest’s comic — about a cosmos-hopping, sexually liberated female answer to Buck Rogers — tells you exactly what to expect. The vibe is tres erotique. The production design is one part mondo futuro, and several parts space-age bachelor pad. There will be a lot of deep-space naughtiness and very little of this should be taken seriously. You can credit Vadim’s carnal cartoonishness for channeling both the source material and the era’s permissive ideas about intergalactic free love, and to the best of our knowledge, this is the only movie that features Anita Pallenberg, famed mime Marcel Marceau, the universe’s hottest angel (you go, John Philip Law!), killer dolls and a machine that induces mind-blowing org*sms. But Fonda is the reason this late ’60s blend of retro sci-fi serials and proto-softcore Skinemax remains an absolute joy to watch. The star later had complicated feelings about her involvement with the project, yet her wide-eyed, fully committed portrayal of Barbarella, “the queen of the galaxy,” remains a beloved cult classic. —DF
‘Invaders from Mars’ (1953)
The Martians have landed in our own backyard — and only 12-year-old David MacLean (Jimmy Hunt) knows that they’re hypnotizing local communities and ready to take over our planet! Director William Cameron Menzies went from imagining utopian futures with Things to Come to this paranoid view of a present day U.S.A. in which our friends and loved ones suddenly turn into different — read: dangerous — people under “foreign” influences. You might say it was prescient, given that Invasion of the Body Snatchers was still several years away from making that subtext more explicit. You could offer a counter-reading that it was already tuned in to what was going in the culture, given that McCarthyism was already in full swing. Or you could ignore the political readings and simply thrill to the site of the movie’s flying saucers, green and bug-eyed “synthetic humans,” and an alien overlord that simply a floating head in a fishbowl. As for the ending, whether you think David is dreaming or is finally wide awake says more about you than you might think. —DF
‘Colossus: The Forbin Project’ (1970)
“Obey me and live, disobey me and die.” Say what you will about HAL 9000, he never held the entire human race hostage by threatening to rain down an arsenal of nuclear weaponry upon us. Dr. Charles A. Forbin (Eric Braeden) designs a supercomputer — code name: Colossus — to control the entirety of the U.S. defense system. The irony is, by removing the possibility of human error in regards to rogue missile strikes, etc., Forbin and his government patrons have accidentally handed absolute power over to this A.I. And, well, you remember what absolute power does, right? Soon after Colossus links with its Russian counterpart, the two supercomputers decide that these pesky humans will no longer have the chance to destroy each other. They’ll do what they’re told by their new computerized masters, or else. The look and feel of director Joseph Sargent’s thriller clearly carbon-dates it to the beginning of the ’70s. As for everything else about its story of machines viewing man as inferior and obsolete? This could have been made yesterday. —DF
‘Jurassic Park’ (1993)
Michael Crichton’s 1990 novel about cloned dinosaurs running wild on an island theme park was destined for the big screen from the moment the concept entered his head. But it could easily have become a lame, paint-by-numbers thriller in the hands of anyone but Stephen Spielberg. The director not only assembled a killer cast that included Jeff Goldblum, Sam Neil, Richard Attenborough, and Laura Dern — he also infused the story with genuine heart and brought in a groundbreaking CGI team that created dinosaurs that still look realistic (and frightening) 30 years later. Don’t pay attention to any of the five sequels. None of them can remotely compare to the original.—AG
‘After Yang’ (2021)
Video essayist-turned-filmmaker Kogonada uses the death of a robot to consider the nature of loss, how memory works, and what it means to be human. A tea shop proprietor named Jake (Colin Farrell), is not sure what to do when Yang (Justin H. Min), the family’s in-house android, unexpectedly shuts down. While attempting to find a way to repair Yang, Jake finds himself as affected by the loss as he explores memories Yang recorded while “alive.” Or maybe that word doesn’t need quotation marks. Adapting a story by Alexander Weinstein, Kogonada offers a few suggestions of the broader near-future world in which the story takes place but keeps the focus on the emotions experienced by each family member in the wake of Yang’s seemingly permanent departure, a loss that becomes a mirror to how they view life and the meanings of endings.—Keith Phipps
‘Destination Moon’ (1950)
No less than Robert Heinlein cowrote this loose adaptation of his proto-YA novel Rocket Ship Galileo (the Hugo-winning legend also did double duty as a technical advisor), in which an airplane engineer (John Archer), a military man (Tom Powers), and a literal rocket scientist (Warner Anderson) form an American team of astronauts racing to beat the Russians to the moon. Yes, it’s a campy, boys-adventure type of take on space exploration aimed at the Saturday matinee crowd, complete a Woody Woodpecker cartoon explaining how rockets work (!) and a dem-dese-dose character from Brooklyn straight out of central casting. But it’s an early Hollywood attempt at bringing “serious” science fiction to screens, forgoing the typical man-versus-alien thrills and chills andfocusing more on the technical issues and real-world problem-solving that NASA’s own Apollo 11 mission would deal with nearly 20 years later. The final credit reads, “The End… of the Beginning.” Even producer George Pal and director Irving Pichel didn’t realize how prophetic that hyped-up statement would become in the years that followed. —DF
‘Space Is the Place’ (1974)
The avant-garde jazz legend Sun Ra always insisted he was an alien teleported from Saturn (not Alabama), traveling the spaceways and making his interstellar music with his Arkestra. Named after his most famous tune, this Afrofuturist space adventure is a freewheeling mix of fiery live performances, Afrocentric political prophecy and Seventies blaxploitation chic, directed by John Coney. Sun Ra’s spaceship touches down in Oakland circa 1974, where he uses his music to spread the word about his “Outer Space Employment Agency.” The Man tries to stop him, of course — but Ra aims to usher the local Black community off to the promised land in the stars. The Arkestra jazz footage is futuristic in itself, but Space Is The Place is a fittingly chaotic tribute to a true visionary. —RS
‘This Island Earth’ (1955)
A warning to all scientists who begin tinkering with a foreign-looking piece of technology that’s been sent to your lab: Be careful, it may be a test that will result in you be recruited by aliens to make weaponry for their interstellar war! This ’50s sci-fi staple of late, late shows (and fodder for a memorable MST3K episode) smuggles in a message underneath its pulpy exterior about the perils of scientific progress being used for destructive means; Rex Reason’s square-jawed hero is initially tempted by an advanced race’s knowledge before he and fellow eggheads Faith Domergue and Russell Johnson are whisked away to the purple-hued planet Metaluna. (Not to be confused with the extraterrestrials who’ve abducted them and literally have egg-shaped heads.) But if you remember this sci-fi thriller, it’s probably less for its cautionary-tale aspects and more for the guard who attacks Domergue — a bug-like mutant who immediately became one of the genre’s most iconic alien creatures. You don’t get those brainy Mars Attacks! bad guys without this monstrosity. —DF
‘Westworld’ (1973)
In the future, rich tourists tired of traditional vacations can visit three adult theme parks in which lifelike robots cater to their every need. But after a series of malfunctions, the androids begin murdering their guests, leading to a final standoff involving Yul Brynner as a surly, trigger-happy gunslinger.Michael Crichton’s 1973 film foresawthe rise of computer viruses andwas one of the first to utilizeCGI technology that would become commonplace years later. While the graphics may look dated now, the film remains a prescient look at the evil cinematic conglomerates found in everything from the Robocop to Blade Runner. Also, murderous cowboy robots will always be a sci-fi geek’s cinematic wet dream.—Jason Newman
