What makes them science fiction movies

Many great science stories destined to be of historical interest are still to be written Posterity will point to them as having blazed a new trail, not only in literature and fiction, but progress as well.

It was a short film, but it showed how the medium could transport audiences anywhere and anytime. The thing I love the most about science fiction is that it takes the things we are dealing with in the world and contextualizes them through art.

As the movies came into prominence in the 50s, we were dealing with the aftermath of WWII and the first atomic bomb drop. How did the world reflect this new reality in film? It was a metaphor for the atomic bomb dropping and gave people a way to talk about the horror and destruction. Or what about The Blob? It was about the fear of the space race, as Sputnik was racing around the globe.

How about Invasion of the Body Snatchers? That was about McCarthyism and the Red Scare. People were being rounded up and accused, and in the movie, you weren't sure who your friends were, or what they really were inside Old science fiction movies had a lot to say.

Let's see how they looked across the last several decades. Let's take a quick walk through some of the other landmark movies and television shows that really defined the genre. Many early science fiction films and shows were direct adaptations from literature. But across each decade we saw individual problems of society. Planet of the Apes confronted nuclear proliferation. Soylent Green was about mistrust of the government, which might not be looking out for our best interests.

Terminator was about rampant technological growth and computer science. As we dug through the 80s and into the 90s, science fiction seemed to look toward the unanswered questions.

Star Trek even changed its tune to a more philosophical look at how societies interact with one another. Deep Space Nine was about a hodgepodge of alien races trying to live together in harmony. Contact was about the big questions religion can't answer that science is chasing. And what about the rise of the internet? That's directly reflected in movies like The Matrix. You can see immigration issues with Men in Black. Other great science fiction movies come from today. I loved how Arrival dealt with language and how Blade Runner took old tropes and made them new by showing us a landscape that was familiar but included modern worry about the internet and isolation.

Over the last few decades, we've seen so many different iterations of science fiction. They're pushed against societal norms, exposed our fears, and challenged us in ways we never thought were possible in entertainment. But what are the best science fiction films of all time? The top science fiction movies echo across generations. The ones that you could consider "must-see.

Rather than waxing philosophical about each title, I just wanted to make a list as a primer. As science fiction got more and more popular, audiences embraced all the different versions of science fiction. Jon M. The Places You'll Go! Outer space. Inner space. New worlds. Tech frontiers. Artificial intelligence.

The best science-fiction movies take us to places beyond our own imagination, dreaming up impossible futures that inevitably go on to shape our own technological advances. Great sci-fi delivers mind-bending visuals packed with mind-blowing ideas, probing everything from the human experience to the future of humanity.

Read on and prosper. Douglas Trumbull had previously brought his VFX experience to film on such groundbreaking classics as , but Silent Running — a sort of proto-Wall-E, with humanity facing the demise of its natural resources — let him loose as a director. Bruce Dern plays Freeman Lowell, one of several crew members on a greenhouse vessel that carries some of the few remaining plants from a ruined Earth. But when his ship is ordered to destroy the vegetation and return, Lowell mutinies and continues to tend his foliage with the help of three memorable robo-assistants.

It's by turns dramatic, quiet, and reflective, an environmental warning that refrains from throwing its message in your face. Read the Empire review. If its premise sounds like a lost Michael Bay movie — criminals on a spaceship are hurtling into a black hole!

Robert Pattinson's Monte is one of a group of prisoners who are effectively used as experimental subjects by Juliette Binoche's scientist.

Dark, moody and occasionally very violent, it's a psychological trip into the void, drenched in palpable dread, with unsettling eroticism, nightmarish abstract imagery, and excellent, thoughtful performances, particularly the ever-great Pattinson. Deep, dark, grown-up sci-fi that eschews outer space action for intellectual and emotional challenge.

Bong Joon Ho's high-concept satire finally has the wide UK release it long deserved. Based on French post-apocalyptic graphic novel Le Transperceneige, Snowpiercer's unique futuristic satire finds the remnants of humanity crammed onto a train hurtling around the surface of a deep-frozen Earth, its carriages containing a stratified society of haves and have-nots.

Chris Evans is Curtis, one of the poor schlubs in the tail section, ready to overthrow the system and fight back against the likes of Tilda Swinton's outrageous Thatcher-alike Mason. As ever with Director Bong's work, it's a real genre mash-up, with great action sequences and an idiosyncratic wit — but in addressing real-world class issues through a fanciful not-so-far-future vision, it's the Korean auteur at his most sci-fi.

Just don't expect it to show up in a Mother And Baby screening any time soon. Giving a more literal interpretation to the phrase 'illegal aliens', the film that announced Neill Blomkamp is a bravura piece of sci-fi that balances serious ideas with mech-fuelled gravity-gun-firing action.

Set in a world where extra-terrestrial 'prawns' arrived decades ago in giant ships, now stranded over the skies of Johannesburg, the film follows Sharlto Copley's cowardly bureaucrat Wikus Van De Merwe, assigned to help evict them from their ghetto. Once he's exposed to their families, and particularly their biotechnology, his point of view changes radically. It's frenetic and fun, with moments of gut-churning body-horror — but in its depiction of a segregated South Africa there's real meaning underscoring the chaos.

Most sci-fi films look to the cosmos for signs of new life. Trust James Cameron, then — long before Avatar — to look to the other inky-black instead, the mysterious ocean depths. With its sub-aquatic entities rendered with then-cutting-edge VFX that still looks good today and a Jules Verne-ian sense of deep-sea exploration, The Abyss feels distinct from the usual space-bound sci-fi.

At the heart of it is a team of expert divers who are hired to look for a missing nuclear submarine and find something much more fascinating. Cameron's love of diving and his environmental side are on full display here, laying the groundwork for much of what he's gone on to since — from the waterworks of Titanic, to Avatar's bioluminescent planet, and the long-promised oceans of Pandora in the upcoming Avatar sequels.

It didn't have the box office impact of Cameron's big-hitters, but it's still worth submerging yourself into. How grounded can a science-fiction film feel while still ultimately remaining a genre work? Alfonso Cuaron's harrowing human dystopia goes right down to the wire — there are flourishes of future-tech in Children Of Men, but its world feels a stone's throw from our own. The year is , and mankind has slowly become infertile.

Cue world chaos and, in what might be the most outlandish concept in an otherwise prescient film, Britain is one of the sole bastions of calm. As immigration soars and the country becomes a police state, Clive Owen's bureaucrat is contacted by a group of suspected terrorists and asked to help a young woman Clare-Hope Ashitey's Kee reach a sanctuary that may not even exist.

The reason? She's pregnant… Taking a sci-fi set-up and exploring it in a world that feels terrifyingly tangible — told with some astonishing immersive extended takes — Cuaron delivers a poignant, urgent story.

Proving that ideas-driven sci-fi could thrive without a blockbuster budget, Richard Kelly's distinctive indie debut plays with time and malleable reality as he puts Jake Gyllenhaal's depressed high schooler through the wringer. With its time-looping narrative, suburban wormhole, and apocalyptic visions of a glowy-eyed bunny-man, Kelly fuses none-more-sci-fi elements into a low-key character drama, with head-scratching talking points and a killer soundtrack that made it a total cult hit.

Trippy, atmospheric, and boasting the impressive screen arrival of Gyllenhaal, Donnie Darko leaves you wanting more — just, don't go tracking down the odd non-Kelly sequel, S. Memory-tampering is a genre staple often reserved for amnesiac thrillers and mind-bending actioners. Not so with Eternal Sunshine, director Michel Gondry and writer Charlie Kaufman instead using it to explore the nature of the human condition — in particular heartbreak. What happens when love goes sour?

And what if you could erase the memories — both bad and good — from your mind? Would you go through with that? But as he explores what made them meld together and then fall apart, he starts to realise that he still has feelings for her. If its tech is fictional, the emotions in Eternal Sunshine are completely real. We can kill it". With its sweltering jungle location and American soldiers falling to an unseen enemy, it's a thinly-veiled genre-fied Vietnam allegory — with a wish-fulfillment twist that ultimately sees military might overcome the enemy.

This is Arnie's film, but the iconic Predator design — with its creepy mask, dreadlocks and snarling jaws — proved enough to fuel a bunch of sequels, reboots, and franchise crossovers without the man-mountain present. Predator went through a torturous development and a wild, location-shifting shoot, but in the end John McTiernan's film speaks for itself — mostly in one-liners and soldier speak until things get spectacularly, spine-rippingly gory. Andrei Tarkovsky is not a man who generally deals in populist sci-fi; his work tends to venture straight into hard and heady territory.

Stalker is a prime example of that, featuring three men — a writer, a science professor and the titular Stalker, who serves as their guard, venturing into a mysterious zone that has been compromised by apparent alien incursion. The story is an exploration of faith, science and art with woozy, stark visuals steeped in post-nuclear imagery.

It's impenetrable if you're not in the right mood, but massively rewarding for those willing to go on the journey. The concept of aliens replacing folk with pod-people is such a robust, re-usable one that has been the source of several films. Don Siegel's version cleverly spun into a satire of paranoia, particularly America's obsession with its politically opposite rivals, replacing the usual '50s tropes of blobs and giant bugs for dead-eyed loved ones that look just like you.

It's Philip Kaufman's version that remains most watchable though, one of the rare great remakes — a prime slice of s cinema boasting the star power of Donald Sutherland and Leonard Nimoy, striking alien effects, and portraying a post-Nixon sense of distrust and malaise in the comedown of the free-loving '60s.

Plus its ending is an all-time chiller. Terry Gilliam's '90s classic combines time-travel, an apocalyptic future, and the outbreak of a deadly virus — the latter making it perhaps not the most comforting film to rewatch in Bruce Willis delivers a great performance as convict James Cole, sent back in time to figure out how a man-made disease devastated the world — left in perpetual states of confusion and panic as he tries to hold onto where and more importantly when he is, tries to track down the origins of the Army Of The 12 Monkeys, and begins to believe the advice of a psychiatrist that it's all a delusion.

Brad Pitt too shows real quirk as Jeffrey Goines, who may or may not have been involved in the outbreak. Gilliam's unique style and eye for oddity is in full flow here, playing with reality and morality in a complex plot that, once unpicked, makes perfect sense.

A compelling cocktail of violence, cyberpunks and mutants, it's a future epic that has tendrils of Japan's past wreathed around its fractured cities and altered bodies. Taking place in Neo-Tokyo, 30 years after an explosion destroyed the original city, the complex narrative takes in biker gangs, government conspiracies, and scientific experiments which turn one of the bikers into a psychic psychopath.

Hollywood has been trying to remake this one for years Taika Waititi is currently attached, though seemingly always busy and you can only imagine the budget it would take to even approach the original, whose astonishing imagery changed the sci-fi genre forever. There have been tons of alien invasion films — but very few in which the alien assumes the form of Scarlett Johansson and drives around the streets of Glasgow in a van, picking up lonely men. Jonathan Glazer's confounding sci-fi horror swirls with unsettling, unknowable visuals, one of the most striking being Johansson herself, pale-faced with a messy black bob and a thick fur coat, delivering something very different from her usual blockbuster roles.

As the central unnamed extraterrestrial figure, she remains on the very edge of humanity — are her interactions with the men she sacrifices giving her a deeper understanding of the human experience? Like other modern directors who have a stylistic and spiritual connection to the cinema of the s, Jonathan Glazer understands that ideas are just as important as story.

Moving between genres has always been one of Danny Boyle's talents, and Sunshine saw him send a crew on a risky mission to reignite the dying sun. It's part disaster movie, part unexpected slasher in its controversial third act , and full of existential explorations, as the Icarus crew soar closer and closer to the sun, or possibly the face of God — or both. Kubrick had never believed a child could honestly play artificial boy David, but Spielberg had a secret weapon in The Sixth Sense's Haley Joel Osment, who went from dead people to bot people.

If the Pinocchio-influenced story of a robo-kid searching for real human connection sounds none more Spielbergian, it's a much colder and harsher film than his usual fare — flush with human cruelty, techno-torture, and a melancholic 'fairytale' ending. It's divisive, but remains a fascinating amalgam of the Speilbergian and the Kubrickian. Iconic sci-fi films conjure up distinctive new worlds — and few are as retina-dazzlingly vibrant as Pandora, Avatar's planet of bioluminescent flora, bright blue fauna, and giant floating rock formations.

Taking the mech-suits from Aliens, the colourful creatures of The Abyss, the epic scope and central love story of Titanic, and the groundbreaking technological leaps of, well, everything he's ever done, James Cameron's record-breaker is none-more-JC. There's a knowing B-movie quality to the cheesy dialogue and Dances With Wolves-inspired plot, but everything else is A-movie blockbuster, in a tale where humans are the alien invaders, consciousness is transferable, and science and nature are equal and opposite forces.

It's rare to see an entire cinematic world so fully realised — and while the Avatar backlash continues in some corners, it would be foolish to bet against Cameron's slew of upcoming sequels. Usually, an extraterrestrial visitor comes to Earth in the movies to blow things up. In Robert Wise's classic, Michael Rennie's Klaatu and his hulking robot companion Gort that's Lock Martin in the metal suit touch down on terra firma to tell humanity to wind its neck in.

If we Earthlings don't change our destructive warlike ways, the intergalactic community will have no choice but to reduce us to atoms. With its cosmic message of peace and unity told in the aftermath of World War II and against the backdrop of atomic bombing, The Day The Earth Stood Still remains subversive, deeply influential in its imagery, and with a phrase that permeated into pop culture at large: "Klaatu barada nikto.

Philip K. Wells First Men in the Moon. With innovative, illusionary cinematic techniques trick photography with superimposed images, dissolves and cuts , he depicted many memorable, whimsical old-fashioned images:. Otto Rippert's melodramatic and expressionistic Homunculus , Ger. It told about the life of an artificial man Danish actor Olaf Fonss that was created by an archetypal mad scientist Friedrich Kuhne.

The monstrous, vengeful creature, after realizing it was soul-less and lacked human emotion, became a tyrannical dictator but was eventually destroyed by a divine bolt of lightning. Its importance as an early science-fiction film was that it served as a precursor and inspiration to Universal's Frankenstein film and many other plots of sci-fi films with mad scientists, superhuman androids, Gothic elements, and the evil effects of technology.

The first science fiction feature films appeared in the s after the Great War, showing increasing doubts about the destructive effects of technology gone mad. The first feature-length dinosaur-oriented science-fiction film to be released was The Lost World It was also the first feature length film made in the US with the pioneering first major use primitive of stop-motion animation with models for its special effects. It helped to establish its genre - 'live' and life-like giant monsters-dinosaurs, later replicated in Gojira , Jp.

One of the greatest and most innovative films ever made was a silent film set in the year , German director Fritz Lang's classic, expressionistic, techno-fantasy masterpiece Metropolis - sometimes considered the Blade Runner of its time. Even today, the film is acclaimed for its original, futuristic sets, mechanized society themes and a gigantic subterranean flood - it appeared to accurately project the nature of society in the year Another Lang film, his last silent film, was one of the first space travel films, The Woman in the Moon aka By Rocket to the Moon.

It was about a blastoff to the moon where explorers discovered a mountainous landscape littered with raw diamonds and chunks of gold. The imaginative English film was based on an adaptation of H. An attempt to prevent scientific progress - and the launch of the first Moon rocket - was vainly led by sculptor Theotocopulos Cedric Hardwicke. David Butler's Just Imagine , a futuristic sci-fi musical about a man who awakened in a strange new world - New York City in the s, provided prophetic inventions including automatic doors, test tube babies, and videophones.

Her original book was subtitled Frankenstein - The Modern Prometheus , and she used this allusion to signify that her main character Dr. Like the Titan god, who stole fire from the gods to benefit mankind, he did not realize the ramifications of his actions.