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50 Brilliant Science Fiction Movies That Everyone Should See At Least Once
Science fiction has rocked cinemas for a century, and the genre has
produced many undisputed classics during that time. But which
movies are essential viewing for anyone interested in the genre?
We broke down the 50 must-watch science fiction films.
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50 Brilliant Science Fiction Movies That Everyone Should See At Least Once
But most of all, we looked for films that would represent science
fiction well to a new audience and totally rock a neophyte’s brain.
Obviously, a list like this can never be 100 percent definitive, and
we may have left your favorite movie of all time out. And there’s
clearly a bias here towards more recent movies that are fresher in
our minds. Anyway, feel free to disagree and post your own lists in
comments!
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50 Brilliant Science Fiction Movies That Everyone Should See At Least Once
This film is one of the most formative works of science fiction of all
time, and its imagery remains potent nearly 80 years later. And now
that there’s a fully restored version finally hitting cinemas — for the
first time ever, outside of Germany — you can finally appreciate
Fritz Lang’s vision in its entirety. With its uniquely weird storyline
involving a worker’s uprising and a woman’s robot duplicate,
Metropolis remains a source of fascination — but it’s also the
source of much of the work that comes after it.
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50 Brilliant Science Fiction Movies That Everyone Should See At Least Once
this movie gave birth to much of the imagery that we still associate
with “mad scientists” to this day. And it’s a work of strange beauty
and alienation, that still has the power to shock our hearts to life
today.
3) The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951, dir. Robert Wise)
The 1950s were the era of sensational movies about aliens and
monsters threatening our way of life — but only The Day The Earth
Stood Still dares to use that framework to make us question that
way of life. Klaatu’s visit to us, and the warning he delivers, still
resonate today. With its thought-provoking premise, this film won
praise from such luminaries as Arthur C. Clarke, who put it on his
own list of the best science fiction films.
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50 Brilliant Science Fiction Movies That Everyone Should See At Least Once
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50 Brilliant Science Fiction Movies That Everyone Should See At Least Once
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50 Brilliant Science Fiction Movies That Everyone Should See At Least Once
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50 Brilliant Science Fiction Movies That Everyone Should See At Least Once
important men and a large number of women will wait out the
nuclear winter. But most of all, writer Terry Southern’s satirical gem
gives us amazing insight into the psychology of apocalypse,
showing us just what sort of men would doom the entire world on
purpose.
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50 Brilliant Science Fiction Movies That Everyone Should See At Least Once
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dialogue.
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50 Brilliant Science Fiction Movies That Everyone Should See At Least Once
There are a lot of great movies about making first contact with
aliens—we almost included Contact on this list as well—but this
one really captures the mystery and wonder of encountering beings
with such a different view of reality that we barely share a language.
The concept of communicating with aliens through musical notes is
such a powerful one, it feeds into the general sense of awe and
strangeness that turns this movie into a powerful experience. For
years, this movie shaped how people imagined meeting more
advanced extraterrestrial beings.
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50 Brilliant Science Fiction Movies That Everyone Should See At Least Once
This film didn’t just launch Scott and star Sigourney Weaver — it
also launched a whole genre of movies about our terrifying
encounters with creatures beyond our own imagination. Scott
merged space opera, Westerns and horror in a way that pretty
much nobody had done before, and the result remains vivid today.
With a sharp script by Dan O’Bannon and note-perfect direction by
Scott, this is a master class on how to do creepiness and a
compelling story in the sterility of deep space. And you really have
to see the sequel, directed by James Cameron, which is a defining
moment in the history of military science fiction and space opera.
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50 Brilliant Science Fiction Movies That Everyone Should See At Least Once
GIF
13) Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (1980, dir. Irvin
Kerschner).
This is the first of three sequels that came out in the early 1980s
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50 Brilliant Science Fiction Movies That Everyone Should See At Least Once
that were better than the films they followed, but which also
innovated in a way that their precursors didn’t. Not that the original
Star Wars wasn’t innovative — it was, in many ways, including its
breathtaking effects, its fresh take on Western and Samurai
themes, and its exhilerating approach to space opera. But Empire
Strikes Back took all of the formal brilliance of Star Wars and
married it to a story that feels truly epic. Luke Skywalker’s journey
in the film, from near-death on Hoth to confronting his own
darkness on Dagobah to learning the truth on Bespin — this is a
real voyage of discovery. You couldn’t skip any of those steps and
have it still work. All our other heroes struggle with tragedy and
adversity — especially Han Solo — and it makes them deeper and
more magnetic as characters. This isn’t just the best Star Wars
movie, it’s one of the most essential movies, in any genre.
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50 Brilliant Science Fiction Movies That Everyone Should See At Least Once
14) The Lathe of Heaven (1980, dir. David Loxton and Fred
Barzyk)
15) Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981, dir. George Miller)
The first Mad Max film is brutal and awesome, and well worth
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50 Brilliant Science Fiction Movies That Everyone Should See At Least Once
16) Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan (1982, dir. Nicholas Meyer)
Like Empire Strikes Back, this film rises above its status as just
another installment in a big, commercial saga. You could show this
movie to someone who had never seen any Trek, and it would still
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50 Brilliant Science Fiction Movies That Everyone Should See At Least Once
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urban dystopia. And you can’t even talk about science fiction noir
without delving into Blade Runner. And like many of the other films
on this list, Blade Runner looks at what it means to be human by
examining our interactions with the “other” — but the line gets so
blurry, and the Replicants so fascinating, that the end result is
something you have to chew over in the hours after watching.
A lot of people may hate on this film, but it changed the way we see
first contact with aliens as much as Close Encounters of the Third
Kind did. And E.T. was one of the first really compelling aliens ever
to appear on the big screen. E.T. takes the sense of wonder from
Close Encounters and makes it more intimate and personal. This is
also the movie in which Spielberg’s obessions with fatherhood,
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children and discovery resonate the best. But also, from a technical
standpoint, it’s an amazing achievement — rewatch it sometime,
and look at how everything is presented from a child’s eye-level,
and the mom is the only adult whose face we see in the first two
acts. Spielberg uses lighting, camera angles and dialog to make a
film that’s not just about childhood, but told from a child’s point of
view.
It’s hard to understate how much this film changed the genre of
science fiction — it’s arguably the first movie to use computer
generated effects, as Lisberger hung out at MIT and learned from
the techies there — but it’s also still one of the most thrilling
depictions of virtual worlds on the big screen. (Compare Tron to
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50 Brilliant Science Fiction Movies That Everyone Should See At Least Once
It’s shocking how few truly great science fiction comedy films there
are, but BTTF would still tower above the rest even if there were
tons. It’s clever and yet never stops being about Marty McFly and
his family. It manages to come up with a coherent theory of time
travel, in which you can rewrite the past and the effects are seen
nearly instantaneously (luckily, Marty is only missing like an arm
and a leg before the timestream rights itself) and never becomes
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50 Brilliant Science Fiction Movies That Everyone Should See At Least Once
inconsistent. And it’s surprisingly daring, jumping feet first into the
tricky waters of time-traveling incest. Plus it’s one of those science
fiction movies that everybody, even genre-hating snobs, will admit
to loving.
And another classic from 1985’s is also a comedy... well, sort of. It’s
possibly the darkest, bleakest, most horrifying comedy you’ll ever
see, with freakish plastic surgery, a man being condemned to death
because of a typographical error, a lecture on ducting and a
vigilante plumber. This is my favorite movie of all time, and probably
the best thing to come out of Monty Python after the television
series. This film probably couldn’t get made today, and it definitely
wouldn’t get made in Hollywood, which tried to neuter it in U.S.
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50 Brilliant Science Fiction Movies That Everyone Should See At Least Once
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This is one of the greatest science fiction action movies of all time,
as a total badass commando (played by Arnold Schwarzenegger,
who else?) is faced with an alien creature that’s way more badass
than he is. The Predator can see in infrared and turn invisible, and
seems unbeatable. And it’s come to Earth for one reason only: To
hunt us for sport. The process of taking this alpha killer down is one
of pure deduction and brute savagery, and it’s amazing to watch.
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This anime classic is still utterly unique, all these decades later. In
2019, Tokyo is an apocalyptic wasteland in the aftermath of World
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50 Brilliant Science Fiction Movies That Everyone Should See At Least Once
War III, and a biker gang led by Kaneda tries to prevent the
devastation from happening again. Unfortunately, one of the bikers,
Tetsuo, has the same kind of psychic powers as Akira, the man
who caused the destruction of Tokyo in the first place. They keep
trying to remake this movie in live-action with American actors, and
let’s hope they keep failing.
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50 Brilliant Science Fiction Movies That Everyone Should See At Least Once
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Like Akira, this is one of the first anime films to hit the U.S. and
make a big impact, and impress on U.S. fans how powerful anime
film-making was becoming. It’s spawned a huge franchise, which
for the most part hasn’t diluted the awesomeness of the concept at
all — Stand Alone Complex is considered one of the greatest
science fiction anime shows, and it wouldn’t exist without this film.
With its theme of possibly false memories and cyber-weirdness, it
had a huge influence on both cyberpunks and memory-altering
works like Dark City and Dollhouse, but it turns into an amazing
examination of the theme of sentience and the definition of life.
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50 Brilliant Science Fiction Movies That Everyone Should See At Least Once
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Also known as “the Star Trek spoof that became one of the best
Star Trek movies.” This is such a brilliant concept: A group of
washed-up actors from a space opera TV show get recruited by
aliens who believe the show is a documentary, and have to learn to
become the characters they played on TV. What makes things even
better is that Galaxy Quest goes beyond just poking fun at all of the
tropes of old-school television science fiction, and actually becomes
a terrific space adventure in its own right.
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50 Brilliant Science Fiction Movies That Everyone Should See At Least Once
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It took immense self-control not to load this list up with a ton of films
from the Pixar guys. But The Incredibles is arguably the best Pixar
film, and the best superhero film, of all. This film takes the mythos
of the Fantastic Four and mashes it up with a bit of Watchmen, and
the result manages to be just as fun as the former and almost as
dark and thought-provoking as the latter. And The Incredibles does
something few other standalone superhero films have pulled off: it
feels like a fully realized superhero universe, in which there are
superhero costume makers, and tons of larger-than-life challenges
all the time, including big robots and supervillains. This film paved
the way for the Marvel Cinematic Universe and so much else.
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50 Brilliant Science Fiction Movies That Everyone Should See At Least Once
This film works on so many levels. It’s a metaphor for the ways in
which you try to erase someone from your memories and your life,
after a breakup, in order to reinvent yourself as a single person.
And yet, the film manages to suggest, that process is a form of
suicide — you have to destroy a piece of your life in order to excise
your former lover from it. And since that process is also the reverse
of falling in love, maybe it leads you to realize why you fell for the
other person in the first place. But Eternal Sunshine is also an
incredibly clever science fiction movie that introduces a bizarre new
technology in a way that’s both surreal and believable.
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50 Brilliant Science Fiction Movies That Everyone Should See At Least Once
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Bong has become more well known recently for directing the
post-apocalyptic thriller Snowpiercer—but this story of a mutant
creature terrorizing Korea is like a new Godzilla for the 21st century.
Instead of being unleashed by atomic bomb tests, this monster is
created by chemical spills and American imperialism, and the
political satire is pretty intense. But this is also one of the all-time
great monster movies, in which the fight against the creature is a
thing of beauty and terror.
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The other great indie film of 2009, this quasi-documentary feels like
an old-school Doctor Who story about a human turning into
something unrecognizeable, wrapped around a totally savage
message film. There’s seldom been a less sympathetic protagonist
than Wikus, who’s a pusillanimous cog in a brutal machine — the
scene where he casually slaughters alien children and jokes about
the popping sound still makes me ill — but we wind up identifying
with him and his plight as he’s cast out of society anyway. That
makes a more powerful statement than if Wikus were a noble
champion of the downtrodden from the beginning. And while Wikus
finally sort of redeems himself, it’s shocking how late it comes. Plus,
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50 Brilliant Science Fiction Movies That Everyone Should See At Least Once
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Like Her, this is a vital film about our relationship with technology,
and it asks the key questions that we’re all struggling with in our
Twitterpated era. In this case, instead of a smartphone in love, it’s
an android who’s irresistibly beautiful and vulnerable. A man goes
to a secret A.I. lab in the middle of nowhere to meet a machine that
can think for itself—not realizing that he, not she, is the experiment.
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Hale-Stern, Cheryl Eddy, Brent Rose, Maddie Stone, Carlos Zahumensky, Diane
Kelly, Attila Nagy and Mario Aguilar for the suggestions!
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50 Brilliant Science Fiction Movies That Everyone Should See At Least Once
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