Movies are a window to another world, a peek inside someone else’s world of imagination and a piece of art that is marvelled upon, for years. Sci-fi movies take it to a next level. From inspiring future inventions to creating cult following, sci-fi movies fill us with awe, what human imagination is capable of.
Here we bring you a list of 10 sci-fi movies that are still having a massive following and have stood out as all-time classics.
The Matrix (1999)
At the dawn of the Internet age, the Wachowskis gave Hollywood science fiction a major upgrade. The movie involves a protagonist, Neo (Keanu Reeves) a hacker, who comes to learn that the world isn’t real – he and the rest of humanity are living in a computer simulation called the Matrix, while being harvested as fuel for sentient machines. But in learning about this unreality, he also comes to know how to break it – bending the laws of physics, seeing through the code, and uploading kung-fu moves directly into his brain. It’s one of the coolest films ever made, deeply stylish and incredibly visionary (particularly the invention of bullet-time and the static camera rig that made it possible). Plus, it has a whole new layer of meaning in its reassessment as a piece of blockbuster queer cinema, a story exploring the idea that internal and external realities may be different, coming from a pair of Trans creators.
Back to The Future (1985)
Time travel and the ripples that spread out from someone changing the past are concepts that are incredibly hard to pull off. Yet few films are as perfectly constructed as the first “Back To The Future”. Certainly, some try to pick plot nits, but there are few to find. Robert Zemeckis and co-writer Bob Gale conjured up a tale that’s so satisfying to watch, even if chunks of it had to be re-shot when original star Eric Stoltz didn’t work out. Replacement Michael J. Fox rode the role to movie star status, bolstered by a great ensemble, and gave the movie the core it required to work like a well-wound watch. Crucially, it cemented the most widely-understood model of fictional time-travel, even if later time-twisting films have sought to debunk it. This movie addresses one of the most famous paradoxes of all time, the Predestination Paradox.
Inception (2010)
A filmmaker ever-fascinated by the architecture of the human mind, Christopher Nolan externalised the human subconscious into physical environments for a Bond-inspired heist-movie blockbuster. Taking place across multiple levels of malleable reality, Inception imagines the possibility of dream-tech that allows Leonardo DiCaprio’s Dom Cobb and his team to infiltrate sleeping marks and extract information from their unconscious minds – until he’s given the altogether harder job of implanting an idea into his next target. Through dizzying set pieces and narrative convolutions, Nolan embraces dream-logic, subverts physics, and orchestrates collapsing realities, creating a psychological sci-fi spectacular that’s sure to boggle minds for decades to come.
Arrival (2016)
A time-twisting short story by Ted Chiang, a script from Eric Heisserer and Denis Villeneuve in the director’s chair; it’s a combination, allied to top work from Jeremy Renner and Amy Adams that delivers the knockout punch that offers both brainfood and a heart-breaking through-line. Aliens arrive in giant ships and humans must figure out how to communicate with the strange creatures, expanding on the first contact idea that has fascinated humanity for years, but with extra layers. Time becomes flexible and you’ll want to revisit it more than once, to steep in both the atmosphere and the story.
Close Encounters Of The Third Kind (1977)
Close Encounters of the Third Kind is a 1977 American science fiction film written and directed by Steven Spielberg, starring Richard Dreyfuss, Melinda Dillon, Teri Garr, Bob Balaban, Cary Guffey, and François Truffaut. It tells the story of Roy Neary, an everyday blue-collar worker in Indiana, whose life changes after an encounter with an unidentified flying object. Close Encounters stands the test of all time, an emotional story of Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss) who becomes wrapped up in an event he can’t quite comprehend, but which changes his life forever.
Interstellar (2014)
Interstellar is a 2014 American epic science fiction film directed and produced by Christopher Nolan. It stars Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Bill Irwin, Ellen Burstyn, John Lithgow, Matt Damon, and Michael Caine. Set in a dystopian future where humanity is struggling to survive, the film follows a group of astronauts who travel through a wormhole near Saturn in search of a new home for mankind. The film uses the concept of wormholes and black holes to great effect based on Eintein’s theory of relativity. This film was praised by the genius physicists of our time for its scientific detail and accuracy.
Annihilation (2018)
Adapted directly (and loosely) from Jeff VanderMeer’s novel, and influenced by Tarkovsky’s Stalker and H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out Of Space”, Alex Garland’s second film as a director is another sci-fi triumph. Deep and ideas-driven, it finds Natalie Portman’s scientist Lena venturing into ‘The Shimmer’, an infected section of the American coastline, along with a team of scientists, trying to find out what happened to her husband who went missing in there – only to emerge as the sole person ever to return from ‘Area X’. It’s a meditation on grief, depression and rebirth, that also boasts mutant bears and plant-creature hybrids, with gorgeous rainbow-refracted imagery to boot. It all culminates in a final act that conjures 2001: A Space Odyssey in its intuitive abstract imagery that resonates on a much deeper level than any literal interpretation.
Avatar (2009)
Avatar is a 2009 American epic science fiction film directed, written, produced, and co-edited by James Cameron and starring Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Stephen Lang, Michelle Rodriguez, and Sigourney Weaver. The film is set in the mid-22nd century when humans are colonizing Pandora, a lush habitable moon of a gas giant in the Alpha Centauri star system, in order to mine the mineral unobtanium, a room-temperature superconductor. The expansion of the mining colony threatens the continued existence of a local tribe of Na’vi – a humanoid species indigenous to Pandora. The film’s title refers to a genetically engineered Na’vi body operated from the brain of a remotely located human that is used to interact with the natives of Pandora.
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
“2001: A Space Odyssey” is a 1968 epic science fiction film produced and directed by Stanley Kubrick. The screenplay was written by Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke, and was inspired by Clarke’s 1951 short story “The Sentinel” and other short stories by Clarke. The film, which follows a voyage to Jupiter with the sentient computer HAL after the discovery of an alien monolith affecting human evolution, deals with themes of existentialism, human evolution, technology, artificial intelligence, and the possibility of extra-terrestrial life.
Alien (1979)
Alien is a 1979 science fiction horror film directed by Ridley Scott and written by Dan O’Bannon. Based on a story by O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett, it follows the crew of the commercial space tug Nostromo, who encounters the eponymous Alien, a deadly and aggressive extra-terrestrial set loose on the ship. The film stars Tom Skerritt, Sigourney Weaver, Veronica Cartwright, Harry Dean Stanton, John Hurt, Ian Holm, and Yaphet Kotto. The crew of a spacecraft, Nostromo, intercept a distress signal from a planet and set out to investigate it. However, to their horror, they are attacked by an alien which later invades their ship.
