The 50 Best Sci-Fi Movies of All Time

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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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.

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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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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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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.

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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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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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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).

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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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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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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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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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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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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?”

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