Empire Magazine's "50 Greatest Sci-Fi Movies"
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- DirectorRidley ScottStarsHarrison FordRutger HauerSean YoungA blade runner must pursue and terminate four replicants who stole a ship in space and have returned to Earth to find their creator.What sci-fi film can best Ridley Scott's genre classic Alien? His other genre classic, the unbeatable Blade Runner – an initially misunderstood masterpiece that, over multiple decades and several recuts, stands as the pinnacle of cinematic science fiction. Based on Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, Blade Runner conjures a bleak vision of a then-future 2019 Los Angeles – an imperious flame-belching hellscape in which Harrison Ford's 'blade runner' cop Rick Deckard is tasked with tracking down a group of human-engineered Replicants who have escaped back to Earth from a working colony. As he 'retires' them one by one, he comes to question his own humanity, both literal and metaphorical. With its ruminations on what it means to be human, Blade Runner is ideas-driven sci-fi all the way. But it's a visual feast too, its interpretation of a futuristic urban landscape – with giant video screens, glowing neon lights and bustling city streets – still jaw-dropping to behold. Coupled with a haunting Vangelis synth score, and Rutger Hauer's arresting turn as Replicant leader Roy Batty (whose "time to die" speech is a total spine-tingler), it's nigh-on untouchable.
- DirectorRidley ScottStarsSigourney WeaverTom SkerrittJohn HurtThe crew of a commercial spacecraft encounters a deadly lifeform after investigating a mysterious transmission of unknown origin.It's fitting that, of all things, Ridley Scott's Alien feels in many ways unknowable, filled with elements that feel genuinely, well, alien. As the Nostromo touches down on the ravaged surface of LV-426 and discovers a mysterious hall filled with extra-terrestrial eggs, it's clear the human crew is well out of their depth – and once their quarantine measures are broken, all hell breaks loose. There's a warning in there somewhere. From the dark, dank corridors of its space-freighter ship, to the unmistakable nightmare imagery of H.R. Giger, to the arrival of Sigourney Weaver's heroic Ripley, the original Alien remains a landmark piece of science-fiction, let alone its innovations in horror. If it's essentially a slasher in space, it's full of reproductive ideas and phallic imagery, all penetration and impregnation and blood-spewing birth. Some science fiction makes us dream of the stars. Alien warns us of the sheer violent chaos awaiting us in the vast reaches of outer space.
- DirectorIrvin KershnerStarsMark HamillHarrison FordCarrie FisherAfter the Rebel Alliance are overpowered by the Empire, Luke Skywalker begins his Jedi training with Yoda, while his friends are pursued across the galaxy by Darth Vader and bounty hunter Boba Fett.If Star Wars gave us a whole new cinematic galaxy, Empire made that galaxy feel so much larger, deeper, and richer. Bolstered by the original's success, George Lucas shot for the moon a second time around, teaming up with director Irvin Kershner to tell the story of Luke training under Master Yoda, Han and Leia heading to Cloud City, and Darth Vader dropping the daddy of all twists. Episode V ramped up the scope with more astonishing model work, dizzying dogfights, the snowy Hoth battle, and a ferocious lightsaber duel between Luke and Vader. It is, simply, bigger and better than the original Star Wars, influential in its own right with its downer-ending and game-changing familial revelations. As far as sci-fi goes, it's not the cinema of ideas – but its blockbuster spectacle is near-unmatched.
- DirectorLana WachowskiLilly WachowskiStarsKeanu ReevesLaurence FishburneCarrie-Anne MossWhen a beautiful stranger leads computer hacker Neo to a forbidding underworld, he discovers the shocking truth--the life he knows is the elaborate deception of an evil cyber-intelligence.At the dawn of the Internet age, the Wachowskis gave Hollywood science fiction a major upgrade. Drawing from cyberpunk anime, philosophy, and religion, the sisters cooked up an era-defining tale that spoke to generational malaise, the rise of technology, and a pre-millennial society ready to break out of its long-held programming. Keanu Reeves is hacker Neo, 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. In a word: woah.
- DirectorStanley KubrickStarsKeir DulleaGary LockwoodWilliam SylvesterAfter uncovering a mysterious artifact buried beneath the Lunar surface, a spacecraft is sent to Jupiter to find its origins: a spacecraft manned by two men and the supercomputer HAL 9000.Talk about scope. Stanley Kubrick's monolithic work of sci-fi might not have much in the way of a tangible linear plot, and yet it covers so much – the dawn of man, the space race, the arrival of artificial intelligence, greater space exploration, and a journey into the cosmic unknown. It's dizzying stuff, realised with technical bravado by Kubrick, open to endless interpretation and with just enough narrative to remain compulsively watchable. From its gigantic rotating sets, to its use of Strauss's The Blue Danube, to its extraordinary climactic light show, 2001 is an audio-visual marvel – while its explorations of human evolution and where it might go next have already proved prescient. An extraordinary piece of work, deeply influential on decades of cinema since, and one that entrusts the viewer to follow along on an instinctual, sensory level.
- DirectorGeorge LucasStarsMark HamillHarrison FordCarrie FisherLuke Skywalker joins forces with a Jedi Knight, a cocky pilot, a Wookiee and two droids to save the galaxy from the Empire's world-destroying battle station, while also attempting to rescue Princess Leia from the mysterious Darth Vader.Yes, it's more space opera than hard sci-fi. But where would the genre be without the impact and influence of Star Wars, of that opening moment in which the Star Destroyer looms over the camera for a seeming infinity? Bursting with iconic aliens, hyper-space travel, and galactic overlords, George Lucas transplanted the classic hero's journey narrative (Mark Hamill's Luke Skywalker is the simple farm-boy who discovers he's got a much bigger destiny out in the world) into a boundlessly imaginative galaxy far, far away, with laser-swords and mystical religions, space-princesses and loveable rogues. From its incredible model work, to its cosmic dogfights, to the look of the opening crawl as it drifts off into the stars, the original Star Wars changed everything – and science-fiction at large has felt the Force ever since.
- DirectorJames CameronStarsArnold SchwarzeneggerLinda HamiltonEdward FurlongA cyborg, identical to the one who failed to kill Sarah Connor, must now protect her ten year old son John from an even more advanced and powerful cyborg.After establishing a smart time-loop scenario in the original Terminator, James Cameron cranked everything up for this sequel – introducing a new liquid-metal android foe, reprogramming Arnie as the good guy, and plotting a new plan to disrupt the future and halt the impending nuclear 'judgment day'. The result is one of the all-time great sequels, delivering incredible action, a thrilling transformation from Sarah Connor as a hardened hero, and a formidable villain in Robert Patrick's shape-shifting T-1000. Beyond the spectacle there are more ideas at play – notably around machine learning, as Schwarzenegger's nice-guy T-800 forms a bond with Edward Furlong's young John Connor and begins to evolve through their interactions. Thumbs up.
- DirectorRobert ZemeckisStarsMichael J. FoxChristopher LloydLea ThompsonMarty McFly, a 17-year-old high school student, is accidentally sent 30 years into the past in a time-traveling DeLorean invented by his close friend, the maverick scientist Doc Brown.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.
- DirectorJames CameronStarsSigourney WeaverMichael BiehnCarrie HennDecades after surviving the Nostromo incident, Ellen Ripley is sent out to re-establish contact with a terraforming colony but finds herself battling the Alien Queen and her offspring.It can't be easy to take over a film series that has been kicked off by so seminal a film as Alien, and yet James Cameron makes it look simple. Aliens expands and deepens the universe of the human vs. Xenomorph conflict and finds brand new ways to make the creatures terrifying. Body horror and war combine with ease – this is yet another intergalactic Vietnam allegory – and the idea of the beasts as a hive is a metaphor ripe with possibility, one that Cameron channels easily. Building on the promise of Sigourney Weaver's Ellen Ripley, it upends her experience by marooning her with a group of marines on a colony world riddled with the slavering beasts. The tension is razor-wire sharp and Cameron never forgets to make a variety of the troopers into something more than forgettable alien-fodder.
- DirectorSteven SpielbergStarsHenry ThomasDrew BarrymorePeter CoyoteA troubled child summons the courage to help a friendly alien escape from Earth and return to his home planet.The polar opposite of The Thing in every sense, Spielberg's coming-of-age tale about a young boy and his alien friend is pure cinema magic. Suburban American youngster Elliott becomes best pal to an intergalactic being accidentally left behind on Earth by his family in a parable about lonely children and outsiders that tackles the emotional fall-out of divorce. While there's the looming threat of nefarious government authorities and the eventual need for E.T. to go home (after phoning first), it's foregrounded by childhood joy as Elliot and his siblings get up to mischief with their botanical buddy. Its soaring imagery of Elliot and E.T. flying in front of the moon on his bike is one of the most unmistakable cinematic sci-fi moments, while the stellar John Williams score remains incredibly emotional.
- DirectorJohn CarpenterStarsKurt RussellWilford BrimleyKeith DavidA research team in Antarctica is hunted by a shape-shifting alien that assumes the appearance of its victims.
- DirectorChristopher NolanStarsLeonardo DiCaprioJoseph Gordon-LevittElliot PageA thief who steals corporate secrets through the use of dream-sharing technology is given the inverse task of planting an idea into the mind of a C.E.O., but his tragic past may doom the project and his team to disaster.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 setpieces 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.
- DirectorDenis VilleneuveStarsAmy AdamsJeremy RennerForest WhitakerA linguist works with the military to communicate with alien lifeforms after twelve mysterious spacecraft appear around the world.A time-twisting short story by Ted Chiang. A script from Eric Heisserer. 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.
- DirectorJames CameronStarsArnold SchwarzeneggerLinda HamiltonMichael BiehnA human soldier is sent from 2029 to 1984 to stop an almost indestructible cyborg killing machine, sent from the same year, which has been programmed to execute a young woman whose unborn son is the key to humanity's future salvation.Eclipsed only slightly by its sequel (read on for more on that), James Cameron's breakout killer cyborg thriller announced his intention to rock the genre with a relatively — by today's standards, at least — low budget and some real invention, even layering in a complicated rumination on time and how the future can be altered for good and ill, which is not the usual subject you expect for such action fare. Arnold Schwarzenegger's man-mountain presence is the threat, but Michael Biehn's future soldier and Linda Hamilton's harassed Sarah Connor are the heart of the story. Cameron keeps the story taught and the action inventive, and there's a pulsing score from Brad Fiedel that has long since entered our collective brains.
- DirectorSteven SpielbergStarsRichard DreyfussFrançois TruffautTeri GarrRoy Neary, an Indiana electric lineman, finds his quiet and ordinary daily life turned upside down after a close encounter with a UFO, spurring him to an obsessed cross-country quest for answers as a momentous event approaches.
- DirectorDuncan JonesStarsSam RockwellKevin SpaceyDominique McElligottAstronaut Sam Bell has a quintessentially personal encounter toward the end of his three-year stint on the Moon, where he, working alongside his computer, GERTY, sends back to Earth parcels of a resource that has helped diminish our planet's power problems.
- DirectorRian JohnsonStarsJoseph Gordon-LevittBruce WillisEmily BluntIn 2074, when the mob wants to get rid of someone, the target is sent into the past, where a hired gun awaits - someone like Joe - who one day learns the mob wants to 'close the loop' by sending back Joe's future self for assassination.Following high school noir Brick and sibling conmen story The Brothers Bloom, Rian Johnson surprised with this time-crossing assassin story. Joseph Gordon-Levitt's titular "Looper" is a hired killer for the mob, who kills victims sent back in time so they can disappear from 39 years in the future. But when Joe's next target is his own older self — closing the loop is the fate of all Loopers, who are paid well for their trouble — he's thrown off his game and future Joe (Bruce Willis) escapes. The ensuing cat and mouse chase takes further twists, but Johnson keeps it all juggled like a pro. The choice to make Gordon-Levitt (in prosthetics) and Willis play the same character is a risky one, but it works, and Johnson injects the movie with plenty of invention.
- DirectorAlex GarlandStarsAlicia VikanderDomhnall GleesonOscar IsaacA young programmer is selected to participate in a ground-breaking experiment in synthetic intelligence by evaluating the human qualities of a highly advanced humanoid A.I.
- DirectorFritz LangStarsBrigitte HelmAlfred AbelGustav FröhlichIn a futuristic city sharply divided between the working class and the city planners, the son of the city's mastermind falls in love with a working-class prophet who predicts the coming of a savior to mediate their differences.
- DirectorPaul VerhoevenStarsPeter WellerNancy AllenDan O'HerlihyIn a dystopic and crime-ridden Detroit, a terminally wounded cop returns to the force as a powerful cyborg haunted by submerged memories.Paul Verhoeven arrived in America with a European aesthetic and kicked the doors down with this satirical sci-fi that, with its vision of a corporation effectively owning a city, comes scarily close to reality. But it's also the story of a cop slain in the line of duty who is brought back as a cybernetic officer tortured by visions of a past life his owners tried to wipe from him. There's real horror to be found in the feeling of man becoming product, but it never becomes po-faced. There is blood and brutality, humour and humanity, all brought together by a slick visual style that belies its 1980s origins.
- DirectorChristopher NolanStarsMatthew McConaugheyAnne HathawayJessica ChastainWhen Earth becomes uninhabitable in the future, a farmer and ex-NASA pilot, Joseph Cooper, is tasked to pilot a spacecraft, along with a team of researchers, to find a new planet for humans.
- DirectorSteven SpielbergStarsSam NeillLaura DernJeff GoldblumA pragmatic paleontologist touring an almost complete theme park on an island in Central America is tasked with protecting a couple of kids after a power failure causes the park's cloned dinosaurs to run loose.By the '90s, the prospect of animal and human cloning seemed so passé. How about… dinosaur cloning? Adapting Michael Crichton's novel into a game-changing, groundbreaking blockbuster about a prehistoric theme park gone wrong, Steven Spielberg delivers dino-spectacle while keeping the story's sci-fi credentials – man messes with forces of nature and reaps the unpredictable ramifications of chaos theory – intact. The result is an endlessly thrilling adventure movie that springs from some surprisingly plausible cod-science, with Spielberg himself the master creator at the heart of it all, somehow conjuring big-screen beasts that still look and feel incredibly real. Clever guy.
- DirectorJames GunnStarsChris PrattVin DieselBradley CooperA group of intergalactic criminals must pull together to stop a fanatical warrior with plans to purge the universe.The MCU has always made a virtue of using characters that hadn't conquered the mainstream, but eyebrows were raised even further when Marvel announced that a music-loving space slacker, a green assassin, a hulking warrior, a talking tree and a raccoon (who isn't a raccoon) would enter the fray. And with James Gunn, best known for his Troma background, horror scripts, Scooby Doo films and odd movies such as Slither? Turns out it was a fantastic decision, Gunn's sensibility breathing comic life into the cosmic characters. The tone works perfectly, there's an emotional gut punch at the end and it smoothly births a franchise, with the Guardians an integral part of future movies, both their own and others. Sci-fi is rarely this much fun, or downright colourful, and we can't wait to see Vol. 3 whenever Gunn can make it.
- DirectorFranklin J. SchaffnerStarsCharlton HestonRoddy McDowallKim HunterAn astronaut crew crash-lands on a planet where highly intelligent non-human ape species are dominant and humans are enslaved.Long before Rupert Wyatt and Matt Reeves happened along to explore how the world got to the point of simian domination, Planet Of The Apes introduced audiences to the concept of a planet (spoiler: it's Earth!) taken over by our hairy brethren. Adapted from Pierre Boulle's novel by Michael Wilson and, tellingly, The Twilight Zone's Rod Serling, it's a little campy in places, but features some prime Charlton Heston gruffness as he battles those damn dirty apes. The idea of another species taking over has always haunted us, and this was impactful enough to impress audiences and launch a franchise (of varying quality) And, of course, it has one of the most memorable final twists in cinema history. All together now: "You maniacs!"
- DirectorAndrei TarkovskyStarsNatalya BondarchukDonatas BanionisJüri JärvetA psychologist is sent to a station orbiting a distant planet in order to discover what has caused the crew to go insane.