Astral Dreams, Utopian Dreams, and Other Concepts: 10 Best SF Movies Jul 10 '04 (Updated Jun 15 '06)    Write an essay on this topic. Tweet Popular Products in Movies Under the Tuscan Sun From $9 Casablanca From $3 The Bottom Line There are so many fine films in the SF genre, so it was hard to choose just 10. These are, I think, pretty good. Some call it sci-fi. Others call call it SF. Still others use the term "futuristic fiction." Whatever the term, science fiction films have been around since the early days of silent movies and "From the Earth to the Moon." It's an enduring genre, to be sure, and an extremely elastic one, too. It can run the gamut from realistic "hard" science fiction in such offerings as 1968's 2001 and 1969's Marooned, to the less "bound by reality" space-fantasy action-adventure of the Star Wars saga and its many imitators. As it happens, it's one of my favorite film categories, and the 10 films listed below are my picks for "Best Sci-Fi" movies. 1. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Arthur C. Clarke, novelist and inventor of the communications satellite, teamed up with Stanley Kubrick to create the ultimate science fiction trip. It has everything a good "hard" sci-fi movie ought to have -- an interesting and believable premise, strong visuals, a great score, and plausible fact-based technology. It also poses questions that haunt the viewer long after the final fade-out: Where did the monolith come from? What made HAL-9000 go, well, bonkers? What would the Star-Child do next? 2. Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (1977). The philosophical opposite to 2001. George Lucas' first installment of what would be a six-film series has two attributes in common with Kubrick's movie -- strong visuals and a stirring score. Other than that -- and the fact that Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, and even Darth Vader fly across space in space vessels -- Star Wars is 2001's antithesis. Action-oriented, fast-moving, and more fantastical, Lucas' movie takes its cues from the old Flash Gordon serials of the Golden Age of Hollywood, with its basic conflict between good and evil, stalwart heroes, dastardly villains, a princess in distress and loyal sidekicks to both assist the good guys and provide comic relief. Coming so soon after the turmoil of the Sixties and Seventies, Star Wars was both technologically innovative and just plain fun to watch. 3. Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). Steven Spielberg's UFO classic depiction of humanity's first major encounter with intelligent life from another world bucked the trend of "bug-eyed monsters attack the Earth" and made audiences leave the theater with the hope that, to borrow the film's tag line, "we are not alone" in the universe. 4. The Terminator (1984). James Cameron's first bona fide hit, this fast-paced, smartly written tale of a relentless, unstoppable, and deadly robot sent back to 1984 to kill a young waitress destined to be the mother of humanity's warrior-savior revived the action movie genre and provided Arnold Schwarzenegger with not only an iconic movie role but a chance to prove that he had an actor's mind as well as a bodybuilder's physique. 5. E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982). Spielberg's tale of a young boy who befriends a stranded alien botanist "3,000,000 light years from home" while still coping with his parents' divorce is one of the director's most popular films. 6. Total Recall (1990). Violent? Yes. Gory? Yes. But director Paul Verhoeven (Robocop, Starship Troopers) teamed with screenwriters Ronald Shusett, Dan O'Bannon, and Gary Goldman to make a whiz-bang and intelligent adaptation of Philip K. Dick's "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale"...and proved once again that Schwarzenegger was more than Conan the Barbarian or the laconic Terminator. (Oh, and did I mention that Sharon Stone is in this one?) 7. Alien (1979). Another film scripted by Shusett and O'Bannon, Ridley Scott's film about a space freighter crew that lands "where no one should have gone before" and runs into a deadly alien organism not only made audiences squeamish, it also made Sigourney Weaver the first female action-adventure hero, proving once and for all that women are just as tough and resourceful as the guys. 8. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982). One of the rare sequels in any genre that outshines and outclasses the "parent" film, Nicholas Meyers' first foray into Trek-dom mixed elements from the original television series (bringing back Khan from Episode 24, "Space Seed"), footage from the first feature, new effects sequences by Industrial Light and Magic, quotations from classic literature, and created a stirring tale of revenge, scientific hubris, sacrifice, and redemption. Most fans consider this to be the best of the 10 Star Trek feature films. 9. Independence Day (1996). Basically, this is a re-imagined update of H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds and almost every "alien invasion" movie ever made, with little asides and tips of the hat to Star Wars, Close Encounters and other famous movies of the genre. Roland Emmerich's directing and fine performances by Will Smith, Bill Pullman and Jeff Goldblum raise this visually stunning film head and shoulders above most science fiction films of the 1990s. 10. Jurassic Park (1993). Although David Koepp and Michael Crichton's adaptation of the latter's novel toned down the darker aspects of this humans vs. cloned dinosaurs story, director Spielberg manages to entertain audiences while exploring the Frankenstein myth's theme that humanity should not play God...even if we have the tools and know-how, the consequences are never what we intend.

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