10: Soylent Green (1973)
Director: Richard Fleischer
Cost to Make: Unknown, but budget-challenged
Setting: New York City, in the year 2022
Sci Fi Subgenre: Dystopic Future
Why It's On The List: The problems faced by the desperate world in the movie are even more relevant to us today: overpopulation, pollution, and rapidly diminishing resources. The film plays in to our primal fears about government and corporate corruption.
Top 10 Sci-Fi Films
9: E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982)
Director: Steven Spielberg
Cost to Make: About $10.5 million
Setting: Suburban California, "present day"'
Sci Fi Subgenre: Fantasy
Why It's On The List: The film asks viewers to imagine that aliens might be just like us -- scared, lonely, silly, and most of all, looking for a way to go home.
Top 10 Sci-Fi Films
8: Metropolis (1927)
Director: Fritz Lang
Cost to Make: 5.3 million Reichsmarks: adjusted for inflation, about $200 million, making it one of the most expensive movies of all time; it nearly pushed studio UFA into bankruptcy.
Setting: "Metropolis," a futuristic, art-deco stylized city, in the year 2026
Sci Fi Subgenre: Dystopic Future
Why It's On The List: The earliest film on this list, and one of the true forerunners of the sci-fi genre, "Metropolis" manages to portray the perils of class warfare and fascism in a super-industrialized age. And it wasn't even a "talkie" -- the silent film was scored by German composer Gottfried Huppertz.
Top 10 Sci-Fi Films
7: Star Wars Episode V: Empire Strikes Back (1980)
Director: Irvin Kirschner; Executive Producer: George Lucas
Cost to Make: About $18 million
Setting: "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away."
Sci Fi Subgenre: Fantasy
Why It's On The List: While all the Star Wars films affected the Sci Fi genre, Empire Strikes Back introduced an entire generation of movie-goers to an alien universe, complete with fantastic species, languages, and settings, that became part of the American pop culture lexicon. Think Yoda: "Do, or do not. There is no try." Not to mention, the film played out a dark, morally ambiguous myth of father-son conflict.
Top 10 Sci-Fi Films
6: The Matrix (1999)
Directors: Larry and Andy Wachowski
Cost to Make: About $63 million
Setting: A simulated reality world that appears to be a large U.S. city in the year 1999, but is actually a barren post-apocalyptic world, somewhere around 2199
Sci Fi Subgenres: Cyberpunk, Dystopic Future
Why It's On The List: The film transformed mainstream cinema's use of computer generated imagery; in particular, The Matrix is largely responsible for popularizing "bullet time," a filming technique that creates the visual experience of extreme transformation of time and space.
Top 10 Sci-Fi Films
5: Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (1977)
Director: Written and directed by George Lucas
Cost to Make: About $11 million
Setting: "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away."
Sci Fi Subgenre: Fantasy
Why It's On The List: One of the first modern blockbusters, the original Star Wars movie broke box-office records and shattered common critical and studio views that sci-fi was a secondary genre.
Top 10 Sci-Fi Films
4. Blade Runner (1982)
Director: Ridley Scott
Cost to Make: $28 million
Setting: Los Angeles, 2019
Sci Fi Subgenre: Cyberpunk, Dystopic Future
Why It's On The List: Owing a stylistic debt to another film on this list, Metropolis, and relying on the visual lexicon of film noir, Blade Runner has become a cult classic. The "detective story" plot, based on Philip K. Dick's award-winning story "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?", forces viewers to confront the dark side of genetic modification and question the accepted definition of human.
Top 10 Sci-Fi Films
3: Alien (1979)
Director: Ridley Scott
Cost to Make: $11 million
Setting: Outer space, aboard a "space mining" ship, the Nostromo, around the year 2122
Sci Fi Subgenre: Horror
Why It's On The List: Introducing the film world to "Chestbursters" and other visualizations of slimy, parastic, insectoid alien monsters.
Top 10 Sci-Fi Films
2: 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Cost to Make: $10.5 million
Setting: Space, in the year 2001
Sci Fi Subgenre: Ethics & Morality
Why It's On The List: Based on Arthur C. Clarke's sci-fi novel "The Sentinel," 2001: A Space Odyssey brought to life the experience of traveling through space: the sounds (and silences), the lack of weight, the hypnotic (and boring) passage of time without context, and the maddening sensory deprivation of life on a spacecraft. It also illuminated the ethical problems associated with defining intelligence as human - as opposed to alien, or artificial.
Top 10 Sci-Fi Films
1: Avatar (2009)
Director: James Cameron
Cost to make: Around $300 million
Setting: Pandora, a moon in Alpha Centauri, in the year 2154
Sci Fi Subgenre: Fantasy
Why It's On The List: Immersive 3D with incredibly detailed effects made it the first truly big-budget film to use 3D to tell a story with all the classic movie elements: plot, characters, and message.
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