We are dealing with a new genre that is inexhaustible, present at the very beginning of the film language, and which has gone through various stages of splendor to the present day. The paranoids of the Fifties, the disruptive seventies, the explanation of an abstract, indie and literary ci-fi of recent times the genre has always moved in changing waters and has been able to adapt to what the public demanded without losing its innovative spirit along the way.
Of course, this list is necessarily incomplete. We did not want it to be exhaustive, but as varied as possible, and throw a multitude of threads so that you keep pulling them. All of the films in this list are not all science-fiction movies, but coincides in that they are all essential, right? In this article, I will make the list of my all-time favorite sci-fi movies.
- Star Wars. Episode IV: A new hope (1977)
Although ‘the Empire Strikes Back’ may have more fans and is generally a rounder film, the impact, and importance of the first ‘Star Wars’ is no match for any other. His adherence to the rules of chivalry films and the tropes of the Hero’s journey, also, gives him a certain timeless air, to which he adds a unique feature in the saga. His charming modesty, conscious of being replicating more to the classics of the serials of the 1940s than to that annoying revival of all the sequels in his lore. Even with its imperfections, a sensational lesson on how to pull off endless mythology.
- Terminator (1984))
Despite its impact on pop culture and, above all, on the special effects industry, the second installment of ‘Terminator’, much more popular and appreciated by fans, pales in terms of glorious science fiction in its pure state in front of this authentic conceptual cannon on an indestructible machine that travels from the future to kill a woman. His devastating high-concept and infernal rhythm, as a kind of chase movie written in all caps, turned Schwarzenegger into a star and James Cameron into one of the key names of Hollywood in the 1980s.
- Trilogy Back to the future (1985-1990)
From the friendly nostalgic paradox of the first installment to the wink of the third to the futuristic delirium of the second, the three films of ‘back to the future’ are, paradoxically, the pure cinema of the Eighties. Imaginative and spectacular, with scripted and staged ideas at every minute, well-humored and escapist in the best possible sense, it is normal that Doc and Marty’s trans-temporal vicissitudes have become classics of time travel because no one made them better and more accessible than they.
- Matrix (1999)
‘Matrix’ came at the perfect moment: the digital effects were beginning to cease to be an extravagance; the issue of the machine rebellion, present in science fiction from the very beginning, acquired unusual ribbons of realism; the genre of action received a series of influences (comics, anime, Oriental films) that would change it forever. And the hacker culture was becoming something that was going to permeate the daily life of viewers. With all that face on, the Wachowski sisters changed science fiction forever.
- Blade Runner
Because we like it: the typical novel Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? Philip K. Dick was lucky to fall into the hands of the perfect filmmaker to visually transmit the spirit of this thrilling story about replicators in an ultra-hostile future, loaded with aesthetics and looks that don’t age after 30 years and a crushing score with Vangelis’s music.
- Children of Men
Because we like to: Seven years before reaching the glory with Gravity (2013), the visionary Mexican filmmaker had amazed us epic levels with this road movie dystopian located in the year 2027 where he portrays humanity that is dominated by infertility through breathtaking sequence shots by photographer Emmanuel Lubezki and production design unprecedented.