It’s hard to imagine a Hollywood exec even sitting through Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris(1972), never mind stumping up for Steven Soderbergh’s US remake, but perhaps the presence of producer James Cameron facilitated this most introspective of space operas. TJĬast: George Clooney, Natascha McElhone, Jeremy Davies Young Lucas evidently believed in heroic individualism, fast cars and the possibility of escape, yet it’s the visualisation of an entire society shaped by universal surveillance, government-supplied sedatives and android police carrying very big sticks which rings darker and truer than the director’s subsequent, significantly more populist output. Viewed today – the only version available is Lucas and co-writer Walter Murch’s digitally spruced-up 2004 ‘Director’s Cut’ – its shaven headed-cast, chillingly benign language intoning state propaganda and oppressive widescreen palette of glacial whites make for genuinely unnerving viewing. The studio hated the result and the subsequent box-office debacle almost killed both their careers. George Lucas and his pal Francis Ford Coppola persuaded Warner Brothers to take a flyer on expanding George’s earlier student short into this Orwell and Huxley-influenced fable about free love and free will versus all-powerful totalitarianism. 🧨 The 101 best action movies of all-timeĬast: Robert Duvall, Donald Pleasence, Maggie McOmie 🦄 The 50 best fantasy movies of all-time 👽 The best sci-fi shows streaming on Netflix As a result, it’s a list that crisscrosses the universe, from Tatooine to Arrakis, Metropolis to Los Angeles circa, uh, 2019. Their reach is reflected in the wide-ranging panel of experts we polled to come up with list of the greatest sci-fi films ever made: from Nobel Prize-winning geneticist Sir Paul Nurse, to Oscar-winning film director Guillermo del Toro, to Game of Throne s creator George RR Martin – along with frequent Time Out writers. Even if it contains fantastical creatures and alien technology and complex mythologies, the sci-fis that stick out most in the popular consciousness deal with themes and ideas everyone can relate to.

It’s a remarkably broad and varied genre: one that speaks to the issues concerning the people of this planet as often as it goes off and creates entirely new worlds. At its best, sci-fi has always spoken to a broad audience. Over the last two decades, the nerds have taken over the entertainment industry, and an argument can be made that – considering the rise of Marvel, the omnipresence of the aforementioned space opera and the simple fact that the concept of a ‘multiverse’ is now in the common lexicon – sci-fi has become the dominant genre, not just in film but all of popular culture.īut science fiction was never just for geeks. It’s hard to imagine now, but it wasn’t that long ago when science fiction was considered niche – even being really into Star Wars was thought of as high-order nerdery.

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