10 Genuinely Perfect Sci-Fi Movies

Sci-fi's a genre that ages fast in one specific way, since the actual technology on screen goes out of date almost immediately, but the good ones don't really care about that and their formulas stay for decades. The ten films on this list hold up because they had so much to offer other than whether their computers look futuristic or not. The ideas underneath the special effects were way stronger and lasted a lot longer than the effects themselves. A couple of these already showed up on other lists, for the same reason as before, some movies are just good enough to earn a spot from basically any angle you approach them from. Good to best, here are ten sci-fi movies that don't have a weak link anywhere in them. 10 'Ex Machina' (2014) Image via A24 This movie won the Oscar for Visual Effects against movies with ten times its budget, and it earned that win with basically one location and three actors. Ava (Alicia Vikander) has this half-transparent robotic body where you can see mechanical parts moving under her skin, and it looks more convincing than most fully CGI aliens from way more expensive movies. The real trick of this one isn't the Turing test setup everyone expects going in. It's realizing, way too late, that the actual test was whether Ava could manipulate a human into helping her escape, not whether she could pass as human at all. Oscar Isaac and Domhnall Gleeson both get completely outmaneuvered by her, and so does the audience. 9 'Arrival' (2016) Image via Paramount Pictures Amy Adams plays a linguist trying to communicate with aliens whose written language doesn't move in a straight line, and by the end, learning that language has actually rewired how she experiences time itself. This looks like flashbacks to her daughter for the whole movie but then it turned out to be memories of a life she hasn't had yet. Denis Villeneuve built an entire blockbuster around a genuine linguistics thesis, based on a Ted Chiang novella, and never once dumbs it down into an alien invasion movie. It's quiet and mournful instead of loud, and the emotional gut-punch at the end hits a lot harder since the build up was too realistic. 8 'Blade Runner 2049' (2017) Image via Warner Bros. Pictures Roger Deakins won his first Oscar for cinematography after thirteen previous nominations without winning one, and if you've seen it, that's honestly kind of insane it took that long. Ryan Gosling plays K with this quiet, controlled sadness the whole way through, and Ana de Armas plays his holographic girlfriend Joi so beautifully but in a way that makes manufactured intimacy feel genuinely tragic instead of just creepy. The movie also deliberately denies you the "chosen one" twist you've braced for the entire lifetime and also the runtime, which takes real nerve for a sequel this expensive. The film is slow on purpose, and it trusts you to sit in that patience instead of rushing you toward answers. 7 'The Matrix' (1999) Image via Warner Bros. The Wachowskis basically invented a whole new camera technique for this movie, a hundred and twenty still cameras arranged in an arc to create that frozen-bullet-dodge effect, and it's been copied and parodied so many times since that it's easy to forget how genuinely new it was in 1999. Keanu Reeves and the rest of the cast trained for months in Hong Kong wire-fu style just to make the fights look a lot more real instead of obviously wire-assisted. There's an actual copy of Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation used as a prop in Neo's apartment early on, which tells you this wasn't just an action movie with a philosophy degree bolted on afterward. The ideas and the action were built together from the start, and that's rare. The movie makes you question your life and your decisions and personally, I love film who just force you to think. 6 'Alien' (1979) Image via 20th Century Studios Everyone remembers the chestburster scene, fair enough, but what actually makes this movie work is how bored and ordinary the crew of the Nostromo is before any of that happens. These aren't square-jawed astronaut heroes. They're basically truck drivers who are continuously arguing about their pay bonus, which was a genuinely new idea for sci-fi at the time. Ridley Scott has directed the film to the best of his ability. He lets the dread build so slowly that by the time anything actually attacks anyone, you're sitting in real tension, your body constantly in fight-or-flight response. Ron Cobb designed the whole ship interior that looks lived-in and industrial rather than the new sleek and futuristic look. The grounded, working-class world is a big part of why the horror lands as hard as it does. 5 'Children of Men' (2006) Image via Universal Pictures Alfonso Cuarón never once stops the movie to explain why the entire human race stopped being able to have children. You just see it in the background, on news screens, on Homeland Security ads, in refugee cages on the side of the road, and you're expected to piece it together yourself while the actual plot keeps moving. The idea, as interesting as it sounds, managed to pull off a proper story till the end. That ambush scene where bullets tear through the windshield was built with an actual air cannon rig timed to fire glass at exact moments, with no CGI standing in for it. This is a sci-fi movie that looks less like the future and more like next year, and that's exactly what makes it so breathtaking and exciting. 4 'Blade Runner' (1982) Image via Warner Bros. Pictures Rutger Hauer's "tears in rain" monologue at the end is mostly his own rewrite, cut down from a much longer scripted speech, done right there on set. It bombed when it came out, and critics mostly didn't know what to do with it, and now it's basically the reason cyberpunk exists as a visual style at all. Deckard (Harrison Ford) hunts down replicants while the movie quietly keeps you guessing whether he's one himself, and it never fully answers that question on purpose. Vangelis's score does as much work building the mood as anything happening on screen, and decades of neon-soaked sci-fi owes this movie a direct debt. 3 'Stalker' (1979) Image via Goskino The first version of this movie got completely ruined by a lab processing error, and Andrei Tarkovsky had to reshoot nearly the entire thing from scratch, losing close to a year of work. He filmed a lot of it near an actual chemical plant, and there's a real, grim theory that the toxic exposure from that location contributed to several members of the crew, including Tarkovsky himself, getting sick and dying years later. The plot is almost nothing. There are three men who are walking toward a room that supposedly grants your deepest wish, and Tarkovsky stretches out that walk for nearly three hours. It's slow enough to test anyone's patience, and it's also one of the most genuinely spiritual, unnerving movies science fiction has ever produced. 2 '2001: A Space Odyssey' (1968) Image via Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Stanley Kubrick built an actual rotating centrifuge set in this movie so his actors could walk in a full circle while the entire structure spun around them, all to fake zero gravity without any CGI, because there wasn't any yet. The first and last twenty minutes of this movie barely have any dialogue at all, and it still doesn't feel slow. HAL 9000 might be the calmest villain in movie history. He never raises his voice even when doing something genuinely terrifying, and this attribute makes him even more dreadful. The film came out in 1968 and predicted tablets and video calls decades early, and the special effects, all practical, all optical, still hold up better than plenty of CGI movies made forty years later. 1 'Solaris' (1972) Image via Mosfilm People used to call Solaris the Soviet answer to 2001, and Tarkovsky reportedly hated that comparison, since he thought Kubrick's movie was too cold and clinical for what he was actually trying to do. This one is about a sentient ocean that reads your mind and manifests the people you've lost, memories made physical and standing right in front of you. It's slow, patient, and genuinely more interested in grief than in space travel. The movie is based on a novel by Stanislaw Lem that's just as strange as its visual depiction. The ending never confirms whether the main character actually leaves the station or gets absorbed into another one of the planet's projections, and that refusal to resolve things cleanly is exactly why this one still gets argued about decades later. Solaris Release Date September 26, 1972 Runtime 167 Minutes