“Today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups… So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing.”

-Philip K. Dick
“I simply regard romantic comedies as a subgenre of sci-fi, in which the world created therein has different rules than my regular human world.”

-Mindy Kaling

We can not accuse sci-fi with being a film genre because huge crowds adore him. Of course,  (even if one of the ancestors of cinematic art was a sci-fi), it doesn’t had enough time to get the adequate appreciation, and it neither did help that this genre could only been imagined within the youth literature for decades. This perception is not unfair in the sense that several works of this genre can be blamed for this and moreover, sci-fi is among the roots of trash next to horror. However, the situation has changed a lot since the 50’s and the ’60s.

Let’s take a look now at the top 6 sci-fi movies of all time:

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6. Blade Runner by Ridley Scott

The Hungarian strand shows up in Ridley Scott’s film too. Those who consider themselves fans of the film have to know what did Edward James Olmos say to Harrison Ford in front of the street sushi vendor. This scene is really characteristic. Blade Runner’s cyberpunk vision remains the inaccessible aesthetic pinnacle of cinema until this day.

The view of the smothering big city lost nothing of it’s power and still leads a multitude of spectators to think- would the future really be something like this? If we do not succeed to limit the growth of the world’s metropolises and the global warming proves to be an unstoppable process, then this dark dystopia, in terms of it’s essential elements may even become a reality.

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5. Donnie Darko by Richard Kelly

Like many other movie makers, Richard Kelly popped up from nowhere at the beginning of the last decade. In his first movie he blended the subject of time travel with the panels of teen movies, and he presented all this as if he had learned filming from David Lynch. After the initial confusion this strange hybrid has found its audience and now it is accounted as a cult work. The unparalleled success story of Donnie Darko is entirely deserved, because it is a truly brilliant movie about the spiritual world of frustrated teenagers, represented in an unforgettable way.

Donnie Darko (Jake Gyllenhaal) is struggling with serious emotional problems, he looks at the surrounding world with incomprehension and anger. A giant rabbit saves his life, and he predicts that the world will soon come to an end.

This film is like a furious and also deadly serious teenage fantasy which wants “Back in the future to become a reality. Donnie Darko is a disturbing movie, which has been put together cleverly. The perfectly selected songs from the eighties deserve praises while a melancholic “what if” story takes place before our eyes.

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4. Alien by Ridley Scott

The Alien series is the best innovative and revolutionary milestone of sci-fi horror, the the high school of suspense, a still fearful cinematic experience. and 33 years have passed since the movie’s completion.

The technological development has enabled the cinema to tell much more monumental stories taking place in the space, but Ridley Scott ‘s masterpiece could not be rivaled by any works.  He is still the unequaled master of the most nerve-racking sci-fi. The nightmarish images of the movie still haunt us.

Today, everyone knows that Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) is the only survivor. The next time you watch the movie again, look for early signs suggesting this outcome. It will be difficult, since the film successfully hides the fact for a long time that actually Ripley is the protagonist. For a while she gets the same amount of time as the six other members of the ship’s staff.

Many things are used to be mentioned, which hoists Alien above the level of  B-Horrors: the legendary turns, the maddening claustrophobic atmosphere of the spaceship and of course the monster of Swiss artist H. R. Giger. But the  scenario deserves at least this praise, which conducts Ripley on the way of becoming a hero with unprecedented natureness Ripley so that it does not become evident prematurely.

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3. Idiocracy by Mike Judge

The and screenwriter, director, producer and cartoon animator Mike Judge has always been good in social criticism, as he is not only the father of Beavis and Butt-Head and the voice of the two idiotic characters, but even the author of their outrageous adventures since 1992. His 2006 sci-fi comedy, Idiocracy is actually a Beavis and Butt-Head episode with live performers about such a 2505 year, when the dream of the two TV-dependent cretin became true.

The brainwashed idiots of the consumer society overgrow in such a degree in this imaginary future, that everyone is sitting on their chair with a built-in toilet and refrigerator or in brothels converted from fast food restaurants and cinema where there is no dialogue between two farts in the movies.

The spoiled test subjects of a hibernation experiment arrive in this world, the world’s most unfortunate soldier (Luke Wilson) who is dumb like an ass, even though he is still the smartest creature on Earth in the future. To make things even more crazy, a wrestler with a porn mustache is the president of the USA in Mike Judge’s envisioned future, who is only thrilled by white women, guns and jeeps. The black president of the movie with a peculiar sense of humor foreshadowed by the way Obama’s election victory two years later, just like The Fifth Element and the Deep Impact.

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2. 12 Monkeys by Terry Gilliam

American-born British film director Terry Gilliam already raised into cultic heights with the super funny animations of Monty Python’s Flying Circus and Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Then, in his own right, he became a good director even without the other Python members (Brazil, The Fisher King, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas) 20 years ago he filmed one of the best time travel sci-fis. Everyone knows the story: the strange looking scientists of a dystopian future send back Bruce Willis to 1996, to locate the crazy leader of the 12 Monkeys terrorist organization (Brad Pitt), before he would set free the virus in 1997 that destroys civilization.

However, the time travel goes wrong, and the bald hero is treated as a fool, and his only hope is that the psychiatrist (Madeleine Stowe) really believes him that he was sent back from the future with an important task to do. The time paradox of the 12 Monkeys fortunately is not so naive and smeared as the Terminator’s, and the film fans are still debating whether it was not only dreamed by Bruce Willis.

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1. Stalker by Andrei Tarkovsky

Stalker is an exceptionally powerful artistic creation with the ability to change people’s lives. Two men, the writer and the professor hires a Stalker who can take them in a closed area. Within the zone they want to get to a particular room, which is supposed to fulfill people’s wishes. After a disaster, the movie got a strange ricochet and everyone began to regard the Zone as the film equivalent of the radioactive area around the Ukrainian nuclear power plant.

A desolate industrial area, which is no longer suitable for human life, and which will gradually return to nature. Like Prometheus, Stalker is about the search for truth. The writer and professor wanted to ferret out the secrets of the room. Faith, however, that their leader evangelizes with childlike naivety, do not come easy for the two learned men.

They take the warnings of the Stalker about the deadly traps and unearthly power with sarcasm and denial. However, while Tarkovsky approaches the topic of faith with patience and humility, Prometheus conjures out  the “big questions of life” as an arrogant magician. Only Tarkovsky‘s performance is worthy to seriously wonder of the answers.

Prometheus is leaving the viewer between doubts, what makes it seem to be more than what actually it is. However, one can go back to the Zone anytime because of the ambiguity and the room will have different meanings at the different stages of our lives, and we’re going to relate differently to the three protagonists. Stalker may serve as a mirror for us throughout our whole life.

Thank you for reading our article about the best sci-fi movies of all time. The next one will be about the top 6 action movies.