Different trends help movie genres rise and fall over time, but certain types of cinema have proven to be perennial crowd-pleasers. Science fiction is one of these genres with an established track record of sustained success. Despite the genre's accomplishments, sci-fi remains a challenging form of storytelling given its almost unlimited possibilities. However, science fiction filmmakers can use the form to explore new and engaging ideas.

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Still, it's easy for sci-fi movies to get lost in special effects or celebrity casts, but these elements mean nothing without a strong story to support them. While there's no shortage of science fiction films happy to function as explosive spectacles, plenty more present thought-provoking ideas that stand the test of time.

15 Minority Report Is A Fascinating, Futuristic Look Into Fate And Identity

Minority Report is a landmark science fiction-action hybrid from the early 2000s. The movie perfectly pairs Tom Cruise's star power and Steven Spielberg's auteurship. Visually, Minority Report is a masterpiece of framing fans have come to expect from Spielberg. Plus, given it's an adaptation of sci-fi savant Phillip K. Dick's short story of the same name, it has a robust narrative foundation to build upon.

In this future world, police utilize psychics to determine "precrime" and stop man-made disasters before they occur. But this system begins to collapse when the head of Precrime, Cruise's Chief Anderton, learns he will soon commit murder. He must then race to determine if someone is setting him up and change his fate or if it's already sealed.

14 12 Monkeys Is A Haunting Time Travel Story With Apocalyptic Stakes

12 Monkeys is a breakthrough picture for its director, Terry Gilliam, and its stars, Brad Pitt and Bruce Willis, who give exceptional performances in this intense time travel tale. In 12 Monkeys, the two leads find themselves entangled in a scheme to go back in time to prevent an act of bio-terrorism that plagues the current planet. Of course, this scheme quickly unravels and grows more complicated by the second.

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Time travel stories frequently collapse under their own weight, but 12 Monkeys carefully thinks through its story and doesn't cheat the audience. Because of the strength of its narrative, it's easy to see how the rich world of this film sustained a four-season TV series that explores the movie's cautionary themes at a greater, more in-depth length.

13 Snowpiercer Becomes A Scathing Indictment Of Society And Capitalism

Directed by Bong Joon-ho of Parasite and The Host fame, Snowpiercer is a nihilistic story about survival and the long-term effects of income inequality. The movie takes place on a frozen Earth, where what's left of humanity is contained in a globe-spanning train segregated based on wealth and status. From this inequality, a mutiny erupts and dismantles the precarious laws that govern this fragile ecosystem.

Snowpiercer works as well as it does because it's as much a contemplative social commentary as it is a dystopian sci-fi story. Like 12 Monkeys, this enthralling setup has spawned a successful TV series. The Snowpiercer TV show has taken this premise and highlighted even more instances of corruption and the hierarchical struggles for survival.

12 Arrival Emphasizes The Importance Of Communication During Times Of Turmoil

Denis Villeneuve is quickly proving himself as one of this generation's greatest science fiction storytellers thanks to projects like Blade Runner 2049 and this unconventional alien invasion picture, Arrival. Starring Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner, Arrival feels indebted to more contemplative sci-fi films, like Contact, focusing more on understanding the unknown than conquering it.

Adams plays a linguistic professor who emphasizes the importance of communication and language when so much of the world is pulling apart. Arrival is full of extraordinary extraterrestrials and apocalyptic stakes, but the movie's greatest triumph is its level of empathy. Whereas other films about aliens feature humanity's conflict against them, Arrival emphasizes the significance of communication not just between nations but between planets.

11 Looper Is A Time Travel Assassination Story With Bite

Time travel is one of the most challenging science fiction tropes to pull off successfully. This difficulty helped Rian Johnson's Looper stand out and set a new standard for time-hopping action films. Looper begins at a point in the future where time travel has become a tool for the wealthy to solve their problems. Agents send targets to the past, where a "looper" assassin is ready to take them out and close the "time loop."

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But this precise process soon unravels when Joseph Gordon-Levitt's looper, Joe, discovers his latest hit is his future self. Looper doesn't condescend toward its audience with its science. Instead, the movie crafts a captivating story where both versions of Joe must wrestle with impossible decisions that affect the future in unforeseen ways.

10 Children Of Men Praises The Miracle Of Birth

Alfonso Cuarón is a visionary director with an enviable filmography that includes Gravity, Roma, and Harry Potter and The Prisoner of Azkaban. One of his greatest hits was Children of Men chronicling a dire post-apocalyptic story where infertility slowly dwindles the Earth's population. When one woman becomes pregnant, the world's forces converge on her and her protector, Clive Owen's Theo Faron.

Children of Men excels in illustrating the grim details that make up this dystopia. The movie presents this purgatory with a grounded level of realism, conveyed in such great detail that the audience will quickly forget the movie immerses them in a science fiction film; it simply feels real.

9 Edge Of Tomorrow Uses Time Loop Shenanigans To Train Tom Cruise's Hero

The mega wattage of Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt's star power gives Edge of Tomorrow a healthy boost compared to other sci-fi-action romps. Still, the movie's primary selling point is its wild subversion of the Groundhog Day time loop formula.

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Edge of Tomorrow finds Earth under attack by a race of extremely fast and deadly extraterrestrials. Tom Cruise's Major Willam Cage is stuck reliving the same battle every time he perishes. The film leans into a "video game mentality" as Cruise's character goes from overwhelmed to overpowered, gradually learning from his in-battle mistakes. Eventually, Cage becomes an apex soldier uniquely trained to defeat this alien threat.

8 The Martian Presents A Patient Struggle For Survival In An Alien World

Ridley Scott has helped evolve the cultural standing of the science fiction genre countless times through classics like Alien and Blade Runner. The Martian marked both a return to the genre and a return to form for the British auteur. Scott creates a grounded but still fantastical story by emphasizing the science in science fiction.

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The Martian establishes genuine stakes once Matt Damon's beleaguered astronaut, Mark Watney, finds himself stranded alone on Mars with limited resources. Watney's precarious mission to survive, combined with a frequently tranquil existence on Mars, produces a beautiful and tonally unique sci-fi film.

7 Interstellar Is A Stunning Display Of Space And Humanity

Following The Dark Knight and Inception, Christopher Nolan has become widely regarded as one of the most talented modern directors. Today, any Nolan film becomes event cinema, and Interstellar is one of the auteur's most passionate and beautiful projects. When dwindling resources on Earth push NASA scientists to turn to volatile wormholes as their best solution for the relocation and repopulation of humanity.

Interstellar examines an arduous struggle to save humankind. Still, the movie becomes an insightful, emotional story about life that rivals one of its primary influences, 2001: A Space Odyssey. The film is a remarkable mix of ideas and images, all held together by an A-list cast.

6 Dune Throws Its Audience Into A Generational Hero's Journey That Lasts Millennia

Frank Herbert's Dune is a totemic science fiction book series that many considered impossible to do justice on the big screen. Both critics and audiences largely considered even David Lynch's 1984 adaptation unsuccessful. But Denis Villeneuve's blockbuster take on the franchise proved the skeptics wrong.

Dune details the hero's journey of Paul Atreides as he reluctantly accepts his fate as a foreign planet's savior. Nevertheless, Dune's narrative is significantly greater than one man's adventures. With a sequel already in the works and nine novels to draw from, Dune has endless more lore to explore. This breadth of the story makes Villeneuve's film feel like just the beginning of something much more significant.

5 Ex Machina Questions The True Nature Of Man Vs. Machine

Before entering the world of directing, cinephiles knew Alex Garland primarily as a writer who, in addition to several novels, penned the scripts for Sunshine, 28 Days Later, and The Beach. In 2014, Garland made his directorial debut with Ex Machina, an instant classic in the science fiction genre.

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Ex Machina tells the story of a young programmer, Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson), who's selected in a company-wide lottery to participate in a top-secret experiment. Caleb joins the corporation's reclusive CEO, Nathan (Oscar Isaac), at his remote mountainside compound. There Caleb helps Nathan evaluate the human qualities of advanced artificial intelligence, Ava, housed inside a beautiful robot woman's body. The tests Caleb runs on Ava open significant questions about humanity and what it means to be a person.

4 Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes Is A Shakespearean Tale

In 2011, Fox rebooted its hallowed Planet of the Apes franchise with Rupert Wyatt's Rise of the Planet of the Apes. The movie was a hit, and the studio quickly greenlit a sequel with director Matt Reeves (Cloverfield, The Batman). While Rise focused primarily on James Franco's human character, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes splits screen time evenly between humans and apes, developing its ape characters arguably even better than its human ones.

In Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Caesar, the apes' leader, must grapple with a fragile harmony between humans and apes while trying to quell a potential coup at the hands of his close confidant, Koba. What transpires is a Shakespearean tale of tragedy and the tenuousness of peace in times of strife. With Reeves at the helm, Dawn pairs stunning visuals with its powerful story.

3 WALL-E Is An Animated Science Fiction Film For All Ages

By 2008, Pixar had cemented itself as one of the world's most critically and commercially successful movie studios. Despite this prosperity, the idea of WALL-E, which features a primarily dialogue-free script, was considered daring at the time. The movie uses its animated format to create arresting visuals that reveal a fully-formed narrative without requiring extraneous dialogue.

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WALL-E tells the tale of its titular waste-collecting robot, who lives on an abandoned Earth that humans have left covered in trash. WALL-E's mundane existence is thrown into chaos when he meets a female robot, EVE, and falls in love. His journey to follow EVE leads WALL-E to help save what's left of humankind.

2 District 9 Is An Action-Packed Sci-Fi Allegory

Few science fiction filmmakers have announced their presence on the scene as emphatically as Neil Blomkamp did with this feature-length directorial debut, District 9. The film takes place in current-day Johannesburg, South Africa, where aliens had landed 20 years prior. In those 20 years, the South African government established a refugee camp called District 9.

Serving as an allegory for South Africa's long history with apartheid, District 9 shows how this refugee camp has deteriorated into a slum in the past 20 years. With the aliens living in squalor and subjected to constant exploitation, the government enlists a defense corporation to evict the Prawns and move them to a new encampment. But when the employee leading the eviction touches an alien fluid, he must team up with the species he deplores to help him.

1 Ad Astra Takes Audiences On An Emotional Journey Through Space

Like WALL-E, Ad Astra portrays an Earth humankind has ravaged with its obsession with consumption and capitalism. And this collective greed has extended beyond our world's atmosphere in the movie. Humans have established a colony on the moon containing all the trappings of modern capitalism, including a Subway and a casino.

Ad Astra follows Brad Pitt's astronaut, Roy McBride, as he traverses through space on a mission to rescue his father, whom he long believed dead after abandoning his family. McBride's mission is to locate his father, hopefully saving humankind along the way. But the isolation of space forces Roy to confront his relationships and his struggle to remain present. Ultimately, Ad Astra is more about humans' propensity to alienate themselves from one another than about alien lifeforms.

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