Throughout movie history, theSci-Figenre keeps pushing boundaries to achieve bigger and better things. One of the first movies ever made was a sci-fi film,Georges Méliès’A Trip to the Moonin 1902.It used trick photography to tell its story, showing that even at the start, science fiction gave filmmakers a unique chance to do something unlike anything else seen in movies. This directly led toFritz Lang delivering his masterpiece, the sci-fi filmMetropolis.
After this,filmmakers kept going, whether in sci-fi horror movies likeFrankensteinandThe Invisible Manor the post-World War II monster movies likeGodzilla.Soon, several legendary directors came onto the scene, with names like Stanley Kubrick, John Carpenter, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Ridley Scott, the Wachowski sisters, and Christopher Nolanshowing what the sci-fi movie genre could accomplishwhen they break all the rules.
While the first sci-fi movie might have beenA Trip to the Moon,Lang stretched the idea into something bigger and smarter. The first movie is just about heading into outer space;Metropolisis about what the sci-fi genre has turned into since that time.It ignores merely going to fantastical places and instead shows how science and a futuristic society could change the world — often for the worse. Thus, the German Expressionist film was the first successful dystopian sci-fi film.
Metropolisdepicts a future urban dystopia, where the son of the city’s leader works to bring society back together after technological advancements created a gulf separating the classes. The film split audiences when it came out, but as with the best sci-fi movies, it was ahead of its time and became recognized later as a true masterpiece. The sci-fi subgenre showing how scientific advances can create a morbid dystopia owes its existence toMetropolis.
The horror genre has had sci-fi themes strung through it all along. However, the idea of sci-fi horror hit its zenith after World War II. The horrors of the war made the Universal Monsters less frightening, and they went out of style. Replacing them were monsters created by science, whereGodzillachanged everything. There was already a giant monster inKing Kong,butGodzillawas created due to the fallout of the Atomic Bomb ending World War II.
Japan introduced the monster that changed everything about similar horror movies for the next two decades,allowing Mothra, Ghidorah, and more to arrive. What resulted was a franchise that has lived on for over 70 years, and shows no signs of slowing down. However, when it came out, it changed what people expected to see in horror movies, and it was all pure sci-fi action from the start.
Not sinceMetropolishad a sci-fi movie altered things like2001: A Space Odyssey.2001is a cerebral sci-fi film that explores science fiction ideaswithout much action,telling the story of a man on a long-distance space journey who discovers the universe’s origin in a way that makes viewers often walk away with different theories.
This was risky and alienated audiences and critics, as it still does with some viewers, while others praise it as a sci-fi triumph. This movie forces viewers to think about what they are watching while providing no easy answers. When released, this was not normal, but today many sci-fi films prefer to deliver complicated stories that don’t spell out what the ending means, allowing the genre to be smarter.2001: A Space Odysseywas the movie that introduced this style of filmmaking.
Contrasting with2001: A Space Odyssey,George Lucas decided to use sci-fi in a way that was exciting and fun.The firstStar Warsmovie proved that sci-fi movies could be huge blockbusters,something that had not really been seen before. Lucas took Joseph Campbell’sHero’s Journeyand used it to slightlyremake the Akira Kurosawa film,The Hidden Fortress,and what resulted was magical.
Fans were split on the more intellectual2001,but everyone bought intoStar Wars.Lucas smartly took less money from the studio in exchange for keeping merchandising rights, and from that, he built an empire that became LucasFilm. Not only did Lucas break all the rules to makeStar Wars,but he changed how Hollywood looked at blockbusters from that point on.
Ridley Scott again changed what people knew about sci-fi horror bytransferring the idea of a haunted house to a spacecraftfrom which there was no escape. He took the idea of the slasher movies that were becoming popular and turned it into a true horror story in space. Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley became one of the greatest Final Girls in history, while the alien queen was an amazing creation, like something out of an H.P. Lovecraft story. However, at the same time, this entire franchise is solidly a sci-fi tale, with genetic engineering, space travel, and the dangers of going too far.
Just three years afterAlien,Scott returned with his rule-breaking sci-fi dystopian thrillerBlade Runner.After watchingStar Warsturn sci-fi action into blockbuster genre fare, Scott brought it back to what Stanley Kubrick developed over a decade earlier.Blade Runneris pure sci-fi, bringing big ideasand no actual answers to a genre whose fans love to think about what they are seeing. Just like2001: A Space Odyssey,it polarized viewers.
Blade Runnercontains a mystery, and Scott shot it like a film noir, with a cop trying to track down and stop a replicant (an android made to appear human) who has decided it wants to live as a free person. There is a line of dialogue delivered by the villain that makes everyone wonder who the good guys and bad guys really are. This is sci-fi that plays by no rules and is a masterpiece for it.
The Thing
Cast
A team of researchers set out to study an alien spacecraft found in Antarctica, where they also discover an alien body on the site. The alien buried in ice is actually alive and has the ability to imitate human form. The group must find a way to distinguish who the real person is from The Thing and stay alive. John Carpenter’s 1982 film is a remake of 1951’s The Thing from Another World and stars Kurt Russel as the hero RJ MacReady.
The Thingis a sci-fi horror movie that almost ruined director John Carpenter’s careerbecause of its disregard for the rules. The same year thatThe Thinghit theaters, Steven Spielberg madeE.T.: The Extraterrestrial.Fans wanted to see uplifting sci-fi, and that is whatE.T.offered them. However, that isn’t what Carpenter wanted to make. AfterHalloween, the director set out to produce something dark and disturbing. Fans and critics rejected it and it flopped hard.
Carpenter was fired from his next movie thanks to the box office failure ofThe Thing.However, something amazing happened. WhenThe Thinghit home video, people were able to watch it with a fresh set of eyes and the real horror fans finally understood what Carpenter was doing.The Thingis now considered one of the best horror movies of all timeand the respect genre fans have for it is almost universal.
Steven Spielberg has hugely impacted Hollywood several times in his career;Jurassic Parkwas the first big-budget blockbuster movie to go all in on CGI. Today, everyone is so used to CGI in movies that it doesn’t seem special anymore.When Spielberg and ILM created the CGI dinosaurs forJurassic Park, no one had ever seen anything like it,and it changed how Hollywood did business. What makes this even more impressive is thatthe dinosaurs inJurassic Parklook betterthan some CGI that studios put into movies 30 years later, illustrating the mastery of Spielberg as a director.
In 1999, the Wachowskis brought their ideas to the brilliant sci-fi movieThe Matrix.The plot of the movie was revolutionary at the time, when computers and the Internet were still in their infancy stages. What if the world was already a wasteland and no one knew it? What if everyone was kept alive as a battery to fuel that world, but lived in a virtual reality?
The best part about this idea was that, if people were living inside a computer simulation, this meant they could do superhuman things and that is when things like Bullet Time happened. Not everything the Wachowskis did worked, as the later movies proved, but the first film was a sci-fi coup.The Matrixchanged sci-fi in the same way that Quentin Tarantino changed crime films,which resulted in severalcopycat films that couldn’t match up toThe Matrix.
Christopher Nolan has tried to break new ground in every movie he has made. His first movie told its story out of order and his second worked in reverse. He recreated the entire Batman mythology and produced a masterful sci-fi film inThe Prestige.However,when Nolan madeInception,he broke more rules and ended up with something masterful, breathtaking, and very confusing.Inceptionis a heist movie where the thieves steal memories from someone’s mind.
The scenes inside the mind are in a world where anything can happen, similar to what was done withThe Matrix.However, Nolan took the ideas fromThe Matrixand pushed them to the limit, allowing the entire world to change around the characters in a confusing labyrinth that never should have worked but ended up as a modern masterpiece. Nolan tried to go even further inTenet,but that movie’s lack of success showed how hard it is to make groundbreakingsci-fimovies likeInception.
