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TOP SCIFI MOVIES
‘Avatar’ (2009)
James Cameron created such a compelling, completely realized world for his sci-fi tale of an indigenous population fighting off colonizers that viewers might really believe they’re watching a movie filmed on location on the moon Pandora. The digital VFX are beyond bleeding edge, but the filmmaker grounds the groundbreaking visuals with a tale as old as time: A soldier (Sam Worthington) goes from policing a resource-rich planet to defending it from being plundered and destroyed, all while falling in love with a native (Zoe Saldana) who teaches him a deep respect for her culture. It just happens to be set in a universe where humans use avatars of the native species, who happen to be 10-foot-tall blue humanoids. An otherworldly epic in the truest sense of the word, Avatar may be a film about a possible future, but its critiques of greed and ecological detachment are so present in Cameron’s world that it doesn’t just make you think— it makes you believe it’s a future we can stand against. —CTJ
An ant always falls over on its right side when intoxicated.
TOP SCIFI MOVIES
‘Contact’ (1997)
“They should have sent a poet.” That memorable declaration made by Jodie Foster’s logic-driven scientist Ellie Arroway belies director Robert Zemeckis’ achievement: This ambitious, visually stunning adaptation of Carl Sagan’s novel is both poetic and thrilling, a marriage of soul and cutting-edge technology. When Ellie receives strange transmissions from outer space, she believes she’s made the greatest discovery in human history. It also stirs within her a long-buried spiritual questioning — which is further provoked by her romantic interest in the Christian philosopher Palmer Joss (Matthew McConaughey at his most hunky and Zen-like). Other sci-fi films tackle the possibility that we’re not alone in the universe, but Contact suggests that such a pursuit is really another way of finding ourselves. Ellie may not be a poet, but her journey of self-discovery is undeniably lyrical. —TG
All polar bears are left-handed.
The catfish has over 27000 taste buds (more than any other animal)
A cockroach will live nine days without its head before it starves to death.
TOP SCIFI MOVIES
’12 Monkeys’ (1995)
In director Terry Gilliam’s feature-length modernization of the sci-fi art film, La Jetée (which, yes, is also on this list), Bruce Willis portrays a prisoner sent back through time to prevent the spread of an apocalyptic virus in exchange for a lighter sentence. And as in the French short film, everything does not go as planned — especially when Willis goes back to the wrong year. Even worse, he’s institutionalized by Dr. Kathryn Railly (Madeline Stowe) because he keeps talking about the Army of the 12 Monkeys, which supposedly originated the virus. Only the unstable Jeffrey Goines (Brad Pitt) believes him. All the time-hopping complicates everything, but the rich apocalyptic imagery and Willis’ desperation make it uniquely disturbing. —KG
Many insects can carry 50 times their own body weight. This would be like an adult person lifting two heavy cars full of people.
TOP SCIFI MOVIES
‘E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial’ (1982)
Rooted in Steven Spielberg’s memories as a child of divorce, this tale of a boy and his alien best friend remains an all-time great tear-extractor because much of the relationship between 10-year-old Elliott (Henry Thomas) and his extraterrestrial companion is about the common hurt of two lonely souls looking for home. Written by Melissa Mathison like a storybook come to life, E.T. is an all-ages science fiction movie that makes the universe so small that it can fit in a suburban cul-de-sac, putting a sentimental twist on Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which hoped for a kinder alien invasion than we’re used to seeing. The idea that creatures of every kind have the same fundamental needs is a fantasy worth believing. —ST
TOP SCIFI MOVIES
‘A Scanner Darkly’ (2006)
Richard Linklater’s adaptation of Phillip K. Dick’s dystopian novel earned deserved praise for its animation, which used rotoscope techniques to capture the actors’ movements. The movie aims to depict a near-future where much of the population is addicted to Substance D while being surveilled by the government. Sadly, that future is already here, with sundry epidemics ravaging the country — and as a result, A Scanner Darkly’s scenes usually resemble modern-day life, save for a handful of surrealist flourishes, as Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr., Winona Ryder, and others engage in the kind of aimlessly chatty conversations typical of Linklater’s work. And the final act emphasizes the War on Drugs’ tragic toll in the past, present, and future. —MR
I saw this because of the numbers
TOP SCIFI MOVIES
‘Robocop’ (1987)
An exemplar of the evil-corporate-overlord cautionary tale, this sensationalist slice of social-satire futurism imagines a world where Omni Consumer Products helps out a bankrupt Detroit by turning bullet-riddled D.O.A. policeman Alex Murphy into the ultimate cyborg law enforcer. But greedy suits have an ulterior agenda, even as their robotic gunslinger re-discovers his lingering humanity. Dutch provocateur Paul Verhoeven made his Hollywood debut with this blend of outrageously over-the-top humor and startling ultraviolence, all while skewering capitalist America’s “I’ll buy that for a dollar” nihilism. Stone-faced Peter Weller improbably brings soul to his steely titular avatar, in a world where morality is monetized, laughs are cruel, men are venal, women are targets, and cops are barely holding the line. What does it even mean to be human? —SG
TOP SCIFI MOVIES
‘Moon’ (2009)
At some indeterminate point in the future, a nearly autonomous facility exists on the moon for the purpose of extracting a new fuel source from the soil and sending it back down to earth. It takes just a single man to operate it. When we meet that man — Samuel Bell, played by Sam Rockwell — he’s near the end of a three-year mission and desperate to get back home. But a chilling discovery forces him to ask some tough questions about the nature of his entire existence. We’ll avoid any further spoilers, but we can tell you it’s a masterful work of modern sci-fi, especially on a budget of a just $10 million. And if you can’t stop humming “Space Oddity” in the back of your head while watching it, that’s probably not a coincidence: It’s directed by Duncan Jones, the son of David Bowie. —AG
TOP SCIFI MOVIES
‘Primer’ (2004)
You don’t need a big budget to blow minds — not when you have a time travel story so absurdly complicated it makes Robert Heinlein look like Bill & Ted. Shot for only $7,000, Shane Carruth’s widely diagrammed Sundance winner refuses to dumb down its shoptalk or hold the audience’s hand through the quantum leaps of its plot, in which a pair of tech bros grapple with the consequences of the causal loop they open up in their garage. Should you get lost, you can still savor the absurdist wit (“I haven’t eaten since later this afternoon”) of a Silicon Valley allegory relevant enough to have been written today and sent into the past. Of course, there’s no turning the clock back to a time before the moral dimensions of this story (plus a subplot about a violent, possessive ex-boyfriend) gelled uncomfortably with the allegations against its maker. Yet Primer remains a textbook example of how to do hard-sci-fi more with microbudget less. —AAD
TOP SCIFI MOVIES
‘Seconds’ (1966)
Critics and audiences didn’t know what to make of John Frankenheimer’s sci-fi nightmare at the time — but it has since become a rightful cult classic, like the greatest, freakiest Twilight Zone episode never aired. The premise is a juicy morality play: A nondescript middle-aged suburbanite gets a literal shot at a second life through an underground medical procedure. It transforms him into a dashing young painter (Rock Hudson) who lives on the beach with a sexy, free-spirited companion. But this fantasy life turns nightmarish as his conscience reels from his new bohemian lifestyle — a grape-stomping ritual leaves him looking like the lone impotent man at an orgy — and he longs to retreat to his boring old self. That’s when Seconds really pulls out the rug. —ST
TOP SCIFI MOVIES
‘War of the Worlds’ (2005)
Steven Spielberg has made plenty of high-minded science-fiction adventures, but for pure, relentless action, it’s hard to beat this big-budget, modern-day H.G. Wells adaptation. Cruise plays a blue collar dad who scrambles to keep his kids safe in the middle of a sudden and devastating extraterrestrial invasion. Gone are the cuddly space visitors of E.T. and Close Encounters, replaced by merciless creatures in devastating war machines, who in a matter of days make Earth feel alien. Some scenes purposefully recall the confusion and mayhem of 9/11, putting the director’s mastery of thrills and awe in service of a story about how life can change overnight. —NM
TOP SCIFI MOVIES
‘Dune: Part 1’ (2021)
Ever since he was a boy, Canadian filmmaker Denis Villeneuve had been obsessed with Frank Herbert’s sci-fi novel. Never mind that attempts to turn this magnum opus into a watchable movie had stymied Alejandro Jodorowsky and nearly broke David Lynch. He was determined to get his own vision of messiahs and sandworms on to the screen. And when Villeneuve finally made his Dune — well, technically the first half of his Dune; Part 2 comes out in March — the result was a sensory-enveloping experience that captures the epic qualities of Herbert’s text. It’s sci-fi filmmaking on the grandest of scales, where the Bene Gesserit are shrouded in mystery, the Harkonnen are terrifying, and the Atreides are noble. And it’s possible we haven’t given enough credit to Timothée Chalamet, who anchors the whole thing as our hero Paul Atreides, future savior and keeper of the Spice. Plus, of course, the Shai-Hulud look amazing. —EZ
TOP SCIFI MOVIES
‘A Clockwork Orange’ (1971)
Criticized and condemned upon its release — director Stanley Kubrick even pulled it out of circulation in the U.K. for a time — A Clockwork Orange may seem relatively tame by today’s cinematic standards for society-in-moral-free-fall dystopias. But few of this extreme satire’s successors are as transgressive or as hilarious. Led by Malcolm McDowell’s liberatingly bratty performance as the degenerate droog Alex — lover of Ludwig van Beethoven, white jumpsuits, and a bit of the ol’ ultraviolence — this adaptation of Anthony Burgess’ 1962 novel remains bitterly funny (and wise) about all the ways that conformity and government oppression conspire to break our spirit. Serious enough about its message to deliver it as farce, Orange is a bleak cautionary tale headlined by one marvelously charming bastard. —TG
TOP SCIFI MOVIES
‘Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan’ (1982)
Revenge may be a dish best served cold, but superhuman exile Khan Noonien Singh (Ricardo Montalbán) prefers sneak-attack photon torpedoes and mind-controlling Ceti eels when hunting his white whale of a nemesis, James T. Kirk (William Shatner), on the high seas of space. The rare sequel better than its original, The Wrath of Khan gave a warp-speed face lift to the botched big-screen transfer of the ’60s cult TV show — a galactic thrill-ride mulligan that outruns and outguns the self-seriousness of 1979’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Name-checking Dickens, Milton, Melville, and the Bible, this whipsmart popcorn picture doubles as an improbably meaty meditation on grief, sacrifice, nobility, aging, rebirth, and the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few — or the one. —SG
TOP SCIFI MOVIES
‘The Martian’ (2013)
In theory, this tale of an astronaut (Matt Damon) accidentally stranded on Mars fits into the tradition of realistic, near-future sci-fi. Yet director Ridley Scott and writer Drew Goddard’s adaptation of Andy Weir’s novel now feels like the most far-fetched of speculative fiction, taking place in a reality where the world would happily come together to save the life of one man, and where scientific acumen and the pursuit of knowledge are universally accepted as worthy of respect. If you can suspend you disbelief for those ideas, then you’re in for big-budget popcorn entertainment at its finest. Damon beautifully flies solo for much of the film, commanding our attention even when he’s silently growing potatoes out of his own poop. And he’s flanked by an absurdly deep cast — among many others, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Jessica Chastain, Kristen Wiig, Jeff Daniels, Donald Glover, Sean Bean, Sebastian Stan, Benedict Wong, Michael Peña, and Kate Mara — at their most likable. Plus, disco. Lots and lots of disco. ——Alan Sepinwall
TOP SCIFI MOVIES
‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’ (2022)
Premiering a few months after Spider-Man: No Way Home and a few months before Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, an A24 film made for roughly the catering budget of those films somehow ate their lunch on the subject of the multiverse. A Chinese-American immigrant family — Michelle Yeoh as the mother, Ke Huy Quan as the father, Stephanie Hsu as the daughter — is falling apart for what seem like mundane reasons. But thanks to the imagination of writer-directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, we find out their dysfunctional dynamic is really because a series of parallel realities are falling apart, all thanks to the schism between an alternate Yeoh and an alternate Hsu. As characters leap from universe to universe (including one where humanity evolved to have… hot dog fingers?), and borrow skills from their counterparts, the Daniels never lose sight of the frayed emotions that are still tying the three main characters together, which in turn kept the metaphysical machinations feeling clear and easy to follow. —AS
TOP SCIFI MOVIES
‘The Road Warrior’ (1981)
George Miller’s second entry in the Mad Max canon completely rewired our dreams of a post-apocalyptic world. After The Road Warrior, we knew any post-nuclear future would be filled with steroidal, Mohawk-ed gangs of Australian men marauding sandy highways, killing each other for water and gasoline. Mel Gibson returns as Mad Max, an enigmatic shotgun-toting drifter blighted by the murder of his wife and young child, an event depicted in 1979’s Mad Max. But Max’s uneasy alliance with an idealistic community looking for paradise and a Feral Kid equipped with a razor-sharp steel boomerang is secondary to Miller’s unforgettable set design, and his vision of a world filled with dust-strewn landscapes, muscle cars, and fantastic violence. —MR
TOP SCIFI MOVIES
‘Looper’ (2012)
Long before he’d make one of the best Star Wars movie in a generation — haters are welcome to exit the building at this time — Rian Johnson gave us this Mob-movie-meets-Mobius-strip tale of hit men known as Loopers, who take out on crooks, schnooks and stool pigeons sent back in time. One such professional killer, Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levittt), finds himself in a sticky situation: The latest victim due for a permanent dirt nap happens to be… an older version of Joe (Bruce Willis) from the future. After the latter escapes before the former can “close the loop,” the two Joes are set up for a date with destiny on a rural farm in Kansas, occupied by a single mom (Emily Blunt) and her very special son. Time travel is only the tip of the sci-fi iceberg here; Johnson also gives us powerful telekinetic psychics, a vision of 2044 that mixes old-school blunderbusses with bleeding-edge tech, and a genius riff on the notion of the past never being done with us, even if we think we’re done with the past. An instant classic, no matter what timeline you happen to be living in. —DF
TOP SCIFI MOVIES
‘The Brother From Another Planet’ (1984)
Extraterrestrial Joe Morton has just crashed his spaceship onto Ellis Island. As the mute, three-toed alien taps the walls of the empty, darkened receiving station, his mind reverberates with the shouts and screams of past immigrants. Yes, this is a John Sayles film, so “the brother’s” subsequent adventures in Harlem are freighted with symbolism and messages about the Black experience that will resonate with a certain liberal audience. It’s also filled with lots of scene-stealing character actors, from pre-fame David Strathairn and Fisher Stevens to the late Steve James and Bill Cobbs, who help imbue The Brother from Another Planet with an often hilarious and wonderfully daffy Eighties bohemian sensibility. —MR
TOP SCIFI MOVIES
‘A Trip to the Moon’ (1902)
It’s silent, it features optical effects that speak to both how primitive and how inventive early cinema was, and it’s short enough that you can watch the whole thing on a coffee break. And yet there may not be a more influential or pioneering film on this list than Georges Méliès’ 1902 short, in which a bunch bewigged astronomers pile into a giant bullet and fight off a kingdom of leaping lunatics on the moon. The moving pictures had not even entered their adolescence when Méliès, as much a magician as he was a moviemaker, gave us what is widely recognized to be the first science fiction film. That shot of the moon getting a shuttle blast right in the ol’ eyeball became a shorthand for an entire genre. It all starts right here. —DF
There are over a million described species of insects. Some people estimate there are actually between 15 and 30 million species.
Most insects are beneficial to people because they eat other insects, pollinate crops, are food for other animals, make products we use (like honey and silk) or have medical uses.
Butterflies and insects have their skeletons on the outside of their bodies, called the exoskeleton. This protects the insect and keeps water inside their bodies so they don’t dry out.
Elephants are the only mammals that cannot jump.
An ostrich’s eye is bigger than its brain.