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Tigers have striped skin, not just striped fur.
A “jiffy” is the scientific name for 1/100th of a second.
The average child recognizes over 200 company logos by the time he enters first grade.
The youngest pope ever was 11 years old.
TOP SCIFI MOVIES
‘Quatermass and the Pit’ (1967)
Created by Nigel Kneale, Professor Bernard Quatermass is a long-running hero of U.K. science fiction, in many films, TV shows, and BBC radio serials. He’s a gruff, rumpled scientist using his Sherlock Holmes/Van Helsing intellect to outsmart alien forces. But of all his many adventures, there’s no stepping to the 1967 Hammer sci-fi/horror flick, directed by Roy Ward Baker, scripted by Kneale, and starring Andrew Keir as the Professor. An ancient skull with weird powers has been discovered in the London Underground. Is it human? Or …alien? In the U.S., it was a late-night TV staple retitled Five Million Years To Earth; Greil Marcus makes it a central text of his classic 1989 study Lipstick Traces, linking it to punk rock and Dada art. It’s genuinely bone-chilling, and no less David Bowie, a huge Quatermass fan, began Ziggy Stardust with an homage to it: “Five Years,” where apocalyptic panic leads to chaos in the streets. —RS
TOP SCIFI MOVIES
‘Minority Report’ (2002)
The director of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial meets the author of Blade Runner — a pairing that would have only looked simpatico to clairvoyants in 1982. But two decades later, Steven Spielberg tabled his more sentimental impulses to build a crackerjacker blockbuster noir from Philip K. Dick’s dystopian blueprint. Tom Cruise is the golden boy of the “precrime” police division, a unit dedicated to nabbing future criminals before they’ve committed their felonies. Then he becomes the suspect in a soon-to-happen murder case, at which point the group’s former commanding officer becomes one more fugitve on the run. The onscreen technology has proven as prescient as the source material, with everything from touch interface to iris scanners to crime prediction methods drifting out of the realm of the speculative and into reality in the years since. —AAD
TOP SCIFI MOVIES
‘Snowpiercer’ (2013)
There’s a glorious simplicity to the concept behind Bong Joon Ho’s first English language film, based on a French graphic novel: The world has frozen. Everyone’s on a train. The rich people are in the front living like kings; the poor people are in the back eating blocks of bugs. Director Bong is an artist who takes his class warfare very seriously — he would go on to make Parasite, after all — but the action of the postapocalyptic movie is as propulsive as the engines of the barreling cars. All that, plus the lunacy of Tilda Swinton in fake teeth, Alison Pill as a gun-wielding school teacher, and a big twist that’s as chilling as it is mind-blowing. You’ll never be able to say something “tastes best” again without shivering. —EZ
TOP SCIFI MOVIES
‘The Empire Strikes Back’ (1980)
The success of Star Wars changed Hollywood, pushing the studios to pursue bigger box office returns by making more crowd-pleasing adventures, filled with bankable characters. Yet this sequel may have been even more influential, with its twisty story that sees the headstrong Luke Skywalker learning harsh truths about the Jedi lifestyle and his own family history, while across the galaxy his friends are stumbling into a deadly trap. Darker and more complex than its predecessor, Empire fruitfully expanded George Lucas’s original mythology by springing mind-blowing surprises and hinting at world-shattering secrets. It gave fans a lot to theorize about, establishing what has become now become part of the ritual with big franchise films: spirited conversations about the choices the heroes make… and about what comes next. —NM
TOP SCIFI MOVIES
‘The Thing’ (1982)
Pilot R.J. MacReady (Kurt Russell) has a growing suspicion that an extraterrestrial life form is infecting and mimicking members of his research group stationed at a base in icy Antarctica. As in the 1951 film that provided the source material for John Carpenter’s brilliant remake, he’s right — and things quickly go from bad to worse. The cast, which includes Wilford Brimley and Keith David, portrays the characters’ paranoia perfectly, which only intensifies as Ennio Morricone’s throbbing score builds and the visuals become nightmarish enough to appear on Fangoria covers. “I know I’m human,” MacReady swears to the group. “And if you were all these things, then you’d just attack me right now … so some of you are still human.” The “thing” at the center of Carpenter’s sci-fi horror movie technically is a sinister alien presence, but the real villain here is panic and how it shapes human interaction. —KG
TOP SCIFI MOVIES
‘Solaris’ (1972)
Director Andrei Tarkovsky didn’t care for Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (and Kubrick didn’t care for Solaris, for that matter), but the two films, separated by four years, feel uniquely complementary, each rejecting traditional space adventure to explore the outer limits of philosophy and metaphysics. In fact, Tarkovsky’s film, based on Stanislaw Lem’s novel, goes virtually nowhere as it follows a psychologist assigned to investigate a space station drifting around the oceanic planet of Solaris, where the only two surviving cosmonauts are going insane. The trance-like hold this planet seems to exert over all the characters makes the movie play like a kind of intellectual ghost story where illusions spring from haunted consciences. It’s a high point in cerebral ’70s sci-fi. —ST
TOP SCIFI MOVIES
‘Planet of the Apes’ (1968)
Charlton Heston was always one of the greatest plot-twist screamers in movie history. But he never had a chewier money line than his ten-word banger from Planet of the Apes: “Take your stinking paws off me, you damn dirty ape!” (Loads of other hits in this movie, but no spoilers here — you’re one lucky human if you get to see it cold.) He’s an astronaut who crashes on a strange world ruled by gun-toting, horse-riding simians, where humans are mute primitives. Franklin J. Schaffner’s 1968 classic gets every detail right: Jerry Goldsmith’s space-jazz soundtrack, John Chambers’ makeup, Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone storyline, Roddy McDowall’s genius for chimpanzee cosplay. It’s a sly satire of post-WWII U.S. tribalism, as chimps, orangutans, gorillas battle for power in Ape City. And surprisingly, Planet of the Apes blew up into a complex Seventies pop mythology, spinning off cheapo sequels, comics, lunchboxes, proverbs like “ape shall never kill ape” and “the only good human is a dead human!” —not to mention the Troy McClure classic “Dr. Zaius.” —RS
TOP SCIFI MOVIES
‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ (1978)
The ultimate paranoid ’70s thriller is the one that says you really can’t trust anyone: Even your nearest and dearest could be one of them. In moving Jack Finney’s The Body Snatchers out of the Red Scare era and into the San Francisco of the post-Nixon years, this terrifying remake shifts the allegorical function of the emotionless alien imposters, who this time represent nothing less than the sea change of America’s soul — an overnight transformation of hippies into yuppies. Yet the true horror of Philip Kaufman’s pod people, newly equipped with a bloodcurdling, ear-splitting vocal alarm, runs past topical anxiety to the existential variety, writ large across the changing facial expressions of Donald Sutherland. It’ll make you afraid to sleep, though after that pitiless ending, you won’t be able to anyway. —AAD
TOP SCIFI MOVIES
‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’ (2004)
Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet’s anguished yet delightful romance powers Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Directed by Michel Gondry, it’s a film that could have easily descended into high-concept frippery if not for the duo’s performances as a couple who, separately, try to have their minds erased of memories of the other. With Kirsten Dunst, Mark Ruffalo, and Elijah Wood in tow, the cast develop a tone reminiscent of a Howard Hawks screwball comedy from the 1940s. However, the way Carrey and Dunst rely on technology to fix what they think is a minor inconvenience — unresolved feelings for the other — without understanding its life-altering consequences is a very 21st century problem that gives Eternal Sunshine heartbreaking relevance. —MR
TOP SCIFI MOVIES
‘Terminator 2: Judgment Day’ (1991)
When this sequel to James Cameron’s 1984 pulp classic came out, it seemed unimaginable that artificial intelligence could become advanced enough to wreak worldwide chaos and confusion; that robots could become teenagers’ buddies fluent in meme-able snark (“Hasta la vista, baby”); or that a computer could control a person’s image to appear to say things they never said. Those advancements were still a farce. Terminator 2 centered on a trip through time for Arnold Schwarzenegger’s merciless android, from 2029 to the Nineties, to protect adolescent John Connor (Edward Furlong) and freak out his mom, Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton). The CGI effects, like the transformations of Robert Patrick’s vicious and viscous T-1000, looked revolutionary then — and they’re still shocking today. The only difference is now if an AI robot said, “Come with me if you want to live,” you’d doubt its intentions even more than Sarah Connor. —KG
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TOP SCIFI MOVIES
‘Edge of Tomorrow’ (2014)
A sci-fi Groundhog Day, this vastly underrated entry boasts a videogame premise that’s appealing to both Tom Cruise’s fans and haters: What if a whole movie was devoted to killing T.C. over and over again? The diminutive action hero is at his self-mocking, amped-up best as Cage, a military P.R. exec who dies while battling vicious, spider-like aliens — only to discover that, each time, he’s beamed back to the start of that same day. Bourne Identity director Doug Liman dazzlingly stretches and twists that clever concept to its breaking point, finding seemingly infinite variations on how Cage can screw up. But MVP honors go to Emily Blunt as a hard-as-nails soldier who has to teach this lovable cad to become a proper warrior. Together, they’re like a Nick and Nora for a future age overrun by gnarly interstellar monsters. —TG
Common Evening Brown (Melanitis leda) has brown wings with eye spots and is found in Asia and Australia.
TOP SCIFI MOVIES
‘Arrival’ (2016)
The aliens are here… but are they friend or foe? That urgent question powers Denis Villeneuve’s sober sci-fi drama, which balances the cerebral and the emotional as gracefully as those interstellar spacecrafts hovering just above Earth’s surface. Amy Adams is a linguist still grieving for her dead daughter when extraterrestrials appear across the globe, speaking in a sophisticated language only she can unravel – that is, if she can stop wary superpowers from declaring war on our visitors first. From the elegant alien design to the screenplay’s eloquent chronological jumble, Arrival eschews the genre’s pulpier tendencies for a realistic portrait of humanity facing down its destiny, leading to an ending that’s both a mindbender and a tearjerker. —TG
TOP SCIFI MOVIES
‘The Man Who Fell to Earth’ (1976)
David Bowie’s feature film debut arrived at an apt moment for the singer to play someone untethered from life on Earth but in danger of falling victim to gravity’s pull. Made in an era when Bowie was living on a diet that consisted heavily of cocaine, milk, and mystical arcana, this Nicolas Roeg film casts him as Thomas Jerome Newton, a fragile visitor from a drought-stricken planet seeking to make a fortune on Earth as a means of saving his home planet and the family he left behind. The source material, a novel by Walter Tevis, used its premise to explore how genius gets subsumed by addiction and other earthly pleasures. Roeg’s adaptation keeps those themes while adding hallucinatory layers that turn ’70s America into a fantasia in which the past and the future keep collapsing into the present, as seen through the eyes of a creature who mistakenly believes he’s only a visitor — and not a prisoner. —KP
Yellow Gorgon (Meandrusa payeni) has yellow wings with black markings and is found in Southeast Asia.
TOP SCIFI MOVIES
‘The Day the Earth Stood Still’ (1951)
Klaatu is coming — and boy, is he pissed. Michael Rennie plays perhaps the most dignified alien invader ever sent to Washington, D.C., on behalf of more advanced species to warn Earth that this Cold War arms-race nonsense simply won’t do. So cut it out or no more Mr. Nice Guy, since the suave Klaatu is the carrot; his shiny, mute, implacable robot pal, Gort, is the stick. Robert Wise directs with a poetic efficiency that reminds you he’s the guy who edited Citizen Kane. A high water mark in a decade that brought a galaxy of shlock sci-fi, Earth also has the distinction of getting a shot-out in the very first words sung in The Rocky Horror Picture Show (“Michael Rennie was ill the day the Earth stood still…”). —CV
Blue Pansy (Junonia orithya) has blue wings with black markings and is found in Asia and Australia.
Psyche butterfly (Leptosia nina) has white wings and is found in Asia and Australia.
Plain Tiger (Danaus chrysippus) has orange wings with black markings and is found in Africa, Asia, and Australia.
Small Salmon Arab (Colotis amata) has orange wings and is found in Africa, Asia, and Australia.
Tree Nymph butterfly (Idea leuconoe) has white wings with black markings and is found in Southeast Asia.
Glasswing butterfly (Greta oto) has transparent wings and is found in Central and South America.
Lemon Emigrant (Catopsilia pomona) has yellow wings and is found in Asia and Australia.
TOP SCIFI MOVIES
‘Starship Troopers’ (1997)
“Everyone fights, no one quits. If you don’t do your job, I’ll shoot you!” Homicidal tough-love pep talks pump up space infantry Roughnecks as they face off against brain-sucking intergalactic arachnids from the Klendathu System. Paul Verhoeven’s brassy sci-fi satire, gushing with all kinds of viscera from human and insect alike, crosses All Quiet on the Western Front with Beverly Hills 90210 for its darkly cartoonish take on futuristic fascists. Horny high schooler Johnny Rico (Casper van Dien) chases his noncommittal girlfriend Carmen (Denise Richards) into military service, watches as his friends get slaughtered, then becomes a Death From Above poster boy for endless military conflict. On a post-democracy Earth, where the global Citizen Federation rules over a two-tiered society that venerates violence and disenfranchises everyone else, bugs are the perpetual phantom threat. Humanity is just fresh meat for the grinder. —SG
Orange Oakleaf (Kallima inachus) has wings that mimic a dead leaf and is found in Asia.