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TOP SCIFI MOVIES
‘The Matrix’ (1999)
The major sci-fi film of 1999 was supposed to be The Phantom Menace – and then a true mind-bender emerged, setting the agenda for the next century’s blockbusters. The Matrix is a dazzling combination of radical political messaging, kick-ass action sequences and a brilliant premise: Anonymous hacker Thomas Anderson (Keanu Reeves) learns that he’s living in an elaborate simulation orchestrated by robots that have enslaved humanity; naturally, only he can stop it. Filmmakers Lilly and Lana Wachowski brought the world bullet-time visual effects and wire-fu fight scenes, grafting a postmodern hipness onto a classic hero’s journey. But just as meaningfully, they tapped into the culture’s pre-millennium tension, envisioning a frightening near future in which humanity would be ruled by the very technology it had created. —TG
TOP SCIFI MOVIES
‘Star Wars’ (1977)
Stop us if you’ve heard this one before: A kid stuck in a podunk town with nothing much to do gets a chance to go on a whirlwind adventure and rescue a beautiful princess in distress. Also, he is quite possibly the person who a group of spiritual warriors once prophesied would be the “new hope” for universe in a fight against a tyrannical evil empire. Also also, there are Wookiees. Don’t get us started on the kid’s dad.
It goes without saying that George Lucas’s movie — which would turn out to be not just the inaugural chapter of a multi-episode narrative, but a Rosetta stone for an I.P. universe that’s still very much in-progress — has made an impact on pop culture. Yet the way his amalgamation of Flash Gordon serials, WWII dogfight epics, Westerns, Akira Kurosawa samurai movies and Greek tragedy changed how several generations have consumed science fiction in particular can’t be overstated; from the moment that ginormous Imperial Starcruiser whizzed across the screen, in hot pursuit of a rebel vessel, Star Wars tapped into our collective imagination and sold us on the power of sci-fi as mass entertainment. The names Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Darth Vader and R2-D2 are as familiar to folks as JFK, Bob Dylan, Donald Trump and Siri — maybe even moreso. Every science fiction film that’s come out after it has arguably either been a reaction to it or an attempt to recapture the film’s awe-inspiring magic. Either way, it’s forever given us a taste for drama, romance, derring-do and morality set in a galaxy far, far away. —DF
TOP SCIFI MOVIES
‘Metropolis’ (1927)
There are multiple reasons why director Fritz Lang’s allegorical science-fiction romance has been an enduring influence on genre cinema. But let’s start with the maximalist set design, which inspired the looks of Star Wars, Batman, Brazil and many, many more. Lang was an ace visual storyteller, who in the silent era proved repeatedly that motion pictures could combine the complexity of a novel with the flash of a magic show. Here, he brought together towering scenery, state-of-the-art visual effects and hundreds of extras for a sophisticated story about the potentially revolutionary relationship between a privileged young man and a working-class activist, each in their own way being ground down by a stratified technocratic society.
Co-written with Thea von Harbou — Lang’s wife, who also wrote the book on which its based — the film dwells on both the literal and metaphorical mechanisms of the modern age. It pulls from different cultures and trends of the 1920s, from the imposing scale of New York’s art deco skyscrapers to the socialist fervor then sweeping through Europe. And it seems eerily prescient with its take on how industrialization may one day make it hard to distinguish people from robots. Artists still draw from this film’s conception of a world destined to be dominated by titanic machinery and shiny pleasure palaces — and where human warmth survives even in the long, cold shadows of tall buildings. —NM
TOP SCIFI MOVIES
‘Children of Men’ (2006)
You can praise Alfonso Cuarón’s dystopian nightmare for so many reasons, from its astounding technical accomplishments (see: the much deservedly celebrated one-take shot by Emmanuel Lubezki from inside a moving car) from the performances by Clive Owen and, specifically, Clare-Hope Ashitey as the potential savior of humanity. But mostly Children of Men should be celebrated as one of the best pieces of speculative fiction of the 21st Century, and one that’s only grown in stature as the years have gone by. Yes, at times it’s a relentingly grim film that revolves around a future characterized by nonstop terrorism, totalitarian rule and mass infertility, where it seems like any glimmer of optimism is a fool’s game. But it also allows that spell of darkness to break in tiny ways, especially in the moving finale — there’s a glimpse of a future for the human race after all. So much sci-fi can imply the absence of empathy. Children of Men is nothing if not a violent, aching plea for compassion. —EZ
TOP SCIFI MOVIES
‘Under the Skin’ (2013)
Call it a Man Who Fell to Earth for millennials. Jonathan Glazer’s cryptic tale of an extraterrestrial femme fatale (Scarlett Johansson, in what is still a career-best performance) who lures unsuspecting dudes to their death — and then accidentally discovers she has more in common with this species than she thought is — in the truest sense of the word, awesome. Lots of movies have tried to channel that old Seventies sci-fi feeling, and Glazer’s visually sumptuous, genuinely unnerving movie is one of the few that feels as if it actually came from that fertile era of space oddities. But this isn’t the equivalent of, say, one of those 21st century bands that go to great pains to sound like a classic rock group. There’s a sense of exploration in its elliptical storytelling that feels light years ahead of most modern aliens-among-us tales, as well as a handful of images (all those lads slowly sinking into the tarpit muck of her feeding room, the climactic scene that justifies the film’s title) that we still haven’t been able to shake. Like so much of the cerebral S.F. that makes up its list, Under the Skin doesn’t just put a stylish, intellectual spin on the idea of visitors from another solar system. It’s a film that forces you to re-examine your own ideas of what it is to be human. —DF
TOP SCIFI MOVIES
‘Alien’ (1979)
After the crew of the spaceship Nostromo is unexpectedly stirred from stasis before their journey’s scheduled end, they barely wake up before the complaining starts. Like Dark Star (another film with a Dan O’Bannon script credit) before it, Alien offers a vision of interstellar travel that’s more workaday grind than cosmic wonder — until, that is, the crew takes on an unexpected passenger in the form of a parasitic creature. It starts by nesting inside one member before bursting out of his chest; then it slowly, methodically begins picking off the others. Space, it turns out, is not a place removed from Darwinian struggle. The contrast between Alien’s metallic, man-made (if grungy) setting and a xenomorph with a biological imperative to kill is just one element that’s made this Ridley Scott film sear itself into the nightmares of all who see it. (H.R. Giger’s creature design — a disturbing assemblage of bones, goo, and sexual imagery — is another.) Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley begins the film as just one of several characters threatened by the ship’s interloper, by the end of the film, she’d secure her place on any shortlist of sci-fi’s greatest heroes. Life is for the survivors. Even the xenomorphs understand that. —KP
Blue Admiral (Kaniska canace) has blue wings and is found in Southeast Asia.
TOP SCIFI MOVIES
‘Blade Runner’ (1982)
Some aspects of the future according to Ridley Scott’s radical take on a Philip K. Dick short story — about a man named Deckard (Harrison Ford) who hunts down rogue “replicants” in the year 2019 — have not come to pass: Four decades later, Los Angeles has yet to go 100-percent vertical, and artificial intelligence hasn’t come to the point where it wants to kill us (yet). But its vision of a stratified world where tech moguls reach godlike levels of power gets more prescient all the time, and despite the fact that the film was considered D.O.A. upon release, you can see it’s influence on every tech noir film featuring decrepit Art Deco architecture, decadent fashion, and rain hissing on radiant neon that followed. The movie’s reputation from cult film to modern classic has evolved greatly over the years (it’s no longer hard to find someone who can recite Rutger Hauer’s “Tears in the rain” monologue verbatim), with Scott cycling through various versions before landing on a director-approved Final Cut in 2007. Now, in its definitive form, Blade Runner ends on a haunting but strangely hopeful note, finding the human in a post-human world. —KR
Common Bluebottle (Graphium sarpedon) has blue wings and is found in Asia and Australia
TOP SCIFI MOVIES
‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’ (1977)
In Steven Spielberg’s first great sci-fi film, music is the universal language, literally. It just takes all kinds of close encounters for Earthlings and extraterrestrials to figure out the five-note musical sequence that humans and E.T.s alike can groove to. But it’s watching everyone’s struggle to figure out how to express themselves with compassion (still the most Spielbergian of themes) which makes the movie great cinema and great fun. Like Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss), an excitable Indiana electrician investigating power outages. He witnesses a UFO and becomes obsessed with them, as does Jillian Guiler (Melinda Dillon), a Muncie mom whose toddler son is abducted. The United Nations and a group of scientists begin investigating the incidents and stumble on a musical sequence, or “doorbell” as Spielberg has called it, to communicate with the aliens.
TOP SCIFI MOVIES
‘Stalker’ (1979)
“There’s no telepathy, no ghosts, no flying saucers,” says the Writer, one of three haunted men venturing into “The Zone,” a mysterious realm where the laws of reality bend. No special effects, he might have added. And no action either. At a moment when Hollywood was chasing glimmers of the galaxy far, far away, the Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky (Solaris) went looking for something deeper. Loosely based on the novel Roadside Picnic, his totemic 1979 allegory is basically an anti-space opera: a terrestrial dirge of heady conversation and meditative quiet, filmed across verdant rural stretches and decaying urban corners of Eastern Europe, real places granted the wonder of an alien landscape. While the genre turned towards zippy fun, Tarkovsky chased a heavy, unfashionable science fiction of ideas.
Chocolate Pansy (Junonia hedonia) has brown wings with eye spots and is found in Asia and Australia.
TOP SCIFI MOVIES
‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ (1968)
It begins at the Dawn of Man and ends with the rebirth of humanity, with Homo sapiens having finally been granted one last evolutionary level-up. In between those two poles of the human experience — one in our prehistoric past, the other light years into our future (hope springs eternal) — Stanley Kubrick give us what still feels like the benchmark for science fiction cinema that engages you in mind, body, and soul. It’s not just that his adaptation of Arthur C. Clarke’s short story “The Sentinel” has become part of our collective consciousness, enough that Barbie could kick off with an extended riff on one of its most famous scenes and everyone got the joke. Or that 2001 contains what may be the single best example of film editing as a communicative art form unto itself. Or that the closest the film has to an antagonist, the self-aware HAL 9000 supercomputer who discovers that machines are no more immune from neurosis and malice than its flesh-and-blood programmers are, is the character we end up feeling the most sympathy towards. “Daissss-yyyy… daisssss-yyyyy…”.
Yellow Orange Tip (Ixias pyrene) has white wings with orange tips and is found in Asia.
Autumn Leaf (Doleschallia bisaltide) has orange wings resembling a dead leaf and is found in Asia and Australia.
Blue Oakleaf (Kallima horsfieldii) has wings that mimic a dead leaf and is found in Southeast Asia.
Malay Lacewing (Cethosia cyane) has red wings with black markings and is found in Southeast Asia.
Chocolate Tiger (Parantica melaneus) has brown wings with white and yellow markings, found in Asia.
Grass Jewel (Chilades trochylus) is a small butterfly with blue wings, found in Asia and Australia.
Guava Skipper (Phocides polybius) has brown wings with orange markings and is found in Asia.
Large Blue Jay (Graphium evemon) has blue wings with black markings and is found in Southeast Asia.
Danaid Eggfly (Hypolimnas misippus) has black wings with white markings and is found globally.
Banded Peacock (Papilio crino) has blue and green wings and is found in Southeast Asia.
Fivebar Swordtail (Graphium antiphates) has black wings with white and green markings, found in Asia.
Common Map (Cyrestis thyodamas) has brown wings with white and red markings, found in Asia.
White Dragontail (Lamproptera curius) has white wings and is found in Southeast Asia.
I am a huge fan of Adele's songs, my favourite being Elastic Heart. Before I take my leave, here are a few fun facts about her and her songs.
ADELE FACTS
One thing that is unique about Adele is that most of her albums are titled with numbers. This is because Adele titles them based on the age she was when she wrote them. So the album 19 was written by Adele when she was 19 years old.
Common Blue Tiger (Tirumala limniace) has blue wings and is found in Asia, Africa, and Australia.
ADELE FACTS
When she was little, Adele spent many hours listening to The Spice Girls and they were a strong musical influence. She also claims she was heavily influenced by Etta James and Dusty Springfield early in life. Later in life, Adele claims she was heavily influenced by the vocal stylings of female artist Amy Winehouse. The two later got to perform as a duo together at the Brit Awards.