TJĬast: George Clooney, Natascha McElhone, Jeremy Davies Young Lucas evidently believed in heroic individualism, fast cars and the possibility of escape, yet it’s the visualisation of an entire society shaped by universal surveillance, government-supplied sedatives and android police carrying very big sticks which rings darker and truer than the director’s subsequent, significantly more populist output. Viewed today – the only version available is Lucas and co-writer Walter Murch’s digitally spruced-up 2004 ‘Director’s Cut’ – its shaven headed-cast, chillingly benign language intoning state propaganda and oppressive widescreen palette of glacial whites make for genuinely unnerving viewing. The studio hated the result and the subsequent box-office debacle almost killed both their careers. George Lucas and his pal Francis Ford Coppola persuaded Warner Brothers to take a flyer on expanding George’s earlier student short into this Orwell and Huxley-influenced fable about free love and free will versus all-powerful totalitarianism. 🧨 The 101 best action movies of all-timeĬast: Robert Duvall, Donald Pleasence, Maggie McOmie 🦄 The 50 best fantasy movies of all-time 👽 The best sci-fi shows streaming on Netflix

As a result, it’s a list that crisscrosses the sci-fi universe, from Tatooine to Arrakis, Metropolis to Los Angeles circa, uh, 2019. To that end, in order to put together our list of the 100 best sci-fi movies ever made, we asked a wide-ranging panel of experts, from Nobel Prize-winning geneticist Sir Paul Nurse, to Oscar-decorated film director Guillermo del Toro, to Game of Thrones creator George RR Martin, along with a few regular old Time Out writers. They deal with relatable issues and themes, not just the geeks writing novel-length theoretical treatises on fan forums. Science-fiction films might frequently create entirely new worlds, but the best of them do what any good movie should do and tell us about the world we actually live in. But the reality is that sci-fi was never meant to appeal only to a small niche.

In fact, that’s been true long enough that for a certain generation, it probably seems bizarre that the genre wasn’t always so popular.

Science fiction isn’t just for nerds anymore.

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