My Top 199 Favorite Sci-Fi Movies... Of Like, Ever

  What happens when the Martians start to get nasty around the holiday season?
They end up getting a nice big ol' can of whoop-ass for Christmas from none other than Santa hisself.

  Oh, and if you notice that the B-movies and/or guilty pleasures are what this list is starting with, no worries.
The quality of films will get better as we get nearer to number one.
I promise.

  Independence Day is a holiday that is mostly associated with the United States of America during the Fourth of July. However, in this big budget, over-bloated blockbuster from the 90's, it's a day that goes global when almost the entire planet of Earth gets blown up by city sized U.F.O's. 
 It is a worldwide catastrophe that causes those of us who inhabit this planet to realize that, if we want to continue to "live long and prosper" as a species, now is the time to roll up our sleeves, get our shit together, and go "kick E.T.'s ass". 
 Word.

 The aliens are through klowning around.
 They are hungry.  For human flesh. Or in this case, human soup(?).
And so, in order to satiate their appetites, they're taking out the big guns. Or in this case, the big balloon animals.

  This modern take on Mary Shelley’s most famous of patchwork men is a prime example of why the creation of a Frankenstein monster is not a theme we see pop up very often in movies of today. The idea of playing “God” by scientifically producing an “Adam” usually only results in the same kind of “life” lessons (or “moral of the story “) that we’ve seen over and over whenever attempting to sew this kind of tartan tale together. And for me, if someone is gonna try to do anything different from the source material, I prefer it to be something much more unique or distinctive than what Depraved has to offer.
   Still, despite acting as yet another demonstration of the lack of originality that often results whenever movie makers try to make Franky go to Hollywood, this under-the-radar adaptation does gain points for putting forth the effort of presenting a fiend friendly flick in the world of today. It may not be the most memorable, but a Frankenstein movie is not something that we fans of fear films get to witness "come alive" anymore.

 Okay,
so maybe Tron’s video game visuals don’t hold up anywhere near as groundbreaking as when it first appeared in theaters back in 1982. But, boy, when those of us who did see it back then, those world building images were unlike anything we had seen before. The science of computer graphic effects was fully upon us and in a land not too far away, the force known as CGI was gestating to become the basis that would make the eyes of sci-fan's drool from here to the eternity of this genre's expansive horizon. It was the early 80’s, and from our viewpoint, the future was now.

 A camp infested B&W sci-fi flick filled to the brim with a heaping sense of guilty pleasure.
 To keep this entry short, here's another list that I made which includes Plan 9 and explains why I like it: www.listal.com/list/guilty-pleasures-thecelestial

  To be brutally honest here, the first Final Fantasy is way more boring that could have ever been expected. Particularly from fans of the source material. Not to mention that the early stages of motion capture technology made the humans depicted here look very stiff and "wooden, despite the advanced leap in the number of pixels per image. But still, at the time of its release, the visuals were really something to behold. For me, this was a major steppingstone that would eventually lead to some of the most high-tech images we are seeing not just on movies screens today, but also, in the crossing over of video-game technology.
  FF wasn’t the best when it came to this particular brand of merchandise crossing science fiction, but it had enough of eye-popping moments to keep it from being one of the worst.

 Elderly owners of a small, crumbling tenant building are threatened with eviction, but are saved by tiny sentient flying saucers.
 A Mini-Me version of Close Encounters of The 3rd. Kind, with just a splash of Cocoon, for that “just the way Grandma used to make it” kind of flavor.

 Back in the mid-seventies, director and writer John Carpenter was just starting his career and developing a reputation as someone who was able to produce films on a shoe-string budget. And to be honest, when a film utilizes a beach ball as an alien life form, a budget doesn't get any more shoestring than that.
  Dark Star is Carpenter's first full feature release, and like most of his early work during this time, this charm-sprinkled black comedy sci-fi has earned a solid membership into the club of cinematic sci-fi cult classics.

 The King of All Monsters takes on a giant shambling mountain of red-eyed sludge that terrorizes the island of Japan by transforming itself into a flying smog-billowing force of pollution incarnate.
 Kinda makes you want to start recycling, huh?

Ants.
Atomic radiation.
The process of mutation.
The desert.
You do the math.

 Okay, so maybe making the transition from small screen to the silver screen wasn’t exactly the most exciting debut for Kirk and crew. And maybe not even the most ardent Trekkie will ever look at this as the best of the Trek franchise. But as someone who wasn't a fan of the TV show,
for me it was kinda cool to see it updated on the silver screen and backed up with a blockbuster sized budget. And for what it was, I gotta admit, I did enjoy it.
  Besides, it did eventually lead up to the Wrath of Khan, Voyage Home and, of course, the awesome 2009 "reboot". 

  Uh oh, looks like I may spoken too soon when I posted in the previous entry that, as a sci-fi fan, I wasn't gonna complain much. Now I gotta write an entry for Phantom Menace without complaining... Oh, wait, I know....
  Growing up with the first three Star Wars movies that made up the original Trilogy, I, of course, was not the biggest fan of the later films. But what i will say is that I was still able to enjoy the visuals of these new chapter, particularly, the diversity of kick-ass looking aliens and otherworldy creatures that filled up the spanning time to the brim (and for me, that always been my favorite aspect of the franchise).

  If there's one thing that can strike fear into the very core of any man, it's the idea that a part of his body is shrinking. The only thing worse would be that every part of his body is shrinking.
And the only thing worse than that would be that every part of his shrunken body was on the menu of a house spider in the basement that he had to run down to in order to hide from the cat after it made the attempt at making him its din-din.
It's a pretty common fear amongst men, actually.
 I think that's why they made it into a movie. It's a fear we all can relate too.

  During the height of McCarthyism and the Red Scare,
comes yet another sci-fi film taking advantage of the attitude scoring across the country at this time.
 A big red mass that keeps getting bigger and bigger, terrorizes a small American town, swallowing up innocent denizens of democracy....
get the symbolism?
  Or is that stretching a metaphor farther than what an extended slimy flesh-disintegrating tentacle can reach?

  For those of you who haven't seen this movie yet, no, it isn't an X-rated movie about some perv who likes to have sex with snowmen (or snowwomen).
It's actually a futuristic tale of about a dystopian ice age, in which humanity's only survivors exist on an enormously long spanning train, the Snowpiercer, that continually circles the globe. And on this perpetually endless train ride, people are divided up by class, with each class being stationed in a different section of the train. Obviously, the lower the class, the farther back on the train they are positioned. To get to the front of the train is path that is arduously narrow, not just physically and logistically, but also, for the purposes of centering the premise of this movie into the genre, sociologically.

  Many of today's generation of kids I'm sure would look at this movie and wonder what the heck is it that the generations before them saw in this big ol' rubbery, radiation blasting, clumsy-looking dino-phenomena.
Well, the only way I can explain it is by saying that, even with the scars of WW2 still visible and the lack of big budgetry in their film industry, Japanese cinema knew how to make do with what they had. And it was this can-do/make-do attitude that helped them to make a big footprint in the arena of 50's colossal creatures genre that was raging in cinema at the time. And it's what also helped Godzilla to deeply stomp his long-standing reputation as the King of all Kaiju Monsters into the lexicon of kaiju lore.

  Armageddon has come and gone, and the survivors of this now post-apocalyptic world don't know how to read. So, when a stranger with a book comes to town, that can be quite a dangerous thing to the law of the land in which only the strong survive.
 This movie isn't really much of a game-changer when it comes to the genre of devastated dystopia, but with A-list actors like Denzel Washington, Mila Kunis, Gary Oldman, and that one big dude from the Rome TV series at the helm, and a decent script with a "faithful" twist, The Book of Eli offers solid entertainment for anyone who enjoys escaping for a couple of hours into the kind of nuclear ravaged future fables that helps us to temporarily forget our troubles.

 After catching fire with the previous Hunger Games movie, Mockingjay Part 1 slows the pace down a bit, mostly because it works more as an establishing platform that is set to lead into what will follow in the 2nd part.
Also, because, from what I've heard, since I never read any of the books, this final chapter in the saga of Katniss Evergreen's revolution is considered by fans as the weakest of the series.
 So, even though this film is a notch down from what we've seen so far, it's still enough of a grand epic that fits the mold of what we expect from these kinds of big budget blockbusting franchises.

  Yo, you wanna make a modern, low-budget, b-movie about a big ass spider? Then take a look this flick. And don't just look at it, study it. Every eight-legged part of it. Because, in the beginning, the whole beauty of those rarified b-movies that have since earned the status of classics or cult films is that, despite their small budgets and other limited resources, somehow, they were able to rise above the restrictions of their paltry production pennies and still create a magic of guiltless entertainment that is the center of many cheapskate cinephiles' tastes. Not since 1955's "Tarantula!" has a film been able to stretch out it's meager means to create a web-weaving wonder of whale-sized wallcrawlers.

 Over at the SETI Institute, they've been scouring the skies for years, in search of any signs of communique from extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI by the way stands for search for extraterrestrial intelligence). However, what they don't realize is that the extraterrestrials have already arrived. Not only do they walk among us, but they've have already begun the process which will terraform our planet into a more suitable environment for their kind of physiology.
And the only person who knows of their plan is Charlie Sheen.
But does he have the right amount of tiger's blood in him that's required in order to stop them?
 Watch this movie and find out.

  A Thanksgiving family get-together gets interrupted by an unidentified uninvited dinner guest. Even though The Blair Witch Project was the movie that put found footage horror on the map, it wasn't by any means, the first of its kind. There were several similar scare-fare cinema of this kind that came before, and obviously, this is one of them. Effectively creepy and convincing, U.F.O. Abduction (also known as "The MacPherson Tapes") is an early example of the compelling type of fictional evidence for those who "want to believe". 

 After a common house fly buzzes it way into an experimental transportation device, it's DNA mixes in with the creator of said device, and in typical 50's b-movie fashion, results in a macabre hybrid of the two. And it will take more than a can of raid or a flyswatter to keep females from screaming at the top of their lungs at the sight of him. Lord knows what their frightened reactions would be if the results of the skewed experiment had caused him to evolve into a "spider-man" instead. Or even worse, a human centipede.

 Timecrimes is a science fiction indie film that doesn't allow itself to get wrapped up in its limitations of budget and production constraints. Instead, the story uses its minimalistic techniques as a way to jump from one chronological situation to the next, with an urgent confidence that sidesteps the theoretical physics, and shifts it way quite through a surprisingly effective thriller and lets the loopholes in the fabric of spacetime be damned.  
  The story starts with Hector and his wife are living a regular life, spending their time doing things like redomesticating their domestic home. When he investigates a minor incident that he witnessed from afar, things start to go from minor to major, and soon, he is caught in a bizarre series of time loops, which continually place him in contact with his alternate selves. And as we all know by now, according to the butterfly effect, the nature of science considers that a crime where the laws of time travel are concerned. 

 Back in the early 80's, I wasn't the biggest fan of anime. Even those few that reached a high level of acclaim had a hard time of getting me to sit through 'em.
Nausicaa Of the Valley of the Wind was one of the first that finally began to open my eyes to the potential that lay within the paints and brushes that colored the cells of these films.
  An ecological fable that treated its premise with the maturity that's found in most adult oriented fantasy books and yet with the innocence of the Disney flicks, Nausicaa was able to strike a uniquely fine balance that appealed to kids and adults alike.

  It's the year 1997 and the city of New York has been converted into a giant prison, because in the not-so-distance future crime has become an epidemic of national proportions. And if that wasn't bad enough for the people living in 1997, Air Force One has crashed right into the middle of the rotten Big Apple thus entrapping the President of the United States at its core. And if soldier-turned-criminal Snake Plissken can save the day, his reward will be a presidential pardon, a page in the future's history books and an entry into the annals of cult movies of the past.
So the government turns to soldier-turned criminal Snake Plisskon for help. They promised him a full presidential pardon, but only if he can save the Prez and save the day. Thus begins the quest to get out of New York and into the annals of cult movie history.

  Remember back when Sputnik was just a simple satellite that was a symbol of Mother Russia's victory in the space race and its only function was to simply circle the globe and send beeping signals down from Earth's orbit? It was a harmless piece of machinery that in the end, demonstrated that when it came to ingenuity of humankind, the sky was truly the limit.
  More than six decades later, the Russkies send out another Sputnik, but this time, it's in the form of a motion picture. And it may not be enough to set off a new Cold War, but it might send a few chills down the spine of a movie viewer or two, no matter what side of the Eastern Block they may hail from. 

  After directing the successful reboot of Star Trek franchise back in 2009, Hollywood mogul J.J. Abrams takes a crack at the most successful of all the space operas, the Saga of the Star Wars.
 And just as he did with the voyages of the Enterprise, Abrams proves that, despite the fan-disparaged prequels, the Force is still awake and still strong, when helmed at the hands of one who still believes in it.

  After several failed attempts of updating the King of Monsters on the cinema screen, first from Toho Studios during the 80s, then by American film producers in the 90's, a combination between the two sides changed all that for the New Millennium. With the rise of the "cinematic universe" franchise movement at the offset of the 2000's, and the record numbers they began to bring to the box office, the stage was set to bring Godzilla back.
 And now, while the old skool cheese lovers are the ones who are missing the rubber suited look of the atomic age city stomper, the kaiju king that started it all is once again raging his way thru the blockbuster genre, but with giant feet that aren't so floppy like they used to be.

  Christopher Reeve, the guy who played Superman, stars in this film as a playwriter who comes to learn that writing plays is not his only gift. But also, that he possesses the super-human ability to self-hypnotize himself through time, and thus capture a heart of a love that exists somewhere else in time.
Or maybe the superpower is on the ravishing Jane Seymour's end. A classical actress who's luminous beauty is enough not only to stop time but to travel through it, too.
Hey, there's an effective bar pick-up line in their somewhere.

 The classic sci-fi serials of the 30's and 40's are bought back to life on the silver screen but presented here as full-length feature extravaganza. And despite its homage-like center, this dieselpunk production is filmed with the advanced digital technology of today. Sharp, crisp, clear generated artificially visuals provide the reality of Sky Captain, and builds a world of tomorrow that would make even more experienced captains of the sky, like Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers, go "Wow".

 Despite what seems like a direct movie title,
this is actually more of a love story with a backdrop of giant alien monsters, of which we probably don't see enough of. I got to give credit to this movie for trying to do something different by intermingling a romance "road trip" plot within the setting of a War of the Worlds type premise, without getting too many of the tentacles all tangled up.
 A journey through a world in the process of alien invasion, it's a Teutonic tale that borders on far reaching aspirations of using its "monsters" as a metaphoric device to help two people from different worlds find love. For my tastes though, I think I would've preferred seeing the makers of this movie make the matters of the heart material go more major in its proportions. Still, in the end, it was worth seeing such a serious effort by all involved, including the actors, putting in the effort required to push a "little love story" to go a bit bigger.

  Godzilla, Minilla, Mothra, Rodan, Gorosaurus, Anguirus, Kumonga, Manda, Baragon, Varan, Andre the Giant.... oh wait... maybe not Andre.
Now Godzilla may be the only household name on that list, but when it comes to monsters with big rubber floppy feet, any hardcore kaiju fanatic can tell you that every name mentioned here is a heavyweight. The only ones missing is Gamera and the kitchen sink.
  Throw in an evil race of female aliens with mind control powers (I know, I know... they don't have to be from another planet to be able to that...am I right, guys...??), and what we end up with is the original Monsters Versus Aliens epic. Not to mention, the battle royale of all battle royales! With cheese!

 To be really honest, for a movie called Mad Max, I kinda expected this story to be a lot more violent/action packed than it was.
I found it to be much more tame than I expected, even by late 70's standards.
However, this is the flick that introduced the character who would eventually become one of the most bad-ass personas to ever race across on the big screen and provides a look into what "drove" the "Road Warrior" during his "pre-post-apocalyptic" days.
  So, even though, on its own, it is still a solid dystopian story about the not so far-flung future, I don't even have to go into further detail as far as describing this movie, other than to just to give it major props as the first chapter in the saga of one my favorite cinematic characters ever.

  As a film, K-PAX weaves thru its various "less epic" identities of E.T., Starman, and even of a fluffier version of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest pretty effectively. But, as with most sci-fi movies with the "aliens walking amongst us to better understand us" theme, it tries to end with a life-lesson that teaches us more about us than it does "them". In this case, it's no matter how crazy our individualized inner-scars can make us, sometimes, all we need is a hopeful hand extended in friendship to help brings us back down to Earth.
  And if that lesson comes off sounding as a bit too "spacey-headed", please take into account what Hollywood writers of these types of scripts have in common with people from K-Pax: They both tend to be a bunch of distant souls that live amongst the stars.

  A community of pink houses with white picket fences and wives who all "properly" know their roles. A mid 70's tale of the American Dream coming in the form of battery powered domestic bliss.

  A teenage kid discovers that the video game he has mastered is secretly a celestial training simulation program, when he is notified by an alien who reveals to him that he is a gunner/star-soldier in an intergalactic war between good and evil.
So, to all you video gamers out there, don't listen to society when it tries to convince you that all those hours spent on your x-box, gameboy or psp will eventually accumulate into a vast amount of wasted life.
For all anybody knows, you could very well be the last starfighter.
  Therefore, feel free to grab your wii and play with yourself as much as you like.
The future of the galaxy may depend on it.

Enemy Mine is a film that starts out as a "bad alien" movie and then evolves into a "good alien" movie by intergalactically pondering the question of "Why can't we all just get along?"
The truth is, no matter what planet one is from, when it comes to reaching racial harmony, even on an interplanetary scale, we all need to follow Jerry Seinfeld's advice and try to take a bite out of both sides of the black & white cookie.
Look to the cookie.
We must all look to the cookie.
Oh, and to all you sci-fi geeks out there,
that's cookie,
not wookie.
So don't start looking towards Chewbacca for any kind of sage words on the subject.

  There's a sci-fi anthology film from 2003 called Robot Stories that is also included somewhere on this list, and which is basically a series of short stories about a world in which robotics had become integrated into almost every aspect of modern society. A.I. Artificial Intelligence is a basically a story that could've been pulled out of RS and stretched out to fill in the full running time of a whole movie. However, being that it was directed by Steven Spielberg and based on a script by Stanley Kubrick, you woulda thought that the combo would have resulted into a much more memorable classic than what A.I. actually ended up being. 

  A tale of romance and time travel that was hopefully successful enough to spawn within my head a whole series of titles for unused follow-up sequels.... The Time Traveler's Kids, The Time Traveler's In-Laws, The Time Traveler's Mistress, The Time Traveler's Drunk Uncle, The Time-Traveler's Pet Retriever, The Time Traveler's Guy He Knows to Get High End Jewelry Below Manufacturer's Cost, The Time Traveler's Four People Who Lead Him to Kevin Bacon in Under Six Degrees......
  If any of the movers and shakers over in Hollywood are out there reading this and want to use any of these ideas, message me thru this site so that I can send the info you may need in order to send me a check....

  In the first Jurassic Park, modern science demonstrated it highest possibilities to date by genetically re-introducing the dinosaurs of the Jurassic era to our time. Then, it went about creating an island theme park in which to inhabit these prehistoric ganstas of giant monsters, in the speculative hope that the general public would eat them up.
As it turned out, it had the opposite effect. It was the park that began eating up the public.
  So, in this 2nd installment of the series, we find out that there was a spawning ground for all those back-in-the-beasties before they were transported to the ill-fated amusement park.
Named "Site B", it's the setting for the prehistoric pandemonium that "naturally' ensues from the lessons not learned.

   The anthology format is rarely used by Hollywood these days, which bums me out since I am a big fan of them.  For me, there's always been something very satisfying about watching a patchwork of stories being stitched together under one film, knowing that if you don't like one particular episode, you'll still have another one coming that might be more to your liking. And if the one that is meeting your expectations as you're watching it, then it'll give you the sense of expectation for the next one.
 Here, in Robot Stories, we get a pretty good bag of time limited tales, all centered around a not-so-in-the-distant future world wherein robots have become integrated into the global, everyday day life of humankind (such as babies and office workers) and the repercussions of such a cyber-centric civilization on the psyche of those of us that are made of flesh and blood.

 The closing chapter to the Simon Pegg and Nick Frost's Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy.
 And to be quite honest, when I first heard that this was the name given to this three-film set, my first thought was "What the hell is a 'cornetto?'".
So, utilizing the power at my fingertips, I googled it.
Turns out that cornetto is either a 16th century woodwind instrument or a brand of ice cream.
To which, with the bullet quick speed of my wit, I instantly realized that it was probably being used in reference to the ice cream in this particular instance.
 So as a result, because of these movies, if the world were to end right now, not only would I die a little bit smarter,
but also, I would die with a cravenous desire for a frozen treat.

 After "donning" the features and identity of an Earth woman, a female human looking alien stalks the night in a van, picking up male prey in order to seduce them back to her apartment/black void of ebonic liquid. How this benefits her, or her race is left to the viewer. Because, as you might have guessed, this is a surrealist sci-fi horror movie whose primary purpose is not to tell the traditional linear tale of high-tech terror, but to induce a foggy feeling of dark creepiness, who's vague narrative will leave you with the kind of lasting ethereal effect that tends to lurk under the skin.

  It's a Dystopian future and surprise, surprise, the human race is on the brink of extinction (damn humans!). And as a result, we must towards the stars for a planet that is more habitable than the one we f#cked up. And it's in the stars where humanity finds what may be a solution... a wormhole near Saturn (although, if the Universe had a better sense of justice, it would of made it a hole near Uranus...). A group of astronauts are chosen to travel through the wormhole and survey the planet on the other side. And this being a Christopher Nolan sci-fi flick, the story gets rather complicated from there. Interstellar is typical of his overly layered style of storytelling but is still a cool science fiction adventure that shoots for the stars. Which even though they turn out to be out of our reach, the journey there still proves to be quite an entertaining ride.

  How does one gain the World Championship title belt of Badassery? Come down from another planet, in full tilt battle-gear and kick the combined asses of "Apollo Creed", "the Terminator", Jesse "The Body" Ventura and that one guy who played one of the corrupt cops in Payback.

 A light and airy love tale starring the ever-adorable Meg Ryan, and featuring not only the concept of time travel, but also, the two guys who, in a later film, would portray a mutant dad-son duo from the X-Men franchise, Wolverine and Sabretooth. Which I guess is enough to make a comic book nerd such as myself to be cool with this movie (although the fact that it is written not as daftly as most of its contemporary rom-com counterparts of the day, that could be another reason of why I like K&L enough to include it on this list).

  I've heard of a mockingbird, and I've heard of a blue jay, but I've never really heard of a mocking ay. So, I don't know if it's an actual bird or if this a mythological hybrid created just for the Hunger Games franchise (if the explanation is in the book, then forgive my ignorance for I have only watched the movies). Either way, I can understand why this series would choose such an obscure avian name for the prophet of this other-Earth style dimensional realm. Comic books superheroes have pretty much taken up, and therefore, copyrighted, just about every other bird-themed moniker that is out there, thus Mockingjay is probably one of the very few that was available.
  And TBH, it's a good name. Along with the red outfit and the archery set, it helps to give Katniss Averdeen the kind of super heroic look that is required to lead the citizens of Panem into rebellion and the citizens of the real world into the movie theaters to watch this final half of the final chapter that is The Hunger Games Saga.

 One of the things I always liked about the Toho brand of cryptids was their ability to incorporate really cool and creative characteristics into the middle of the lore of the rubbery cheese that was running amok thru the cardboarded streets and buildings of Nippon.
 Mothra is one of my favorite examples of this. A giant insect that is linked telepathically to two tiny fairy-like beauties who act almost as familiars to the great dusty daikaiju. On top of that, Mothra is conceived almost as a Phoenix-like entity, in that every time it dies, it is soon resurrected as a giant egg, soon to hatch into its larvae form which is almost as equally formidable as it's mature moth stage.
   For me, it's this kind of mythological slant that accompanies this particular kaiju kreature that sets it apart from its floppy-footed counterparts and therefore makes it one of my more favorites of this quirky, B-level genre.