The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
In the same vein as Gravity and The Martian, this depicts spaceflight with scrupulous scientific regard. Essentially Apocalypse Now in space with Brad Pitt on a mission to Neptune to find his father who has gone rogue
The fourth of the Alien films. French director Jean-Pierre Jeunet comes on board and delivers a comic-bookish run through of a Joss Whedon script that overspills with too many ideas
Despite a director that has spent a career making bad sequels to other people’s franchises, you have to admit this is an Alien sequel emerges better than you expect it to do
Witty and quite charming low-budget SF film with Don Opper as a gawky android on a space station trying to understand the human condition amid the arrival of escaped convicts
A film that relentlessly celebrates its own brainlessness. Michael Bay directs an asteroid collision film amid plenty of loud noise, mass destruction, flag-waving patriotism and resolute heroism
Animated film featuring a team-up between the sons of Batman and Superman, which ends up being far more fun than you expect
Someone figured out Adam West and Burt Ward, Batman and Robin from the 1960s Batman tv series, were still around and put them in this animated film that replicates the look of the show and pays homage to its willful silliness
Roger Corman jumps aboard the Star Wars fad and offers up a version of The Seven Samurai/The Magnificent Seven located in space. Corman has thrown a reasonable budget at the film for once and it emerges as colourfully enjoyable
One of Francis Ford Coppola’s earliest films. Roger Corman has obtained rights to a Russian-made space expedition film and handed it over to Coppola who added a few extra scenes to repackage for US audiences
The third of J.J. Abrams’ Cloverfield films. This is set on a space station thing and has an alternate timeline plot but seems disinterested in little more than creating a bizarre effect every few minutes
George Pal’s successor to Destination Moon imagines one step further – an expedition to Mars. Where Destination Moon had a bold unfettered optimism, this is killed off by an ending that falls prey to typical 1950s fear and anxiety
Carl Sagan’s novel about SETI is inflated into a big budget film determined to impress even though the story did not need it. Sagan’s interesting debate about religion and science is emasculated so as not to offend any religious groups
Gareth Edwards, the director of Monsters and Godzilla, makes a genre-defining work about robotics and artificial intelligence set in a stunningly detailed future world. This site’s Top Film for 2023
Finally, the answer to what happened to Marc Caro after parting ways with Jean-Pierre Jeunet. Caro directs what would appear to be a darkly lit and confusing variation on The Green Mile set on a space station
Action film set aboard a space station that houses cryogenically frozen survivors of a devastated Earth as C. Thomas Howell tries to stop a mad Matt Frewer
A breath of originality in a decade overrun with Mad Max copies, a clever and original little film in which the crew of a space station return to Earth after the nuclear holocaust
The second film from Neill Blomkamp. As in District 9, he starts out making a savage and biting social critique about social privilege and financial elites only to let the film descend into action moves in the third act
I will defend Orson Scott Card as an exceptional science-fiction writer, his controversies aside. While this is an extremely faithful adaptation of his book, it works unevenly as a film and never soars dramatically
Paul W.S. Anderson puts together a well-produced and atmospheric copy of Alien, However, this also comes with a premise – spaceship returns after travelling through Hell – that is nonsensical
One of the big hits among the spate of Marvel Comics adaptations in the 2000s. This has a very mixed reputation but brings the comic-book team to life in a reasonable effort
From the pen of Iain Reid who wrote I’m Thinking of Ending Things, an SF film about a man recruited for a space mission and the training of his android replacement. Expectedly, what is going on is shifting and pulls expectation out from under us
Sequel to the Christopher Lambert starring future prison film, this relocates the action to an orbiting space station. Less brainless than its predecessor if in the end no more than average
Japanese comedy with various humans and aliens interacting around an interstellar burger restaurant on the road from Earth, although none of it seems that funny
Directorial debut of Roland Emmerich’s regular screenwriter Dean Devlin who has clearly been given orders to make another Emmerich film. Thus we get all the same effects-driven mass destruction spectacle, absurd science and pro-environmental messages
Sensational drama with Sandra Bullock as an astronaut trapped in orbit. The film is scrupulous and thorough about portraying being in space scientifically accurately and the dramatic set-pieces are gripping in tension
Cheesily entertaining film about a crew aboard a space station fighting off an alien monster. Cited as one of the films that influenced Alien. With a screenplay co-written by Batman co-creator Bill Finger
Cult animated film that adapts several stories from the adult fantasy comic-book Metal Hurlant/Heavy Metal. These vary but in its better moments that has a trippy cult hallucinatory quality
Fourth of the Hellraiser films. This attempts to tell a story set in three different eras but was subject to much studio interference that waters the vision down to something forgettable
A gripping work set aboard the International Space Station where the US and Russian crews are suddenly placed at one another’s throats as war between the two sides breaks out down on Earth
An action film set aboard the International Space Station, which has been converted into a prison to house terrorists, who proceed to hijack it, turning the station into a suicide missile headed towards Earth
This could be Christopher Nolan’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. But where Kubrick was cold and oblique, this is a 2001 with a heart. A pleasure to see a film rooted in credible science and dealing with high concept SF
Train to Busan director Yeon Sang-ho turns his hand to making an SF film about the attempts to perfect an android soldier and the fight to complete and control it
Second of the Bruce Timm animated films based on DC’s Justice League, this has been construed as a Mirror Universe take that pits the Justice League up against villainous versions of themselves
This is essentially Alien as a scientifically grounded space film like Gravity where an original alien menace attacking aboard the International Space Station
Luc Besson written action-prison film that blatantly borrows from Escape From New York. An entertaining comic-book of a movie, even if its depth exists no further than Guy Pearce tossing off flip one-liners
Melancholy film that does some ambitious things on a low-budget about a lone astronaut stranded aboard the International Space Station after contact with Earth goes dead
Robert Rodriguez turns his earlier action film into an insanely creative comic-book overflowing with SF devices (and homages). The casting alone is side-splitting and Rodriguez’s visual absurdism wins the day
This ended up being the lowest rated of all MCU films. One wondered whether this was just fannish hyperbole but no what we end up with is the Batman & Robin of The MCU, the single worst film that franchise has produced
The eleventh James Bond film and one that sees that series trying to compete with the success of Star Wars and taking Roger Moore into orbit. One of the most spectacular productions of the series, it is also killed by a cartoonish unserious tone
Film spinoff from tv’s Mystery Science Theater 3000 and its deplorable habit of inserting jokes into old films. Here it is the turn of This Island Earth, which is a far better film than the attempt to send it up here
Roland Emmerich’s first film, made while he was still a student, involving intrigue aboard a weather control station
This falls short of being a great science-fiction film by a hairs breadth. Not the big space/action film it was sold as, more a Philip K. Dickian conceptual breakthrough film that seems to have borrowed large chunks of its set-up from Moon
Rare cinematic treatment of the generation ship story that conducts it with a modest degree of affectiveness. Produced by Paul W.S. Anderson.
Low-budget film set aboard a space station clearly springboarding from the success of Destination Moon and featuring a Robert Heinlein script
Third in the series about android terrorists, this is now about an amok android on a spaceship
Absurd space exploration fantasy where men encounter an all-women planet and proceed to put them in their place. The film has a Plan 9 from Outer Space-level badness and the appallingness of the sexual politics makes you do a double-take today
The idea of Dwayne Johnson facing a giant gorilla in an adaptation of a 1980s arcade game doesn’t exactly shout out Academy Award material; on the other hand, appreciated as a zero expectation cartoon of a film and the mindless mass destruction spectacle it is, this works in a goofily entertaining way
Second half of the two-part animated adaptation of The Death of Superman, which depicts the aftermath where Metropolis is puzzled over the appearance of four impostors all claiming to be the real Superman
Austrian film where three people aboard a space station survive a toxic cloud that obliterates all life on Earth below
A film ostensibly about alien abductees that has rather pleasurably been construed as a series of wild head-spinning twists that are constantly pulling everything we think we know is going on from under the audience, even if it eventually provides more questions than it ever does answers
Ambitious SF film about a space expedition to save the Sun, this bombed at the time but is not uninteresting
Called the Russian 2001. Andrei Tarkovsky makes one of the great SF films, a haunting ghost story set on a space station as an alien planet below drives the crew mad with recreated doppelgangers of their loved ones
Steven Soderbergh’s English-language remake of Andrei Tarkovsky’s epic SF film. Soderbergh trims Tarkovsky’s long-windedness and makes the plot tighter, more intimate but this still emerges as a lesser version than the original
The title and the description of a space station crew dealing with a mutating runner duck gives the expectation of something wacky – what we get is more like a variant on Dark Star, a comedy set around the boredom of life on a space station and a 1970s era episode of Doctor Who
This has an irresistible premise – of doing for 1970s tv SF what GalaxyQuest did for Star Trek – parodying the sets, costumes and cliches. On the other hand, the superb conception fails to ever play out as comedy and the film centres around a series of singularly dull personal dramas
South Korean space opera about a crew of space junk collectors. If the Star Wars series wanted to find a director to create fresh and exhilarating effects scenes, they need look no further than here
Stuart Gordon takes a lame concept – a trucker film set in space – and makes something far more enjoyable than one expected with most of the cast getting into the spirit of the exercise
When you approach this in terms of exactly what it promises to be – a revival of the good old B movie standard of the giant spider film – this proves absurdly entertaining and with some surprisingly good CGI spider effects
Second of the Star Trek films, usually regarded as the fan favourite because of its often moving character focus on themes of life, death and aging. Ricardo Montalban makes a grandly theatrical villain and the film gets some great suspense out of space war sequences
Leonard Nimoy steps into the director’s chair of the third Star Trek film and his doing marks the shift of the films from intergalactic adventuring into the regulars engaged in a safe, easy set of adventures playing to fan audiences
Gene Roddenbery created a tv series that was about boldly going, confronting different ways of life. The choice to hire the director of The Fast and the Furious films to helm the film made for the show’s 50th anniversary says how wrong-headed the reboot series has become – all about cool young leads and hurtling effects sequences
A Star Trek film spun off around Michelle Yeoh and the secret service that appears in the modern revival series
An extraordinary example of the fan film where Finnish filmmakers created a parody of Star Trek: The Next Generation and Babylon 5, with effects that rival those of A-list studio fare made on their home computers
The third of the films based around Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry’s Genesis II concept where a cryogenic sleeper awakes in a post-apocalyptic world
Spacegoing film that follows the crew aboard a space station as they survive the destruction of the Earth
This live-action film version of the cult Gerry Anderson puppet series is a disaster. Great effort is made to replicate the look of the original but the film is killed by the choice to rewrite everything as a modern formula kid’s movie
Very nicely made space opera from animator Don Bluth, operating from a Joss Whedon script, that unfortunately proved a big box-office flop
The greatest science-fiction film ever made? Stanley Kubrick goes against all convention – the film is slow, has no clear story and reaches an enigmatic ending and yet it is a work of brilliance, both visually and in terms of effects technology
Animated film based on the popular fantasy wargame. The set-up is a fascinating mix of SF and mediaeval religion but the plot rehashes Aliens without much payoff and the animation is B-budget
It was a box-office bomb but this is one of the most breathtaking and completely designed SF work to ever cross the screen. In terms of effects, sets and costuming, Luc Besson gives us a work that is an overwhelming treat for the eyes
A near-dialogueless story of a lonely robot clearing up junk in the aftermath of civilisation. This is surely Pixar’s most endearing film to date where they are operating at the peak of their creativity
Chinese attempt to make a Roland Emmerich-type mass destruction spectacle about the moving of the Earth. Much effects spectacle but the film suffers from plain absurd science
One of the various Italian space operas of the 1960s from director Antonio Margheriti. This has a certain colourful ambition despite frequently being let down by cheap effects