Top 10 SF Movies of All Time from Dzero's blog
1. Alien (1979)
In the near future, during its return to the earth, a commercial spaceship Nostromo intercepts a distress SOS from a distant planet. The seven-member crew are woken up from the hypersleep and the spaceship subsequently descends on the planet. While exploring the planet, a three-member team of the crew discovers a derelict spaceship and a huge chamber inside it containing thousands of eggs. When a curious team member goes too near the egg the parasite inside the egg attacks him, rendering him unconscious. He is brought back aboard, the spaceship takes off. After a little while the parasite dies and his host wakes up seemingly unruffled. Everything returns back to normal - but not for long.Director: Ridley Scott.
Writers: Dan O'Bannon (story), Ronald Shusett (story).
Stars: Sigourney Weaver, Tom Skerritt and John Hurt.
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2. Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
Director: Steven Spielberg.
Writer: Steven Spielberg.
Stars: Richard Dreyfuss, François Truffaut, Teri Garr.
3. Star Trek (2009)
Director: J.J. Abrams.
Writers: Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman.
Stars: Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Simon Pegg.
4. Blade Runner (1982)
Director: Ridley Scott.
Writers: Hampton Fancher, David Webb People.
Stars: Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, Sean Young
Deckard is a Blade Runner, a police man of the future who hunts down and terminates replicants, artificially created humans. He wants to get out of the force, but is drawn back in when 4 "skin jobs", a slang term for replicants, hijack a ship back to Earth. The city that Deckard must search for his prey is a huge, sprawling, bleak vision of the future. This film questions what it is to be human, and why life is so precious.
5. 2012 (2009)
Director: Roland Emmerich.
Writers: Roland Emmerich, Harald Kloser.
Stars: John Cusack, Thandie Newton, Chiwetel Ejiofor.
Several years before, geologist Adrian Helmsley comes across information that shows the world will come to an end in 2012. No announcement is made but the G8 countries begin to prepare for the event. Jack Curtis is a divorced and a less than successful writer. While on a camping trip with his children in Yosemite, he meets Charlie Frost, who is preaching that the end of the world is at hand. A series of events leads Curtis to believe what Frost has told him and with his family, heads for China where the industrialized countries have been working on a response to the impending disaster.
6. Independence Day (1996)
Director: Roland Emmerich.
Writers: Dean Devlin, Roland Emmerich.
Stars: Will Smith, Bill Pullman, Jeff Goldblum.
In the beginning of July, a strange spaceship is heading towards Earth. Humans received a strange signal, and this has turned into a global phenomenon. It was aliens. smaller spaceships began to cover entire cities around the world. Suddenly, the wonder turns into horror as the spaceships destroy the cities. Then, when the world counterattacked, the alien ships are invincible to normal weapon systems, then The President of the United States, decides to head to area 51, to formulate a plan to defeat the aliens. Now, the fate of the world rests on a handful of surviving humans.
7. Twelve Monkeys (1995)
Director: Terry Gilliam
Writers: Chris Marker , David Webb Peoples.
Stars: Bruce Willis, Madeleine Stowe, Brad Pitt.
Terry Gilliam's nightmarish low-tech/high-tech future vision takes place in 1997, after a deadly virus has killed 99% of the human population--forcing the survivors to flee beneath our planet's surface. This leaves the (other) animals topside, to rule the Earth once again. The scientists select James Cole, an imprisoned sociopath, to return to the past and gather information useful in the defense against this contagion. Once back in time, he is to investigate the mysterious 'Army of the Twelve Monkeys' and report his findings. Scientific, social, and political themes like time travel (and its inherent paradoxes and nested loops), mental illness, the nature of reality, animal rights, and the Armageddon-potential of unchecked technological advances are artfully and cleverly explored.
8. Sunshine (2007)
Director: Danny Boyle.
Writer: Alex Garland.
Stars: Cillian Murphy, Rose Byrne and Chris Evans.
Space-ship Icarus I failed to kick-start Earth's dying sun back into action and disappeared. Icarus II carries the last available nuclear super-bomb on a mission to try again. The navigator's oversight causes serious damage to the ship, yet returning is no longer a hope, the mission dubious. Having picked up Icarus II's emergency signal from Mercury, they decide to try pick up its bomb. That side-trip comes at a high cost. But an even worse surprise is lurking aboard.
9. Deep Impact (1998)
Director: Mimi Leder
Writers: Bruce Joel Rubin, Michael Tolkin.
Stars: Robert Duvall, Téa Leoni, Elijah Wood.
A teenage astronomer and his teacher discover an object amongst the stars at night. Little do they know that it's a comet on a direct collision course for earth. After the teacher dies in a car crash trying to report his findings the President announces the comet's existence. He also states that there is no need to panic, because NASA is going to send astronauts on the space mission, Messiah. Their mission is to destroy the comet before it gets too close to the earth. When Messiah backfires, the President announces that special caves will have to be built, and the government will have to have a lottery-of-fate to randomly select 800,000 ordinary American citizens to go along with 200,000 scientists, soldiers, and other officials. These 1,000,000 people will be set aside to save the population from extinction when the comet hits.
10. Knowing (2009)
Director: Alex Proyas.
Writers: Ryne Douglas Pearson, Juliet Snowden.
Stars: Nicolas Cage, Chandler Canterbury, Rose Byrne.
In 1959, a group of primary school students draw pictures for a time capsule of what they think the world will look like in 2009. One of the children, Lucinda Wayland, doesn't draw a picture but completes a long list of numbers. In 2009, the school opens the capsule and distribute the pictures to the students with Caleb Koestler getting the page with all the numbers. Caleb's father John, a university professor and astrophysicist, is intrigued and in managing to decipher the code, realizes that the numbers represent the date, location and number of people killed in major catastrophes, some natural and others man-made. He also sees that there are 3 disasters that have yet to occur. Lucinda Wayland has died but John contacts her daughter Diana and together they try to warn officials of what is coming. The last of the three disasters may be unstoppable however.
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