Top Ten Must-Watch Science Fiction Films That Redefine the Genre
- E. Thomas Canton
- Aug 8
- 19 min read
Updated: Oct 17
E. Thomas Canton has been making waves in the literary world with his latest releases. If you TOP TEN MUST SEE SCIENCE FICTION FILMS THAT REDEFINED THE GENRE o
This is a list of the best science fiction films that I've seen. Sadly I couldn't fit every film on this list that I wanted to, and so many great films have not made this discussion. Metropolis, Interstellar, Contact and many more are missing, but I think you'll find that those I have included have all earned their place.
There are countless films that could be part of this list. Sadly, I wasn't able to include some classics such as Metropolis, Interstellar, Contact, along with many more are missing, but I think you'll find those that I have included have all earned their place here..
John Carpenter's 1982 version of The Thing is a classic, no doubt about it, but I want to talk about the original 1951 version of the film, produced by Howard Hawks. Both films are based on the novella Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell. If you're into science fiction, then you know the name. Campbell is a legend.
Carpenter's version is, by far and away, more true to the book than the original which changes the shape-shifting antagonist for a vegetable with an attitude. Hawk's film was roundly criticized for not being faithful to the book, however, the 1950s couldn't provide the special effects necessary to show the shape shifting alien transforming, so its probably for the best.
1982's The Thing is about a group of men who, when confronted with the intruder, retreat into mistrust and paranoia. It concludes with two men surviving (Kurt Russell & Keith David), each not trusting the other. Either of them could be the creature and neither one of them can allow it to survive.
It doesn't matter which genre Hawks is working in, western, war or science fiction, Hawks' movies are never about mistrust between individuals, they're about disparate groups of individuals forming a cohesive group to defeat the threat, and his version of The Thing is no different.
Having said that, let's get this over with, there is a standing controversy over who actually directed the film. The credit is given to Christian Nyby, and the producer credit was given to Howard Hawks although many people say he actually directed it. I'm not getting into this in this small review only to say that Hawks' fingerprints are all over the film. From the rapid fire dialogue, to the film's non-stop pace, the idea of an isolated group over the individual, how the story goes from extreme danger to comedy, to its depiction of strong, independent women who could out drink the hero, this is a Hawks film. I don't say this to disrespect Nyby, but whether he directed the film or not is irrelevant, The Thing is a Hawks' movie.
Who Goes There? takes place at an Antarctic research base, but the film, The Thing is set in the Arctic. The reason for this is because this film takes place during the cold war, and it is from the North that the Russian missiles would be flying. The Distant Early Warning radar bases in the Canadian north were set up to detect Russian missiles coming over the pole. To people of that time, north was the direction from which death would rain down. In the film, the airmen ask one another on the way to the crash site, “The Russians are all over the pole,” and “Could it be a downed Russian plane?” And then there was the reporter who was at 'Bikini', a reference to the famous atomic bomb test at the Bikini Atol in the South Pacific. This was also only four years after the Roswell crash in 1947. There was a wave of people reporting flying saucers all over the United States for years afterward. Hawks version is
The Thing took science fiction down a path it would follow straight on to the twenty-first century. This film also marks the first time a stuntman was actually set on fire for a full body burn on film. The Thing title with light streaming through the title into a fog was also a first.
rce of strength and conflict.
FORBIDDEN PLANET (1956) Clara's journey is one of self-discovery, as she learns to confront her
Forbidden Planet had one of the biggest cinematic influences on the science fiction genre. Along with The Day The Earth Stood Still, and Metropolis, Forbidden Planet was one of the first Hollywood science fiction films to take itself seriously and to pose big ideas for the audience to contemplate. Being based on Shakespeare's The Tempest gives the film a depth not normally seen in films of that era.
The film refuses to be campy. It is an intelligent, well written story with amazing effects. Science fiction was a B movie genre throughout most of film history, but Forbidden Planet had an A budget from a major studio, MGM. It was even shot in widescreen, and in colour, both of which were highly unusual for a film of this sort.
Making Forbidden Planet even more unusual was that fact that the monster in the film was not an alien, or more to the point, the alien was not a monster. There was no actor stumbling around in a ridiculous rubber costume trying to be scary. Instead, the 'monster' is actually man's own subconscious, the deepest, darkest part of being human. Its a piece of everyone that cannot be controlled in any conscious way. Even more audacious, the audience never actually sees the monster except in undefinable outline in the spaceship's protective energy field. Despite all of this, Forbidden Planet's 'monster' remains one of sci-fi most frightening, possibly due to the idea that this monster lays dormant in each of us. The actual aliens are nowhere to be seen as they went extinct literally overnight in a mysterious way, and how they appeared is only vaguely expressed through their oddly shaped doorways, and the headpiece from the machine.
Much of the science fiction of the 1950s, as it is today, was, in one way or another, dystopian.
It was about human civilization collapsing or what happens after the collapse. Instead Forbidden Planet melds both the utopian and the dystopian within the Krell – a non-human civilization. Morbius holds them up as an example of a great and noble people with an incredible intellect, but a people who mysteriously caused their own extinction, destroying their entire civilization. All because, like humans, they could not control their subconscious. As Morbius points out, at the height of their intellect and culture, the Krell could not have even guess at the cause of their destruction.
In the same year that this film was in production, 1956, John McCarthy at Dartmouth College coined the phrase, Artificial Intelligence. Forbidden Planet saw its creation, Robbie the Robot become a new form of cinematic robot. Robbie was not the cardboard box on top of a larger cardboard box, painted silver with nobs and dials attached to them. His entire design is vastly different. Robbie is more of a modern AI, and less a 1950s idea of a 'robot'. He demonstrates his own personality. This was unheard of at the time for a machine character.
Forbidden Planet is a film that has been so influential that it is difficult for new generations to understand how groundbreaking and original the film was. If you haven't seen it, watch it now.
2. "Chasing Shadows"
2001: A Space Odyssey was not based on the novel by Arthur C. Clarke, but instead, it was developed simultaneously as the film was being created. Both the book and the movie, brought up philosophical ideas, but offered no answers.
2001 A Space Odyssey set a whole new standard for both design, special effects. The effects bar was set so high that, unlike most other science fictions films, the effects still hold up today.
The film begins, famously, at the dawn of humanity when pre-human apes discovering a monolith. Where it came from remained a mystery, but when an ape touches it, something happens. The ape has his first abstract thought; making a bone into a weapon. Winning a dispute at a watering hole, the ape hurls the bone into the air. Then there is that famous transition from the bone to a satellite in orbit, which I discovered later was suppose to be a missile platform. Both weapons, but with a higher degree of sophistication. The question posed; how far have we actually progressed? The apes needed to control the waterhole to survive, and now we need to conquer space. It is an eternal cycle of violence as symbolized by the continually spinning of the space station.
A second monolith is discovered buried on the lunar surface. It has the dimensions of 1:4:9. The first three square numbers. This is a sign of intelligent manufacture. Again it is touched, but this time the monolith sends a signal out to Jupiter, moving humanity on to its next evolutionary step. Again, the cycle repeats.
In the year 2001, (remember the film was made 33 years earlier) mankind has created its own intelligence in the circuits of HAL, the Discovery's onboard computer. HAL is visualized as a circle within a rectangle. In other words a monolith that inside it, contains our cycle in the form of circles that repeat to form HAL's 'eye'.
HAL understands, logically, emotions, but can never feel them. That is why HAL scares people; the combination of intelligence but with no empathy. HAL, in human terms and by definition, is a genuine psychopath. HAL killed the astronauts for the same reason that the apes killed one another at the watering hole – self preservation. This suggests that HAL had grown beyond its original design. He evolved into an entity that needs to control the Jupiter mission, and by doing so, his reason for being. This is HAL throwing the bone into the air. The cycle continues.
Dave, the last surviving astronaut, discovers a third monolith orbiting Jupiter. He leaves the ship and gets drawn into it. Inside the monolith, Dave watches his old self die, and then watches as he is reborn into a more evolved being. He then leaves the monolith and hovers in Earth orbit.
This film can be interpreted many ways as many great films can. Try to see this on a big screen if you can.
As Alex delves deeper into the case, he finds himself entangled in a web of deceit and Like Like most of the movies on this list, Planet of the Apes is based on the book by Pierre Boulle. It famously has what many people, including myself, think is the greatest ending in cinema history. It answers the basic questions poised by the film, while throwing out so many more that do not get answered.
Astronaut Taylor (Heston) both disgusted by humanity and eager to leave it behind goes on a space mission to test a time travel hypothesis. Thousands of years later at the end of the film, he is the last remaining intelligent human on an earth devoid of the people he so detested. In other words, he gets what he wanted.
Planet of the Apes was a film released squarely in the middle of American's civil rights movement, and can be read as a clear statement on race relations. For example, Heston being sprayed with a fire hose to subdue him, was taken straight from newspaper photographs of civil rights demonstrators facing the same situation. Every film in the saga begs for racial tolerance. If not, the end will be destruction for everyone.
The script by Rod Serling (The Twilight Zone), Michael Wilson and Pierre Boulle is very well thought out. The astronauts lose their clothing, and therefore blend in with the local humans; Heston gets shot in the throat preventing him from speaking, but the real inspiration is how the film uses sci-fi movie tropes against the audience. Astronauts landing on a planet with the exact same gravity, air, atmospheric pressure as Earth, and with two species that are readily identified as human and simian. And the simians speak English. For most science fiction films of that time that would all have seemed perfectly natural. They were all quick fixes for cheaper storytelling. They couldn't have people bounding over the landscape due to a lack of gravity because they didn't have the budget. They also didn't want to translate foreign languages, and of course astronauts had to breathe and survive. So this was all taken for granted in science fiction films up until recently. If it hadn't been, then the audience would have understood that they landed on earth right from the beginning. The greatest ending of all time would have never happened.
the book down.
Based on the 1961 novel by Polish writer, Stanislaw Lem, Solaris was directed by the great Russian filmmaker, Andre Tarkovsky. It was Tarkovsky's response to Kubric's 2001: A Space Odyssey which he viewed as cold, technological, and inhuman.
On the surface, Solaris is about humanity's first encounter with an alien intelligence. Beneath that surface is a turbulent sea of memories, regrets, and loneliness. It is also about learning to forgive both yourself and others while finding comfort in that forgiveness.
Psychologist Kris Kelvin is sent by himself to a space station orbiting a planet call Solaris. Earth had been receiving non-sensical messages from the station and the people on board the station have reported strange events before communications were cut off. Before leaving, Kelvin spends time with his emotionally distant father. The death of his mother had impacted both father and son very hard.
When he arrives, Kelvin learns that a friend of his on the station had committed suicide. He wakes up from his sleep to find his long dead wife, Hari, sitting in his room. Kelvin gets her to enter a rocket and launches her into space. She reappears in his room. This time Kelvin accepts her. He falls in love with her again, despite the fact that on Earth, Hari committed suicide, and Kelvin had always blamed himself.
The ocean on Solaris seems to be alive, and trying to communicate with the cosmonauts, but the alienness on both sides makes this almost impossible. The scientists on the station discover a way to kill the dopplegangers with a device called the 'annihilator,” but not fully understanding the nature of the dopplegangers, decide not to kill them, yet. Instead, they suggest beaming Kelvin's brainwaves into the ocean on Solaris, hoping it will help the planet realize that the dopplegangers were unwanted.
The Hari doppleganger becomes increasingly more of an individual. One of the scientists brutally reminds Hari that she is not human, she tries to commit suicide. Solaris heals her despite herself. Kelvin does not want her dead. He likes having her around. She ultimately uses the annihilator on herself.
Solaris stops sending the dopplegangers, but instead creates small islands on the surface of the planet.
Kelvin is convinced that Solaris tried to communicate with him by creating the doppleganger Hari. Solaris gave him the opportunity to resolve his pain and guilt in order to study his reaction. Its as if Solaris is psychoanalyzing the psychologist, trying to discover what makes us human. It discovers that it is our faults, self-loathing, memories, and conscience that make us who we are. What Solaris and Kelvin both seem to discover is that each man is his own island. As we see the visuals make this unmistakable at the end as Kelvin is literally on his own island with his father at the house he grew up it. The small island is surrounded by the sea on Solaris.
INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (1978)INVA Justice and Morality: The novel raises questions about what it means to seek justice and the moral dilemmas that come with it.
This film was based on The Body Snatchers (1955), by Jack Finney. It is an intensely eerie and riveting film with a shock ending that undercuts any possible optimism you might have felt at the ending of the 1956 version. Much has been said and written about the classic 1956 version's subtext of America's fear of communism during this era. Its a great film and a must see, but the 1978 version also has a very interesting take on life in the 1970s. Interestingly, director Phillip Kaufman saw this version as a sequel, and not a remake. The 1956 version ends with a truck carrying pods to San Francisco.
The story picks up twenty years later in San Francisco. During the late sixties and the early seventies, San Francisco had been the home of the counter-culture, but disillusionment from the failure of the hippie ideals began a trend to a more conservative time. It would only be two years before Ronald Reagan became president, and the movie reflects a culture becoming more cynical, more conservative with a post-Watergate sense of government mistrust. In short, this new Invasion of the Body Snatchers sheds the old subtext to adopt one that reflected the new era. The subtext in this version is more cultural, psychological as well as political.
Each of the cast plays their character so grounded in reality that they make the film more creepy than it otherwise would be.
Elizabeth Driscoll (Brooke Adams) notices some strange behaviour in her boyfriend. She tries to tell her friend, health inspector, Matthew Bennell (Donald Sutherland), but he doesn't believe her until it becomes something close to an epidemic across the city. Driscoll and her friends (also Leonard Nimoy, Veronica Cartwright and Jeff Goldblum – all in stand out performances) uncover alien pods duplicating humans with emotionless copies as they sleep.
This is one of the very few truly classic remakes of a classic film.
Courage and Resilience: Alex's char
acter embodies courage as he faces numerous challenges throughout the story.
GAGATTACA (1997)GAGA
Makes E. Thomas Canton Stand Out?
Gattaca – Guanine, Adenine, Thymine, Thymine, Adenine, Cytosine, Adenine. GATC; The Four nucleobases of DNA that encode genetic information. These are what you need to manipulate to create designer babies. Children genetically altered to eliminate the possibilities of disease, genetic defects, and so on.
Welcome to a very possible future where the new elite, 'Valids', run the world while natural born babies serve them. DNA testing is constant in order to be certain that the elite are not compromised in any way. The future is sterile.
How do you, as a natural born person, beat the system when the human body sheds 500 million cells, and up to 150 hairs every day. Any one of them can betray you sending you to prison?
Vincent Freeman (Ethan Hawke) was born naturally, his parents were only able to afford the procedure for their first born son, Anton. The doctors inform his mother and father that Vincent will probably develop a serious heart condition causing him to die in his early-mid thirties.
As Vincent and Anton grow up, they engage in competitions by swimming out in the ocean until one of them gets scared or winded and gives up. Vincent wins, which suggests there is something more to humanity than mere genes. Vincent wants to travel to Jupiter's moon, Titan, but would never be allowed because of his birth. To achieve this he gets employed at the Gattaca corporation as a janitor.
Vincent meets with German (Tony Shalhoub) a blackmarket dealer who connects him with 'Valid' athlete Jerome Eugene Morrow (Jude Law). Morrow was left unable to walk after a car accident. As Jerome states, he was bred to be the best, but he only ever achieved a silver medal at the olympics. Even being a designer baby, he can only amount to second best. Vincent assumes the identity of Jerome for a price. It is a high wire act without a net. Vincent cannot allow a single cell or hair to be left on his desk, clothing, keyboard or anywhere. He must be able to pass random blood tests at a moment's notice. He must also be able to provide urine samples whenever he is asked for it.
The sets are minimalistic, much like certain science fiction sets in the 30s – 50s. The cars seem to be mainly upgraded throwbacks from the 1940s and 1950s. Their culture seems to look backwards suggesting the decline or death of their own culture or at least that they're not able to progress their culture.
Gattaca is what Ray Bradbury described in 1953: “Science fiction is, after all, the fiction of ideas; the fiction where philosophy can be tinkered with, torn apart, put back together again. Its the fiction of sociology and psychology and history compounded and squared by time. It is the fiction where you may set up and knock down your own political and religious and moral states.” Gattaca has no intergalactic space flights, no lasers, no car chases, no alien menace. In the entire movie, only a single punch is thrown. It is an intelligent, well written, socially & politically relevant script. Easily one of the two best science fiction films of the 1990s. I highly recommend watching this film. Gattaca was the writing and directing debut of New Zealand born Andrew Niccol.
Dark City is one of few films on this list that isn't based on a book or play. Its a completely original story, and I mean that in more than one way. It is a film about memory and identity.
The theatrical version of this film suffers from a voice over inflicted on it by a nervous film studio. The director's cut eliminates that voice over, and adds eleven more minutes to create a film that is one of the best science fiction films I've seen. It is dark, moody, and mysterious. Dark City is heavy on style with awe inspiring visuals, wardrobe, set design along with great performances by Rufus Sewell (Man in the High Castle), Jennifer Connelly, William Hurt, Kiefer Sutherland, Richard O'Brien (Rocky Horror Picture Show), and Sir Ian Richardson. The film is the brain child of director Alex Proyas (The Crow).
Profoundly impacting the foreboding mood of Dark City is the shifting urban landscape the characters navigate. The dark twisting environment visualizes for the viewer the continually altered memories and identities inflicted on them by the “Strangers.” The city itself is a unending expressionistic nightmare of inescapable dread. The architecture and wardrobe are an unsettling collision of styles from the 1940s through to the 1960s that lend a film noir fatalism to the lives of the characters.
John Murdoch (Sewell) wakes with a start. He has no memories. A dead woman lies on the floor, beside a bloody knife. The phone rings. A voice warns him to get out before the “Strangers” get there. He runs.
Murdoch learns his name and that he may (or may not) have a wife, Emma (Connelly). The “Strangers” - pale men in long leather coats - corner Murdoch. Not knowing how he's doing it, he alters physical reality. This ability shocks the Strangers who believed only they could 'tune'.
At midnight, Murdoch watches as all the people fall asleep, while the Strangers tune the city. The buildings collide, reshape, morph, grow and vanish to create an entirely new urban landscape. He sees the Strangers changing peoples' memories through an injection. Providing the injections is Dr. Schreber, the man who warned Murdoch on the phone.
He discovers that the Strangers are extraterrestrials using human corpses. They have a hive mind, and are becoming extinct. They experiment with human memories and identities believing that these could save their race.
Dark City is an engrossing film and an engaging mystery, however, the following year brought the Matrix which would tread much the same ground. The commercial, cultural success of the Matrix buried Dark City in the public mind. It has only been recently that the film has been rediscovered and is finding a new audience.ul
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Arrival is based on the 1998 Nebula winning novella, Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang. It is about communication and how that affects how we see time, fate, and predestination.
The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (also called linguistic relativity) is the real world theory that suggests language determines cognition. In other words, language determines how we perceive/understand reality, including time.
The aliens, or Heptapods as they became named by humans, do not see time as a linear arrow going from past into the future. They view time very differently than we do.
When they arrive on Earth, Dr. Louise Banks (Amy Adams), one of the best linguists in the world, is called in to try to communicate with them. The Heptapods use a written language very alien to humanity. It is a language of circular motifs. The language, being so entirely different from human language, have given the Heptapods a completely different perception of reality than humans.
At first, communicating with the aliens is one failure after another, but after a while, she begins to understand their language little by little. The more she understands, the more her cognition changes. At first its only in dreams, but soon Banks begins to think like the Heptapods in terms of being able to view her life without the intervening idea of time. She has no present or future, she simply is. This is linguistic relativity manifesting in Banks. Understanding their language changes the way she views time.
One of the issues is that Banks now sees what humans would perceive as her future. In that future she marries, and has a daughter who dies young. This begs the question is the future set or is free will still at work. Banks chooses to embrace her future for the happiness that it will bring despite the tragedy, but this is presented as Banks choosing that path, and not blindly following it. She might have chosen to avoid the tragedy, but she made the conscious choice not to. In this decision lay the emotional core of the entire film even as it delves into much deeper water philosophically than most films can handle.
ers:
During an interview promoting the 1989, Theatrical re-stored release of the classic 1962 film, Lawrence of Arabia, its star, Peter O'Toole referred to the film as “the last of the great epics.” I agreed with him. Over the years, cinematic epics had become a lost art. There were long, historical films that came alone like, Braveheart, but nothing with the breadth, scope or depth of Lawrence. Then Denis Villeneuve created this new version of Frank Herbert's novel. Dune is a true epic in terms of it's massive scope, it's deeply complex story, and it's Oscar winning design and cinematography. The film also won Oscars for its score, sound, editing and visual effects. The first film won six Academy Awards, while part two, won an additional two.
Both films are based on the 1965 novel by Frank Herbert, and together, form the entire novel. Like the book, the films explore the themes of power, colonialism, and religion.
The story is mythic. It follows Paul Atreides from being a spoiled son of a Duke to being a messianic leader of the Fremen on the distant world of Arrakis. There he leads the Fremen in a revolution that overthrows the Emperor.
He is also the son of the Lady Jessica, a Bene Gesserit sister. The Bene Gesserit through the generations have manipulated the Imperial bloodlines in an attempt to create the universe's super being, the Kwisatz Haderach. Jessica thinks her son Paul may be that being.
The Bene Gesserit is one of the three legs that support/control the empire. The others being the Congress of Royal Houses, and the Spacing Guild. Of these the most important is the Guild. It has sole say over all interstellar travel, but without the spice Melange, the guild navigators would not have the ability to navigate. This is why the spice is the most important substance in the Empire. The Empire couldn't exist without it.
The Emperor hands Duke Atreides the responsibility of controlling the spice trade on Arrakis. This world is the only place in the universe where the spice is mined. The Emperor rightly calculates that the honour would be too great for the Duke to turn down.
Atreides' rival, the Baron Harkonen, conspired with the Emperor to exterminate the Atreides who they both viewed as a threat. They slaughter the Atreides on Arrakis. Paul and his mother escape, and are taken in by the indigenous people of Arrakis, the Fremen. Paul is increasingly seen as a messiah figure to the Fremen. He is the outsider of their religious prophecy who they believe will lead them to true freedom. This prophecy of the Fremen, like on many other 'primitive' worlds, was created by the Bene Gesserit, in order to manipulate the populations. Paul leads the Fremen against the Harkonens, and the Imperium in a revolution to claim the Imperial throne for himself, not necessarily for the Fremen. Their faith in him makes them follow him blindly as a messiah, but he uses their faith in him to manipulate them as his army to use to his own ends.
Dune is a true epic that demands to be seen on the biggest screen possible.
"The suspense in 'Chasing re a few options:
Local Bookstores: Support your local bookstore by checking their shelves for Canton's books.
Online Retailers: Websites like Amazon and Barnes & Noble offer both physical and digital copies of his novels.
Libraries: Don't forget to check your local library for availability. Many libraries offer digital borrowing options as well.
Final Thoughts
E. Thomas Canton's latest releases are a testament to his talent as a storyteller. With engaging plots and relatable characters, his books are sure to resonate with readers.
Whether you are looking for a heartfelt family drama or a thrilling detective story, Canton has something for you.
So, grab a copy of "Whispers of the Past" or "Chasing Shadows" and immerse yourself in the world of E. Thomas Canton. You won't be disappointed.
As you explore these new stories, you may find yourself reflecting on your own experiences and the themes that resonate with you. Happy reading!
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