5. ‘WALL-E’ (2008, G)

Give a Philip K. Dick sci-fi story to director Paul Verhoeven, the guy who made “RoboCop” and “Showgirls,” and you don’t exactly get a nuanced return. But you do have a lot of fun. Arnold Schwarzenegger plays Douglas Quaid, a construction worker obsessed with Mars in the year 2084. To get the obsession out of his system, he visits Rekall, a company that will implant the memory of a vacation to Mars in which Quaid will play a secret agent. Is the outlandish story that follows real, or is it the implant? Who knows. But Schwarzenegger pulls a tracking device out of his nose and there’s a hooker with three breasts. It’s that kind of movie (by which we mean an awesome one).

8. ‘Forbidden Planet’ (1956, not rated)

The 1950s was rife with forgettable, downright embarrassing sci-fi B-movies; “Forbidden Planet” is not one of them. Planet Altair IV is the backdrop for one of the first sci-fi films set entirely on another planet, where Commander Adams (Leslie Nielsen) and crew travel to investigate the fate of a previous expedition. Colorful matte paintings, terrifying alien creatures and Robby the Robot make for a fantastical adventure that represents the best of the decade.

7. ‘Aliens’ (1986, R)

for the genre). The second space adventure based on the beloved TV show brims with swashbuckling charm as the aging crew members of the Enterprise face off against an old foe: Khan Noonien Singh (Ricardo Montalban), an exiled genetically engineered superman out for vengeance. A movie is only ever as good as its villain, and Montalban’s performance is as memorable as his outrageous pecs.

Leave it to the storytelling wizards at Pixar to turn a post-apocalyptic tale about Earth’s catastrophic pollution into a love story, who managed to create a silentfilm love story between two machines roaming the wastelands of an abandoned Earth that’s as moving as any flesh-and-blood union. And that’s just the first act. WALL-E follows his beloved EVE into outer space and aboard the spaceship Axiom, where the morbidly obese remnants of humanity have long forgotten the spoiled riches of Earth.

4. ‘Superman’ (1978, PG)

Only the imagination of H.R. Giger could have conjured up something as terrifying as the 7-foot-tall nightmare with acid blood and multiple mouths that stalks and systematically murders the crew of the spacecraft Nostromo. Save, that is, for Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley, the mother of all hard-core film heroines. It’s a masterclass of atmospherics, often beautiful and terrifying in the same intake of breath before the screams let loose.

2. ‘Star Wars: Episode V — The Empire Strikes Back’ (1980, PG)

This is easily the best of all the “Star Wars” films (and the only one that mastermind George Lucas neither wrote the screenplay for nor directed — think on that). It’s also the darkest, and it ends with Han Solo frozen in carbonite and Luke Skywalker minus a hand and plus a daddy complex. Lucas helped kick-start the sci-fi renaissance of the late ‘70s and ‘80s with “A New Hope,” but this is the one that confirmed his sprawling, swashbuckling space opera was about more than just special effects and action figures — it was a new American mythology.

1. ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ (1968, G)