Best of the best
Counting down the 10 best sci-fi movies of the decade
My best-films-of-the-2010s list includes two science-fiction tales – Arrival and Her – but you could create a film festival out of all the great examples of the genre from this past decade. Here are some standouts, and not a Transformers among them.
INTERSTELLAR (2014, CHRISTOPHER NOLAN)
The future of humanity is, in one form or another, the theme of most art, but few have explored it on as large a canvas as Nolan.
Using our planet’s environmental crisis as a jumping-off point, he imagines future explorers seeking a new home for our species, and finding inspiration in the unlikeliest places. Oh, and he also made Inception (2010), with one of the best, most frustrating endings in cinema — not to mention a fine job of editing.
EX MACHINA (2014, ALEX GARLAND)
Garland’s first feature, starring the wildly talented Alicia Vikander, features one of the smartest screenplays of the decade, as a young programmer (Domhnall Gleason) must determine if an A.I. is sentient. Garland followed it up with Annihilation (2018), a nightmarish vision of interplanetary contamination.
LOOPER (2012, RIAN JOHNSON)
The best time travel movie in years — yes, that’s looking forward and backward — features Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis as the same assassin, separated by three decades.
GRAVITY (2013, ALFONSO CUARÓN)
Sandra Bullock plays a rookie astronaut who loses her ride and has to find her way back to Earth.
Astronauts and scientists gently carped that the film featured numerous physical impossibilities, but that’s only because it was so realistic in so many other ways.
MAD MAX: FURY ROAD (2015, GEORGE MILLER)
Basically a two-hour car chase through the desert, but strapped to the hood is a simple, satisfying story starring Charlize Theron as the wonderfully named, don’t-mess-with-me Imperator Furiosa.
BLADE RUNNER 2049 (2017, DENIS VILLENEUVE)
This inspired sequel to Ridley Scott’s 1982 classic feels at once familiar — flying cars, replicants, Harrison Ford — and shockingly new, thanks to the central story of an L.A. cop (Ryan Gosling) trying to crack an existential mystery to which he himself may be a clue.
Themes of free will, memory and what it means to be human play out in a stunning new landscape in what I suppose must now count as the future’s future.
RISE OF / DAWN OF / WAR FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES (2011, RUPERT WYATT; 2014, 2017 MATT REEVES)
An excellently executed trilogy that first reimagines the classic 1960s movie, and then runs with that new interpretation.
It looks great, it raises big ideas, it thrills and terrifies us with a vision of the future, and it holds up a funhouse mirror to the present. When you shake the family tree of human evolution, you never know what’s going to fall out.
ATTACK THE BLOCK (2011, JOE CORNISH)
Science fiction goes old school in this tale of an alien invasion in a grubby, rundown corner of South London, and the street urchins who repel it.
Despite the modern language and technology, it has an appealing ’80s feel. And it features John Boyega, whom you may know from …
STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS (2015, J.J. ABRAMS)
The ennealogy — what, you thought it was a “non-tet”? — that wraps up this year with Episode IX got a fantastic boost when The Force Awakens revived the moribund storyline — with nary a Gungan in sight! Han Solo said it best: “Chewie, we’re home.”
FIRST MAN (2018, DAMIEN CHAZELLE), APOLLO 11 (2019, TODD DOUGLAS MILLER), OPERATION AVALANCHE (2016, MATT JOHNSON)
The first two aren’t sciencefiction — they’re a dramatization and a documentary of the science-fact that was the first manned moon landing of 1969. But doesn’t that history still feel in some strange way like the future?
And the third, a finalist for the $100,000 Rogers Best Canadian Film prize that year, is both a mockumentary and a tense thriller that dares to imagine what crazy people have been saying for 50 years; Apollo astronauts never actually walked on the moon.
Johnson clearly doesn’t believe the conspiracy nuts, but he makes a great case for the kooks anyway.