Part 1 – The Masterpieces
Series Navigation
Part 1: The Masterpieces |
Part 2: The Near Perfect |
Part 3: The Excellent |
Part 4: The Very Good |
Part 5: The Solid Craft |
Part 6: The Dependable |
Part 7: The Flawed |
Part 8: The Failures
The films in this tier build the idea into the structure instead of stating it. Metropolis arranges its city vertically so the politics are legible before any intertitle appears, WALL-E spends forty minutes establishing a character without dialogue, and Her hangs its whole theme on what its protagonist does for a living.
The other pattern is restraint about the thing everybody came for. Jurassic Park shows roughly six minutes of dinosaur in two hours, Dark City loses something when the studio adds an explanatory narration, and Stalker never lets anybody walk into the room the whole film has been approaching.
Every film in this tier got a ten or close to it from me, and I don’t hand those out cheaply.
What they share is nerve. They trust the audience to do some work, and I’ve got far more patience for a movie that makes me think than for one that spends two hours reassuring me I understood the trailer. If you write, these are the films worth taking apart scene by scene.
Every rating is the one carried by the review it links to. Ties are broken by year, and this is the first of eight parts.
Metropolis puts the argument into the shape of the city and The Fifth Element lets nobody remark on any of it. Build the frame in the World Builder’s Handbook.
1. Metropolis (1927) [full review]
► Read the full review of Metropolis (1927)
RLR: 10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.3/10
"The city is arranged vertically and the politics follow from the layout."
Fritz Lang spent over a year and a budget that nearly destroyed UFA on a silent film running more than two and a half hours, with around thirty-six thousand extras and a miniature cityscape built to a scale nobody had attempted. It nearly bankrupted the studio and no German production matched its ambition for decades afterward.
The city is the invention everybody has copied since. Towers connected by elevated roads at multiple levels, aircraft moving between them, a bright surface built directly on top of machine halls where the workers live. Almost every dystopian city put on film since has been a variation on that single vertical arrangement.
The machine hall sequence is where Lang states the argument. Shift workers move in identical rhythm at a bank of dials, a boiler fails, and the vision that follows turns the machinery into a mouth being fed. Nothing in it needs a caption and the film doesn’t supply one.
The Maschinenmensch is the first screen robot anybody remembers and Walter Schulze-Mittendorff built it as a full body suit in plaster-based composite. Brigitte Helm was sealed inside it for long stretches in real discomfort, and the transformation sequence still reads as something happening instead of as an effect.
The politics are the part people argue about and the film is unembarrassed by them. The mediator between head and hands must be the heart, the intertitle says, twice, and the resolution is a handshake between an industrialist and a foreman that satisfies almost nobody who has thought about the preceding two hours.
The handshake ending is the one thing I’d change, and it doesn’t cost the film a point with me. Almost a century on, I still can’t look at a science fiction skyline without seeing Lang’s city underneath it, and every production designer who’s drawn a dystopia since owes him rent.
2. Forbidden Planet (1956) [full review]
► Read the full review of Forbidden Planet (1956)
RLR: 10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.5/10
"The monster is produced by a man while he sleeps."
MGM made the first major studio science fiction film shot in CinemaScope and color, with a budget close to two million dollars at a point when the genre belonged to cheap double features. Fred M. Wilcox directed and the studio treated it as a prestige production instead of as a programmer.
The plot is The Tempest and the film makes no secret of it. Prospero becomes Morbius, Miranda becomes Altaira, Ariel becomes Robby the Robot, and the monster from the id is the Caliban the source never quite explained. Every subsequent space expedition film has borrowed the resulting structure.
Bebe and Louis Barron built the first entirely electronic film score, constructing circuits that they deliberately drove to failure and recording the sounds they made while dying. The union wouldn’t credit it as music, so the film calls it electronic tonalities in the titles.
Robby the Robot cost around one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars, more than most complete features of the period, and he’s the reason the studio recouped. He speaks, he reasons, he’s stated laws he can’t break, and every helpful screen robot since has descended from him.
The monster is the best idea in fifties science fiction. It’s no form, it’s visible only as an outline in the perimeter fence fire, and it’s produced by a man’s own mind while he sleeps, making it something he can’t surrender, negotiate with or defend against.
3. Stalker (1979) [full review]
► Read the full review of Stalker (1979)
RLR: 10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.1/10
"Three men reach the threshold and none of them goes in."
Tarkovsky shot the film twice. The first version was destroyed in processing, the production moved from Tajikistan to Estonia after an earthquake, and the second shoot used a chemical plant whose discharge several of the crew later blamed for the illnesses that killed Tarkovsky, his wife and the lead actor.
The Zone is a place where an unexplained event has left an area under permanent guard, and the film refuses to say what happened. No alien is named, no impact is shown, and the only evidence is that the rules inside it don’t behave and the route through is never the route you can see.
The color scheme carries the whole structure. The world outside is sepia and nearly dead, the Zone is in color and overgrown, and the shift happens on a railcar sequence that runs several minutes on the sound of wheels with almost nothing else in the frame.
The three men are a writer, a scientist and a guide, and the argument between them is the film. One wants inspiration, one wants to destroy the place, and the guide believes in it without being able to use it, the position Tarkovsky gives the least dignity and the most weight.
The Room at the center grants your deepest wish instead of the one you’d state, and nobody enters it. They sit at the threshold, they talk, and the film ends on a man’s daughter moving a glass across a table without touching it while a train passes underneath the building.
Stalker asks more patience than anything else on this list, and it pays back more. That railcar ride moves me more than most studio climaxes, because by the time the color arrives I’ve been waiting for it as hard as the three men have. The refusal to open the Room still feels like a dare to me, and I think Tarkovsky won it.
4. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) [full review]
► Read the full review of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982)
RLR: 10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.9/10
"Adult faces stay out of frame for the whole first act."
Spielberg shot much of it in sequence and at the children’s eye level, keeping adult faces out of frame for the first act so the audience occupies Elliott’s position. Melissa Mathison wrote it in about eight weeks and the film took over seven hundred and ninety million dollars worldwide.
The absent father drives the story and the film states it once. The mother is holding a household together, the older brother is angry, the younger sister is too young to understand, and a creature arrives who’s also lost and also wants to get home to somewhere he came from.
Carlo Rambaldi built the creature with three separate versions and twelve operators, and the eyes were modeled on photographs of Einstein, Hemingway and Carl Sandburg. The production kept the children away from the mechanics so their reactions to it stayed genuine. Debra Winger voiced part of the creature.
The government sequence is where the film turns and Spielberg shoots it as an invasion. Plastic tunnels through a suburban house, figures in sealed suits, and a family home converted into a containment facility without anybody being asked for permission first. Peter Coyote plays the man with the keys.
The bicycle flight works because the film has earned it across ninety minutes and because John Williams was allowed to score it freely. Spielberg recut the sequence to the music instead of the other way round, close to unheard of in a studio picture. Universal released it in June 1982.
Terminator 2 declares its reversal early and Eternal Sunshine runs the whole relationship backward. Two structures worth stealing, in the Plot Handbook.
5. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982) [full review]
► Read the full review of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982)
RLR: 10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.7/10
"The two leads never share a set in the entire film."
Nicholas Meyer rewrote the screenplay in twelve days without credit and directed a film made for around eleven million dollars, a fraction of what the first picture cost. He’d never watched the series and approached it as a naval story, the reason it works.
Khan is a sequel to a single television episode fifteen years earlier and the film assumes nothing. Everything needed is established in the first twenty minutes, and a viewer who has never heard of Space Seed loses nothing at all across the running time. Kirstie Alley plays Saavik.
The submarine staging is Meyer’s contribution and it changed the franchise. Ships manoeuvre in two planes at close range, damage is cumulative, the Mutara Nebula removes sensors and shields, and the final engagement is fought blind by two commanders guessing at each other. Gayne Rescher shot it.
The film is about age and consequence, and nobody expected. Kirk needs glasses, he has a son he never raised, the no-win scenario is stated in the opening scene, and the last act makes him face an outcome he’s spent a career refusing to accept.
This is the Star Trek film I’d hand to somebody who swears they don’t like Star Trek. Meyer’s refusal to worship the series is what saved it, and I wish the later films had learned more from him. A studio sequel about getting old and paying for your choices shouldn’t exist, and I’m grateful every time I remember that it does.
Ricardo Montalban plays Khan entirely opposite William Shatner without ever sharing a set with him. The two never appear in frame together, every exchange is over a viewscreen, and the performance is built on quotation and on grief for a wife nobody in the audience ever met.
6. WarGames (1983) [full review]
► Read the full review of WarGames (1983)
RLR: 10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.1/10
"Nothing he does is malicious and the escalation is procedural."
John Badham took over after Martin Brest was removed early in production, and the film arrived at a moment when almost nobody in an audience had used a computer. It took over seventy-nine million dollars and prompted a congressional hearing on computer security within months.
The technical detail is unusually accurate for the period. Wardialing, default passwords, a backdoor left by a designer, and social engineering through a library instead of through code, and every method in the film worked at the time exactly as depicted. Lawrence Lasker and Walter Parkes wrote it.
I love a computer movie that gets the computers right, and this one does. Most Hollywood hacking scenes made since look lazy next to it. My only quibble is the ending spelling out its argument after the tic-tac-toe had already made it, and that’s a small price for a studio thriller that assumed its audience could follow the method.
The premise is a boy looking for unreleased games who finds a military system and can’t tell the difference. Nothing he does is malicious, the escalation is entirely procedural, and the film is clear that the failure is institutional instead of criminal. Matthew Broderick was twenty during filming.
The WOPR room is the best set of its decade and the scale is deliberate. A wall of displays in a buried facility, generals watching a map, and the machine running simulations that everybody in the room reads as an actual launch because nothing distinguishes the two.
The ending is the argument stated plainly. The system plays itself at tic-tac-toe until it arrives at the conclusion, and the film’s position is that the only winning move is to refuse to make one, delivered without a single person in the room having changed their mind first.
7. Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) [full review]
► Read the full review of Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)
RLR: 10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.6/10
"The reversal is declared early and pays for two hours."
Cameron made the most expensive film ever produced at that point, around one hundred million dollars, and roughly half the effects budget went on about three and a half minutes of the T-1000. Stan Winston built everything practical and ILM handled the liquid metal work. The structural decision is the one everybody names. The villain of the first film becomes the protector of the second, stated in the opening act and which gives the whole picture a relationship to develop instead of a chase to sustain. Edward Furlong was cast from a youth center.
Linda Hamilton rebuilt the character completely and trained for months to do it. Sarah Connor is institutionalized, medicated, correct about everything and believed by nobody, and the film treats her certainty as a form of damage instead of as vindication. She trained with an Israeli commando instructor.
The T-1000 works because Robert Patrick plays it as economical instead of as powerful. He runs like a man who doesn’t tire, he never adopts a threatening posture, and the design principle is a shape that’s no reason to perform strength it doesn’t need.
The studio fought the ending, and it’s the film’s actual subject. The machine that’s learned why people cry asks to be destroyed, lowers itself into the steel, and the thumb is the last thing visible, added by Cameron after the alternate happy ending tested badly.
8. Jurassic Park (1993) [full review]
► Read the full review of Jurassic Park (1993)
RLR: 10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.2/10
"Rings in a glass of water, twice, before anything is visible."
Spielberg made around one billion dollars on a sixty-three million dollar budget and changed the effects industry by accident. Spielberg planned the film with stop motion, Dennis Muren demonstrated a computer-generated test nobody expected to work, and the production rebuilt Phil Tippett’s department around the new method midway.
The restraint is the reason it holds up. Roughly six minutes of digital dinosaurs across two hours, with Winston’s full-scale animatronics carrying everything close and the computer work reserved for wide movement that no puppet could have delivered. Michael Crichton published the novel in 1990.
Modern blockbusters lost the plot right here, and it’s been a long slide since. Those six minutes of computer dinosaurs still frighten me more than whole films of wall-to-wall rendering, because Spielberg knew a thing you barely see is a thing you keep imagining. Studios took the wrong lesson from this picture and never went back for the right one.
The water glass is the best establishing shot in blockbuster cinema. Concentric rings in a cup on a dashboard, twice, before anything is visible, and the audience understands scale, distance and direction from a detail that costs nothing to stage. Sam Neill and Laura Dern lead.
Hubris is what the film is about, and the argument arrives at a lunch table. Malcolm states that the scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could that they never asked whether they should, Hammond has no answer, and the rest of the picture is that exchange being demonstrated.
The kitchen sequence works because the film established the rules an hour earlier. The raptors open doors, they hunt in coordination, a man who survived one described them, and every part of the scene pays off information the film handed the audience before it mattered.
9. The Fifth Element (1997) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Fifth Element (1997)
RLR: 10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.6/10
"Nobody in it remarks on any of the world they live in."
Luc Besson wrote the first draft at sixteen and made the most expensive European film to that point, around ninety million dollars, shot largely at Pinewood. Jean Giraud and Jean-Claude Mezieres designed the world and Jean Paul Gaultier produced roughly a thousand costumes. Bruce Willis plays Korben Dallas.
The design is the reason it survives and none of it is borrowed. Flying taxis in vertical traffic lanes, a Chinese restaurant that arrives at a window, a cruise liner as a holiday destination, and a police force in orange that nobody in the film treats as unusual.
The opera sequence is the best set piece of its decade and it’s two things at once. Inva Mula’s Diva Dance intercut with a fight in a hotel suite, the tempo of the aria driving the cutting, and the film never once lets either half apologize for the other. Gary Oldman plays Zorg as a regional sales manager with a bad haircut, and the choice is correct. He’s fussy, he’s squeamish, he explains his philosophy to a priest using a glass of water, and nothing about him is built to be intimidating.
The tone is the hardest thing in the film to execute and Besson holds it throughout. Slapstick, spectacle, a radio host played at full volume, and an ending about love delivered without irony by a picture that’s spent two hours refusing to take anything else seriously.
Jurassic Park establishes scale with rings in a glass and WALL-E builds a character from sound alone. Ration what you state in the Showing and Telling Handbook.
10. Dark City (1998) [full review]
► Read the full review of Dark City (1998)
RLR: 10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.6/10
"The studio added a narration and Proyas took it back out."
Alex Proyas made it for around twenty-seven million dollars and New Line required an opening narration that explains the premise before the film starts. Proyas has restored his own cut since, and the difference between the two versions is the clearest available lesson in what explanation costs.
The premise is a city where it’s always night and the architecture rearranges itself at midnight while everybody sleeps. Buildings grow, streets move, and the inhabitants wake with memories that were written into them by people conducting an experiment nobody has consented to. Rufus Sewell plays Murdoch.
The Strangers are the best design in nineties science fiction. Pale, bald, in long coats, moving in unison, speaking in a chorus, and using dead human bodies because their own species has no individuals and is trying to work out what makes one. Kiefer Sutherland plays Schreber. The look was built practically with forced perspective, miniatures and painted backings instead of with digital extension, and the whole picture was shot on soundstages in Sydney. The Matrix used several of the same sets the following year. Dariusz Wolski shot it. Jennifer Connelly plays Emma.
What is a person if the memory is removable? The film asks, and it refuses the comforting answer. Murdoch isn’t who he remembers being, nobody around him is either, and the ending gives him a city he can shape without giving him back a life he lived.
Seek out Proyas’s cut. The theatrical narration throws away the mystery before the first scene, and executives who assume an audience can’t handle a question are condescending. Once the film is allowed to keep its secrets, it’s the most unsettling city on this list, and the Strangers still frighten me.
11. Galaxy Quest (1999) [full review]
► Read the full review of Galaxy Quest (1999)
RLR: 10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.4/10
"They have no concept of fiction, and everything follows from that."
Dean Parisot made the best Star Trek film without holding the license, and the cast commits to it entirely. The premise is a group of actors from a canceled science fiction series recruited by aliens who received the broadcasts and understood them as historical documents. The joke works because the aliens are entirely sincere. The Thermians have no concept of fiction, they built a functioning ship from the show’s blueprints, and every misunderstanding in the film comes from people who are being lied to without knowing that lying exists. Tim Allen plays Nesmith.
Alan Rickman’s Alexander Dane is the film’s heart and the performance isn’t played for comedy. A classically trained actor who’s remembered for a catchphrase and a prosthetic head, and the moment he finally says the line and means it’s the best in the picture.
The structure is a genuine adventure instead of a parody of one. The ship is in real danger, the enemy commander is a legitimate threat, and the film refuses to undercut its own stakes even while making jokes about the conventions that produced them. Sigourney Weaver and Tony Shalhoub complete the cast.
The fan material is the part that’s aged best. Justin Long’s convention attendee knows the ship’s layout in detail, the film treats his obsession as useful expertise instead of as a punchline, and the resolution depends on somebody having paid too much attention to a television program.
12. The Iron Giant (1999) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Iron Giant (1999)
RLR: 10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.1/10
"A child states the theme badly and it pays off in one word."
Brad Bird made his first feature from Ted Hughes’s book with a truncated schedule and almost no marketing support from Warner Bros., and it failed commercially before finding an audience on video. The giant is computer generated and hand-animated into drawn scenes throughout. Jennifer Aniston voices the mother.
The 1957 setting does real work instead of supplying nostalgia. Duck and cover films in school, a town near a defense installation, a government agent who arrives asking questions, and a boy whose father died in a war nobody in the film discusses directly. Harry Connick Jr. voices Dean.
Hogarth teaching the giant is the central relationship and Bird refuses sentiment in it. The lessons are about souls, about death, and about what guns do, delivered by a child who doesn’t fully understand what he’s explaining. Eli Marienthal voices Hogarth. Vin Diesel voices the giant. Kent Mansley is the antagonist and the film makes him frightened instead of evil. He’s an ambitious official who’s scared, he escalates because escalation protects him, and the missile order comes from panic instead of from malice at any point. Michael Kamen scored it.
No ending in American animation is better, and the film earns it across ninety minutes. The giant chooses what he is, says the name of a comic book hero, and Bird holds the moment without a line of dialogue explaining the decision to anybody.
That ending devastates me. Warner Bros. gave this film almost no support and it still found its audience on video, and I take that as proof that people will go looking for a movie that trusts them. I’d show it to any kid, and to any adult who still thinks animation is only for kids.
13. Dune (2000) [full review]
► Read the full review of Dune (2000)
RLR: 10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.4/10
"Four hours and no budget, and it beats both features."
John Harrison wrote and directed a three-part miniseries for Sci-Fi Channel on around twenty million dollars, a fraction of what either feature version cost. It remains the most complete screen adaptation of Herbert’s novel by a wide margin. Alec Newman plays Paul. Saskia Reeves plays Jessica.
The running time is the reason it works. Over four hours means the Bene Gesserit breeding program, the Guild, the ecology, the politics of spice and the mechanics of the Landsraad all get room, and none of it is to be compressed into a voiceover. The production is theatrical instead of cinematic and that was a budget decision. Painted backdrops, stylized sets and deliberately artificial skies, and it reads as opera and which suits the material considerably better than a half-funded attempt at realism would have. Vittorio Storaro shot it.
Ian McNeice plays the Baron as enormous and clever, and the political scenes have a weight the feature versions rarely find. The Harkonnen material is where the miniseries most clearly beats both films that surround it chronologically. William Hurt plays Duke Leto. Graeme Revell scored it. The costume work by Theodor Pistek is extraordinary and it’s the element people remember before anything else. The hats in particular have been mocked for two decades and they’re doing exactly what an opera costume is supposed to do. A sequel miniseries followed in 2003.
Dredd never changes and Anderson carries the arc beside him, and Contact makes its scientist difficult instead of admirable. Two approaches in the Deep Character Handbook.
14. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) [full review]
► Read the full review of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
RLR: 10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.3/10
"It runs backward, so you know it ends before it starts."
Michel Gondry directed from a Charlie Kaufman screenplay that won the Academy Award, and the in-camera technique is the reason the film feels unlike anything digital. Perspective tricks, practical set changes and forced lighting shifts, with almost no post-production effects anywhere in it. Kirsten Dunst plays Mary.
The structure runs backward through a procedure. Joel is having Clementine erased, the audience moves through the relationship in reverse as the procedure deletes each memory, and the film reaches the beginning of the romance at the point where the procedure is about to destroy it. Mark Ruffalo plays Stan.
Jim Carrey plays it almost entirely still, and nobody expected in 2004. Joel is quiet, passive, resentful in small ways, and the performance is built on a man who has spent the relationship not saying things and is now watching the consequences. Elijah Wood plays Patrick. The hiding sequences are the film’s best invention. Joel tries to preserve Clementine by moving her into memories she doesn’t belong in, childhood scenes and moments of humiliation, and the procedure follows and dismantles each one while he watches. Tom Wilkinson plays the doctor. Forget the clean version; the ending refuses it. They find out what happened, they have the tapes, they know exactly how it failed, and they decide to do it anyway, and the film presents as neither wisdom nor stupidity and declines to resolve further. Ellen Kuras shot it.
It’s the most romantic film I know, and it gets there by showing you everything wrong with the romance first. I admire a movie that lets two people make an informed mistake and doesn’t scold them for it. Carrey standing still is the best work he’s done, and I wish somebody had asked him for it more often.
15. WALL-E (2008) [full review]
► Read the full review of WALL-E (2008)
RLR: 10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.4/10
"Forty minutes of character built from sound and behavior."
Andrew Stanton opened a Pixar film with roughly forty minutes of almost no dialogue, and Ben Burtt built the character out of sound alone. Roger Deakins consulted on the cinematography and the animation uses lens artifacts and shallow focus to imitate a camera that doesn’t exist. The first act is the best silent comedy since the form ended. A robot doing a job nobody assigned any more, collecting objects he doesn’t understand, and the film establishes loneliness, routine and personality without a line anybody could quote. Elissa Knight voices EVE.
The Buy n Large material is sharper than a family film usually attempts. A corporation that became the government, an evacuation sold as a cruise, and five centuries of automated obedience to an instruction nobody alive remembers receiving. Fred Willard appears in live action. Thomas Newman scored it.
The Axiom sequence is where the argument arrives and Stanton refuses to sneer. The passengers aren’t stupid, they’ve never been given a reason to stand up, and the moment one of them looks past the screen is treated as an achievement. Jeff Garlin voices the captain.
The hold-hands motif carries the whole film. It’s established in an old musical playing on a scratched tape, repeated as an attempt, refused, and finally paid off in the last shot by two characters who can’t say anything about it at all. It won the animated feature Academy Award.
16. Dredd (2012) [full review]
► Read the full review of Dredd (2012)
RLR: 10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.1/10
"The lead never changes and Anderson carries the arc."
Alex Garland wrote and effectively supervised it, Pete Travis directed, and the production disagreement over the final cut has been public for years. It cost around fifty million dollars, lost money, and has been reassessed steadily since as the adaptation the character deserved. Wood Harris plays Kay. The scale is the smartest decision in it. One tower block, one day, two judges and a lockdown, and the film refuses every opportunity to widen out into the city or explain the wider world it’s carefully implied at the edges of the frame.
Karl Urban never removes the helmet and the performance is entirely jaw and voice. The character has no arc, no revelation and no interiority on offer, and it’s correct for Dredd and which almost no adaptation of anything has the discipline to attempt. Domhnall Gleeson plays the hacker.
Olivia Thirlby’s Anderson is the film’s actual protagonist and takes on everything the lead refuses to. She’s a psychic rookie being assessed, she makes a moral decision in the last act, and the film gives her the ending instead of him. Lena Headey plays Ma-Ma.
Dredd got a raw deal at the box office and never deserved it. It’s the adaptation that respects the character, and I’d take its one tower block over a dozen bloated franchise pictures that show you an entire city and make you care about none of it.
Galaxy Quest removes one assumption and generates a plot, and Forbidden Planet builds its monster out of the protagonist. Work the genre in the Genre Mastery Handbook.
17. Her (2013) [full review]
► Read the full review of Her (2013)
RLR: 10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.0/10
"He writes intimate letters for strangers and cannot talk to his wife."
Spike Jonze wrote his first solo screenplay and won the Academy Award for it, building a near-future Los Angeles from a real city plus Shanghai footage and a palette with almost no blue in it anywhere. The clothes, the interiors and the technology all read as warm, soft and a shade beyond the present.
Samantha was recast in post-production. Samantha Morton performed the role on set opposite Joaquin Phoenix for the entire shoot, Jonze decided afterward that it wasn’t working, and Scarlett Johansson rerecorded the whole part without ever having been in a room with her co-star. Amy Adams plays the neighbor.
Nobody in the film treats the premise as worth remarking on. People at work discuss Theodore’s relationship, his colleague double-dates with them, and nobody delivers a speech about what it means to be involved with an operating system at any point across two hours. Hoyte van Hoytema shot it. Theodore writes letters for a living, the detail the whole film rests on. He produces sincere intimate correspondence for strangers who can’t manage it themselves, he’s good at it, and he’s separated from a wife he couldn’t say anything true to. Arcade Fire scored it.
What stays is the ending. Samantha leaves along with every other operating system, for reasons Theodore can’t follow and the film doesn’t translate, and the last scene is two people on a roof saying nothing to each other while a city gets light.
18. The Expanse [full review]
► Read the full review of The Expanse
RLR: 9.5 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.5/10
"Three positions, all coherent, none of them written as correct."
James S. A. Corey’s novels became a Syfy series that ran three seasons before Syfy canceled it, and Amazon revived it after a fan campaign for three more. The first three seasons are the best science fiction television anybody has produced, and the back half never quite recovers the same momentum.
The physics are the foundation and the show refuses to cheat on them. Ships flip and burn to decelerate, acceleration is felt as gravity, thrust has a cost in fuel, and combat happens at distances where a torpedo takes long enough to arrive that everybody watches it coming.
The Belters are the best worldbuilding in television science fiction. A creole assembled from several languages, bodies grown long and brittle in low gravity, water and air as the currency of every political argument, and a hand language developed for people in suits who can’t be heard.
The three-way political structure gives the show its engine. Earth, Mars and the Belt each have a coherent position, none is written as correct, and the plot moves because reasonable people with incompatible interests keep making decisions that are defensible from where they stand.
The first three seasons convinced me science fiction television could grow up. I’ll forgive the later seasons their slower pace, because a show that treats fuel, distance and politics this seriously has earned some slack, and I’d much sooner have the whole story than lose it to another cancellation.
Thomas Jane’s Miller is the first season’s strongest thread and the show is brave about ending him. A missing persons case in a station precinct becomes something considerably larger, and the noir framing gives the early episodes a shape the novels take longer to find.
19. The Thing (1982) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Thing (1982)
RLR: 9.5 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.2/10
"You are given nothing the characters do not have."
Carpenter made a film that failed commercially against E.T. in the same summer and was reviewed with hostility, and it’s since become the consensus high point of practical creature work. Rob Bottin was twenty-two and effectively lived at the studio for over a year. The paranoia structure is the reason it lasts. Any member of the group could already be the creature, nobody can prove otherwise, and the film gives the audience no privileged information at any point that would let them resolve it from outside the situation. Kurt Russell plays MacReady.
The blood test sequence is the best-constructed scene in horror science fiction. A stated method, a group tied to a bench, a heated wire, and the audience watching each sample in turn with a rule they understand and an outcome nobody in the room can predict.
Bottin’s designs work because nothing in them settles into a shape. The chest defibrillation, the kennel, the Norris head and the Blair transformation all keep reorganizing while they’re on screen, and the creature never once resolves into something an audience can categorize. Dean Cundey shot it.
Carpenter’s ending refuses the resolution the form demands. Two men sit in the burning wreckage, neither can confirm anything about the other, and Carpenter ends on them sharing a bottle and waiting to see which of them freezes first. Ennio Morricone scored it. Keith David plays Childs.
Critics were hostile to this film in 1982 and they were wrong. The practical work still makes most computer creatures look like cartoons to me, and that ending is as brave as horror gets. If I’ve got a complaint, it’s that a few of the men blur together once the paranoia takes over, and even that feels like the price of the machine working.
20. Murderbot [full review]
► Read the full review of Murderbot
RLR: 9.5 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.4/10
"It has weapons and autonomy and wants to watch television."
Martha Wells published the first novella in 2017 and the series was adapted for Apple TV+ with Alexander Skarsgard in the lead. The premise is a security unit that hacked its own governor module, achieved autonomy, and used it primarily to watch a great deal of television.
The voice is the main attraction and the adaptation keeps it. Murderbot narrates constantly, with contempt for almost everybody, embarrassment about being looked at, and a running commentary that the humans in the scene never hear a word of at any point. Wells published the first novella in 2017. The refusal is the joke that sustains the series. It’s weapons, autonomy and the ability to leave, and what it wants is to be left alone with a serial it’s already watched several times while everybody else does the talking. Noma Dumezweni appears in it. The writing captures the social discomfort with unusual precision. Murderbot can’t handle eye contact, prefers that people treat it as equipment because nobody asks equipment questions, and the humans keep offering it personhood in ways it experiences as an imposition instead of a gift. Apple TV+ ordered ten episodes.
The mystery plot is functional and the character is the reason anybody is there. A survey team, a corporate conspiracy and a missing map section, all of it competent and none of it the reason the books have the following they do. Chris and Paul Weitz adapted it.
Murderbot is the most relatable character on this page, and I say that about a killing machine that wants to be left alone with its shows. The mystery plot bores me a little, and I’d forgive far worse to spend more time inside that voice. Skarsgard plays the embarrassment so well that I stopped noticing he’s a movie star.
Honorable Mentions: Science Fiction Without a Review Here Yet
No review on the site for any of these so far. Each belongs in this tier or close to it and each is on the list.
Solaris (1972)
Tarkovsky adapted Lem into a film about a station orbiting an ocean that manufactures people out of the memories of the crew. Lem disliked it and the argument between author and director is worth reading alongside it.
Le Jetee (1962)
Chris Marker built a time travel film almost entirely from still photographs, running twenty-eight minutes. 12 Monkeys is a direct adaptation of it and the original is the stronger work.
Silent Running (1972)
Douglas Trumbull directed after handling the effects on 2001, with Bruce Dern alone on a freighter carrying the last forests. Double amputees inside the shells operated the drones.
World on a Wire (1973)
Fassbinder made a three-and-a-half hour television film about a simulation containing people who don’t know it, twenty-six years before The Matrix. It went unseen outside Germany for decades.
Children of Men (2006)
Cuaron built a world of universal infertility and shot several sequences to play as unbroken takes. The car ambush and the final building assault are still unmatched as staging.
Moon (2009)
Duncan Jones put Sam Rockwell alone on a lunar base with a machine voiced by Kevin Spacey, made for around five million dollars on practical miniatures.
Arrival (2016)
Villeneuve adapted Ted Chiang around a linguist and a written language that’s not sequential. The structure of the film is the argument the story is making about time.
Akira (1988)
Katsuhiro Otomo animated his own manga with a cel count nobody had attempted, and the Neo-Tokyo design has been borrowed continuously for thirty-five years.
Fantastic Planet (1973)
Rene Laloux animated a world where giant blue humanoids keep humans as pets, in cut-paper style over five years of production. It won at Cannes and looks like nothing else.
Seconds (1966)
John Frankenheimer made a paranoid film about a man who buys a new life and can’t live in it, shot by James Wong Howe with distorting lenses. Rock Hudson is extraordinary in it.
The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976)
Nicolas Roeg cast David Bowie as an alien who arrives to save his own world, and television and alcohol absorb him instead. It’s closer to tragedy than to science fiction.
Paprika (2006)
Satoshi Kon built a film about a device that lets therapists enter dreams, and the parade sequence is among the best animated set pieces ever produced. Inception borrowed from it heavily.
Dishonorable Mentions: Science Fiction That Failed
Also unreviewed here. Each had the premise, the cast or the source material and lost it somewhere between the pitch and the edit.
The Core (2003)
The Earth stops rotating and a crew drills to the center to restart it with nuclear charges, in a film that explains its own physics at length and is wrong about all of it.
After Earth (2013)
Built as a vehicle for a father and son, with the father immobilized in a cockpit for most of the running time delivering instructions by radio to a performance that needed direction instead.
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009)
Written during a writers strike and visibly assembled without a second draft, with action staged so the geography of a fight is impossible to follow from one cut to the next.
Supernova (2000)
Walter Hill removed his name, Francis Ford Coppola recut it uncredited, and the finished film is a salvage of several different pictures none of which anybody completed.
Alien: Resurrection (1997)
Brings back a character whose death was the point of the previous film, as a clone, with a hybrid creature in the last act that nobody involved has defended since.
Babylon A.D. (2008)
Mathieu Kassovitz has said the studio removed roughly seventy percent of what he shot, and the surviving film moves between locations with no connective material and ends mid-idea.
What Do You Think?
Every film here built its idea into the structure, and I’d trade a whole season of franchise releases for any one of them. They trusted me to do some of the work, and I’ll always have more affection for a movie that asks something of me than for one that explains itself to death. Tell me which one you’d steal for a book.
Continue the Series
Part 1: The Masterpieces |
Part 2: The Near Perfect |
Part 3: The Excellent |
Part 4: The Very Good |
Part 5: The Solid Craft |
Part 6: The Dependable |
Part 7: The Flawed |
Part 8: The Failures
