The Best Sci-Fi Movies Everyone Should Watch Once

Aliens, astronauts, time travel--you name it, there's a dazzling sci-fi film about it. That makes compiling a list of the best sci-fi nearly impossible. It's almost impossible to know where to start--or where to stop. To understand where sci-fi films came from, you need to head back to the dawn of the cinema age. Right at the beginning, Metropolis, released in 1927, used groundbreaking visuals to create a reference point for all future urban dystopias--it's no fluke, for example, that the aesthetic of Blade Runner bears more than a passing resemblance to Fritz Lang's prophetic city hellscape. Then along came War of the Worlds (1953), a gripping tale of alien invasion adapted from H. G. Wells' classic novel. In 1964, Dr. Strangelove did more than most films before or since to ossify the fear of a nuclear holocaust. Below is WIRED's ever-evolving selection of the sci-fi movies everyone should watch, from the obscure to the hugely influential. You may also enjoy our guides to the best sci-fi books of all time and the best space movies. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from. When Alfonso Cuarón wrote the screenplay for Gravity, he wasn't setting out to make a film about space itself. Rather, he was interested in exploring the concepts of adversity and human resilience, with space as a secondary background. But it was hard for audiences to not be wowed by the visuals in this Oscar-winning film about two scientists (George Clooney and Sandra Bullock) who find themselves stranded in space, and what they must endure in order to get safely back to Earth.