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.

As the millennium was about to turn, The Matrix arrived in theaters like a speeding bullet--or maybe a very slow-moving one, filmed with the then-novel extreme-slo-mo special effect that would become known as "bullet time." Digital technology played a much smaller role in most people's lives in 1999. The internet was still a novelty, used by most people mainly for sending and receiving email. Smartphones were nonexistent, music was still mainly listened to on CD, and Netflix was a two-year-old company primarily in the business of mailing movies on DVD to people's houses. The idea that all of humanity was trapped in a simulation, our physical bodies parked in life-sustaining pods while our daily lives unfolded in a virtual space run by distant evil overlords, still sounded like a cool science-fiction metaphor, not a description of banal everyday reality.

In the 1980s the fantasy genre achieved unprecedented popularity with the release of films such as Labyrinth, The NeverEnding Story, Ladyhawke, and Time Bandits. Science fiction author Matthew Kressel says he loves watching classic fantasy movies like Krull, in spite of the slow pacing and dated special effects. "I know it's really cheesy, and corny at parts, but there's something about the world of that film that draws me in every time," Kressel says in Episode 486 of the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast. "I watched that movie with my cousin, who's no longer alive, and I have an emotional attachment to it. Every time I watch it, I'm back as a kid in that theater watching it." Humor writer Tom Gerencer says that for adults who grew up in the '80s, nothing can compare to the magic of watching Heavy Metal or Highlander.

Earlier this year, videos of Tom Cruise started popping up on TikTok of the actor doing some surprisingly un-Tom-Cruise-like stuff: goofing around in an upscale men's clothing store; showing off a coin trick; growling playfully during a short rendition of Dave Matthews Band's "Crash Into Me." In one video, he bites into a lollipop and is amazed to find gum in the center. "Mmmmm," he says to the camera. How come nobody ever told me there's bubblegum? The 10 videos, which were posted between February and June, featured an artificial intelligence-generated doppelganger meant to look and sound like him.

What King Kong in all its remakes can teach us about AI strategy for business. Why you need a diversity of thinking, including sceptics, and why learning about AI and its implications is a survival hint for the adventure. I am old enough to remember, when the 1976 version was the NEW King Kong and we all marveled at the advances in special effects since the original 1933 classic. Of course the new, new version (15 years old already) takes another technological leap forward. What I find captivating about King Kong, however, is not its special effects.

When watching a film, you may be the sort of person who immerses themselves in the story and special effects with a view to a couple of hours of escapism. Or, perhaps like me, you are the type who wants to work out what is real and what is computer generated imagery (CGI) and how realistic it really is. Either way, filmmakers continue to push the boundaries to improve the quality and variety of the special effects they deliver with the purpose of enhancing the audience experience and keep us coming back to the box-office. Films are now leaving the studio and the location shoot and moving in a steady stream towards the data center. The latest wave of technology seeing adoption includes areas such as Machine Learning and Deep Learning, which are all subcategories of artificial intelligence (AI).

After a while, we just created a layout of the scene and took it from there." It's a simple story to follow, and most of the action takes place right in front of you. The viewer is free, however, to look elsewhere, and if you're using the Spotlight Stories app, the movie will adapt accordingly. If you look at the musicians, for instance, the main action -- Méliès and his wife -- will wait off-screen until you turn your head back. That's possible because of some special Google software called the Spotlight Stories Editor, which allows for nodal-based logic, similar to what's used in a video game. "It's immersive theater much more than it is a film." Mark Davies, a CG supervisor at Nexus Studios, says it works like punch-drunk-style theater. "It's immersive theater much more than it is a film," he said. "Because the actor is there, and if they see that you're staring at the floor, the ceiling or something else, they'll wait for you to turn around, and go, 'Oh, yes, I can begin acting again.'"

Berlin startup Spil.ly had a problem last spring. The company was developing an augmented-reality app akin to a full-body version of Snapchat's selfie filters--hold up your phone and see your friends' bodies transformed with special effects like fur or flames. To make it work, Spil.ly needed to train machine-learning algorithms to closely track human bodies in video. But the scrappy startup didn't have the resources to collect the tens or hundreds of thousands of hand-labeled images typically needed to teach algorithms in such projects. "It's really hard being a startup in AI, we couldn't afford to pay for that much data," says CTO Max Schneider. Spil.ly's engineers began creating their own labeled images to train the algorithms, by adapting techniques used to make movie and videogame graphics.

Inside an old Palo Alto auto body shop, Stefan Avalos pushed a movie camera down a dolly track. He and a small crew were making a short film about self-driving cars. They were shooting a powder-blue 1962 Austin Mini, but through special effects the rusted relic would be transformed into an autonomous vehicle that looked more like the DeLorean from "Back to the Future." Stepping back from the camera, Avalos referred wryly to the movie he was filming as "Project Unemployment." The film was a way of testing new technology from a startup called Arraiy, which is trying to automate the creation of digital effects for movies, television and games.

Computer scientists at the University of California, San Diego, and UC Berkeley devised a way to make animals in movies and video games more realistic by improving the look of computer-generated fur. It might not sound like much but the researchers call photorealistic fur a "holy grail" of computer graphics. "Creating photorealistic … characters has long been one of the holy grails of computer graphics in film production, virtual reality, and for predictive design," Ravi Ramamoorthi, a professor of computer science at UC San Diego, who worked on the project, told Digital Trends. "Realistic rendering of animal fur is a key aspect to creating believable animal characters in special effects, movies, or augmented reality." To do so, they leveraged artificial intelligence to better reflect the way light bounces between the fur of an animal pelt, which has a surprisingly significant effect on realism.