TJĬast: George Clooney, Natascha McElhone, Jeremy Davies Young Lucas evidently believed in heroic individualism, fast cars and the possibility of escape, yet it’s the visualisation of an entire society shaped by universal surveillance, government-supplied sedatives and android police carrying very big sticks which rings darker and truer than the director’s subsequent, significantly more populist output. Viewed today – the only version available is Lucas and co-writer Walter Murch’s digitally spruced-up 2004 ‘Director’s Cut’ – its shaven headed-cast, chillingly benign language intoning state propaganda and oppressive widescreen palette of glacial whites make for genuinely unnerving viewing. The studio hated the result and the subsequent box-office debacle almost killed both their careers.

George Lucas and his pal Francis Ford Coppola persuaded Warner Brothers to take a flyer on expanding George’s earlier student short into this Orwell and Huxley-influenced fable about free love and free will versus all-powerful totalitarianism. 🧨 The 101 best action movies of all-timeĬast: Robert Duvall, Donald Pleasence, Maggie McOmie 🦄 The 50 best fantasy movies of all-time 👽 The best sci-fi shows streaming on Netflix

As a result, it’s a list that crisscrosses the sci-fi universe, from Tatooine to Arrakis, Metropolis to Los Angeles circa, uh, 2019.

To that end, in order to put together our list of the 100 best sci-fi movies ever made, we asked a wide-ranging panel of experts, from Nobel Prize-winning geneticist Sir Paul Nurse to Oscar-decorated film director Guillermo del Toro to Game of Thrones creator George RR Martin, along with a few regular old Time Out writers. In the end, though, the sci-fi that sticks out in popular consciousness is the stuff that deals with themes and issues anyone can relate to, not just the geeks writing 4,000-word theoretical treatises on fan forums. Sure, there may also be some convoluted time-travel involved, or fantastical technology, or odd creatures that are either benevolent or mean as hell. The only difference is that it might invent an entirely different world to do so. The best sci-fi films do what any good movie should do, and that’s tell us something about ourselves and the world around us. Science fiction isn’t just for nerds anymore.

100 best movies 2017