We are now in the year of 2024, for better or worse, which means there are entire adults with college degrees who have existed only and solely in the twenty-first century. And while there is nothing wrong with that (although, sorry, kids, I wish we had made a better century for you), it does mean there is a whole generation of people for whom “the 1900s” are a distant land, which includes its art, music, books, and films.
And you know what? Unless it is literally your job or classroom assignment to dig into the history of art and entertainment, I think it’s fine if you (initially) pull a blank face on creative work that existed before you did. Every new generation prioritizes its own art and culture and entertainment and the generation of artists who have come up concurrently with them. The entertainment industry also has a vested interest in having you buy shiny new things. There’s also the fact that when it comes to the science fiction films of the twenty-first century, some of the best films in the genre have been made inside its borders, including Arrival, Inception, Everything Everywhere All at Once, Fury Road, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Children of Men, and The Shape of Water to name just a few. There’s been enough to keep serious devotees of form busy and critically thinking about the field without having to cross the century line.
With that said, one’s understanding of most things in life is richer and better when one knows the history of it. The same holds for science fiction film: there are certain films made in the twentieth century whose ideas and innovations acted as starter yeast for the genre, and whose influence on the field are still being felt today. Today I would like to highlight some of these films in a “starter pack,” if you will, for interested folks.
If you are under the age of thirty, these are films that you have almost certainly heard of or seen written about. For this exercise I am not trying to drop in relatively obscure but still significant twentieth-century science fiction films (if you want that, however, try Alphaville, Solaris, Colossus: The Forbin Project, On the Beach, and Brother From Another Planet. Enjoy). Nor it is a complete list—it’s called a “starter pack,” for a reason, and the column has to end at some point.
What this is about is giving some context as to why these films continue to echo far and wide in the genre, and why they are worth seeing by anyone, younger or older, who wants a more complete grounding in the cinema of science fiction.
In chronological order:
Metropolis (1927, Dir. Fritz Lang): Metropolis was not the first science fiction film by a long shot, nor even the first feature-length science fiction film (that’s generally agreed to be the 1918 Danish film Himmelskibet). It is the earliest science fiction film with cultural staying power, however, thanks to its pioneering set design with its soaring cityscape, innovative special effects, and the enduring theme of a dystopian society divided between the haves and the have-nots. Funded with a blockbuster-sized budget for the time, it also achieved a level of spectacle that is common in the genre now, but would become rarer in science fiction for decades, as Hollywood in particular relegated the genre to serials and B-movies.
Cinematic descendants: Blade Runner 2049, Snowpiercer, AI: Artificial Intelligence
Frankenstein (1931, Dir. James Whale): The famous 1931 Universal version of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s novel popularized a number of important science fiction tropes, from scientists—full of hubris or not—delving into forces they do not fully understand, created creatures rebelling against their creators, and of course the interest and motivations of the creatures themselves being misunderstood by, well, everyone. Also, more generally, Frankenstein, with Universal’s Dracula released in the same year, launched one of the most durable of all science fiction genres: the monster movie.
(PS: Frankenstein is significant, but 1935’s Bride of Frankenstein is the better movie, not only in terms of story but in terms of technical and cinematic innovations, many of the latter of which carried over into future science fiction films. See them both!)
Cinematic descendants:Ex Machina, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, The Shape of Water
Godzilla (1954, Dir. Ishirō Honda): Yes, Godzilla launched the science fiction subgenre of kaiju films into the cinematic stratosphere, a subgenre that is still very much alive and kicking (over skyscrapers) here in 2024, including in films featuring Godzilla himself. But there is an equally significant way that Godzilla is a pioneer: it (the original Japanese version, slightly less the re-cut US version which stuffed in Raymond Burr as an Explainer-to-Americans) is one of the very first films to concretely address the anxiety that the world was beginning to feel about nuclear power.
Godzilla wasn’t the only monster film of its year to feature creatures unleashed by nuclear power—Them! in the United States played with the same topic in the same year—but the subtext between those two films, the first created by a country that the second country used nuclear bombs on, could not be starker. Other science fiction films would borrow the theme of nuclear anxiety, with or without huge monsters, but Godzilla was the one to stomp down the floodgates.
Cinematic descendants:Cloverfield, Pacific Rim, Fury Road, and, you know, all those Godzilla films (but especially Godzilla Minus One)
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968, Dir. Stanley Kubrick): Stanley Kubrick, unquestionably one of the great film directors of all time, whose films run an extremely wide gamut of themes and concerns, was given an Academy Award only once, for this film, for Best Visual Effects. Now, an Oscar is an Oscar is an Oscar, but there are many who consider this single award to be a slight to Kubrick.
It’s not. With this film, and in no small part due to its visual effects, which were startlingly realistic until they startlingly were not, the field of science fiction went from a budgetary and creative afterthought for film companies—something mostly to shove out on the cheap to bored teens on a date—to prestige cinema that could compete on an equal level with anything cinema had to offer. It was science fiction cinema that you did not have to rationalize attending. Visual effects were not the only category the film competed in at the Oscars: Kubrick also received directing and screenplay nods (the second shared with Arthur C. Clarke), and the film was also noted for Art Direction.
Along with the establishment of Prestige Science Fiction, Kubrick and Clarke cemented the trope of the Immensely Advanced Alien—not the first to do it (The Day the Earth Stood Still is an earlier popular example), but the one to present it in a way that stuck moving forward.
Cinematic descendants:Arrival, Inception, The Martian
Star Wars (1977, Dir. George Lucas):Star Wars is immense in so many ways, so for this exercise I am going to focus on one:
It’s fair to say no one expected Star Wars to be a smash, something that in retrospect is evident by the fact that 20th Century Fox thought that giving George Lucas the merchandising rights in exchange for a cut to his director’s fee was a good deal. It was not, although the flip side of this is it’s likely that at the time the Star Wars universe would not have been as assiduously developed through the merchandising side of things if it were tied specifically to movies.
It was through this merchandising as much as anything else that the modern concept of the “movie franchise” was born through Star Wars. Movie series are as old as the movies themselves, and movie companies have never been shy in spinning off product to suck up the cash. But Star Wars supercharged the concept, along with solidifying the concept of the Summer Blockbuster that Lucas’s friend Steven Spielberg pioneered a couple of summers earlier with Jaws.
“But what does franchising have to do with science fiction per se?” Simply this: the absolutely immense flood of money that established science fiction (and fantasy!) film as a vital part of the cinematic ecosystem exploded with Star Wars, and the merchandising aftereffects of it spill out in ways that keep the economic engine of more than one industry chugging along.
Cinematic descendants:Dune, Avatar, Transformers
Superman (1978, Dir. Richard Donner): The modern superhero film gets its start with this blockbuster take on the Man of Steel, with Christopher Reeve still definitive as Superman, Gene Hackman as the genial villain Lex Luthor, and Margot Kidder as the scrappy and quippy Lois Lane. Director Richard Donner and his screenwriters nail the superhero formula right from the start: a relatable hero, an antagonist who is the equal to the hero and possibly more fun to watch, a world that feels real rather than trapped on a sound stage, high stakes, and a zippy plot filled with humor as much as (if not more than) the film is filled with special effects, of which there should be a lot, and eye-popping to boot. Superman itself was so proud of its special effects technology that the film’s tagline was “You’ll Believe a Man Can Fly.”
While all modern superhero films offer a significant debt to Superman, there is no little irony that the film company who at least initially took its lessons to heart the best was not Warner Bros., which owns DC comics (home of Superman, Batman, and Aquaman among others), but Marvel Studios—since 2009 owned by Disney—who offers the competing comics slate of Spider-Man, Iron Man, and Captain America among many many many others. It will be very interesting to see how Marvel veteran James Gunn’s upcoming take on Superman will pan out.
Cinematic descendants: (Waves vaguely at every single superhero film since 2005’s Batman Begins)
E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982, Dir. Steven Spielberg): It’s hard to explain to people who weren’t there at the time what the cultural impact of E.T. was in the moment, but the way I might try is: take all the intense fan feeling associated with the Lord of the Rings movies, or with Taylor Swift’s long-running musical hegemony, and squish it down into one single film. That’s what it felt like, especially if you were the target audience of pre-teens (and the parents who had to go to the theater with them, again and again and again).
Science fiction films had previously been films you could bring a whole family to, but only rarely had been “family films”; Disney had a clutch of live-action films in the ’60s and ’70s like Flubber and The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes, but they were only incidentally science fiction, and Disney’s 1979 Star Wars-cash-in attempt, The Black Hole, was squarely aimed at older audiences, evidenced by the film being Disney’s first “PG”-rated film.
E.T. (also rated “PG” since it had kids talking like actual kids, i.e., swearing) served notice to Hollywood and everyone else that, as the saying goes, “The golden age of science fiction is twelve.” It’s a lesson that Hollywood has been remembering ever since, particularly Disney and all the other studios making animated movies.
Cinematic descendants: Wall-E, Lilo & Stitch, The Mitchells vs. The Machines
Akira (1988, Dir. Katsuhiro Otomo): Manga and anime had been around for decades, but in the United States, at least, it took Akira to cross over on the cinematic level. Dystopic, beautiful to look at, and undeniably weird all the way through, Akria is influential both as a whole experience and also in its specific moments (the “Akira slide” is to visual cinematic tropes what the “Wilhelm scream” is to cinematic audio) and cemented the anime aesthetic as part of cinematic science fiction’s visual grammar.
Cinematic descendants: Ghost in the Shell, Alita: Battle Angel, Ready Player One
The Matrix (1999, Dirs. Lana & Lilly Wachowski): Our final entry into the starter pack is not only a stunning summation of science fictional cinematic influences to that point—in The Matrix you can see Metropolis, Frankenstein, 2001, Superman, and Akira for starters—it then adds its own newness to the genre: a kinetic experience that owes more to Hong Kong than Hollywood, a visual aesthetic that plays with color grading and intentionally overt computer graphics in a way that previous science fiction films had not, and a philosophical look at the very nature of reality, and how it’s mediated by technology. That, and an inherent queerness to the film that has only become more obvious over the years, and in the continuation of the series into the twenty-first century.
Cinematic descendants:Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Everything Everywhere All at Once, Minority Report
“Yes but what about [insert unmentioned but incredibly significant science fiction film from the twentieth century here]?!?” Well, see. This is an invitation for you to offer up your own Starter Pack, too. Drop in Blade Runner or Planet of the Apes or Close Encounters or Alphaville or whatever you like. Then share why it mattered and what films it influenced. I believe in you!
© 2024 John Scalzi
John Scalzi is a former full-time film journalist and critic, reviewing thousands of films and interviewing filmmakers and stars like Harrison Ford, Samuel L. Jackson, John Woo, Quentin Tarantino, Gale Anne Hurd, and many others. He is the author of two books on film: The Rough Guide to Scifi Film (Rough Guides) and 24 Frames Into the Future: Scalzi on Science Fiction Films (NESFA Press).
Additionally, Scalzi writes the occasional novel, the most recent being Starter Villain (Tor). He lives in Ohio with his family.