Science fiction films are most often noted for their technical aspects. Since they often are set in fantastic worlds or feature inhuman characters, it’s only natural that they would serve as ideal showcases for visual effects, makeup, costuming, or any number of other visual crafts. However, all of that hard work would be for nothing if the story and characters were weak. As with every genre, the best sci-fi movies start with the script.
The best-written sci-fi movies cover a wide spectrum of the genre, from the most fantastical fiction to those more grounded in reality. No matter the setting, they all feature sharp dialogue, clever plotting, and indelible characters. These are ten of the most perfectly written science fiction films, masterpieces of storytelling that have come to define the genre.
10
‘The Martian’ (2015)
Andy Weir‘s debut best-selling novel, The Martian, balanced humor with hard science, never letting the technical details override the human element of the story. That balance was maintained in the fairly faithful film adaptation written by Drew Goddard. Part of its success was in Matt Damon‘s charismatic lead performance, but Goddard’s script never let him, or the rest of the star-studded cast, down. Following Damon as an astronaut stranded on the red planet, the script is smartly paced between his solo fight for survival and the team efforts of NASA back on Earth.
Using video logs as a way to visualize the many journal entries of the lead character from the novel allows Damon to flex his comedic muscles and gives him plenty of room to endear himself to the audience, involving them in his fight to survive. The film also generally avoids dumbing down the novel’s dense scientific jargon, which actually helps ground the narrative rather than make it inaccessible. It’s only in the film’s climax that it takes a more typical Hollywood approach, as Damon’s character is finally saved from the planet, but by that point, it has more than earned it.
9
‘Nope’ (2022)
In each of the three feature films he has written and directed, Jordan Peele has found ways to ingeniously subvert genre formulas while adding layers of social commentary. His grand sci-fi horror film, Nope, uses an alien antagonist to tell a story of spectacle and exploitation laid over a more personal one of family tragedy and connection. It features Peele’s characteristic use of allegory and symbolism woven through a boldly entertaining blockbuster.
Set in the desert of Southern California, the film follows a pair of siblings whose struggling ranch finds a potential new revenue stream when an unidentified flying object begins stalking the surrounding skies. As they become obsessed with capturing an image of the creature, Peele slowly builds his narrative around the very real history of exploitation in the entertainment industry. The most harrowing sequence sees the aftermath of a trained chimpanzee’s rampage on a television set. Nope is another incredible elevation of genre by one of the most exciting voices currently working in Hollywood.
8
‘The Matrix’ (1999)
For The Matrix, the Wachowskis combined a dozen disparate influences, from Hong Kong action cinema to Simulacra and Simulation, to craft one of the most iconic original action films of the 20th century. The film, and its script, wear their influences on their leather-clad sleeves, but manage to coalesce all of them into one cohesive vision of a dystopian future where man and machine wage war against one another.
The Matrix is set in a world where contemporary reality is all a simulation designed by machine overlords to keep humanity subjugated and used as an energy source. While that premise is not wholly original, the Wachowskis cleverly use it to explain their characters’ superhuman abilities. In between bouts of kung fu fighting and balletic gunplay, the movie dips its toe into some philosophical pondering, but it is all made easily digestible and never once drags the pacing. It’s masterful world-building, and even if the sequels never took advantage of that potential, The Matrix is still a towering achievement.
7
‘Back to the Future’ (1985)
Back to the Future uses the concept of time travel not to tell some ambitious sci-fi story about its consequences, but instead to tell an intimate, familial one. Co-writer Bob Gale got the initial inspiration for the film’s script after going through his father’s high school yearbook and wondering whether he would have gotten along with his father if they had gone to school together. With Robert Zemeckis, the two collaborators developed the idea into an indelible teen comedy.
While the initial script went through many drafts and changes — the original concept for the film’s iconic time machine was a refrigerator — the final version sees too-cool-for-school Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) transported back to 1955 in Doc Brown’s (Christopher Lloyd) DeLorean, where he inadvertently comes between his parents’ budding romance. The script is a textbook example of set-up and payoff, and while the film’s ultimate success came from a series of minor miracles after many setbacks, it remains one of the most perfectly constructed sci-fi comedies of all time.
6
‘Ex Machina’ (2015)
Alex Garland has become one of the most prominent voices in genre cinema in the last two decades. From his collaborations with Danny Boyle that began with the franchise-spawning 28 Days Later and the minor sci-fi masterpiece Sunshine, to the pulp comic adaptation Dredd, Garland has had a sizeable impact on genre cinema in the 21st century. His most engaging and thought-provoking piece is his directorial debut, Ex Machina, a small-scale science fiction film that tackles big ideas surrounding artificial intelligence, gender, and identity.
It follows a young programmer who is invited by a wealthy tech CEO to his private residence to help him test the consciousness of his most recent invention, a highly intelligent female-presenting android. Through this triptych of characters, Garland explores humanity’s relationship with technology and how ambitions more often outpace morality. It’s a smart, taut script that never wastes a single word as it pushes its characters toward an inevitably violent climax.
5
‘Blade Runner’ (1982)
Ex Machina owes more than a little debt to Blade Runner in its exploration of humanity. While this iconic sci-fi noir is primarily known for its visuals, the spare script, credited to Hampton Fancher and David Peoples but heavily influenced by director Ridley Scott as well as actors Harrison Ford and Rutger Hauer, is just as impressive. Loosely adapting Philip K. Dick‘s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the film’s script keeps several key characters but streamlines the plot while reinforcing its themes. While the initial vision would be compromised in the theatrical cut of the film, which added a wholly unnecessary voiceover and changed the ambiguous ending, the eventual director’s cut would restore it.
Ford plays the replicant-hunting Rick Deckard (Ford), who has been brought out of retirement to track down several dangerous rogue androids led by Hauer’s Roy Batty. Along the way, Deckard begins a relationship with the advanced replicant Rachel (Sean Young) and starts to question his humanity. The script is evocative of hard-boiled detective fiction, but instead of the quickfire dialogue indicative of that genre, Blade Runner finds solace in more contemplative exchanges. The most iconic exchange is the final soliloquy by Batty as he slowly dies in the rain, a heartfelt moment of humanity experienced through imminent mortality.
4
‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ (1968)
Before the androids of Blade Runner or Ex Machina ever did it, Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke were pondering humanity’s relationship with technology, and with the universe, in the landmark science fiction epic 2001: A Space Odyssey. The script grappled with heavy themes while offering no concrete explanations, allowing the audience to draw different conclusions from its surreal final act. The film was also prescient in its depictions of technology, particularly artificial intelligence and its inherent dangers.
As a group of astronauts set off towards Jupiter on an unspecified mission, the film’s general plot, which was inspired by several works of author Clarke, is structured as a thriller, but paced far more methodically. The murderous actions of HAL 9000, the iconic A.I. antagonist, are depicted more as tragedy than outright villainy, with the advanced computer’s “humanity” becoming its ultimate downfall as it proves susceptible to pride and paranoia. 2001: A Space Odyssey is a singular sci-fi event that is written with the kind of patience and precision that has become far too uncommon in the genre.
3
‘Arrival’ (2016)
Arrival is a film all about language, and, as such, is a pretty stellar exemplar of it. Not necessarily in the mechanics of linguistics it depicts, but in the deep human emotion it elicits. Communication is the key to the narrative, which was adapted by screenwriter Eric Heisserer from Ted Chiang‘s novella Story of Your Life and shares the source material’s themes of free will and determinism.
The film is structured to mimic the language form of its extraterrestrial characters. Their experience of time is simultaneous as opposed to linear, as reflected in their circular symbology that fuels the film’s conflict and its resolution. The arrival of the aliens causes dissent among the different factions of humanity seeking to understand them. That understanding is also what allows protagonist Louise Banks, played by a career-best Amy Adams, to know her own future and the tragedy it will entail. Arrival is smart sci-fi that finds its way to the heart through the mind.
2
‘Solaris’ (1972)
Using science fiction to explore human emotions may be the most effective use of the genre in the film medium, given the necessity of brevity and simplicity in narratives that must conform to a manageable runtime. Those films that do it well, however, are beyond compare in any medium, and there is no better proof than Andrei Tarkovsky‘s adaptation of Stanislaw Lem‘s Solaris. Co-written by Tarkovsky and Friedrich Gorenstein, the film was made in direct response to films like 2001, which Tarkovsky saw as too emotionally distant in favor of technological achievement.
While following the novel’s plot, about scientists on a space station studying the titular planet and its effects, the film refocuses on a more emotional core. While Lem’s novel is cynically concerned with humanity’s futile efforts in attempting to communicate and understand an alien sentience, the film is anchored to its protagonist and the conflicting emotions he experiences when the titular planet manifests a replica of his deceased wife. Solaris is an interstellar exploration of love and grief that engages with the human condition in a specifically cinematic expression.
1
‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’ (2004)
Love, memory, and longing explored in a cinematic form have no better example than Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a perfectly constructed romantic drama from mercurial writer Charlie Kaufman. Though the film’s triumph lies in the marriage between Kaufman’s script and the visuals crafted by director Michel Gondry, not to mention the pitch-perfect performances by Kate Winslet and Jim Carrey, there is no doubting that the script provides the perfect blueprint. Kaufman developed the screenplay from an initial concept developed by Gondry and collaborator Pierre Bismuth, adding his idiosyncratic insecurities and focusing on the film’s central relationship over its sci-fi concepts.
Carrey is Joel, a man heartbroken over his shattered relationship with Winslet’s Clementine, who has since had her memories of him erased. He decides to undergo the same procedure, but has second thoughts during it and begins to fight against it in the confines of his mind. Eternal Sunshine is perfect in its depiction of imperfections. It shows us just how messy and painful life and love can be, and no matter how passionately we may fight against our own impulses, there is no escaping the choices we’ve made and must continue to make.