Ten Greatest Science Fiction Films Of All Time

10- Interstellar (2014)

Being the most recent film in the list says a lot about the kind of ambitions that Christopher Nolan had for his gigantic, monumental space saga and also about how the film, even with its relentless pondering of both science and humanity, exceeded every single expectation that we, as spell-bound followers of the prodigious director, had from him. The story at the crux of 'Interstellar' is one that belongs to Steven Spielberg, of us Earthlings overcoming our cynicism and embracing the wonders that lay beyond the dimensions of time, space and imagination. And the scientific marvels that Nolan packs into the enthralling, epic galactic ride of astronaut Cooper (a fine Matthew McConaughey) are dazzlingly hypnotic in Kubrick fashion but even more than those influences, this is his own beast. 'Interstellar' presents to us the overwhelmingly emotional message that our greatest, most subversive discoveries are just within our sight; we only need to reach out our hands. Of all his films, this is the one that makes us think while making our hearts pound with excitement, tension and drama. 

9- Mad Max (1979)

It is hard for anyone who went bonkers over the action-packed tornado known as 'Mad Max: Fury Road' to imagine that such outrageous ferocity, berserk energy and stunning spectacle owe their origins to one modest little film made in the Outback in the wee end of the 70s that dared to do something different. Dystopian near-future worlds had been portrayed on screen before but George Miller, whose grandiosely anarchic vision has been there in all his sequels, showed the world as a bitter, desolate and even disgustingly sociopathic wasteland where there is simply no hope for improvement. Made on a shoestring budget and featuring the greying, dusty post-apocalyptic bastion of Bartertown, 'Mad Max' was also the film from which Miller made sure to plunge us viewers into breakneck flights of road rage as its Western-style premise of revenge (Mel Gibson's eponymous do-gooder cop avenges his family killed under the bike tyres of a band of scavengers) is meshed with a roaring, raunchy slasher movie spirit that still maintains its blunt force.

8- The Matrix (1999)

It is perhaps safe to say that numerous replications, imitations, even creative inspiration taken by future whiz-kids like Christopher Nolan and Duncan Jones, have diminished the once-unquestionable status of 'The Matrix' as the most sensational and conceptually stunning cinematic event of the 1990s. It can also be said that a more objective critique reveals that beneath that alluringly sexy surface and scientific and spiritual mumbo-jumbo, there is admittedly little real depth. But consider for a moment the sheer mind-numbing delights that this cyberpunk classic offered to us when we were still wet behind the ears. There is that bewildering idea that our day-to-day world may be just a grand illusion. There is that hellish view of humanity enslaved by machines and there are those hideous, crawling Sentinels. There are the thrilling karate-chop sessions and, finally, those physics-defying, bullet-time barrages of action and explosions. For sheer sizzle and spectacle alone, 'The Matrix' is worth a watch anytime. Just forget about those terrible sequels.

7- Alien (1979)

Two years after George Lucas started a new parallel religion with his 'Star Wars', Ridley Scott set out to prove that the galaxy was not a grand soap opera saga but rather a dark place hiding horrors that belong to nightmares. Stripped of glamour and bombast, the sleek and elegantly crafted 'Alien' is, at heart, a routine road trip gone disastrously wrong thanks to a monster that was hiding in the boot. As we follow the ill-fated spacecraft Nostromo, with an intriguing crew that includes terrific character actors Harry Dean Stanton, Ian Holm and John Hurt, we are, so far, witnessing an otherwise ordinary, space-riding mission but that is only the case for the first hour of the film. When a creature bursts famously out of a blood-spurting belly, the stage is set for total mayhem and it is up to unlikely heroine Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) to save her skin. H.R Giger's seminal, almost Freudian sets go along with Dan O' Bannon and Ronald Shusett's brisk script and Scott's superb, tense direction to deliver a real sucker punch.

6- A Clockwork Orange (1971)

Adapting Anthony Burgess' pitch-black comedy, about a futuristic Britain in which gangs of boys run wild and get high on milk-plus and ultra-violence, was always going to be a tall order, not least because of the material's dazzlingly unique language of Nadsat, a blend of Cockney, English, Russian and pure nonsense. But trust Stanley Kubrick to do enough artistic and narrative justice to even the most untameable books (though Burgess was famously not satisfied). Malcolm McDowell is a roaring revelation as Alex DeLarge, the loony and wicked-eyed anti-hero who loves rape and Beethoven with equal measure but gets the rap when he commits an accidental murder. Till that point, Kubrick plunges us into the delirious, maddening frenzy of Alex' reckless exploits, painted in broad strokes of blood orange and milky pink. After he is subjected to a mind-washing therapy that also removes every trace of soul that he had, the film turns into a tragically terrifying portrait of a person's free will diminished to nothing by a society far more ruthless than him.

5- Brazil (1985)

Terry Gilliam's status as a fabulous fantasist is already cast in iron but it was with his take on George Orwell's '1984' that we got an actual taste of biting, acerbic satire that the man was capable of. The future cityscape of 'Brazil' (named after the eponymous song that plays in a dream) is a totalitarian world of mediocrity and shallow affluence, with offices crammed with paper and bugs and houses with elephantine ducts, with hilarious menus and plastic surgery and pointless, silly written orders that can take an innocent life. In the midst of this world of bureaucracy and apathy, hapless office worker Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce) has to struggle with a domineering mother, work that puts him in strange coincidences and a defunct air-conditioning system that is repaired by terrorist Harry Tuttle (a superb Robert De Niro). Sure, he dreams of vivid escape too but it is Gilliam's bruising, broadly comic yet darkly prescient portrait of life and death decided by mere paperwork that delivers the most powerful blows on our imagination.

4- Close Encounters Of The Third Kind (1977)

At a first glance, Steven Spielberg's finest yarn about humans meeting estranged visitors from outer space (sorry, 'E.T') seems like a wet dream for every insomniac star gazer who believed that, to quote a great David Bowie song, 'there is a starman waiting in the sky'. And sure, with the eponymous climactic watershed moment, when those aliens actually descend in their grand and glittering mothership on Earth, it just seems to reaffirm our wildest fantasies of life out there in the galaxy. But look closer and you will find a sobering, sensational and enthrallingly terse tale of human obsession in the face of scientific speculation. Mirroring the globe-trotting quest of scientists, translators and surveyors to predict encounters when we can actually shake hands with those little other-worldly fists is the near-suicidal despair of cable worker Roy Neary (a terrific Richard Dreyfus) whose world collapses in the face of his own unblinking sense of the inevitable. Sure, 'Close Encounters' is a massive, spaceship-sized spectacle but Spielberg ensures that even as we stare with wide eyes, we feel both fear and exhilaration.

3- 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

It is the extraordinary, seminal, monumental space saga that every director, from Danny Boyle to Christopher Nolan, has tried to replicate but has never been able to beat. But then it had to be the brainchild of Stanley Kubrick, by that time the single most intelligent filmmaker to be daring enough to push the boundaries of cinema while telling a cryptic story of mankind itself nudging open the doors to unexpected marvels that were always there for us. Shuttling from apes learning to hunt and kill to men who traverse the very dimensions of space with majestic spaceships that could give lessons to NASA for scientific realism, '2001' is a stunning, searing parable about humanity discovering its importance in an entire universe. It is also something of a terse, clinical thriller and a pitch-black jab of mockery at perfection defeated by human flaw; the malfunctioning computer HAL 9000 (voiced by Douglas Rain) takes devastating decisions that plunge the viewer in pure, pulse-pounding danger. And then there are the marvels to behold: Kubrick's painstakingly crafted effects that still remain sensational. 

2- Eraserhead (1977)

Fantasy worlds of dreams and nightmares have always been a favourite of David Lynch. And that is why each of his incredible works (especially his berserk yet brilliant 'Dune') could have made it to this list. But there is something particularly shattering and devastating about the bleak, grimy, slimy and relentlessly dark world of 'Eraserhead' that makes it one of the darkest visions ever brought to the screen. In the murky and monochrome industrial cesspit of Henry Spencer (Jack Nance), the most horrifying nightmares and delusions can come to life. One of them is this poor loser's fears of fathering what is not even a child and he is soon saddled with a  pitiable creature who defies every nightmarish description. But that is just the beginning of a hellish cinematic ride that never fails to make you squirm with fear. Made on a stringy budget and yet blessed with a wealth of terrifying imagination (Lynch was himself expecting to be a father at the time), 'Eraserhead' is a tale of terror made believable and demons of guilt and isolation wreaking havoc on all our minds.

1- Blade Runner (1982)

The greatest science fiction is something extraordinary and miraculous, a phenomenon that overwhelms our senses and gives us an unforgettable glimpse of a world unlike ours yet all too familiar and real. By that measure, Ridley Scott's 'Blade Runner', a drop-dead gorgeous and emotionally poignant adaptation on Philip K. Dick's novel, was already an absorbing and atmospheric window into a futuristic world of both neon-lit glitter and noir grub, a Los Angeles, circa 2019, where sprawling multi-cultural races swarm and flaming, Euro-pudding skyscrapers stand amidst rain-dazzled wastes. The dynamic director has a well-known reputation for conjuring up vivid real and other-worldly landscapes but this was something else, a cityscape both larger-than-life in its spectacle and overwhelming in texture. 

But none of it could have mattered if it did not have a powerful, mind-numbing narrative to go along with that tremendous vision. The dense, thoughtful script by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples condenses a detective thriller template and blends it with neo-noir tropes as the titular dogged cop Rick Deckard (a never-better Harrison Ford) hunts for fugitive androids even as he falls in love with one himself. Scott's majestic, almost elegiac storytelling follows him as his coldly cynical heart begins to thaw as he questions the moral complexity of his seemingly straightforward mission. 

'Blade Runner' is hardly the predictable action feast that a virgin viewer would think it to be. Rather, it is a buzzing, busy and brilliantly raging meditation on our concept of what is good and evil. Rutger Hauer's indelibly intriguing android Roy Batty is both the anarchic pulse and beating, tortured heart of this tale and Scott delivers each moment of revelation like an eye-gouging miracle. Flying cars and video-calling phone-booths might still be a bit far-fetched and we are lightyears away from colonising planets but the film's message is resonant as ever: there are times when we need artificial beings, our perfect creations, to remind us of our humanity. 

Amazing Adaptations: Paul Thomas Anderson's 'Inherent Vice'

What happens when one of America's greatest, most subversive novelists of the 20th century meets one of America's most subversive and progressive filmmakers of today's generation? Naturally, it would be nothing short of a miracle. However, one should not forget that the writer here in question is no less than Thomas Pynchon, the hard-boiled, relentlessly reclusive and endlessly uncompromising teller of long, winding labyrinths of tales that can be both beautiful and befuddling, complex and creatively liberating and both maddening and mesmerising.  From the die-hard lovers of his 1973 magnum opus 'Gravity's Rainbow' (as well his previous and subsequent triumphs of raging, almost terrifying imagination) to the virgins who might wish to dig the relatively lighter 'Inherent Vice' to get a grip on this baffling yet breathless literary universe, there will be the unanimous opinion of the sheer untameable quality of this extraordinary writer's prose. 

But then, the director in question is no less of a modern legend: Paul Thomas Anderson, who has built his own reputation for films and narratives that have broken boundaries constantly and are, as evidenced by his last three ambitious outings, more than what intriguing surfaces may offer, making them more hypnotic and worthy of repeated viewings, something akin to Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese and David Lynch. And even before that, the riotously rollicking side-view of 70s pornography in 'Boogie Nights' and the metaphysical, massively powerful force of 'Magnolia' have given proof of this filmmaker's daring ambition to push boundaries to great limits. So, maybe, it is a match made in heaven; like many of Pynchon's own lovably quirky yet utterly believable creations playing off each other in his rambling, dense interlocking storylines and Anderson's own penchant for an almost hate-love chemistry between each pair of protagonists, this too feels like a seductive symbiotic relationship and it pays off in spades when it comes to 'Inherent Vice'.

To understand just how Anderson turns out to be both ardently loyal and ingeniously innovative with the book, let's first consider what 'Inherent Vice' is all about. At the surface, it is a deliriously nutty mystery caper set in a very familiar zone; California, with its sun-kissed boulevards and sexy glitz, with both its sunlight and sordid crime and sleaze, has been the favoured location of many a mystery film or crime novel. From James Elroy to the noir classics of the 1940s, down right to 'Chinatown' and even the films of Robert Altman and Anderson, California has been the stage for both suspense and intrigue and even a reflection of the country's constantly changing cultural scene. 'Inherent Vice' might be indeed more accessible than most of Pynchon's mystifyingly spell-binding work but it is still every bit yet another of his wistful, nostalgic backward glances at times gone long ago and of the struggles of the people to catch up with the present and future. It is there in the helplessly paranoid freaks, losers, megalomaniacs and dames hunting for the V-2 Rocket in 'Gravity's Rainbow'. So, even as the book will be replete with twists, thrills, spills and loose ends and corpses, it is essentially a tale of rebels trying to conform, its dogged private eye hero Doc Sportello coming into a sense of the tragically transformed world around him, of the end of a cultural revolution and of a spirit of freedom and how all the suspects, false leads and evil geniuses are trying to just get used to the change. 

Anderson's film, on the other hand, thickens the political subtext even to a greater extent than what the book deals with. Pynchon was concerned, primarily, with the shifts of socio-cultural fabric; Anderson is more explicit in his implication of a possible collusion between a paranoid government and a ruthlessly capitalist industry making its move; the nefarious drug-smuggling outfit 'The Golden Fang' is revealed in the film as more of a political strategy against subversion and it also answers quite a few questions that the book raises. As the film's narration explains, the elusive cartel's activities, from feeding drug addiction to curing its side effects to offering anti-communist gospel was just perfect to restore order to a land going out of control. Pynchon does not quite deal with it directly but basically, both the book and the film are making the same argument.

Apart from being a gifted, anarchic satirist, Pynchon is also known for the kind of side-splitting, broadly outrageous hilarious set-pieces that infuse his wistful, thoughtful perspective with a heady overdose of roaring, ribald slapstick. His stories are crammed with split-second gags, gobsmacking dialogue of unexpected turns of phrase, veering from poetry to profanity, flitting from slang to language. He also has lost none of his penchant for nonsense lyrics and limericks. Anderson may skimp on the songs and the more outrageously cheeky bits of his style (there is no mention, for instance, of marshmallows on pizza) but he has also made the source raunchier and funnier in most unexpected ways, most notably with his own flair for foul-mouthed, fiery dialogue.  

From Lt. Detective Bigfoot Bjornsen spelling out the F-word with relish, to the bitter, almost acerbic banter between Sportello and the federal agents grilling him to reveal his motives to even the other admirable little tweaks that he gives to all the rollicking conversations in the book, this is as close as one can be to the inimitable hilarity of Pynchon and it is also innovative and ludicrously inventive in its own way. 'Inherent Vice' is also a film that drips with sleaze in almost every second frame. Pynchon's treatment of the sex in the book is markedly cynical and mostly there for the laughs but Anderson, armed with his superbly juicy musical selections,  ratchets up and coats each frame with the sordid yet electric eroticism of a soft-core flick. That rough doggy-style spanking between Sportello and his ex-lady (and the tale's only real femme fatale) Shasta Fey Hepworth loses some of its sarcasm because it turns poignant in his hands, even a touch sentimental and flushed with real, heartbreaking romance. 

It is so much of Anderson's focus on this failed romance, this love-lorn feel of the film that makes his adaptation of 'Inherent Vice' so remarkably faithful to the elusive writer's potent intentions. Like much of his work, this book too is like a penultimate, pained yet passionate love letter to another era, to a time of love and bliss. At its heart, it is yet another of those shaggy, utterly hapless love yarns that he loves to tuck in the midst of his super-sized sandwiches of tales. The best precedent for this could be the star-crossed, lusty love that statistician Roger Mexico and his unlikely partner, the free-spirited Jessica Swanlake share in 'Gravity's Rainbow'. There is a war around them, the tumult of a time gone beyond their hands and their own uncertainties about staying together. But at times, nothing matters to them more than just the enthralling feeling of their mutual love which is both tender and torrid in equal measures. 

'Inherent Vice' is all about that love, the thrilling yet all-too-brief feeling of something seminal, something special and Anderson understands that perfectly, as much he has gets nearly of Pynchon's twisted character dynamics as well. The most notable here is the repartee between Sportello and his direct and equal opposite Bjornsen. The book sees them, despite their well-known mutual distaste, as something akin to unlikely partners, sharing the kind of love-hate rapport that was also between the historical heroes of Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon in his epic 'Mason & Dixon'. 

Just as Mason's self-doubting seriousness clashed memorably with Dixon's freewheeling nature, here Bjornsen's paranoia and loathing for the hippie culture clashes perfectly with Sportello's jaunty, slippery way of life. One wishes that the film could have delved a bit more on the backstory surrounding their arc; the director skimps totally on the pivotal bit in the book about how these two freaks of nature actually came to meet each other. But credit should go to him for tweaking on this in his own way. In the film, the two characters, in a trademark Anderson flourish, seek solace and acceptance by sparking off each other and become, by the bittersweet end, eerily similar on a number of counts. Bjornsen, bothered by his loneliness, cannot resist the allure of freedom while Sportello, bemused by the changes around him, cannot help but try to fit in with this new world. 

Visually and aurally too, Anderson gets so much of the book's whimsical, even wacky Californian landscape perfectly right. And I am not just talking about the bigger pieces but also about the feel, the texture that the book portrays so well. There is actually a carpet of blue angora on the walls of the Chick Planet Massage Parlour and there are actually cops frolicking in the swimming pool while Sloane Wolfmann is decked out in slinky black. Cinematographer Robert Elswit's visuals are stunning, smoky and languid and they also let in both the patchouli scents and the sweaty odours to flow into the frames. It is utterly atmospheric, just like the novel. 

One of my favourite songs from John Lennon's penultimate album 'Double Fantasy' is the swelling, rousing love ballad 'Just Like Starting Over'. On Lennon's final interview with Playboy in 1980, Yoko Ono claimed that the song was his message to the people that they could now get back all the freedom and enthusiasm of the 1960s that had burned out in the 70s. Pynchon's book and Anderson's film are both about the aftermath of that burnout and while it may be one goofy, loony caper crammed with weirdos who love cartoons and menus for cunnilingus, it is still filled with a sadness that is irrevocable and exquisite. That also leaves the room open for an exciting possibility. 'The Master' borrowed a few elements from 'V' and even 'There Will Be Blood' has a bit of the same parable of a virgin land divided by conquest which was also subliminally explored in 'Mason & Dixon'. So, now that Christopher Nolan has made 'Dunkirk', can we expect Anderson to give us his own thrilling take on 'Gravity's Rainbow'? Hell, why not?