The greatest sci-fi epic movies of all time

If you’ve already seen Blade Runner, you can probably picture the rain-soaked streets of Los Angeles where this sci-fi classic is set. This is a dark version of a then-future 2019 where synthetic humans have been made, and then banned after a violent uprising on an off-world colony. Harrison Ford is Deckard, a blade runner who hunts down errant replicants.

Put away suggestions The Matrix was tainted by its sequels. On a rewatch, the film is just as thrilling as it was back in 1999. Keavnu Reeves’s Neo receives a phone call telling him the world is not as it seems, drawing him into an apocalyptic reality where he may or may not be the “chosen one” destined to save the world. Incredible fight scenes, mesmerising concepts and killer style.

There have been three major film series of Planet of the Apes. 2011’s reboot continues to this day. But the crown has to go to the 1968 original starring Charlton Heston and Roddy McDowall. A space crew crash land onto a planet, after spending thousands of years in suspended animation. But this planet is ruled over by intelligent apes.

Modern auteur Christopher Nolan has made three sci-fi films. Tenet. Inception. Interstellar. The latter gets our vote in the epic sci-fi category for its sheer scope and spectacle. A NASA mission is out to find another planet to move humanity to before the Earth’s resources run out. But the planets they find orbit a huge black hole, Garganuta. What lies beyond the event horizon?

This singular film from Stanley Kubrick is not your average sci-fi watch. It doesn’t explain itself, and acts as a voyage through human civilisation as well as through space. 2001: A Space Odyssey expanded not just the scope of sci-fi but what films as a medium could do. It is relatively slow-paced, though, so might not be one you can fully appreciate if you’re after pure escapism after a hard week at work.

This film is the rarest of achievements, a sequel that (probably) eclipses the original. More than 35 years after the first Mad Max movie, George Miller returns with Fury Road, in which human civilisation has devolved into near-feral gangs in the desert. Furiosa (Charlize Theron) is in search of her homeland and frees effectively enslaves wives of mad gang leader Immortan Joe with the help of Max Rockatandky (Tom Hardy).

Dune is a sci-fi epic in more than one field. The paperback of Frank Herbert’s book Dune is almost 600 pages long, while he would go on to write six Dune novels. And the series that would be expanded to more than 25 novels after Herbert’s death. Now it’s the source for one of the great sci-fi movie (fingers crossed) trilogy epics. 2021’s Dune: Part One features exceptional world-building, drawing you right into the dunes. Part Two ups the ante with even higher-stakes action. If only we didn’t now have years to wait until Part Three, which is rumoured but not officially confirmed just yet.

1927’s Metropolis was not the first sci-fi film, an accolade that probably belongs to George Melie’s A Trip to the Moon, but it might be the first sci-fi epic. It was the most expensive film ever made, a 24 million Euro production after adjusting for inflation. A silent Fritz Lang film, Metropolis paints a dark utopia of a futuristic city where the privileged live up above, the workers below in a grim underworld.

Steven Spielberg is such a master movie-maker, Close Encounters of the Third Kind might onto fit into the lower half of a top 10 of his greatest movies. But it’s his most epic sci-fi project. In this 1976 classic, a giant alien craft descends through the sky and down into mid-west America. It begins to attempt to communicate with what sounds like orchestral music. Finally, a film where the aliens aren’t immediately humanity-zapping monsters.

Back in 2009 Avatar felt like one of the most expensive films ever made. It was. But these days, even after adjusting for inflation, it barely cracks the top 20. It’s a masterclass in visual world-building. Viewed on the biggest screen possible, director James Cameron pulls you into its blue-green world. Sure, it doesn’t have the most intricate story going, but it’s off-the-charts epic. As are its box office receipts, pulling in $2.7 billion.