Madness! Madness I tell you! A new Blade Runner film without Ridley Scott directing and Deckard (Harrison Ford) only making his return in the final third of the film? The rebooting of Scott’s films hasn’t gone well so far (Prometheus I’m looking at you) but there are plenty of other amazing science fiction films to keep you going (before Star Wars of course). Calum Collins shares his top five films:
Neil Blomkamp’s directorial debut about a new apartheid in South Africa, is as chilling as it is thrilling. When an alien mother-ship arrives over Johannesburg, the strange looking but deeply human ‘Prawns’ inside are segregated into camps. The film explores racism in a scary ‘mockumentary’, but shifts to an action finale as we find emerging human traits in the alien, Christopher Johnson, as he attempts to return to his home planet to help his son and species.
Duncan Jones’ deeply underrated gem see’s Sam Rockwell mining Helium on the Moon to provide fuel for Earth’s nuclear reactors. Accompanied only by a robotic companion GERTY (Kevin Spacey) he has an accident and wakes up to find a clone of himself in the base. Unsettling to its core, Moon owes its look to the chunky aesthetic of 80’s sci-fi.
An instant classic of British Indie film-making. When a terrifying species of ‘big alien gorilla wolf mofo’s’ crashes in a London council estate, a gang of teenagers must defend themselves. The first screen appearance of the fantastic John Boyega (soon to star in The Force Awakens) this little film is hilarious and scary in equal measure. Jumping straight into themes of class and race, the mature character development of its cast (taken from London drama youth groups) is what propels it into the top 5.
You can’t have sci-fi horror without Alien. From its fantastic design elements to its bad-ass female lead, Alien is one of the films that defined the sci-fi landscape forever. Alien doesn’t work off jump scares either: its tense soundtrack and slow progression as the crew of the Nostromo realises they have a killer organism on board, builds up to a screaming pitch as the crew get picked off. You never really get a clear look at the now infamous Xenomorph either; leaving your imagination to fill in the scary bio-mechanical blanks.
What can I say about Blade Runner that hasn’t already been said? When a group of near-human androids called Replicants go on the run, Harrison Ford must track them down and execute them. In a grim globally-warmed future, Scott’s masterpiece explores that age old question: ‘What does it mean to be human?’ in the most morally ambiguous story ever told. The replicant leader Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) has the most beautiful answer ever in a speech that reveals the sadness and beauty of being alive: ‘All those moments will be lost in time. Like… tears in rain…’
Just watch it now.
