Watching high school friends enlist in an assault against the cosmic "bugs" who attacked them, splinter off into different arenas of battle within the massive war machine, and then find each other again toward the end of the long-running conflict provides a sweeping emotional core among a lot of strewn body parts. What's left, sneering subtext aside, is a disturbingly fun, excessively bloody action movie that's become a bone-crunching cult classic. In Troopers' case, we, as viewers, are tricked into rooting for a fascist war-driven society modeled after Nazi Germany as they take up arms against an intergalactic race of giant insect beings. Much like RoboCop, Paul Verhoeven's previous work of gory and great sci-fi, Starship Troopers is satire snuck inside super-violent propaganda. "C'mon, you apes! You wanna live forever?" Stars: Casper Van Dien, Denise Richards, Dina Meyer.You won't even notice, until it's too late, that Ex Machina is a crazed cautionary tale about the hypothetical terror of technology. Sci-fi can be both eye-popping and mind-opening, and quite often it's the more cerebral stories that resonate the loudest. tale designed to set you on edge and catch you off guard.Īs a stylish and savage slow-burn thriller, Ex Machina is the perfect example of the genre taking a huge leap forward with a small-scale film. Stars: Alicia Vikander, Domhall Gleeson, Oscar IsaacĪlex Garland's intimate, close-quarters sci-fi suspense piece Ex Machina centers on a lowly programmer (Domhnall Gleeson) who gets invited to the house of his CEO (Oscar Isaac) to administer the Turing test to the CEO's latest creation - a humanoid robot (Alicia Vikander).Evoking the distinguished charm of old silent movies, while still featuring occasional dialogue, WALL-E clings to optimism in the wake of waste. It's an imaginative romp through the fattened ashes of humanity featuring a mostly-silent, slapstick-prone protagonist finding romance amidst enthralling visuals and an emotionally-charged apocalypse. Laced with satirical social commentary regarding the consequences of excess and pollution, WALL-E is a love story among the landfills and one of the best Pixar movies to date. Stars: Ben Burtt, Elissa Knight, Jeff Garlinįinding Nemo's Andrew Stanton went from deep sea to deep space for this delightfully warped trek, seen through the eyes of a trash-bot tasked with cleaning up a centuries-later Earth smothered in garbage.Unless we're just dreaming all of this, that is… Of course, as good as Cobb is at his job, it's his own dreams - including appearances by his dead wife (Marion Cotillard) - that are his biggest challenge.īuoyed by a great cast (including Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ellen Page, Tom Hardy, Ken Watanabe and Michael Caine), stunning visual effects and those rarest of Hollywood commodities - an original and intelligent script - Inception is a no-brainer for this list. At the heart of the picture is Leonardo DiCaprio's Dom Cobb, a stricken widower who specializes in a form of corporate espionage that involves stealing information from a mark's mind while they sleep. Inception doesn't just simply fit into the sci-fi genre, it's a caper film as well as an avant-garde delve into dreamscapes. A mind-bending sci-fi stunner that proved Hollywood blockbusters could still be smart while also dazzling us on a visual and visceral level, Inception is certainly one of the best films to hit, sci-fi or not, in this still young 21st century. Stars: Leonardo DiCaprio, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Elliot PageĬhristopher Nolan movies won the hearts and minds of fanboys with Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, but he truly solidified his status as a filmmaker at the top of his game with 2010's Inception.
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