For a marathon to work, you need a few films that people already love, at least one genuine discovery, and something that sparks a conversation at the end.
Go back far enough and you find films that had no idea they'd become classics. The 80s and 90s produced more of them than any other era.
Great sci-fi uses the impossible to illuminate the real. Distance from the present is what allows these films to say things that otherwise couldn't be said.
Vincent is an all-too-human man who dares to defy a system obsessed with genetic perfection. He is an "In-Valid" who assumes the identity of a member of the genetic elite to pursue his goal of traveling into space with the Gattaca Aerospace Corporation.
A team of elite commandos on a secret mission in a Central American jungle come to find themselves hunted by an extraterrestrial warrior.
Not paying attention to his job, a young demon allows the evil cleansing machine to overflow and explode, turning the young demon into the infamous monster Janemba. Goku and Vegeta make solo attempts to defeat the monster, but realize their only option is fusion.
An alien is left behind on Earth and saved by the 10-year-old Elliott who decides to keep him hidden in his home. While a task force hunts for the extra-terrestrial, Elliott, his brother, and his little sister Gertie form an emotional bond with their new friend, and try to help him find his way home.
The final installment finds Marty digging the trusty DeLorean out of a mineshaft and looking for Doc in the Wild West of 1885. But when their time machine breaks down, the travelers are stranded in a land of spurs. More problems arise when Doc falls for pretty schoolteacher Clara Clayton, and Marty tangles with Buford Tannen.
These films use the grammar of science fiction â the technology, the strangeness, the distance â to say things that couldn't be said any other way.
Wallace and Gromit have run out of cheese, and this provides an excellent excuse for the duo to take their holiday to the moon, where, as everyone knows, there is ample cheese.
Three back-to-back anime films by three different directors make up this sci-fi trilogy three years in the making.
A widowed field mouse must move her family -- including an ailing son -- to escape a farmer's plow. Aided by a crow and a pack of superintelligent, escaped lab rats, the brave mother struggles to transplant her home to firmer ground.
Handsome 25-year-old Cesar had it all -- a successful career, expensive cars, a swank bachelor's pad, and an endless string of beautiful and willing women -- until he is thrown into a strange psychological mystery after a car accident scars his face and lands him in prison.
The starship Enterprise and its crew is pulled back into action when old nemesis, Khan, steals a top secret device called Project Genesis.
The films that fly under the radar often do so because they resist easy categorisation. That resistance is usually exactly what makes them worth finding.
The best sci-fi films feel more relevant with time, not less. The future they imagined turns out to be a map of now.