Friday night with friends is about energy. You want something that earns its place in the conversation - a film that people are still talking about on the way home.
The 2000s produced a remarkable run of intelligent, ambitious cinema - a decade that took genre seriously and rewarded patient audiences.
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.
Fresh off ripping space-time a new one at the end of "Bender's Big Score," the Planet Express crew is back to mend the tear in reality, or (hopefully) at least not make it worse. Beyond the tear, though, lurks a being of inconceivable...tentacularity. What will become of Earth, and indeed, our universe, when faced with the Beast with a Billion Backs?
When 9 first comes to life, he finds himself in a post-apocalyptic world. All humans are gone, and it is only by chance that he discovers a small community of others like him taking refuge from fearsome machines that roam the earth intent on their extinction. Despite being the neophyte of the group, 9 convinces the others that hiding will do them no good.
After a violent storm, a dense cloud of mist envelops a small Maine town, trapping David Drayton and his five-year-old son in a local grocery store with other local residents. They soon discover that the mist conceals deadly horrors that threaten their lives, and worse, their sanity.
Lewis, a brilliant young inventor, is keen on creating a time machine to find his mother, who abandoned him in an orphanage. Things take a turn when he meets Wilbur Robinson and his family.
Spanning over one thousand years, and three parallel stories, The Fountain is a story of love, death, spirituality, and the fragility of our existence in this world.
The science fiction films that last are the ones where the ideas are inseparable from the story. Not grafted on â woven in. These films are genuinely about something.
When Leela is insulted by a group of space-rednecks (like regular rednecks, but in space), she enters the Planet Express ship in a demolition derby. Leela emerges victorious, but when she brings the damaged ship home, and the Professor sees the fuel gauge, he's enraged by the hit he's going to take at the Dark Matter pump. Now the crew have to find a way to break Mom's stranglehold on starship fuel, even if they have to wade through a Lord of the Rings-inspired fantasy-land to do it!
Called in to recover evidence in the aftermath of a horrific explosion on a New Orleans ferry, Federal agent Doug Carlin gets pulled away from the scene and taken to a top-secret government lab that uses a time-shifting surveillance device to help prevent crime.
A military veteran goes on a journey into the future, where he can foresee his death and is left with questions that could save his life and those he loves.
Follows three social outcasts -- two geeks and a cynic -- as they attempt to navigate a time-travel conundrum in the middle of a British pub.
When their ship crash-lands on a remote planet, the marooned passengers soon learn that escaped convict Riddick isn't the only thing they have to fear. Deadly creatures lurk in the shadows, waiting to attack in the dark, and the planet is rapidly plunging into the utter blackness of a total eclipse. With the body count rising, the doomed survivors are forced to turn to Riddick with his eerie eyes to guide them through the darkness to safety. With time running out, there's only one rule: Stay in the light.
The best suspense doesn't come from action - it comes from caring about what happens. These films make you care, then twist the knife.
The best sci-fi films feel more relevant with time, not less. The future they imagined turns out to be a map of now.