Many
science fiction films were low-budget productions (eg.
Day of the Triffids), but because of growing popularity and recent developments in the technology of special effects, most films are now multi-million dollar projects.
The tone of science fiction films is often a guide to the tone of the times the film was made: other worlds and species are viewed in turn as wonderful, terrifying, threatening, incomprehensible, and childishly benign.
Notable science fiction films include:
- 1902 [A Trip to the Moon]? (original title Le voyage dans la lune)
- 1927 Metropolis
- 1931 Frankenstein
- 1933 [The Invisible Man]?
- 1938 [Things to Come]?
- 1951 [The Day the Earth Stood Still]?
- 1951 The Thing From Another World (Howard Hawks original)
- 1958 [Plan 9 from Outer Space]?
- 1952 The War of the Worlds
- 1954 Godzilla
- 1956 [Forbidden Planet]?
- 1954 [This Island Earth]?
- 1957 The Incredible Shrinking Man
- 1958 [The Blob]?
- 1959 [Journey to the Center of the Earth]?
- 1960 The Time Machine
- 1963 Day of the Triffids
- 1964 Dr. Strangelove or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
- 1966 Fahrenheit 451
- 1968 2001 A Space Odyssey
- 1970 [THX 1138]?
- 1971 A Clockwork Orange
- 1972 Solaris
- 1973 Sleeper?
- 1974 Dark Star
- 1975 Rollerball?
- 1977 Star Wars
- 1977 [Close Encounters of the Third Kind]?
- 1979 Star Trek: The Motion Picture
- 1979 Alien
- 1981 Outland?
- 1981 Escape from New York
- 1982 E.T.?
- 1982 Blade Runner
- 1982 The Thing (John Carpenter remake)
- 1984 Dune
- 1984 The Terminator
- 1984 Starman?
- 1989 [The Abyss]?
- 1995 Twelve Monkeys
- 1996 Mars Attacks
- 1999 The Matrix
- 1999 eXistenZ?
- 2000 [Mission to Mars]?
- 2001 [Artificial Intelligence: AI]?