io9
The greatest science fiction movies sometimes aren't labeled as science fiction at all. As with literary novels like The Road and The Confessions of Max Tivoli, some classic movies explore alternate or futuristic worlds, even as they slip under the radar of mainstream (or alternative) audiences. Call them slipstream, or "stealth science fiction." Here's our list of 15 great movies you may be familiar with, but didn't know were science fiction.
Methods: We compiled a list of 35 or so movies that we believed were unsung science fiction classics. And then we winnowed it down, eliminating movies that weren't great, or which everybody already acknowledges as science fiction. And here's what we ended up with.
8 1/2. A director, trying to finish his next movie — a science fiction epic — becomes creatively blocked, and starts falling into a fantasy world of his own id. The real and the imaginary become more and more blurred, until you can't tell what's happening in Guido's head and what's actually happening.
Adaptation. Okay, we just talked about the reality-warping powers of Charlie Kaufman's movies, but Adaptation deserves to be included here. Everybody acknowledges Eternal Sunshine and Being John as science fiction or slipstream, but Adaptation also warps reality in amazing ways, with its made-up mind-warping flower and blurring twin Kaufmans.
Babe: Pig In The City. Okay, first of all, Babe himself is a mutant, as we discover in the first Babe movie, where his miraculous powers of reasoning and communication startle the humans around him. And then this sequel takes him to Metropolis, a city that's a CGI blend of 5 cities. Mad Max maestro George Miller creates his most compelling future dystopia yet.
Brimstone and Treacle. The 1980s were full of movies where people are sort of aliens. Blue Velvet and Sex, Lies & Videotape both feature characters who are so alienated and bizarre they might be from outer space. But B&T is the ultimate alien-among-us movie. The title might fool you into thinking Sting is the devil, but the movie doesn't actually say so. He's like the protagonist of Karen Joy Fowler's classic novel Sarah Canary — a strange interloper that we're never told is an alien. We just sort of know.
Chumscrubber. This dark comedy takes place in a weird alternate present where everyone's on prescription drugs, and reality starts to blend with the video game of the movie's title, which is all about a postapocalyptic warrior who carries his own severed head. It's a Tim Burton-esque suburbia without any actual Edward Scissorhands.
Confederate States of America (CSA). This is possibly the greatest alternate history movie ever, because it does such a great job of reworking our media-saturated culture to a very different timeline. It's yet another "South won the Civil War" narrative, but with a sharp satirical edge to it. In the early 21st century, large swathes of America still own slaves — and drugs like Prozac are used to keep the slaves under control, as we see in fake ads. CSA is not just alternate history, it also pays tribute to Brave New World.
The Conversation. This Gene Hackman film takes surveillance technology to its furthest extreme. Says Film.com: "Decades ahead of its time, the brilliant final scene shared with us a glimpse of the future that was to come in which technology could see or hear us at almost any time. And Hackman's performance nails down a generation's feelings on the coming technology."
Deep Cover. Lawrence Fishburne and Jeff Goldblum star in this tense thriller about a fictional designer drug created by a combinatorial chemist. The brutal drug trade becomes a metaphor for the destruction of the nation-state by the global economy.
Ghost Dog: The Way Of The Samurai. All of Jim Jarmusch's movies are full of quasi-aliens, but this one is actually a superhero narrative. He's a black samurai who works for the Mafia, and he communicates via carrier pigeon. He clings to the Bushido, the way of the Samurai, in the midst of a world of randomly murderous thugs, and seems to have almost superhuman fighting abilities. Plus he can communicate somehow with his friend who only speaks French. (Telepathy?)
The Manchurian Candidate (original version). A Korean War hero is brainwashed and reprogrammed, using unreal mind-control techniques, to kill the president. The film derives a lot of its spooky menace from the Communists' bizarre mind-warping of Lawrence Harvey. The Jonathan Demme remake substitutes a microchip brain implant for the original's brainwashing.
Modern Times. The original movie about human alienation from technology is also, arguably, the first cyborg movie. Charlie Chaplin becomes so ingrained in his dehumanizing factory work, he actually becomes part of the machine he works with. And then, in a famous scene, he's literally swallowed up by the gears of his machine. 
Pleasantville. We dissed this movie a while ago, but it actually is a terrific film. A brother and sister pass inside their television set, thanks to a hacked piece of technology in their remote control, courtesy of Don Knotts. The black-and-white world of the 1950s sitcom where the siblings get stuck is a metaphor for sexual repression and lost innocence, but also an alternate reality which they access through technology.
Sneakers. It's the ultimate spy movie and possibly the greatest of the hacker movies of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Robert Redford leads a team of hackers who discover the ultimate codebreaking machine, which can decode literally anything. You could argue the ultimate decoder is just a fancy McGuffin, but it's wound in to the movie's theme of hackers uncovering secrets.
W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism. Half documentary, half bizarre sexual-psychological drama, DuĊĦan Makavejev's strangest film explores the weird science of Wilhelm Reich, who believed you could collect orgasmic energy in "orgone boxes." It ties that science in with the sexual (and social) repression of Communism, culminating in a representative of Communism having sex with a woman and then beheading her with her own ice skate.
Zelig. Woody Allen not only made Sleeper and the mad-science-heavy Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex, he also gave us this story of a man with the strangest superpower of all: he can blend in with the people around him. He not only acts like whoever he's with, he looks like them too. This movie also dips into alternate history, with its warped version of World War II.
Comments
No.
I don't know about some of these. There is a fine line between "Weird" and "Sci-Fi". By the rationalization here you could also include "Pulp Fiction" "Tristram Shandy" and all of the Bond films. All great, none sci fi.
pig in the city is amazing. pleasantville, less so.
Yuck.
What's science-fictional about The Conversation. They had a bunch of parabolic microphones recording two people in an open area, then used the various tapes to mix out the background noise. High tech, but nothing beyond the means of people at the time the movie was made.
And Ghost Dog? Being quixotic doesn't make you SFnal. You might as well call Down in the Valley, where Ed Norton acts like a cowboy in LA, science fiction.
Why not The Hunt for Red October or the James Bond films where people really do use technology that isn't real.
CSA is awful, awful, AWFUL Alternate History, making no attempt to create a plausible history. While the issues it raises are important, the timeline it invents is completely implausible had the writers done any research.
Bit of a stretch on some of these, but there are a few forgotten gems in there. Sneakers was written by the guys behind Wargames and is the only real Mission Impossible movie ever made. Zelig is a clever meta-Forest Gump told through newsreals. And The Conversation is simply one of Coppola's best, hands down. Quieter and more intimate than Apocolypse Now but just as devestating.
What about Tron?
Sting's not the Devil? I was fooled, (seriously, I thought he was supposed to be a demonic entity of some sort in that movie).
Also...A whole bunch of David Lynch stuff. Twin Peakes (Fire Walk With Me), Wild at Heart...Just about anything with him attached to it has quite an otherworldly feel. It's like watching someone's acid trip.
I haven't seen most of these films, tho from descriptions I want to see some now, so thank you.
But Ghost Dog as scifi? I generally have a very loose idea of scifi, but I don't recall anything in that film that made me think it was scifi. Perhaps there was something I missed. I thought it was overrated too, so perhaps with the proper enthusiasm for it, the argument for scifi is more clear.
Sneakers was a pretty good movie. I liked that one.
The Conversation is one of my favorite movies. I had never thought to classify it as science fiction, but nevertheless I think it is a movie that sci-fi fans would really enjoy. It has a fantastic soundtrack.
@bcapirigi: Amazing, but based on a true story, so I'm not sure it counts here.
Wouldn't Mulholland Drive kinda fit in with these? Videodrome? I'm also thinking about this old german film about a psychotic guy where the sets show his skewed vision (black and white), but can't think of the name. At the end I think he's in an insane asylum...
@Garrison Dean: Tristram Shandy is clearly scifi.
@Miranda Kali: We almost included some David Lynch movies, but ended up going for the Jim Jarmusch instead b/c people wouldn't think of him as much.
@moff: was it? that's crazy.
Makavejev rocks.
"I like scratches. They look like rain."
Pleasanville? That's fantasy. And rather poorly thought out too, watch for the anvils.
Yay for the Sneakers nod though.
Someone told me once that science fiction should have some science in it. Crazy, right?
@Seth L: Well they use technology to get inside the TV set.
@bcapirigi: My bad. I was thinking about the one with the horse and the city. The HBO show they're making a movie of. The one with Chris Noth.
(Never gets old.)
The Death of a President, a couple years ago, would fit this list quite well. Done in the style of a documentary from the future about, well, the Death of a President. It's almost more like alternate history about history that hasn't happened.
David Lynch tends to tell sci-fi stories without the sci-fi. Mulholland Drive had some very SF-ish aspects with identity swapping and time loops. Inland Empire explored similar themes.
Oooo! Almost forgot the slapstick contingent...
"Amazon Women on the Moon", "The Burbs", "UHF"....Sure they have sci-fi elements, but would they be considered sci-fi? (or just damn, funny...well to some people, at least)
I'd actually add Delicatessen to this list... it's showing on TMC this week, I believe, if you haven't had the canabalistic pleasure.
You're REALLLLY reaching, to the point of dislocating your shoulder, on most of these.
BRIMSTONE & TREACLE's antagonist isn't an "alien"--he's a psychopath. Period. You'd have to include SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, PSYCHO & PEEPING TOM on the list using this criteria.
SECONDS with Rock Hudson is veiled sci-fi posing as horror. So was Cronenberg's SHIVERS & RABID.
Thunbs up to Sneakers, which I think is underrated and one of the more realistic "hacker" movies around. (OTOH, considering how realistic the average hacker movie is, that's not too high a bar to clear.)
I was actually IN Zelig! Now I can brag that I was in a sci-fi movie! Yay!
Honestly, I didn't think anyone but Me, my mom and Woody saw it.
@PVIII: are you thinking of "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari?" I guess it's technically a psychodrama, though some classify it as horror. There was a remake with sound in 2005 that is pretty well regarded as well.
You left off "Dude, Where's My Car?".
Okay, I don't want to jump on this bandwagon, but how is 8 1/2 SF and not fantasy? The same basic device powers Brazil, but at least that's set in a dystopian steampunk SF near-future making it SF in a fairly obvious way with the fantasy being inside the main character's head and not in the movie's supposed reality.
8 1/2 is set in the ostensible real world Italy while the fantasy is, again, in the main character's head. Where's the SF?
I laughed *so hard* at Babe: Pig in the City. I still feel bad that the reviewers were so brutal. It was delightful and weird in a good way.
@SeeingI: Actually, Dude Where's My Car was on the longlist. But it's so obviously SF that people would have been like, "Duh!" Plus, many people would argue it is not a great movie. Including me.
@JennaW: OMG you're back! W00t! Well, 8 1/2 is SF because he's making an SF movie and his dream world blends in with it. Plus Brazil is way way too obvious. We were trying to avoid the slam-dunk movies here, the ones everyone pretty much acknowledges as SF already.
@Charlie Jane Anders: *beams* Thank you!
Okay, but what he's doing is making an SF film which is a real thing to be doing, but it's his *fantasy* life that causes things to go weird even if that blends in elements of his real life as the maker of an SF film. I don't see how that makes the movie itself SF.
And, yeah, I was just using Brazil as an example of the same plot device rather than as an example of an unsuspected SF film. Plus, any chance to reference Brazil *and* 8 1/2 in one comment is a film geek slam dunk
So, a movie featuring alienation is science fiction? I suppose that Red Desert and Fargo and Macbeth are all science fiction, as well.
This almost justifies the "Sci Fi" channel's Saturday film line up. Bring on Ghost and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang!
@Charlie Jane Anders: You know the more I look at this list, the more I gotta call BS on it. In almost every one of these films the only thing that could make it Sci-Fi is almost always merely a cheap plot device to allow the director to do what they want. The Code in Sneakers, The Brainwashing, the Magic Remote, Stress Induced fantasy world, Chemical Superdrug. I think most of these are amazing films, but in no way are they sci-fi. I think things have gotten so literal in the creative world nowadays that we forgot how far the reach of "Fiction" can be.
Is Don Quixote sci-fi because he has visions? Is Beowulf sci-fi because it has a monster? Is Macbeth sci-fi because it has witches, or Romeo and Juliet that has a super drug that simulates death.. No, they're all fiction that use fantastical creative elements to move the plot forward. they were created in a time before people rolled their eyes at any weird thing in a story that may not make perfect sense in the real world.
@Garrison Dean: Is Macbeth sci-fi because it has witches...
Well, no, that would make it a fantasy -- which The Tempest very unarguably is ;)
What seems most stretchy to me among all of the stretchiness of this list is the notion that one can say of any Makavejev film that it's the strangest of them all. W.R. is probably the one of the most cohesive, thematically, therefore not so strange. Sweet Movie is way more strange.
I hate the notion of slipstream (well-noted and, again, Yuck!) but I love this post for its ability to irk the scifi audience so I offer my own nomination: Cronenberg's Spider. Completely overlooked by most, Spider may be the last "classic" Cronenberg flick (while being completely unique in its own right) before he moved on to more traditional stories like History of Violence and Eastern Promises and his tightest, most perfect offering since Dead Ringers.
@JennaW: Fair enough, but that is kind of my point. In the films above, based on what science fiction is... Which ones use speculative science and or sociology as the driving force behind their plot to examine the world and its cultures. And how many of them just have "weird stuff" happening, some of it technological, but still falling, at best, under the umbrella of Fantasy.
@Garrison Dean: Oh, but the dirty little truth about SF is that it *all* falls under the larger umbrella of Fantasy!
/beam me up!
@JennaW: No it falls under the umbrella of Fiction, as does Fantasy. If Sci-Fi is any old thing that has sort of weird stuff init or laserbeams then anything could be sci-fi. What is wonderful about true sci-fi, be it any of its sub genres is that it does work under some set of rules. Those rules are not in play here. Not to mention that CJA is stretching it way thin with some of these things.
I'd like to see a cyborg crossover film with the Little Tramp and Tetsuo the Iron Man now that I've read this.
The one connecting theme for all these films is... ready?...THEY NEVER REALLY HAPPENED. There, I said it. All pure fiction, someone Made It All Up, fantasy. So let's stop all this fussin' & a fuedin' and watch "Two Snakes II" on SciFi Channel! Yay!
Oh yeah, "slipstream" is a terrible term, makes my eyes itch. yuk.
@JennaW: Ah, but we're pickers-and-choosers here; blasters, not wands, you know.
Good Ghod, I'm channeling Minsk!
Welcome back, BTW.
@Garrison Dean: Isn't that Lois McMaster Bujold? She says something to the effect of all mainstream novels comprising the largest shared-world fictional universe in existence.
We can make a chart where ">" equals "encompasses"
Fiction > Fantasy > SF > Slipstream > irate fans who get all weird about little sub-sub-subgenre categories and take classifications *way* too seriously
Or not ;)
@JennaW: Yup, I guess that works. Toss out all the rules. Let the chips fall where they may.
I'm not being picky here by the way. Tell me you have watched any...ANY of these movies above before and said. Hey.. this is kind of sci-fi. CSA is the only one I can think that works. I mean, they hardly have a sci-fi element in them. We can debate what sci-fi is til the womp rats come home. But you can't honestly tell me that these are sci-fi. I can think of the list that they wanted to make and at the top would be Moulin Rouge, but I don't think thats Sci-Fi.
@AmishJohn: Thanks! Good to be back.
@JennaW: Wouldn't (yuck) "slipstream" be further up the food chain than fantasy and science fiction, since it really is a broader category incorporating anything that uses a fantastical element in its story, while excluding all that explicitly can be agreed to be science fiction and fantasy? And then, somehow, the sfers reincorporate it back into sf. Slipstream is science fiction, but science fiction is not slipstream. It boggles the mind.
Sigh. Yet another utterly crap list from I09. If you knew anything, you'd include movies like the one I mentioned earlier, Brother John, where Sidney Poitier is revealed in the film's final scene to be an alien who, like Klaatu has been sent to Earth because it posed a danger to universe, only his judgment was the humanity could not be served and should be wiped out before they could spread.
And where's Pi where we learn the device is sentient in the end?
Again, your list blows.
@Garrison Dean: I meant that generally -- fans do get all worked up and outraged that someone would imply the Serious SF they are enjoying might be FANTASY!!!! *dun-dun-duuuuuuun*
I think proposing such topics is a good way to get conversations going which is the point of a blog like this, so that's cool. I argued against 8 1/2. I think a case could be made for The Conversation but the fun is more in the discussion than in deciding absolutely either way.
But then I also think that this site should be about Spec Fic and not *just* SF because too often the line is so blurry, we're either avoiding really good topics or stepping into Fantasy territory anyway and trying to make the SF case for it (e.g. BABE: Pig in the City).
@Tim Faulkner: When you can find two people to agree on a definition of slipstream, then we can discuss its placement in the continuum! *slaps knee in hilarity*
My own encounters with slipstream have all been on the SF side of the slipperiness, but I'm not sure something that parses other genres can then be elevated above them. It can be a subgenre of both, however (as can steampunk in my experience).
@JennaW:
"But then I also think that this site should be about Spec Fic and not *just* SF because too often the line is so blurry"
Agreed. But alas, we aren't the ones making up the rules, then arbitrarily abandoning them when something shiny strikes their eyes.
@JennaW: I like putting forth topics for discussion, but I think they too often go for the quick route without really thinkng them through. A sentiment echoed by Annalee on the last Horrorhead post. The burden is on them to produce the content, if they don't we have the right... NAY THE DUTY!!! to pick them apart with our words born out of boredom at work.
I would say CQ is more sci-fi than 8 1/2
While I dont' agree that Sci-Fi falls under the umbrella of Fantasy, I do feel that Sci-Fi, Horror, Fantasy all walk hand in hand often. And I feel this site does limit themselves by picking and choosing what is Sci-Fi to suit their needs. They either need to stick to true sci-fi, or bring in the Freddies, Jasons, and Orcs to the familiy.