The best sci-fi films

As usual, there are lists of the best movies for all tastes. In this article I will focus on three:

• The 100 best films in history, the result of a vote among seven film critics, organized by the newspaper La Vanguardia in 2007.
• The 100 best films in history, the result of a vote among hundreds of thousands of users of IMDb, the largest database on cinema.
• My personal preferences: the 230 movies I have liked best.

The first source covers a few years less than the other two, since it was made in 2007. Together, the three sources cover one century of film history, between 1920 and 2019.

I have classified the films into ten decades: 1920-29, 1930-39, …, 2010-19. The attached figure shows the corresponding distribution. The green curve represents the critics' vote; the red curve, the IMDb vote; the blue curve shows my preferences.

It can be seen at a glance that the critics' vote and mine are closely correlated. The difference in values ​​is due to the fact that I have worked with 230 films, while the critics considered 100, but the shape of both curves is almost identical. The maximum in both cases corresponds to the period 1940-65, which has been considered, almost universally, as the golden age of the history of cinema.

It can be argued that the criteria of film critics may not necessarily be the best. Perhaps this is true. But I think the criteria of hundreds of thousands of IMDb users is even less reliable. They have voted mostly for films from the last three decades (1990-2019), which means that they are unaware of the cinema of previous years. Many young people today, many of whom vote in this kind of poll, have only watched the most recent premieres.

Let's move on to science fiction. The three data sources above refer to all kinds of movies. Those of the genre that concerns us here are a minority. I have not considered as science-fiction those movies that are really fantasy, such as The Lord of the Rings, nor those of superheroes, like Superman, Batman or The Avengers. In the list of La Vanguardia there are 8 science-fiction films; on IMDb, 11; in mine, 12. Let’s see which ones.

• Just three science fiction films were on all three lists: 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968); Star Wars, episode 4 (1977); and Matrix (1999). Although some of these films contain scientific mistakes, the fact that they appear on all three lists is a point in their favor.
• Five films were on two of the three lists: Metropolis (1926); King Kong (1933); Alien, the eighth passenger (1979); Blade Runner (1982); and Return of the Jedi (Star Wars, episode 6, 1983). Guess which list did not contain each of them.
• Twelve films were just on one list: Frankenstein (1931); The Fly (1958); Fantastic Journey (1966), The Empire Strikes Back (Star Wars, episode 5, 1980); E.T. (1982); Return to the Future (1985); Short-circuit (1986); Terminator 2 (1991); Gattaca (1997); Wall-E (2008); Origin (2010); and Interstellar (2014). Guess which list contained each.

By the way: my criticisms against mass voting to find out which were the best films, can also be applied to political democracy. Especially if history is removed from the education of future citizens.

The same post in Spanish

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Manuel Alfonseca