Scifi Movies History

Scifi movies history began early in the silent movie era, typically as short movies shot in black and white, sometimes with colour tinting. They usually had a technological theme and were often intended to be humorous. In 1902, Georges Méliès released Le Voyage dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon), a movie that used early trick photography effects to depict a spacecraft’s journey to the moon. Several movies merged the

science-fiction and horror genres, such as Frankenstein (1910), a movie adaptation of Mary Shelley's novel, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1912). A longer scifi movie, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1916), was based on Jules Verne’s novel. In the 1920s, European moviemakers tended to use scifi movies for prediction and social commentary, as can be seen in German movies such as Metropolis (1926) and Frau im Mond (1929).

1930s–1950s

In the 1930s, there were several big budget scifi movies, notably Just Imagine (the first feature length scifi movie by a US studio), the US-made movies King Kong (1933) and Lost Horizon (1936) and the British-made Things to Come (1936). Starting in 1934, a number of scifi comic strips were adapted as serials, notably Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers, both starring Buster Crabbe. These serials, and the comic strips they were based on, helped fix in the mind of the US public the idea that scifi was juvenile and absurd, and led to the common description of scifi as "that crazy Buck Rogers stuff". After 1936, no more big budget scifi movies were produced until 1950's Destination Moon, the first color sf movie.

During the 1950s, public interest in space travel and new technologies revived. While many 1950s science-fiction movies were still low-budget B movies, there were several successful movies with larger budgets and impressive special effects, notably Destination Moon, The Day the Earth Stood Still, This Island Earth, and Forbidden Planet. Some of the many B movies are also still of interest today, especially Howard Hawks's The Thing from Another World, Invasion of the Body Snatchers and It Came From Outer Space.

There was a close connection between many movies in the scifi genre and the monster movie, in, for example, Them!, The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, and The Blob

Ray Harryhausen began to use stop-motion animation to create special effects for movies such as Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956).

1960s

There were relatively few scifi movies in the 1960s, but some of the movies transformed scifi cinema. Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) brought new realism to the genre, with its groundbreaking visual effects and realistic portrayal of space travel and influenced the genre with its epic story and transcendent philosophical scope. Other 1960s movies included Planet of the Apes (1968) and Fahrenheit 451 (1966), which provided social commentary, and the campy Barbarella (1968), which explored the sillier side of earlier scifi. Jean-Luc Godard's French "new wave" movie Alphaville (1965) posited a futuristic Paris commanded by an artificial intelligence which has outlawed all emotion.

1970s-1990

The era of manned trips to the moon in the 1970s saw a resurgence of interest in the scifi movie. Andrei Tarkovsky’s slow-paced Solaris (1972) had visuals and a philosophic scope reminiscent of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Scifi movies from the early 1970s explored the theme of paranoia, in which humanity is depicted as under threat from ecological or technological adversaries of its own creation, such as Silent Running (ecology), Westworld (man vs. robot), THX 1138 (man vs. the state), and Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (threat of brainwashing). Conspiracy thriller movies of the 1970s included Soylent Green and Futureworld. The scifi comedies of the 1970s included Woody Allen's Sleeper and John Carpenter's Dark Star.

Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, both released in 1977 , were box-office hits that brought about a huge increase in scifi movies. As well, Star Wars helped to blur the distinction between the scifi, fantasy, and superhero genres. In 1979, Star Trek: The Motion Picture brought the television series to the big screen for the first time, While Disney released The Black Hole. Ridley Scott's movies, such as Alien and Blade Runner, presented the future as dark, dirty and chaotic, and depicted aliens and androids as hostile and dangerous. In contrast, Steven Spielberg's E.T. The Extra Terrestrial, one of the most successful movies of the 1980s, presented aliens as benign and friendly.

The big budget adaptations of Frank Herbert's Dune, Alex Raymond's Flash Gordon and Arthur C. Clarke's sequel to 2001, 2010, were box office duds that dissuaded producers from investing in scifi literary properties. Disney's Tron turned out to be a moderate success. The strongest contributors to the genre during the second half of the 1980s were James Cameron and Paul Verhoeven with The Terminator and RoboCop entries. The Japanese anime movie Akira (1988) also had a big influence outside Japan when released.

1990s–2000s

In the 1990s, the emergence of the world wide web and the cyberpunk genre spawned several movies on the theme of the computer-human interface, such as Total Recall (1990), The Lawnmower Man (1992), eXistenZ (1999) and The Matrix (1999) . Other themes included disaster movies (e.g., Armageddon and Deep Impact both from 1998), alien invasion (Independence Day from 1996) and genetic experimentation (e.g., Jurassic Park from 1993 and Gattaca from 1997).

As the decade progressed, computers played an increasingly important role in both the addition of special effects, (thanks to Jurassic Park), and the production of movies. As the software developed in sophistication it was used to produce more complicated effects . Developments in software also enabled moviemakers to enhance the visual quality of animation, which was used in the scifi movies Ghost in the Shell (1995) from Japan and The Iron Giant (1999) and Titan A.E. (2000) from the US.

During the 2000s, fantasy and superhero movies abounded, as did earthbound SF such as the Matrix trilogy. In 2005, the Star Wars sextet was completed with the darkly-themed Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. Science-fiction returned as a tool for political commentary in movies such as A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, Minority Report, and Children of Men.

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