Make sure you watch Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey if you only watch one science fiction film in your life. While it's difficult, to sum up, the picture in a few words, it's best described as a meditation on human evolution—and a striking one at that, thanks to its huge scope and stunning photography.

It's also quite foresightful: While it famously dates back to the dawn of time, the majority of 2001's plot revolves around a group of men aboard a spaceship who are aided in their mission, then held hostage, by HAL 9000—a piece of AI technology that appears to have surpassed the flesh-and-blood astronauts relying on it in terms of being "human."

The film's pace is known for being glacial, yet its unique storyline and revolutionary filming techniques set it apart from practically every other film in history. It's simple to trace the origins of almost any sci-fi film released after 1968 back to Kubrick's genre classic.

Director: Stanley Kubrick
Stars: Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood, William Sylvester
Runtime: 149 mins

Dune, by Frank Herbert, is one of the most important science fiction books ever written, and it has inspired some of the most memorable science fiction films ever made. However, as proven by Jodorowsky's Dune, a 2013 documentary about avant-garde filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky's disastrous effort to film Herbert's text, attempts to adapt Herbert's book have been notoriously troublesome.

While David Lynch was able to adapt the novel, it was widely regarded as a flop when it was released in 1984—though it has since gained a devoted cult following, and Lynch has since expressed interest in redoing his adaptation. Denis Villeneuve—the man behind sci-fi classics Enemy, Arrival, and Blade Runner 2049—applied his now-signature novelistic technique and was able to succeed where others had failed the third time around.

Villeneuve tells the narrative of Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet), a young man who is destined for greatness but must first survive a journey through the universe's most deadly planet. Dune is a brilliantly shot epic that is as intelligent as it is beautiful, and a sequel is already in the works.

Director: Denis Villeneuve

Stars: Timothée Chalamet, Oscar Isaac, Zendaya

The next film on our list of the best sci-fi movies is Blade Runner (1982). A future based on science that allows men to take on the role of God. What is it that they have created? Forced into slave labor and born with a ticking-clock expiration date, artificial intelligence is more human than human. Deckard, an ex-cop and ex-Blade Runner, is tasked with putting down a gang of rogue Replicants. This is the foundation upon which Ridley Scott's masterwork is built. Around that underlying assumption comes the stuff that makes great science fiction: moral and ethical problems that are tough to navigate and even more difficult to satisfy convincingly on screen.

Scott easily knows how to tell this tale — you can feel it in every frame, every cut, and every music cue — using Philip K. Dick's source material as a blueprint to build a detective story that wants to be about more than just Deckard catching his victim. Scott and his production team imagine a futuristic Los Angeles replete with neon and skyscrapers piercing a perpetually rain-streaked sky. Blade Runner is film noir science fiction from the top down, as unique and vibrant as the androids from which its protagonist must retire. The film's influence on visual storytelling is indisputable.

Blade Runner is also a genre classic and triumph because every single one watching is the same; you'll notice a new detail here or pick up on a different subtext in a line of dialogue there. You'll believe you've grasped the movie's message, only to learn you've just scratched the surface. Blade Runner 2049 may take a few more years and a little more perspective to make our list, but Denis Villeneuve's sequel, 35 years later, is a visual feast that skillfully expands on the original.

Director: Ridley Scott
Stars: Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, Sean Young
Runtime: 117 mins

Yes, there are AT-AT fights and Boba Fett, as well as the legendary "I am your father" twist in Empire. Nothing, however, can compare to the original Star Wars in terms of pure science fiction action and adventure.

From the opening scene of the Star Destroyer pursuing the fleeing Rebel ship to the climactic ceremony in which Luke Skywalker and Han Solo were honored as galactic heroes, A New Hope wowed audiences. Between these two points, there was everything a sci-fi/fantasy enthusiast could want: lowly heroes drawn into greater realms, roguish scoundrels, princesses in peril, a zoo of strange and lovely aliens, and epic space wars that hung in the balance the fates of planets.

George Lucas embraced all that was excellent about early twentieth-century adventure serials and modernized it with a modern flair in A New Hope. It isn't the most intricate or detailed of the Star Wars films. It's the purest enjoyment somebody can experience when viewing a film.

Director: George Lucas
Stars: Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher
Runtime: 121 mins

The Alien film series was characterized by the tagline "No One Can Hear You Scream in Space." While Alien is a "monster in the house" horror feature, here the house is a spaceship and the monster is a mouth-tongued beastie that lays eggs and uses people's chests as doors, it was Ridley Scott's film that first pitted Warrant Officer Ripley against the acid-bleeding xenomorph.

The joy here is that science fiction is more realistic than Star Trek or Star Wars, which makes the horrors feel more urgent and real. In the future, ships resemble oil derricks rather than Enterprise. Putting a blue-collar crew in the heart of our first truly great "monster in space" film spawned a new subgenre of the genre, which Hollywood has milked with mixed results ever since.

Both the filmmaker and the main lady's careers were revolutionized by Alien. It introduced one of the best creatures ever seen in a film. It also reminded us how fantastic the genre can be when it blends superb narrative with novel ideas. And tongues in the mouth.

Director: Ridley Scott
Stars: Sigourney Weaver, Tom Skerritt, John Hurt
Runtime: 117 mins

The Empire Strikes Back takes the "leave your hometown" thrills of its predecessor and adds an adult sensibility and thematic through-line that gives George Lucas' galaxy far, far away from a real depth. While the phrases "dark" and "stylish" are often overused when discussing filmmaker Irvin Kershner's part in the series, it is certainly the darkest and most stylish of the series.

Han Solo's uncertain fate, Luke's dreadful epiphany about his father, Lando's betrayal, the Rebels' defeat on Hoth... these were all gut-punch moments that left us reeling back then and still does in some ways, even if Return of the Jedi's soft-pedaling undoes so much of Empire's hard work. That, however, is a topic for a distinct list.

Director: Irvin Kershner
Stars: Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher
Runtime: 124 mins

The original 1968 Planet of the Apes isn't just a terrific sci-fi film; it's also one of the very first genre franchises to come out of Hollywood, spawning four sequels, two reboots, a TV series, a cartoon, comics, toys, and every kind of marketing tie-in you can think of.

In the far-off future of 1972, the magnificently misanthropic George Taylor (Charlton Heston) travels into space to escape all those blasted dirty hippies, only to end up living among all those damned dirty apes in the far-far-off future of the 40th century. Perhaps the film's apes' makeup and themes have worn thin by today's standards, but this was cutting-edge technology at the time. A film in which apes descended from humans? There has to be a solution!

The solution is straightforward: Whereas the first film is the most polished, highbrow, and grandiose of the series, the sequels all brought value to the broader concept, never resting on their monkeyshines laurels but instead developing and furthering the themes of the first film. But it all started with the 1968 picture, with its upside-down world of social criticism and Big Ideas about science, religion, and history. And this is where it will all begin again and again.

Director: Franklin J. Schaffner
Stars: Charlton Heston, Roddy McDowall, Kim Hunter
Runtime: 112 mins

Wrath of Khan is the best of the Trek films, as it confronts some of the series' most difficult issues, such as employing space exploration to stay youthful despite the fact that life always comes to an end.

The plot revolves around the effects of mortality on William Shatner's Admiral Kirk, a man who doesn't believe in no-win situations, but who pays the price when a man he hasn't seen in 15 years shows up with phasers tuned to "KHAAAAAAAN!" Subtextually and emotionally, there's more going on than a movie based on a sci-fi show (with too many Styrofoam sets) needs. But that's the brilliance of Trek II: it goes above and beyond the genre's expectations to offer a fantastic tale and film. That is why this experience from the twenty-first century is still entertaining today.

And if Kirk and Spock's final moments together, separated by glass, don't make you cry the same huge fat tears you do when you watch Pixar movies, then you have a Ceti eel in your heart.

Director: Nicholas Meer
Stars: William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley
Runtime: 113 mins

The Matrix, directed by the innovative, boundary-pushing Wachowskis, grabbed the minds of sci-fi fans everywhere and introduced them to a new style of the film. The first film in the trilogy remains a vicious and nihilistic roller coaster of butt-kicking brilliance, despite the franchise never being the "new Star Wars" that everyone praised it as at the onset.

There are a lot of philosophical questions in this film. What exactly is reality? Is the world around us real or a figment of our imagination? Who has the best kung fu? The picture aspired to be more educated and serious than the ordinary action film, but it was never hesitant to abandon its philosophical musings in favor of some well-choreographed bullet-dodging and martial arts mayhem. The slow-motion combat ballet of The Matrix inspired millions of imitators, yet none, not even the two Matrix sequels, have been able to match the original.

Director: Lana Wachowski, Lilly Wachowski
Stars: Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, Carrie-Anne Moss
Runtime: 136 mins

An alien with the power to absorb any form of life infiltrates an Antarctic research outpost, and the 12-man team is soon engulfed in carnage, mistrust, and paranoia. John Carpenter's best film sits squarely in the midst of the horror and science fiction cinema genres.

As a sci-fi film, a cross between Alien and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, it succeeds in posing the question "Who Goes There?" by pushing our survivors to figure out who they truly are as The Thing puts their humanity to the test, just like its literary source material did. The intensity rises, and Kurt Russell, as team leader MacReady, gives one of his greatest performances.

The practical special effects hold up better than you might expect, and we dare you not to be blown away when a victim's head sheers itself from its flaming corpse and spider-walks away. If you haven't seen this film yet, you should do so right now.

Director: John Carpenter
Stars: Kurt Russell, Wilford Brimley, Keith David
Runtime: 109 mins