Spaceships, cloning labs, memory-erasing machines, they all show up somewhere on this list. But ask what any of these six movies is actually about an
Spaceships, cloning labs, memory-erasing machines, they all show up somewhere on this list. But ask what any of these six movies is actually about and you’ll end up talking about grief, or power, or what’s left of someone once you strip away the thing that made them feel human, long before anyone brings up the actual technology.
The R rating matters here too. It gave these directors room to push the violence and the despair as far as the story actually needed, without worrying about softening the ending for a bigger opening weekend. Six movies that used genre as cover for something a lot more personal underneath.
6
‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’ (2004)
A company called Lacuna Inc. offers to erase specific memories of a person from your brain, and Joel Barish (Jim Carrey) uses it right after a brutal breakup with Clementine (Kate Winslet), only to realize halfway through the procedure that he doesn’t actually want to forget her anymore. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind structures the whole story backward through his own dissolving memory, which makes the movie like it’s literally falling apart as you watch it.
Charlie Kaufman wrote it and Michel Gondry directed it, and together they turn a breakup movie into something closer to a panic attack about the nature of memory itself, using practical in-camera effects instead of CGI to make Joel’s mind visually crumble around him. Dr. Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson), who runs the memory-erasing company, turns out to have his own messy reasons for offering this service. It won the Oscar for Original Screenplay, and it’s aged into one of the most quietly devastating breakup movies ever made.
5
‘Blade Runner 2049’ (2017)
K (Ryan Gosling) is a replicant whose entire job is hunting down older, rogue replicants, and the movie spends most of its nearly three hours asking whether he can trust the one memory that makes him feel like a real person instead of a manufactured one. Blade Runner 2049 is a sequel that showed up decades after the original, and it earned that gap.
Deckard (Harrison Ford) returns after thirty years in hiding, and Joi (Ana de Armas), K’s holographic AI girlfriend, raises just as many uncomfortable questions about consent and personhood as the replicants themselves do. Denis Villeneuve directed it, and the film moves at a deliberately glacial pace, letting Roger Deakins‘ cinematography do the magic. It’s bleak and icy and gorgeous in a way most studio sequels never risk being, and Niander Wallace (Jared Leto) makes for one of the more unnerving corporate villains in recent sci-fi.
4
‘Brazil’ (1985)
Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce) works a soul-crushing government job in a retro-futuristic bureaucracy so tangled that a single typo gets an innocent man arrested and killed early in the movie, and Sam spends the rest of the runtime escaping into elaborate daydreams just to survive his own life. Brazil looks like nothing else from the 1980s, all crumbling architecture and absurd paperwork stacked to the ceiling, and that visual chaos is doing just as much work as the plot.
Harry Tuttle (Robert De Niro), a rogue heating engineer who fixes ducts outside the system’s insane paperwork requirements, becomes the closest thing the movie has to a folk hero, appearing just long enough to make the bureaucracy look even more absurd by comparison. Terry Gilliam fought his own studio for years over the ending, refusing to let them replace his bleak conclusion with a happier one, and that fight became almost as celebrated as the film itself. It’s satire dressed up as science fiction, and it’s only gotten more relevant since it came out.
3
‘The Terminator’ (1984)
A killer robot gets sent back from a nuclear-ravaged future to murder a woman named Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) before she can give birth to the son who’ll one day lead the human resistance, and Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn) gets sent back right behind it to protect her. James Cameron made The Terminator on a fairly compact budget, and the low-budget grit actually works in the movie’s favor, it feels grimy and desperate in a way the glossier sequels never quite matched.
The Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger) himself barely speaks and never explains its motivations, it just relentlessly pursues Sarah through the film with no hesitation. Underneath the chase-movie structure, there’s a strange time-loop romance holding the whole plot together, one that only fully makes sense once you realize who Kyle Reese actually is to Sarah’s future son.
2
‘Aliens’ (1986)
Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) gets pulled out of decades of cryosleep only to be sent right back to the planet where she lost her entire crew, this time alongside a squad of overconfident marines who assume their weapons make them secure. James Cameron directed the sequel, and instead of copying the snail-paced dread of the original, he rebuilt the whole thing as a war movie, louder, faster, and just as tense in a completely different register.
Newt (Carrie Henn), the only survivor of the colony, turns Ripley’s arc into something the first film never touched, a story about a woman choosing to become a mother in the middle of a literal war zone. Bishop (Lance Henriksen), an android on the crew, spends the whole movie quietly proving he’s more trustworthy than half the humans around him, while Burke (Paul Reiser) reveals that corporate greed is still the real monster driving the plot. It’s one of the sporadic sequels that doesn’t just repeat the original, it argues with it.
1
‘Children of Men’ (2006)
No woman on Earth has been able to have a baby in eighteen years by the time this movie starts, and Theo Faron (Clive Owen), a burned-out former activist, gets roped into smuggling the one pregnant woman left, Kee (Clare-Hope Ashitey), to a group that might actually be able to protect her. Alfonso Cuarón directs entire sequences in single unbroken takes, including a messy battle near the end that runs for minutes without a single apparent cut.
Jasper (Michael Caine), Theo’s aging hippie friend, provides most of the film’s only real warmth, which makes it hit even harder when the movie eventually takes that warmth away from you. The world Cuarón builds around this story, refugee cages, constant surveillance, ambient terrorism playing on every TV screen, feels less like speculative fiction now than it did back in 2006, which is exactly why the movie has only gotten harder to watch with age.
Children of Men
- Release Date
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January 5, 2007
- Runtime
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109 minutes
- Director
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Alfonso Cuarón
- Writers
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Alfonso Cuarón, David Arata, Timothy J. Sexton, Hawk Ostby, Mark Fergus, P. D. James
