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The 25 best science fiction movies of all time

What are the best movies about mysterious planets, visitors from other worlds, and the future on our very own Earth? Check out our picks!

4. 'Blade Runner'

Ridley Scott's 1982 dystopian sci-fi classic follows Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), a "blade runner" tasked by the police with tracking down illegal robots who are nearly indistinguishable from human beings. The genetically engineered organic robots, known as "replicants," are designed for off-world colonies and strictly prohibited on Earth. Deckard's hunt for a group of four suspected replicants leads him to question his own motivations and ultimately the definition of humanity.

Scott's meticulous attention to detail means that the gritty 2019 Los Angeles of the movie feels fully realized. The film's strong art direction and dark style have gone on to influence a generation of filmmakers.

In an interview for Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone Magazine, author Philip K. Dick, who wrote the novel "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" on which the film was based, expressed his pleasure with what he saw of the film (he died a few months before the movie's release). In the interview, Dick said he disliked the original screenplay by writer Hampton Fancher but was much more pleased by the revised script by David Webb Peoples. "I saw a segment of Douglas Trumbull's special effects for 'Blade Runner' on the KNBC-TV news," Dick said. "I recognized it immediately. It was my own interior world. They caught it perfectly."

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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