5 BEST SCI-FI FILMS – FROM STAR WARS TO THE MATRIX

As the new Dune is released, Kevin Maher picks the science fiction movies you really do want to watch.

1. Star Wars

(1977) It’s the one. The only one. It’s the one that got Dune right, for a start. It neatly absorbed that classic novel's desert planet setting (Arrakis), mystical mumbo jumbo (the Voice) and obsession with the mineral “spice” into an entirely different desert planet setting (Tatooine), more mystical mumbo jumbo (the Force). But it absorbed other things too: Flash Gordon serials, the novels of Tolkien and Edgar Rice Burroughs, Lawrence of Arabia and Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress. Star Wars is a film that gathered all influences and then made them new. Yes, it changed commercial cinema forever – hello Marvel ! – but on its own terms, as a seemingly disposable space epic, it’s a breathtaking work of art.

2. The Matrix

(1999) Here is a film that defies a central cinematic truism – it becomes more, not less, timely as it gets older. The world described in The Matrix in 1999 was a nightmarish slave planet where humans were soulless biomass, daily jacked into a synthetic digital reality where their fake best selves were either furiously engaged or numbed out into irrelevance. This was long before the first tweet was sent, in 2006. The film’s action was good too, as was the anime aesthetic and the beautiful vacancy of Keanu Reeves. But it’s the message that continues to resonate. We’re all in the Matrix now. And we love it.

3. Alien

(1979) Also known as the film that

Dune built. In 1975 film-maker Alejandro Jodorowsky gathered together a team for a

10-hour movie adaptation of the Frank Herbert novel. After two years of pre-production and

US$2 million spent, the project collapsed. However, the key creative team migrated over to camp Ridley (Scott), and became pivotal to the development of this definitive space horror. 4. Metropolis (1927)

Yes, it’s the most influential sci-fi movie ever made. Yes, the futuristic cityscapes were copied in Blade Runner and the character of Maria the robot resurfaces in everything from C-3PO to the Terminator. And yes, the appropriate way to consume this socialist parable about worker exploitation is by watching the definitive 148-minute restored version from 2010. But, really, it’s hard to top the poppy 83-minute cut from Giorgio Moroder (1984). Freddie Mercury singing Love Kills as Maria the robot, sending the wealthy denizens of

Metropolis into a lusty frenzy, is simply sublime. 5. The Fifth Element (1997)

Only the French could do a space epic with Jean-Paul Gaultier bondage wear, a camp Hitler-style dictator (Gary Oldman's Zorg) and a plot that hinges around an 11th-hour declaration of love from the emotionally constipated hero Bruce Willis. This Luc Besson classic has been divisive precisely because it has that one precious element missing from so many generic Hollywood scifi flicks: personality.

WATCH Dune is in cinemas from December 2.