Via Jeff “jefitoblog” Giles, who wrote the Editor’s Notes, the collaborative review site Rotten Tomatoes has generated a list of the top 100 science fiction films, based on their user ratings. It’s split over 100 individual pages, and tarted up with lots of slow-to-load graphics, so here are their top twenty films:
- 20) Mad Max
- 19) Frankenstein (the 1931 version)
- 18) 2001: A Space Odyssey
- 17) Solaris (the 1972 version)
- 16) Invasion of the Body Snatchers (the 1956 version)
- 15) The Terminator
- 14) Brazil
- 13) Galaxy Quest
- 12) Bride of Frankenstein
- 11) The Road Warrior
(The top 10 are after the cut…)
- 10) Aliens
- 9) Star Wars (the 1977 version)
- 8) The Host (a Korean movie from this year)
- 7) Children of Men
- 6) The Empire Strikes Back (the 1980 version)
- 5) Minority Report
- 4) Alien
- 3) Metropolis
- 2) Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
- 1) E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial
It’s in… interesting list. It’s somewhat skewed toward recent movies (four of the top ten are from 2002 or later), but that’s not terribly surprising given that it’s based on a compilation of ratings from the Internet. That aside, though, it’s a pretty reasonable list.
The other remarkable thing about this is that there are four original-sequel pairs (Frankenstein/ Bride of Frankenstein, Mad Max/The Road Warrior, Alien/Aliens, and Star Wars/The Empire Strikes Back). I’m not sure what this means, other than that SF is an extremely series-heavy genre, but it’s sort of interesting.
What do you think of the list? Surely, there are some glaring omissions– what’s left out, and what would you replace?