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Everyone has a movie they say they’ll watch ten minutes of and end up finishing at one in the morning. These eight are mine. Most of them are older than some of the people reading this, and the spaceships and robots still look real, mostly because somebody built them out of metal and plastic instead of leaving it to a computer.
I tried to find the weak spot in each one, the scene you could cut or the line that doesn’t quite work. I came up empty every time, even after seeing some of them more than a dozen times. Here’s the list, starting with the one I’d watch last and ending with the one I’d watch first.
8
‘Alien’ (1979)
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Image via 20th Century Studios</figure>
The crew of the Nostromo, a group of blue-collar space truckers, wake up early from hibernation to answer a distress signal and bring something deadly aboard. Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) was relatively unknown when she took the part, with only a small role in Annie Hall before this. Ridley Scott directed Alien, and the cast, including Tom Skerritt as Dallas and Ian Holm as the android Ash, plays the crew like real coworkers who are tired and bickering about pay.
The chestburster scene is the one everybody remembers, and a lot of that comes from how it was filmed. The cast didn’t know exactly what would happen, so when the blood sprayed across Veronica Cartwright (Lambert), her shock on screen was real. H.R. Giger designed the creature, and Scott cast Bolaji Badejo, a 6’10” art student, to wear the suit. Nothing in the movie feels rushed, and it stays scary every time you watch it.
7
‘The Terminator’ (1984)
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Image via Orion Pictures</figure>
A cyborg assassin (Arnold Schwarzenegger) is sent back from 2029 to kill Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), a waitress whose unborn son will one day lead the human resistance. Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn), a soldier from the future, follows to protect her. James Cameron wrote and directed The Terminator on a tiny budget of around $6.4 million, and the script came to him in a fever dream, when he was sick in Rome and pictured a metal skeleton coming out of a fire.
Cameron sold the script for just one dollar to producer Gale Anne Hurd, on the condition that he’d direct it. Schwarzenegger was first considered for Reese, and he took the villain role instead, a choice that made him a star. He struggled to say “I’ll be back” the way Cameron wanted, since the contraction gave him trouble, but Cameron kept the line. The chase never lets up, and the ending still lands.
6
‘Back to the Future’ (1985)
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Image via Universal Pictures</figure>
Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) is a teenager in 1985 who accidentally travels thirty years into the past in a DeLorean built by his friend Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd). He ends up meeting his own parents when they were in high school, and his mother, Lorraine (Lea Thompson), falls for him instead of his father. Robert Zemeckis directed Back to the Future, and every setup in the first half pays off in the second.
Eric Stoltz was originally cast as Marty and filmed for about five weeks before the filmmakers decided the tone was wrong and brought in Fox. He was already busy on the TV show Family Ties, so he worked days on one set and nights on the other for months. The time machine was almost a refrigerator, but the writers worried kids might copy it and trap themselves inside, so it became a car. Dozens of studios had rejected the script before it got made.
5
‘Blade Runner’ (1982)
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Image via Warner Bros. Pictures</figure>
In a rain-soaked Los Angeles in 2019, Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) is a retired cop pulled back to hunt down four replicants, artificial humans who have escaped from an off-world colony. He meets Rachael (Sean Young), a replicant who doesn’t know what she is, and starts to doubt his own work. Ridley Scott directed Blade Runner, adapting Philip K. Dick‘s novel, and Dick died only a few months before it came out, never seeing the final film.
Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer), the leader of the replicants, delivers the famous “tears in rain” speech at the end, and Hauer cut down the scripted lines and added the best ones himself. The movie exists in several versions, including a theatrical cut with a voiceover and a happy ending the studio demanded, and the 2007 Final Cut is the one Scott prefers. Every version is worth seeing, and the world it creates still looks like the future.
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‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ (1968)
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Image via Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer</figure>
A mysterious black monolith shows up at key moments in human history, first with early apes, then on the Moon, and finally near Jupiter, where astronaut Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea) is sent to find out why. HAL 9000 (voiced by Douglas Rain), the ship’s computer, begins to act strangely. Stanley Kubrick directed 2001: A Space Odyssey, working with writer Arthur C. Clarke, and the first spoken words don’t come until about twenty-five minutes in.
Kubrick built a real rotating set, a giant wheel, for the centrifuge scenes, so when Frank Poole jogs around the ship, the actor is actually running on a moving floor. When HAL is being shut down, he sings “Daisy Bell,” a nod to a real 1961 demonstration where an IBM computer sang the same song, which Clarke had seen. No computer graphics were used, and the film still looks incredible. It asks big questions and lets you work out the answers.
3
‘The Matrix’ (1999)
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Image via Warner Bros.</figure>
Thomas Anderson (Keanu Reeves), a hacker who goes by Neo, learns that the world he lives in is a computer simulation run by machines, and Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) offers him a way out. Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) joins the crew, and Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving) hunts them. The Wachowskis wrote and directed The Matrix, and the film changed how action movies look, especially with the famous “bullet time” shots, filmed with around 120 still cameras placed around the actors.
Reeves spent months training in kung fu with fight choreographer Yuen Woo-ping, and he had neck surgery before filming, which limited some of his early stunt work. The green code that rains down the screen was actually made from Japanese sushi recipes, taken from a cookbook belonging to the designer’s wife. Will Smith turned down the role of Neo. It works as a thriller, a kung fu movie, and a philosophy lesson, all at once.
2
‘Aliens’ (1986)
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Image via 20th Century Studios</figure>
Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) wakes up after fifty-seven years in hibernation and learns that the planet where her crew first met the alien now has a human colony, which has gone silent. She goes back with a team of Colonial Marines, including Hicks (Michael Biehn), Hudson (Bill Paxton), and Vasquez (Jenette Goldstein). James Cameron directed Aliens, and he turned the horror of the first film into a war movie, with Newt (Carrie Henn), a young girl who survived alone, at the center.
Cameron reportedly pitched it to studio executives by writing “ALIEN” on a board and adding an “S,” drawing a dollar sign through it. Lance Henriksen, who plays the android Bishop, did the knife trick between his fingers for real, and he did cut himself a few times. The Queen alien was run by puppeteers inside and outside the suit, with no CGI. Weaver was nominated for Best Actress at the Oscars, which almost never happens for a sci-fi action movie.
1
‘The Empire Strikes Back’ (1980)
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Image via 20th Century Fox</figure>
Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) goes to a swamp planet to train with Yoda (voiced by Frank Oz) while Han Solo (Harrison Ford), Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher), and Chewbacca run from Darth Vader across the galaxy. Lando Calrissian (Billy Dee Williams) offers them shelter in his floating city, and the trap is sprung. Irvin Kershner directed The Empire Strikes Back, and George Lucas paid for it himself, around $33 million, after the studio balked at the budget.
When Leia tells Han “I love you” before he’s frozen in carbonite, the script had him reply “I love you too,” but Ford suggested “I know” on set, and it stayed. The famous twist that Vader is Luke’s father was so tightly guarded that actor David Prowse delivered different lines on camera, and James Earl Jones recorded the real ones later. Hamill only learned the truth right before shooting the scene. The ending leaves everyone in trouble, and it’s still the best of the series.
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