Ranking the most epic science fiction films of all time, from Hayao Miyazaki's Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind to Denis Villeneuve's Dune: Part Two.
It's pretty easy for science fiction movies to become epic. They're trying to tell stories that involve things like time travel, space battles, interstellar travel, and intergalactic warfare, so it's only natural that they'd have a grand scope and long runtimes.
Epics in the genre aren't a recent development either. There have been large-scale sci-fi films since the silent era, and every decade brings new technological innovations that precipitate new epics. From the 20th century to the 21st, there have been enough sci-fi epics to fill out an entire cinematic universe and then some. Many of them are landmark films, for both the genre and filmmaking in general, while others are lesser known but no less epic.
They come from vastly different filmmakers, and all use the genre to reach different ends, but they all accomplish it on a grand scale. These are the ten greatest sci-fi epics of all time, ranked. 10 Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind is a sci-fi exception from Hayao Miyazaki. Set in a post-apocalyptic world where humans and nature struggle to co-exist, it's another beautifully animated epic from one of the medium's most influential filmmakers.
Though it was given a poorly edited release in the U.S., that mistake has long since been rectified, and the film has been internationally recognized as a foundational anime. Nausicaä is the pacifist princess of the Valley of the Wind, a human enclave that becomes caught in conflict involving the Toxic Jungle that surrounds them and an Empire that seeks to eradicate it.
Influenced by major science fiction works like Dune as well as fantasy, the film also carries many of the themes Miyazaki would elaborate on later in his career. It advocates for empathy over anger and the ability of humans to coexist with nature, which it illustrates with some truly wondrous, and sometimes psychedelic, sci-fi imagery. 9 Interstellar is a hard sci-fi film by Christopher Nolan, filtered through his four-quadrant blockbuster sensibilities.
Originally developed by producer Lynda Obst and physicist Kip Thorne, the film follows a group of astronauts on a mission to save a blighted Earth by investigating other planets as potential replacements. The final film actually feels like a more cohesive marriage of Steven Spielberg's sensibilities and 2001 director Stanley Kubrick, even more so than A.I. Artificial Intelligence, which was handed off between the directors.
Interstellar still has Nolan's fingerprints all over it, and it blends epic entertainment with big sci-fi concepts. 8 Dune: Part Two is a sci-fi achievement by Denis Villeneuve. Adapting the latter half of Frank Herbert's first Dune novel, the film picks up with Paul Atreides living among the Fremen, where his myth as a messiah begins to grow while he seeks to overthrow the Harkonnens who caused his family's downfall.
It's suitably epic, but unlike Nolan, Villeneuve doesn't use heavy exposition and prefers to use visuals to convey much of the plot and characters. It makes his adaptation of Herbert's dense novel a little less nuanced, but it compensates with incredible epic images. 7 Terminator 2: Judgment Day is a sci-fi thriller by James Cameron, though it's clear he always had ambitions for it but was merely limited by budget.
Essentially rebooting the plot of the first film but on an elevated scale, Terminator 2: Judgment Day brings back the villainous T-800 as the protector of John Connor
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