Hollywood spends $200 million on CGI spectacles that make no sense and a billion dollars anyway. Meanwhile, some of the most brilliant science fiction ever made is buried in a streaming library with 400 reviews and a poster nobody remembers.
These 11 films aren’t obscure because they’re bad. They’re obscure because they did something dangerous: they took the science seriously, trusted the audience’s intelligence, and refused to wrap everything up neatly. That combination tends to kill a box office.
In this video, I’m covering 11 hard sci-fi films that deserved a much bigger conversation from a 1970 AI thriller that predicted every “machine knows better” story that followed, to a 2021 Netflix film that asks an impossible moral question and refuses to answer it for you.
Films covered:
🎬 Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970)
🎬 The Andromeda Strain (1971)
🎬 Silent Running (1972)
🎬 Gattaca (1997)
🎬 Contact (1997)
🎬 Primer (2004)
🎬 Moon (2009)
🎬 Europa Report (2013)
🎬 Aniara (2018)
🎬 Ad Astra (2019)
🎬 Stowaway (2021)
I saw most of these at one time or another and was surprised I remembered them. He makes a good point about how good stuff is often under the radar.