10 Great Sci-Fi Movies With Terrible Concepts

Sometimes the greatest films can unexpectedly come from the most head-scratching ideas, and what sounds like a laughable premise can turn out to be an instant classic of its genre.

Just look at 1996's Scream, which managed to turn "smug teens comment on slasher film cliches whilst living through a slasher movie" into an instant classic.

More recently, horror fans were surprised to see that 2016's edgy indie home invasion thriller Better Watch Out managed to wring some blackly comic scares out of (serious spoilers for the uninitiated) a killer spoiled suburban twelve year old.

As evidenced in WhatCulture’s recent rundown of horror movies whose seemingly doomed concepts turned out to be unexpected classics, this phenomenon appears throughout cinema history.

Another genre whose high concepts can result in some successes no one saw coming is sci-fi, where ambitious conceits can either be total flops or unexpectedly effective pieces of cinema depending on the director’s vision.

Often, the best sci-fi movies can come from conceits that sound terrible on paper, as evidenced in these ten classics of the genre which sound more than a little flawed when all you’ve heard is their premise.

Released in 1998, The Truman Show is one of the most poignant and prescient pieces of sci-fi satire from the last few decades.

Following a superb Jim Carrey as the titular hero, who is unaware that his entire life has been an elaborately staged TV show, the movie interrogates why audiences enjoy the voyeurism of watching real people’s everyday lives. Its twisty plot takes apart reality TV’s constructed “reality”, deconstructing the idea of the genre before it was anywhere near as successful with viewers as it is today.

But this doesn’t change the fact that The Truman Show’s premise, on a bare bones technical level, doesn’t really work.

Who is the target audience for this presumably deeply boring, incredibly expensive show in its first few years, when Truman is still an infant incapable of any agency of his own? Hell, even after that what's the contingency plan if this sheltered person turns out, well, sheltered and uninteresting as a protagonist? Also, why did the producers let our hero even find out about Fiji when they need him to never leave?

If Peter Weir’s famous satire had lingered for a moment longer on the logistics of how the eponymous show functions, everything would fall apart. Without a reason for viewers to watch, it's impossible to see how the show would become a phenomenon and maintain its massively expensive conceit in the first place, so it's just as well that a great script and superb performances hold this one together.