10 Mind-Bending Sci-Fi Movies That Will Melt Your Brain

9. Moon (2009)

Well, what did you expect from a film directed by Ziggy Stardust's son?

Starring Sam Rockwell (and pretty much nobody else) in a Oscar-worthy performance (which, of course, he wasn't nominated for one), Moon is a mind-bending science fiction thriller that you'll find yourself wanting to revisit the very moment it ends. Rockwell plays a man named Sam who lives alone in a research station on the moon. But his humdrum existence is suddenly compromised when he unexpectedly stumbles upon a... foreign object.

Moon's genius stems from the way that it subverts the sci-fi genre and plays with audiences expectations. The "twist" that occurs at the beginning of act two, which results in the film having even more Sam Rockwell than it already did (never a bad thing), ensures the kind of complex, philosophical exploration that hard sci-fi fans just love to debate.

Complex plottings aside, though, Moon is, above all, a beautiful homage to science-fiction cinema in general - everything from Solaris to Silent Running to 2001: A Space Odyssey is alluded to in this masterful love letter to director Duncan Jones' favourite genre.