10 Sci-Fi Movies That Break The Genre

One of the all time great sci-fi flicks, Ridley Scott's Alien has gone on to represent much of what we consider to be science fiction these days. But for its time Alien was a film that really broke many of the boundaries that surrounded the science fiction genre of that era.

The film certainly sets itself out as the majority of sci-fi fare of the time; the space travel, the dark glimpse into the future but, before the audience even knows it, they find themselves in the depths of one of the most effective horror films of all time. The film plays with the premise of our lack of knowledge about what's out there in space and asks the question 'do we want to know?'. Alien does not romanticise space but instead turns it into something to be feared and avoided at all costs.

Along with that, the deeply unexpected, and now iconic, John Hurt scene was a completely left-field move for the genre to kill off a starring character like that. Alien has gone on to inspire several great films of similar ilk, films like Event Horizon, but for its time it was something completely different from what had come before.