20 Best Science Fiction Movies Released Since 2000

For many of us, the moment the beat from Prodigy’s “Invaders Must Die” kicked in during the trailer was the moment Edgar Wright’s Scott Pilgrim vs the World became a modern classic. Wright’s first American-made, Canadian-filmed feature chucks out the chaotic British comedy stylings of the director’s early work, and makes use of a sizeable CG budget and some serious star power.

Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera), a wayward twenty-something with a failing garage band and a teenage girlfriend he doesn’t care for, finds his life flipped one-eighty when he meets the girl of his dreams, Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead). But scoring a date with her isn’t as easy as it seems, and Scott must defeat her seven evil exes before him and Ramona can catch a movie and dinner.

Scott Pilgrim is a close cousin of the cutesy, awkward, rom-com teen movies Cera made his name in (Juno, Nick and Norah, etc.), but Wright takes this genre and reforms its parts into the shape of a sci-fi actioner, with a heavy video game influence. Scott’s world, after all, is not just snarky comments and swooning over girls, but one of fighting superpowered vegans, collecting extra lives, destroying mind control devices and travelling through subspace. And it’s this precarious position it holds between known genres and tropes that made it so difficult to sell to mainstream audiences at the time, but which has made it a stone-cold classic since.