20 Best Science Fiction Movies Released Since 2000

There’s a good reason the bulk of Alasdair Gray’s novels have never made it to the big screen: Scotland’s foremost postmodernist writer, Gray specialised in creating spanning worlds and times, with narratives that fold in on and climb over themselves, often passing comment on the story he was writing, in-text, while writing it. And yet.

Yorgos Lanthimos took on the monumental project of bringing Gray’s 1992 novel Poor Things to life on the big screen just three short years ago. Lanthimos regular Emma Stone stars as Bella Baxter, a naïve young woman Frankensteined from a dead body and a baby’s brain, who outgrows the confines of her creator Godwin Baxter’s (Willem Dafoe) home, and journeys into a weird and colourful retro-futurist world to discover everything life has to offer – much of which centres around “furious jumping”.

Few directors could have taken on any of Gray’s work and lived to tell the tale, and yet Lanthimos’ idiosyncratic style matches perfectly with the writer’s. Despite being set in the 1800s, Poor Things’ cities and landscapes have a luscious steampunk aesthetic that captures this branch of sci-fi better than any self-consciously steampunk effort has managed to date (Sky Captain; Hellboy; Sucker Punch). The story feel fresh yet classic, the visuals like Pride & Prejudice meets Wizard of Oz, and suffice to say there is no other film – sci-fi or otherwise – quite like this.