Top Ten Favorite 2014 Sci-Fi Movies

With more and more superhero movies popping up each year, the Science Fiction landscape expanded to include even more large-scale tent pole releases in 2014, but at the same time, there was a healthy market of low/no budget sci-fi that flew under the radar. Every year I think that we’ve hit a peak of quality science fiction, but this is the second year in a row that has surprised me and surpassed my expectations.

So the Psycho Drive-In Top Ten Favorite Sci-Fi Films of 2014 is an eclectic list that includes some things you’ve seen, some things you meant to see, and a few movies you may not have heard of.

Have at them!

Autómata

Autómata is the second feature film directed by Spanish director Gabe Ibáñez and is a visual feast. Drawing visual inspiration from the work of Kubrick and Ridley Scott (with a hint of Terry Gilliam thrown in), and conceptually from Isaac Asimov via Philip K. Dick, Autómata is the story of Jacq Vaucan, an insurance claims investigator for ROC Robotics in a future after solar flares have irradiated most of the Earth, killing off over 99% of the population. ROC manufactures robots called Pilgrims, who have been shunted off to perform manual labor after they failed to stop the advancing deserts. They have two unalterable protocols: they cannot harm any form of life, and they may not modify themselves or other robots.

But it turns out some Pilgrims have started repairing themselves, and Vaucan (Antonio Banderas) has managed to convince his boss, Robert Bold (Robert Forster), to transfer him to a semi-mythic coast if he can find the programmer who discovered how to break the protocols. He’s kind of obsessed with this since the city is a cesspool of radiation and acid rain and his wife Rachel (Birgitte Hjort Sorensen) is pregnant with a daughter.

The script, by Ibáñez, Igor Legarreta, and Javier Sánchez Donate, isn’t great, meandering a bit once the story moves into its second half, but Banderas is a treat to watch as he slowly discovers that some of the robots are more human than the humans who hunt them. And even when the story drags, Ibáñez and cinematographer Alejandro Martinez have crafted a beautiful film. The use of puppetry to bring the robots to life is another bonus here, as is the design work.

These robots are humanoid in only a rudimentary sense, and even the sexbot that Vaucan encounters is so disturbingly non-human that the thought of people having sex with it is one of the most unnerving aspects of this future society. It’s almost like finding your lawn mower or your toaster sexually inviting.

You couldn’t see me, but I just shuddered.

In the end, we meet the first AI (voiced by Javier Bardem) and get cameos by Dylan McDermott, Tim McInnerny, and Melanie Griffith. There’s some sound and fury, but it doesn’t really amount to a lot, dramatically. While the ideas are interesting, the script doesn’t really seem to know what to do with them.

And yet, I couldn’t stop watching. Ibáñez is definitely a director to watch. Hopefully we won’t have to wait too long for a new project to arrive on the scene.

— Paul Brian McCoy

Captain America: The Winter Soldier

There are many things to admire about Captain America: The Winter Soldier, from the realistic stunts pulled in the fight scenes to the always superb cast of Chris Evans, Scarlett Johansson, Anthony Mackie, Samuel L. Jackson, and I don’t know about anyone else but I was delighted to see Hayley Atwell come back as Peggy Carter.

The dual character development of Steve Rogers a.k.a Captain America (Chris Evans) and Bucky Barnes a.k.a the Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan) is both heart-wrenching and exhilarating.  As Rogers struggles to accept the fact that his childhood best friend is not only alive but working for the enemy organization, Barnes fights to regain control of his life.  We see glimmers of recognition in Barnes’s eyes whenever he sees Rogers and think that this will finally be the time he snaps out of it and joins the good guys, but decades of violent and relentless conditioning is harder to break than we thought.  In the final fight scene, Rogers trying to fight off a brain-washed assassin while falling through the air on a burning and decomposing Helicarrier is nothing compared to the mental fight Barnes goes through as he attempts to rid himself of Hydra’s influence once and for all.  After Rogers falls unconsciously into the Potomac River, nothing is more satisfying than seeing Barnes rescue him.

If fast-paced fight scenes with plenty of guns and explosions is more your style, don’t worry; there is plenty of that too.  Once again, the Marvel universe doesn’t fail to deliver the most awesome and high-tech weapons like the Taser Rod and the Magnetic Disk Grenade.  And of course with the addition of Barnes’s prosthetic arm that rivals Captain America’s Shield, there are plenty of wicked-awesome fight scenes full of destroyed vehicles and buildings to keep things interesting.

Whether you like buff and sensitive men, chaotic brawls, strong and sarcastic female characters, or just love keeping an eye out for Stan Lee, there’s a little something in Captain America: The Winter Soldier for everyone.

— Kit Miller

Coherence

Have you ever had one of those nights? You have a group of friends over for dinner, there’s some awkwardness as one guy brings someone else’s old girlfriend as a date, there’s wine, some snark, and then a comet approaches the earth and you find yourself at the center of a crossroads of alternate realities and by the end of the evening you don’t know which friends are actually the friends from your world and which are from other, slightly different worlds?

I know, right?

Coherence is a micro-budget science fiction film filmed over five nights with no real script beyond a 12-page treatment that the director James Ward Byrkit and co-writer Alex Manugian kept secret from the cast. Each night, the cast members would be given note cards with things that they needed to get across during their improve, which leads to real excitement and surprise as things start to take a turn for the very weird.

Although none of it is quite as weird as seeing Buffy the Vampire Slayer‘s Xander, Nicholas Brendon, playing Mike, who was apparently the lead in Roswell. Remember Roswell?

Anyway, as the plot slowly unfurls, Coherence turns into a brilliant little piece of experimental sci-fi that not only plays around with the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, but creates truly effective suspense and tension without ever breaking a sweat. Each of the performers is completely grounded in their characters and despite not knowing each other at all before filming began (another weird stipulation Byrkit put on himself before filming), they all seem to really be old friends (and lovers). So when it begins to dawn on them just who it is at the dinner party taking place down the street, it is extremely effective and more than a little chilling.

Byrkit and Manugian caught lightning in a bottle with their first feature, crafting a piece of cult film filmmaking right out of the gate. Fans of Twilight Zone, or time travel stories, or even anxiety-ridden dinner parties, should definitely give this one a look. You won’t be disappointed.

— Paul Brian McCoy

Edge of Tomorrow

I thought I had seen Edge of Tomorrow before, but I was wrong. With all of the action movies with Tom Cruise posing in a badass looking pose that have been out over the past few years, I refuse to accept all of the blame for being wrong. When I sat down to watch it AGAIN in preparation for this article, I felt a little frazzled, much like the beloved Mr. Magoo, who I imagine I will resemble when I get older except that I will have glasses and a ponytail.

Movie posters and marketing issues aside, I was very pleased when I realized that the movie I was watching was not actually Oblivion. Any movie involving alien invasion and time travel has already scored major points with me, but a well-executed one becomes dear to my heart and is rare to find. Although I am vaguely familiar with the source material, the 2004 Japanese novel All You Need is Kill by Hiroshi Sakurazaka, I cannot wait to devour it.

I would best describe the movie as Groundhog Day meets Alien with a dash of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The movie manages to remind me of these great movies without becoming a parody or generic copy of any of them. “On your feet, Maggot!” works just as well as the song “I Got You Babe” did in Groundhog Day to illustrate how mundane and mentally exhausting living the same after day after day after day would be to anyone even if you are battling to save the world. Ultimately, this movie reminds me of old-school video games that had no save feature. After days or weeks of playing the same game, you knew exactly how to move and where each foe or booby trap would be. After perfecting the lower levels, you eventually meet the boss that you had never seen before and you have no clue how to battle it.

The film is dripping with allusions to Christianity. Master Sergeant Farrell told the troops this attack would be their baptism. For Cage, it truly was. He fell into water and shed his old life as a military PR pretty boy. After the attack, he was reborn as a soldier. He found redemption for his cowardice by training and attempting to locate and kill the Omega. Then, he sacrificed his life to save the world. He arose after death to discover an unexplainable power surge had destroyed the Omega.

Perhaps casting Tom Cruise as Cage is another link to Groundhog Day because, at first, this movie seems to be the same old action flick. Cage is introduced a the typical pretty boy military spokesperson for the war who, when it comes down to it, is a coward and would avoid combat at any cost. When he threatens to blackmail a General, he is knocked down to private and sent to the front with no combat training whatsoever. Cage is dropped down with the other troops on a beach attack that is reminiscent of the Battle of Normandy. Before Cage dies, he somehow kills an Alpha whose bloods mixes with his, allowing him to reset the day each time he dies while carrying over any knowledge and skills he has obtained. He joins forces with Rita (Emily Blunt), the same name as Andie MacDowell’s character in Groundhog Day for those keeping score. Rita, “The Angel of Verdun,” has experienced the same time-loop effects. Although she has since lost her ability to loop, she joins forces with Cage to help him train both physically and mentality to destroy the Omega and save the world.

Edge of Tomorrow is NOT just another action or science fiction movie. It is much deeper and the writing is a work of beautiful artistry.

— Jessica Sowards

Guardians of the Galaxy

I’ve been joking online that Guardians of the Galaxy is “our” Star Wars. Which is ridiculous, because I’m old, and Star Wars was my Star Wars. By which I mean Episode IV, 1977 only. What I’m really doing is comparing one excellent, exciting, pulpy space opera to another. We’ve had a lot of sci-fi since 1977. But it’s usually been in other modes — dystopias. Robot apocalypses. Sub-2001 space exploration gone awry (like Event Horizon, Sunshine, Supernova, etc.). Sub-Alien monsters picking off the crew (like Deep Rising, Predator, even war movies like Starship Troopers, Ender’s Game, and other bug-fests to an extent).

But how often have we had laser guns and princesses and magic stones and dread locations and Ancient Gods and assassins and sentient trees and funny animals all at once? Not nearly enough! Which is not to say that GoTG is a rip-off of Star Wars, just that it achieves a similar mix of whimsy, humor, action and thrilling death-defying feats evenly spaced through a tale accessible enough to be clear to kids but sophisticated enough to involve the adults as well.

It also has verifiable star turns in the cast, this time in the main characters as well as the supporting roles which is kind of a step up. Chris Pratt is both Luke Skywalker and Han Solo, a rogue and a thief but also an orphan with a mysterious heritage. Zoe Saldana was already a movie star, but Gamora adds to her growing resume of formidable astronauts and aliens, and she plays an excellent straight man to Pratt’s prankster barrage of quips, dance-offs and music.

Rather than R2, C3P0 and Chewbacca, we’ve got Rocket, Groot and Drax, all of them versions of the kinds of oddballs one finds on the fringes of mainstream (interstellar) society. Someone has figured out not just what a wealth of lore Marvel has insofar as licensable characters (many of them based originally on movie inspirations, ironically), but also what a diversity of settings Stan and Jack’s (and Jim’s and Steve’s and Joe’s and Marie’s and everyone else’s) complicated universe provides, from urban noir to fantasy kingdoms to mystic realms to whole races of inter-galactic warriors.

GoTG wisely decides to bring this crew together in jail, where they are converted to a higher cause against the threat of Thanos (and his agents Ronan and Nebula). While we respect their heroism, having seen them at their worst, we already love them for their flaws and bad fortunes. We’re right there with them as they learn who their father is, or try to save their sister, or visit the derelict ship graveyard, or get caught in the asteroid storm, or fall into the trash compacter while making a last-minute escape. Anti-heroes R’ Us! Marvel’s got a whole universe of them. And they also have their own diversity of planets to rival Tatooine, Geonosis and Naboo.

And, yes, you could say Star Trek has been the most viable rival to Star Wars up to this point, but Star Trek has its moralistic and military model to define it and keep the Kirks of its world from having too much fun. Star Wars doesn’t have to question good and evil or right and wrong, the Force is morally clear to all its users, based on acts of faith.

Marvel mixes both approaches, believing in science while letting magic work, giving them maximum story flexibility and letting us witness mere mortals confronting gods, time and time again.

— Shawn Hill

Interstellar

Interstellar is one of the best films of 2014 due to its excellence in dialogue, story, special effects and acting. The dialogue is excellent, written by Christopher and Jonathan Nolan, (The Dark Knight saga and Memento). Christopher Nolan (Inception) directs, giving the film a Kubrickian feel, with his quintessential modular plotline, crafting a story that bends time and perception. This modular plot line is integral to the storytelling of Interstellar since much of that story comes from abstract theoretical physics. In short, the heroes of Interstellar must find a new, sustainable planet in order to save humanity. These heroes, are “astronauts “ Cooper (Matthew McConaughey, Dallas Buyers Club), Brand (Anne Hathaway, The Dark Knight Rises) and scientist-back-on-Earth, Murph (Cooper’s daughter played by Mackenzie Foy).

Holding the entire story together is a theory from Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. The theory posits that time travel is real and possible, as long as one finds a spaceship that can travel faster than light. And in the world of Interstellar, we have that spaceship, and Cooper is piloting it. Writing a story that centers on the existence of time travel, wormholes and black holes could be overcomplicated or cheesy. However, Cooper, the super intelligent, but cool, Captain in charge explains the theory of time travel in his attempts to understand it himself.

Cooper is painted as the simple, yet brilliant pilot/farmer who is constantly conflicted about his roles in this life. Yet his simple understanding of the basic principles he needs to pilot a time traveling shuttle makes the abstract science accessible to the viewer. Stephen Hawking’s theories on time travel are understandably complex and even Albert Einstein was wrong about time travel (according to Hawking). Yet the story is crafted with an organic, father-daughter relationship between Cooper and Murph that make the story’s content accessible in a new way. It’s time travel that separated father and daughter, so is it time travel that will reunite them? Cooper prodigal daughter, Murph might actually get the theories of time travel. So, money’s on her to help Cooper save humanity. But does she?

In addition to organic dialogue, the movie has an intricate and compelling story. In science fiction, it’s important a story follow its own rules. And if the story breaks the rules, we shouldn’t be taken out of the world of the film. Interstellar does a great job constructing a world that is so well-connected, you are never taken out of the world of the film. The movie is escapism — not without thought — but escapism in its purest sense; it transports you to another reality. Think of the way we accept realities in a horror movie — that a slow-moving serial killer can catch up to a running cheerleader — but we get mad if the blood on set is too orange. As the viewer, I could fully grasp that time travel may be possible and there may be life on other planets. These are the guys that made Memento and Inception, so we trust them to bend the rules of time and perception. And when you’re willing to bend your perception, this movie is really fun.

The special effects are also great. Yes, movie tickets are categorically expensive, but go for the IMAX or 3D. It’s visually stunning and its content is the ever expanding galaxy, so it should look pretty awesome. And again, we’re trying to illustrate concepts like “there is no unique measure of time that all viewers will agree upon” so we need those super cool special effects where everything looks like the actual universe. And we also need these stunning visuals to illustrate just what a wormhole is, although Cooper does a great job explaining, stabbing looped paper with a pencil. This film is simply beautiful and imaginative. I could see it being projected in the 1960s alongside viewings of 2001: A Space Odyssey, in the haze of smoke and acid trips. Yet Interstellar also has that new special effects/CGI feel — and it’s a LOT of fun.

To wrap it up, the acting here was exceptional. Matt Damon had a nice cameo as Mann, the nut-job inspiration for the adventure. It was cool to see Damon play a dick for once. And Hathaway does a decent job playing the role of Brand, daughter of the madman behind the entire mission. Her character arc is interesting enough, eschewing the Sigourney-Weaver-in-Alien role for the more subdued ingénue. And Cooper (McConaughey) is torn between saving the future and being in his daughter’s life. His inner struggle is heartbreaking and real.

And if we’re going to be subjected to the Nolan’s penchant for long film duration, Cooper gives us something nice to look at. All in all, a good mix of Stephen Hawking, special effects, and quality acting. (Did I mention Stephen Hawking?) And beyond that, it actually makes you think. Is it possible to time travel? Would you go back in time? Forward? What if you could affect history?

— The Final Girl

Lucy

Luc Besson’s Lucy caught a lot of flak for playing to that old wives’ tale about people only using 10% of their brains, but if you let that go and look at this film with the same eyes you read comics when you were a kid, then this is a kick-ass superhero origin tale that suddenly, about half-way through, decides it’s more of a straight-up science fiction story about the evolution of humanity and transcendence of our physical forms.

But don’t worry! There’s a shit ton of Matrix-style action and adventure before we get to the mind-bending conclusion, and it’s all directed by Luc Besson, who can do frenetic, kinetic action sequences in his sleep.

So the story goes a little something like this: Lucy (Scarlett Johansson, in her second appearance on this list as she makes her bid to be Sci-Fi Queen of 2014) is a college student in Taiwan, whose boyfriend (of a week or two) convinces her to deliver a suitcase for him — and by convinces, I mean he handcuffs it to her and laughs it off like a joke — to Oldboy (Min-sik Choi). I mean Mr. Jang.

But Mr. Jang is having none of it and has the guy murdered in front of her and then forces her to be a drug mule (along with three other guys) and have an experimental new drug — CPH4 — surgically implanted in her abdomen. Unfortunately, instead of being taken to the airport, Lucy is taken to a seedy backroom where she is beaten and kicked nearly to death after refusing the “advances” of a young gentleman.

And that’s when things get crazy.

The bag of drugs is ruptured and begins leaking, coursing through her body and forcing a gravity-defying biological/neurological change and just like that we’re off to the races, charting Lucy’s suddenly expanding superpowers as she unlocks more and more of her brain’s potential while trying to figure out just what to do with all this knowledge and power.

Luckily, she’s got Morgan Freeman to help guide her along the way.

Who couldn’t use Morgan Freeman as your moral compass?

We have a few amazing setpiece action sequences, including a car chase (sort of) that is simply amazing to watch, before Besson wisely moves beyond simple violence into a realm of simple dismissal of threats that many filmmakers would avoid, if only to keep the action coming.

But instead of being a shifting down of intensity, there’s a bizarre increase as Lucy moves more and more towards a transhuman state and begins to tinker with the very fabric of time and space.

Like Snowpiercer (the next film on this list), Lucy is a film where you just have to swallow the silly premise and then sit back and enjoy the ride. It’s well worth it.

— Paul Brian McCoy

Snowpiercer

Snowpiercer surprised the hell out of me.

I really wasn’t expecting much when I ran across the movie on Netflix. I figured I would kill an hour and a half with some action and some cheesy special effects. What I got was an amazing social commentary wrapped in a post-apocalyptic mystery/break-out film.

Like many Sci-Fi stories, the central conceit is a bit ridiculous but once the premise is accepted any doubt quickly dissolves. The remnants of humanity live on a train that constantly travels across a frozen and lifeless Earth. In the years since the train first started its journey, it’s become a physical and spiritual savior, and its engineer, a messiah and a tyrant. The train cars are separated by social class; the aristocracy are up front in well-lit, well-provisioned luxury cars while the lower classes are packed tightly into that back cars, forced to eat and trade gelatinous food bars for survival. The low class exists solely on the “charity” of the upper class and, in trade, they sometimes have to give up children that fit certain, umm, requirements. The mystery of the missing children and a revolt from the rear cars drives the narrative in this film and it succeeds on all levels.

For a film I had never heard of, it sports a cast of impressive talent, Chris Evans, Kang-ho Song, John Hurt, Tilda Swinton, and Ed Harris all do a fantastic job. Tilda Swinton, in particular was amazing as a zealous bureaucrat. The characters wear their motivations on their sleeve but there was still enough nuance and secrecy to keep me engaged.

Along with the human drama, the special effects were amazing. The frozen desolate landscape, the cramped, claustrophobic fight scenes were beautifully crafted throughout.

I’m glad I stumbled across this movie. This drama featuring a train to nowhere has become one of my favorite dystopian films.

— Dave Hearn

Under the Skin

Sometimes you watch a film and have no idea what’s going on, but you can’t turn away. Under the Skin is kind of like that. Directed by Jonathan Glazer and written by Glazer and Walter Campbell, Under the Skin is a loose adaptation of the novel of the same name by Michel Faber. The film follows Scarlett Johansson (in her THIRD appearance on this list!!) as she drives around Glascow, Scotland in a non-descript van, propositioning men, picking them up, taking them back to her house, and… feeding them to a black void where they float around until their organs are dissolved, leaving only empty flesh sacks?

Meanwhile a dude on a motorcycle rides around tying up loose ends as some sort of security/defense mechanism?

You’re not going to get a lot of explanation from the film, which lends itself to interpretation — if you’re into that sort of thing. Interpreting the meaning of what’s going on isn’t really the point of Under the Skin, though. The film is really all about looking at humanity from an alien perspective; watching people interacting; toying around with their lusts and motivations; prodding our weaknesses and discovering moments of transcendence.

I’m not going to go into any more detail than that, other than to say, from the perspective of an outside observer — say an alien — human beings are driven by lusts and hungers that make us seem little more than beasts at times.

And when someone — say an alien — is suddenly confronted with an emotional reaction of pure bliss, it suddenly changes how we are perceived. Maybe we’re not just cattle for the slaughter. Maybe, just maybe, we’re truly sentient beings just trying to survive and praying for emotional connection.

If you suddenly realize that you’re just the bait on a multi-dimensional angler fish and the creatures you’re been luring to a grisly end are just as capable — perhaps more capable — of transcendent happiness, what other rational response is there but psychological collapse?

Johansson surrenders herself to this role, playing distant and abstract before moving into something almost childlike and experimental. She loses herself in the sensations of being (or pretending to be) human, and pays the price.

I won’t lie. The film is a little slow and can be challenging if you’re looking for a traditional narrative. You’re not going to get that. Instead, you’re going to get Kubrickian visuals and a sense of how humanity would appear from the perspective of some sort of Praying Mantis-type superior being.

It’s not going to be for everyone, but it’s brilliant, nonetheless.

— Paul Brian McCoy

X-Men: Days of Future Past

I imagine there was a meeting and it went something like this: “Here’s the idea. We use characters from a known property. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, something from Marvel Comics. We’ll make a movie. Really do it right, you know? Cast the hell out of it. Make sure we get just the right people for the parts. Then we keep making movies. We build a franchise. Call it, I don’t know, a cinematic universe or something highfalutin’ like that. Then, years down the road, let’s get the casts of all these movies together and make one huge epic fan service of a movie. Really blow them away.”

…And then Bryan Singer made the first X-Men movie in 2000. Okay, maybe it wasn’t quite as premeditated as Marvel Studio’s box-office-shattering cinematic universe, but regardless of Singer’s ambitions for the future of the series, the first X-Men movie was huge. It single-handedly dragged superhero movies out of the morass of the 90s (I can count every decent 90s comics-related movie on one hand) and ushered in the modern age of cinematic superheroes.

Raimi would come along two years later and add a color palette with his take on Spidey, Batman Begins would add gravitas in 2005, and Iron Man would blast his way onto screens in 2008. But in 2000, for the first time since Christopher Reeve put on his red boots, we comic fans felt like someone in Hollywood had finally bothered to take things seriously. This is not to say the construction of the X-men cinematic universe was without hiccups, but the expansion of the cast in 2011’s X-Men: First Class proved to be the genetic trigger to mutate this series onto a new evolutionary level. Then, in 2014, it all paid off in the most ambitious X-Men film yet.

X-Men: Days of Future Past is an epic, sweeping story that maintains cohesion while subtly retconning itself and the entire series. It is bumper-to-bumper fan service from the abundance of character Easter eggs in the opening scenes to the post-credits stinger and everywhere in between. The story has the potential to be a minefield of plot holes, but not only is the minefield expertly navigated, the story-tellers even find a nice spot to spread out a blanket and have a picnic.

I don’t have the space to do proper justice to the cast and their performances. Hugh Jackman slides into the role of Wolverine like Sean Connery sliding into 007’s suit for another go-around. Jennifer Lawrence’s performance is perfectly understated, despite the fact that the entire film revolves around her character. Fassbender and McAvoy lend an added dimension of conflict, nearly (but not quite) equaling the preternatural chemistry of Sirs Ian and Patrick (hey, let’s face it, that’s a really high bar). The returning casts of both extensions of the film series (including some pleasantly surprising cameos) all blend together into a gigantic, yet entirely satisfying union. Sure, 2014 was arguably the biggest year yet for comic-related movies, but none of the year’s releases were as much of a love letter to the loyal fans as Days of Future Past.

— Rick Shingler

How’s that for a range of movies, eh? You want action? We’ve got it. You want brains? We’ve got it. You want artistic statements? Yup. That’s in there too.

The science fiction films of 2014 covered just about any type of variation on the theme you could imagine. And I’m sure we missed some! Let us know below what you thought should have been on the list!