The 1970s featured a lot of groundbreaking sci-fi movies that helped set the stage for what has become some of the biggest genre movies that followed over the five-plus decades. These movies came just over two decades after World War II, which itself changed how Hollywood and international studios approached science fiction. By the ‘70s, things were becoming even more fearful for people, whether looking at apocalyptic futures or dystopian authoritarian worries. This allowed filmmakers to present stories that often looked at various possible futures and show the dangers the world could face if it continued at the pace it appeared to be determined to take.
With so many landmark films in the decade, here is a look at the best sci-fi movies of the 1970s.
10) The Man Who Fell to Earth
Image Courtesy of British Lion Films
David Bowie made his acting debut in the Nicholas Roeg sci-fi movie The Man Who Fell to Earth. Roeg hired music icon David Bowie to play an alien who arrives on Earth to find a way to transport water back to his own dying planet. However, this movie sees Bowie’s Thomas Jerome Newton fall victim to Earth’s hedonistic pleasures and remain on the planet for way too long. By the time he is ready to take the water back to save his world, the U.S. government has discovered him and sets out to stop him. The movie tells a smart story that shows how even scientifically advanced beings can fall to the allure of Earth’s depraved pleasures and how that is why things often fail to ever improve.
9) Silent Running
Image Courtesy of Universal
Released in 1972 by director Douglas Trumbull (the special effects maestro who worked on 2001: A Space Odyssey and Close Encounters of the Third Kind), Silent Running shows Earth in the future when all the forests have become extinct thanks to careless environmental damage. Scientists saved some plants and sent them into space stations to care for them until Earth could become habitable again. However, when one scientist is ordered to destroy all the plants and return to commercial service, he saves the plants instead and goes on the run. It is a smaller, environmentally conscious sci-fi film that shows what happens when humans stop caring about their future.
8) Mad Max
Image Courtesy of Roadshow Film
Released in 1979, Mad Max was the film that started a franchise that was still making movies as late as 2024. However, for anyone who loved the over-the-top spectacle of Mad Max: Fury Road, the original movie might prove somewhat of a shock. This film is still an action-packed sci-fi adventure, but on a smaller level with Mel Gibson’s Mad Max seeking revenge against the biker gang who killed his partner and then murdered his wife. It is easy to see how this movie morphed into what the franchise became, and this is a solid sci-fi revenge tale set in an apocalyptic landscape.
7) Logan’s Run
Image Courtesy of MGM
Logan’s Run was a sci-fi dystopian action movie that takes place in the year 2274, when all humans live in a city under a cluster of domes, all run by a supercomputer. Because space remains limited in these cities, there is a strict rule that states all people much enter the “Carrousel” on their 30th birthday to be killed with the promise they would be “Reborn” in a religious symbolic manner. However, there are some people who believe there is life outside the cities in the Sanctuary, and when they try to escape, they become “runners” and huntsmen known as Sandmen hunt them down. Logan is one of the Sandmen, and he has to figure out if the Sanctuary is real or not. This was one of several 1970s sci-fi films exploring the idea of an authoritarian dystopian future, and it remains the best of them all.
6) Soylent Green
Image Courtesy of MGM
In 1973, Soylent Green presented another dystopian world, but there was a huge twist in this movie that makes it stand out, with the twist even more famous than the movie’s actual plot. This film shows a world where the oceans are dying and the year-round humidity caused by the greenhouse effect is killing people, while overpopulation makes things even worse. The main plot follows a murder investigation in this future world (2022). Charlton Heston is the NYPD detective investigating the murder, only to learn that the new artificial water created by the Soylent Corporation has a very disturbing secret ingredient.
5) Superman
Image Courtesy of Columbia
There is talk in 2026 of superhero fatigue, where box office numbers are down (but still huge) and people wonder if there are too many comic book movies made today. That was not the case in the 1970s, where there had never been a big-budget superhero movie made for theaters before. However, that all changed in 1978 when Richard Donner directed Superman. The character appeared in movies in the past, but nothing on this level, and this film opened the door to let Hollywood know superheroes could succeed on the big screen, although it took another decade before another movie did it as well (Batman in 1989).
4) Invasion of the Body Snatchers
Image Courtesy of United Artists
Many movie fans feel remakes are uniformly terrible, but that is not always the case. In less than a decade, no less than four remakes surpassed the original movies, with Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Thing, The Fly, and The Blob. Invasion of the Body Snatchers was the first of these and presented a brilliant Cold War sci-fi thriller where an alien race had infiltrated Earth and began replacing humans, while placing the original bodies in pods. With a cast that included Leonard Nimoy, Donald Sutherland, and Jeff Goldman, and even a cameo from the original movie’s star, Kevin McCarthy, this remains one of the best sci-fi remakes ever made.
3) Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Image Courtesy of Columbia
Steven Spielberg had a series of movies that were unlike any other director, as he created movies in different genres that all had massive success and remain iconic to this day. After hitting it big with his horror movie Jaws, Spielberg turned to sci-fi and created a brilliantly told sci-fi drama called Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Richard Dreyfuss stars as a father who is obsessed with the idea of alien life, and when he learns a spacecraft might be headed toward Earth, he sets out to find it, even at the cost of his family. Spielberg received his first Oscar nomination for this film, and it remains a sci-fi masterpiece.
2) Alien
Image Courtesy of Fox
One of the best sci-fi horror franchises ever made debuted in 1979 with Alien. While the movies, over time, became action-packed sci-fi extravaganzas and then morphed into high-concept sci-fi themes, the original movie was a straight-up sci-fi horror movie, a haunted house story in outer space. Sigourney Weaver stars as Ellen Ripley, a woman who works on a scavenger ship sent to retrieve a vessel lost in space, only to find alien creatures aboard it. The entire movie is a claustrophobic slasher movie with an alien monster, but what resulted was a franchise that is still going to this very day.
1) Star Wars
Image Courtesy of Fox
When George Lucas released Star Wars in 1977, the studios expected little from it. Using the Hero’s Journey as a script template and the world of Akira Kurosawa as an influence, Lucas convinced the studio to let him keep the rights to all merchandise rights, which is what made him an extremely wealthy man. That is because Star Wars started a franchise that morphed into more movies, comic books, toy lines, TV shows, and so much more. The first movie remains one of the most influential sci-fi movies ever made, and the reason so many later space operas exist.
What do you think? Leave a comment below and join the conversation now in the ComicBook Forum!