The best science fiction movies take audiences to places they never imagined and show them things they had never seen before, so of course, the history of sci-fi cinema is full of great scenes. Going all the way back to the silent era, the genre has offered thrilling spectacles. Adventure, destruction, horror, delight, and joy are all possible in sci-fi.
Some of the greatest scenes in sci-fi movies include an iconic parental reveal by one of cinema's most famous villains. There's the unforgettable image of a robot slowly coming to life as machinery whirs. There are alien attacks and heartstopping revelations, not to mention plenty of gorgeous, out-of-this-world imagery.
But with all the iconic moments in Silver Screen history to pick from, some moments steal the futuristic spotlight. These are the 32 greatest scenes in sci-fi movie history. Note that there's only one scene per movie on this list, but multiple movies from the same franchise do appear.
32. "Come and Get Your Love" (Guardians of the Galaxy)
The Guardians of the Galaxy were not especially well-known characters even among die-hard comic book fans before the 2014 Marvel Cinematic Universe film. James Gunn's kooky, cosmic adventure was a gamble, but it confidently announced itself very early in the runtime, and won audiences over. Following a brief opening that shows how Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) was abducted by aliens when he was a kid, the action cuts to the now-adult Quill, operating as Star-Lord, pulling up to an imposing, abandoned temple on some strange planet. But, rather than moody sci-fi tunes and a cautious approach, he instead hits play on his Walkman and dances his way to his goal while Redbone's 1974 song "Come and Get Your Love" plays. Right away, it's clear this is a different type of superhero film and a different sort of sci-fi movie.
31. Soylent Green Is People! (Soylent Green)
A plot twist so famous that many people who are only dimly aware that it comes from a movie have probably heard of it. Soylent Green's ending is one of sci-fi's greatest. Set in a dystopian, overcrowded New York City, the film follows Charlton Heston's character as he investigates a conspiracy theory involving the titular food product that the masses consume for sustenance. When he learns, in horror, that the elderly are being euthanized and turned into food, he lets out a now-iconic cry.
30. Payakan Attacks (Avatar: The Way of Water)
A good chunk of the Avatar sequel is spent swimming around in Pandora's oceans, meeting the highly intelligent whale-like creatures known as Tulkun. We're told over and over again how non-violent these gentle giants of the sea are. That's why it is such a thrill when one of them, the outcast Payakan, decides to attack the humans who are threatening his Na'vi friends. The sight of Payakan's massive body emerging from the water and slamming down on those space-whaling jerks' boat is one of the best fist-pumping moments in motion picture history.
29. "Klaatu Barada Nikto" (The Day the Earth Stood Still)
This '50s sci-fi classic offers a twist on alien invasion stories because the alien, Klaatu (Michael Rennie) is not invading so much as offering humanity a choice on behalf of the aliens he represents. He did not come totally unarmed, though. His companion Gort is a silent, hulking robot who shoots lasers from his eye. When Klaatu is (temporarily) killed, it's only the words "Klaatu Barada Nikto" that can calm Gort. Helen (Patricia Neal), a human Klaatu befriended, is the only one who knows the phrase, and the sequence of her standing down a dangerous robot is an incredibly tense, effective one in a film that's otherwise intentionally sparring when it comes to action.
28. Exploding Head (Scanners)
Sure, there's a great psychic duel at the end, but the best moment in David Cronenberg's 1981 sci-fi horror flick Scanners comes right at the beginning. Darryl Revok (Michael Ironside) is a powerful, unstable telepath known as a scanner, and he opens the film by taking out another scanner who is trying to harness these psychic abilities for a private military company. In an unforgettable bit of gory practical effects, Revok makes the mustachioed man's head explode using only his own mind.
27. The Holdo Maneuver (Star Wars: The Last Jedi)
Complain all you want about how the Holdo Maneuver broke Star Wars canon—the moment is undeniably cool. Facing overwhelming odds as Supreme Leader Snoke's flagship and armada bear down on the fleeing Resistance, General Holdo (Laura Dern) opts to sacrifice herself by pointing her transport ship at the enemy and sending it into hyperdrive, essentially turning it into the galaxy's most spectacular bullet. Who cares if now there are questions about why the Rebels or the Empire weren't using this extremely effective technique elsewhere in the franchise? Can't a moment just be cool?
26. Jean Jacket Face Off (Nope)
Jordan Peele's Nope essentially asks the question, "What if Close Encounters of the Third Kind was Jaws?" After discovering that the UFO lurking in the desert outside of Los Angeles is actually a saucer-like alien creature, OJ (Daniel Kaluuya) has the ride of his life as he baits it into the perfect shot so he and his sister (Keke Palmer) can have video proof of the extraterrestrial. It's an absolutely thrilling sequence that looks like nothing you've ever seen before—and after more than a century of sci-fi spectacles, that's saying something.
25. "They're Here Already! You're Next!" (Invasion of the Body Snatchers)
Both the 1956 original and the 1979 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers have killer endings. The latter film ends on Donald Sutherland's character, now revealed to have been taken over by the alien pod people, letting out a horrible screech as he alerts his fellow pod people to the existence of a remaining human. The '50s movie isn't quite as grotesque, and it ultimately has a happy ending, but the penultimate sequence where Kevin McCarthy screams at passing drivers on the highway of the looming danger is extremely effective—especially when he screams at the camera, as if warning the viewers that they're next. It's no wonder that McCarthy was brought back for the '70s movie to essentially reprise the scene in an Easter egg that eerily foreshadowed what was coming.
24. Landing on the Moon (A Trip to the Moon)
The great French filmmaker Georges Méliès is one of the godfathers of cinema and certainly one of the greatest and earliest sci-fi directors. His most iconic image came from the 1902 silent film A Trip to the Moon, which followed a professor and his assistants as they loaded themselves into a capsule, got fired from a cannon, and landed on the moon, where they encountered alien Selenites. Or, rather, they landed in the moon, as the shot of them arriving has the capsule going smack into the Man in the Moon's eye—a whimsical and enduring visual that's been referenced and parodied countless times in the century since.
23. The Wave Planet (Interstellar)
In an intelligent sci-fi movie that's full of big concepts and cool sequences, it speaks to just how incredible the wave planet scene of Interstellar is that it's undeniably the film's highlight. Matthew McConaughey's astronaut and his team, following up on leads for a possible habitable planet, arrive on a world that seems to be nothing but knee-deep water with far-off mountains on the horizon. As the seconds tick by (subtly but effectively emphasized thanks to Hans Zimmer's tense score), the astronauts realize in horror that what they're seeing isn't mountains, but a massive tidal wave that circles the planet and will be upon them imminently.
22. Wall-E and EVE Dance (Wall-E)
The nearly dialog-free extended opening of Pixar's masterpiece that follows the last working trash robot on an abandoned Earth going about his tasks in solitude is perhaps too long and too extensive to qualify as a "scene" for the purposes of this list. So, instead, we're including the absolutely joyful sequence when Wall-E and EVE dance together in outer space, twirling in zero gravity amidst the stars. It's one of the most beautiful and pure scenes in any science fiction film.
21. "Like Tears in the Rain" (Blade Runner)
"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe," the replicant Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) says in an iconic monologue, knowing that his time is nearly up. "Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die." Everything Batty mentions is a much more grand and cosmic sort of sci-fi than what we actually see in Blade Runner, which follows Harrison Ford as he tries to hunt down fleeting replicants. That's part of what makes the monologue so great. We don't need to know what Batty's talking about or the significance of them. Only that they sound incredible, and that despite not being "real," he has experienced them.
20. Highway Chase (The Matrix Reloaded)
The first Matrix movie did things with gunfights and fistfights that moviegoers could never have dreamed of. The Matrix Reloaded, for whatever flaws it might've had, deserves praise for doing the same thing to car chases. The standout action set piece of the sequels has Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) and Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) fleeing dangerous programs and Agents on a highway at high speed. The physics of the Matrix makes for a uniquely propulsive and exciting chase, full of exciting moments like when Morpheus takes out a car with a samurai sword.
19. The Invisible Fight (Ghost in the Shell)
This landmark cyberpunk anime film is full of heady ideas about the nature of identity and one's self in an increasingly digital world. It also looks extremely cool, perhaps never more so than in an early action scene when Major Motoko Kusanagi, a cyborg who is almost entirely robotic except for her human consciousness, takes out a fleeing cybercrime suspect. Her robotic body nearly invisible thanks to cloaking technology, Motoko thrashes the crook in shallow water in front of a futuristic skyline—an unforgettable image in a movie you'll be thinking about long after it's over.
18. The Sword Reveal (Pacific Rim)
It's a credit to Guillermo del Toro's passion and craft that Pacific Rim isn't just a dumb giant monsters vs. giant robots mashup: It's a sublime giant monsters vs. giant robots mashup. Del Toro understands what audiences want to see and how to deliver it, as seen in the standout sequence when a winged kaiju carried the Jaeger Gipsy Danger high up into the sky, only for co-pilot Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi) to reveal the robot has a hidden sword up its mechanical sleeve, which it uses to slice the creature carrying it in half. This is cinema, folks.
17. "Superman" (The Iron Giant)
The best moment involving Superman in any movie — the one that best speaks to what the iconic hero represents — is not in any official Superman movie at all. Instead, it comes at the end of the beautiful animated sci-fi movie The Iron Giant, when the titular robot (Vin Diesel) sacrifices himself to stop a nuclear missile. Rather than be the weapon he was built to be, the Iron Giant goes out as a hero, adopting the pose of the comic book character his human friend Hogarth (Eli Marienthal) so admired as he flies into the nuke. I'm tearing up just thinking about it.
16. Maschinenmensch Come Alive (Metropolis)
One of the greatest and most influential silent films ever made—especially with regards to science fiction—Metropolis is still astounding to watch today, more than a century after its 1927 premiere. A dystopian tale of a great futuristic city, Metropolis' most enduring image comes when the inventor Rotwang brings his robotic creation, Maschinenmensch, to life. As laboratory equipment sparks and eerie rings of light circle the robotic form, it transforms into the visage of Maria, a young woman. To say it's memorable would be an understatement, given how old Metropolis is and how people are still talking about it.
15. Riding the Sandworm (Dune: Part Two)
Denis Villeneuve's two Dune movies are some of the most visually stunning works of sci-fi ever produced, but he deserves extra credit for the sequence where Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) rides a massive sandworm for the first time. It's an epic set piece and a hugely important moment in the narrative, but not one that's inherently cinematic. Most of the worm is underneath the sand, after all, and the massive scale of the Shai-Hulud could actually work against a filmmaker when trying to make something look fast and visceral. Villeneuve overcomes these hurdles with aplomb, and the audience can feel their breath caught in their throat as Paul clings to the side of a massive missile as it plows through the sand at blistering speeds. Bless the maker indeed.
14. Spock's Death (Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan)
The Wrath of Khan, the second and best of the Star Trek movies, boasts one of the greatest death scenes in cinema history, when Leonard Nimoy's Spock sacrifices himself to repair the Enterprise's warp drive. It's the logical thing to do, as Spock himself says, but that only makes his selfless action more emotional, especially when he says farewell to an agonized Kirk (William Shatner) on the other side of the glass. Spock didn't stay dead—the next Star Trek movie was a search for him—but that in no way lessens the impact of his sacrifice. (Star Trek Into Darkness, which is atrocious, comes close to diminishing it when it attempts to flip the script for its rebooted Khan face-off.)
13. The LA River Chase (Terminator 2: Judgment Day )
Aside from the fact that the two of the three people in the scene are actually cybernetic killers from the future who have been sent back in time (Robert Patrick's T-1000 and Arnold Schwarzenegger's T-800), there's not actually that much that's science fiction-y about Terminator 2's chase through the Los Angeles river. Instead, the T-1000 pursuit of a young John Connor (Edward Furlong) as Arnold rides a motorcycle to his rescue, cocking a shotgun with one hand, is simply one of the greatest action scenes ever filmed—and since it happens within a sci-fi movie, that's enough for high placement on this list.
12. The Aliens Arrive (Close Encounters of the Third Kind)
The great trick that Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind pulls is that it makes the alien visitors awful but in the literal "full of awe" way rather than anything negative. The stakes are high and there's a lurking unease through most of the movie, sure, but the sequence of the massive alien mothership first communicating with humanity through music and colorful lights is an inspiring, moving sight—almost as overwhelming as the booming final bass note the mothership plays when it completes the musical sequence.
11. "Get Away From Her" (Aliens)
Alien is one of the best horror movies; Aliens is one of the best action movies. Both are incredible sci-fi films, and James Cameron's sequel, which has Sigourney Weaver's Ellen Ripley facing off with a horde of Xenomorphs on a distant colonized planet, has a rightfully iconic ending. After almost all of the gung-ho space marines she landed with have been wiped out by the aliens, it's up to Ridley to protect young Newt (Carrie Henn) from the Alien Queen. Getting into a power loader—a mech suit that, while imposing, was not meant to be a weapon of war—Ripley goes toe-to-toe with the queen Xenomorph, her warrior and maternal instincts in full force as she yells out one of sci-fi's great quotes.
10. The Bike Slide (Akira)
Akira, one of the greatest anime movies ever made (and certainly one of the most impressive when you remember that every single frame of this 1988 masterpiece was intricately and painstakingly drawn by hand), opens with a thrilling bike chase by two rival gangs through the streets of Neo-Tokyo. It's a stunning sequence that ends with the protagonist, Kaneda, winning a head-on game of chicken, causing his rival to crash and for him to bring his speeding bike to a sliding stop—a moment so cool and iconic that it's still getting referenced and homaged decades later.
9. The Bike Flight (E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial)
"Soaring" is the correct word to describe John Williams' masterful score for one of Steven Spielberg's most beloved movies, and it's a big part of why the iconic sequence of Elliot (Henry Thomas) taking flight on his bike thanks to E.T.'s alien powers is so effective. Silhouetted against the moon, Elliot and E.T. look small and maybe even a little vulnerable while simultaneously being joyously free, up there in the air. There's a reason why Amblin, Spielberg's production company, uses the image of the flying bike as its logo.
8. The Defibrillator (The Thing)
One of the all-time great horror movies in addition to being a classic sci-fi movie, John Carpenter's 1982 remake of a '50s alien creature feature follows a crew of an Antarctic research base that has been infiltrated by a shape-changing monster. When one of them suffers an apparent heart attack, the crew's doctor attempts to defibrillate him—only for his chest to open up, revealing a toothy maw that chomps down. Jaw-dropping body horror ensues as grotesque creatures emerge. It's one of the most shocking (pun not intended) moments the genre has to offer.
7. Trinity's Kick (The Matrix)
It's a testament to how cool The Matrix's opening scene was that, within a couple years after its release, Shrek was parodying it. That shouldn't be held against The Matrix, though, nor should it take away from the first scene, which has Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) taking down a bunch of cops and doing the instantly iconic kick as the camera spun around her in mid-air. Movies had never looked like this before—and even the most imaginative sci-fi fans probably never dreamed they could've looked like this, to say nothing of all the other groundbreaking things The Matrix pulled off. Trinity's kick was a perfect way to, well, kick off all that was to come.
6. The Chestburster (Alien)
Imagine being in a movie theater in 1979 and seeing Alien. You don't know how Xenomorphs "work" because there haven't been any Alien movies until then. This is a brand new creature. So when a member of the Nostromo's crew (John Hurt), who earlier had some sort of face-hugging creature attached to his face, suddenly starts writhing in pain at dinner before a new alien bursts from his chest, you'd probably be pretty darn surprised! Alien's Chestburster sequence was a new frontier in horror and sci-fi, and it's frankly pretty wild that the franchise has become so successful that now we just take creatures popping out of people's stomachs for granted.
5. The Statue of Liberty Reveal (Planet of the Apes)
Planet of the Apes' reveal that Charlton Heston's astronaut George Taylor was not on some far off alien planet but instead Earth in the far future is arguably the greatest twist ending in movie history. As Heston beats the sand in the surf as he gazes on the ruins of the Statue of Liberty and laments "You maniacs! You blew it all to hell!" we're left with no comforting resolution. Taylor won't ever get home because he is already home, a haunting realization that colors everything that came before it and elevates Planet of the Apes from a great sci-fi romp to a movie masterpiece.
4. Shutting Down HAL (2001: A Space Odyssey)
You could reasonably make a case for any sequence of Stanley Kubrick's sci-fi epic to be one of the greatest scenes in sci-fi film history. The opening with the apes? The spacecraft docking with one another? The mind-bending stargate sequence? All of them are among the finest works the genre has ever seen, but for this list, we'll go with the scene where David Bowman (Keir Dullea) goes into the malfunctioning supercomputer HAL's processor core and begins to disassemble HAL's circuits one-by-one. In addition to being visually stunning (as every frame of the movie is), there's something haunting about HAL's calm pleading for mercy, a request that eventually descends into a distorted singing of "Daisy Bell (Bicycle Built for Two)." It's an incredible death of an incredible sci-fi villain.
3. Binary Sunset (Star Wars: A New Hope)
Choosing which single scene from the first Star Wars deserves to be the one representing the movie on this list is an incredibly hard call, but ultimately the answer has to be the moment of that striking binary sunset, when Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) looks out at Tatooine's twin suns across the horizon as John William's stirring, iconic score swells. As Luke looks beyond his station at the sun and stars beyond and every possibility they represent, the Star Wars galaxy has never felt bigger.
2. The Aliens Attack (Independence Day)
Independence Day, which is unironically a masterpiece of cinema, probably marks the high point of an entire field of filmmaking. In 1996, CGI was on the rise but couldn't yet be counted on to pull off every single effect, the way the technology would start to be (prematurely) leaned on in the years to come. That's why for Independence Day CG was just a tool that augmented practical effects like model-making, and it's precisely because of this that the spectacular destruction of the Empire State Building, the White House, and Los Angeles' U.S. Bank Tower, looks so incredible. Those are detailed models—some of the best that would ever be built—that are actually, practically getting blown up. The explosion is an incredible, singular special effect that also functions as a narrative explosion, as the looming threat of the hovering alien crafts becomes undeniably, catastrophically real.
1. "I Am Your Father" (Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back)
For as much as science fiction inherently lends itself to spectacle—after all, this is the genre that so often takes audiences to distant planets or showcases strange technology—it's ultimately just a type of story, and stories are about characters. To that end, the greatest scene in all sci-fi film history is a villain telling the hero that they are, in fact, related. Often misquoted as "Luke, I am your father," (the actual line is "No. I am your father,") Darth Vader's reveal of his relation to Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) is a dark capper on an already dark middle-chapter. With these words, Vader has done more damage to Luke than he could've done with any lightsaber. It recontextualizes everything that came before and radically changes Luke's journey going forward. The sci-fi setting within the bowels of Cloud City is dazzling, but it's the dialog that captures the audience's imagination.
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