The earliest fantasy films are tales of adventure or Lost World films. Some of the most popular films of the 1930s can be conceived of as fantasy. These include:

• King Kong (1933)
• Lost Horizon (1937)
• The Wizard of Oz (1933)

In the 1940s, films such as The Thief of Bagdad (1940) and Sinbad the Sailor (1947) can be considered to fall in the fantasy category.

Ray Harryhausen (1920--) was a prominent special effects supervisor who worked on many early science fiction and fantasy films. Some of his most important work includes:

• The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953)
• The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad (1958)
• Mysterious Island (1961)
• Jason and the Argonauts (1963)
• First Men in the Moon (1964)
• One Million Years B.C. (1966)

The history of science fiction on film can be broken into a handful of eras:

• The Machine Age, roughly from the start of World War I to the start of World War II
• The Atomic Age, roughly from the end of World War II to the late 1960s
• The Space Age, roughly from the late 1960s to the present

The Machine Age includes three major types of stories:

• utopias and dystopias
• tales of mad scientists and monsters
• comics and serials

Tthe term "utopia" comes from the title of an essay by Sir Thomas More on the perfect society; a dystopia is the opposite of a utopia. Major films in this category include

• Metropolis (1926)
• Things to Come (1933)
• The Mysterious Island (1929)

Many American science fiction films of the Machine Age focus on the Faust figure and the idea that there are some things man is not meant to know; these films often warn about the dangers of technology and they often straddle the science fiction and horror genres (Telotte 89). The most prominent of these films are:

• Frankenstein (1931)
• The Invisible Man (1936)

Though produced in the 1950s Forbidden Planet (1956) also features a scientist who has overstepped his bounds.

In the 1940s serials kept the science fiction genre alive; some critics mark these serials as the beginning of the “pure” sf film . These serials effectively disappeared with the advent of television (Telotte 91-2)

Science fiction newspaper comics and comic books rather than the pulp magazines had initial influence over sf serials (Telotte 72).

Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon came from the newspapers; Superman and Captain Marvel came from comic books.

The following film serials are derived from the comics:

• Flash Gordon (1936)
• Flash Gordon's Trip to Mars (1938)
• Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe (1940)
• Buck Rogers (1939)
• Adventures of Captain Marvel (1941)
• Brick Bradford (1947)
• Superman (1948)

Today besides the Superman films we have another whole set of films based on comic books, most notably the Marvel comics which feature flawed or angst-ridden heroes:

• Batman (1989) and its sequels
• Spider-Man and its sequels
• Daredevil (2003)
• The Hulk (2003)
• Hellboy (2004)
• X-Men and its sequels

Comics and serials did not explore the more thoughtful themes of artificial life and the ethics of scientific experimentation or the effects of science on society (Telotte 73)

• nuclear threat and disaster
• alien invasion
• space exploration (Telotte 95)

In the wake of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II, cinema began to explore possible consequences of nuclear fallout and radiation poisoning. Some popular films on this topic include:

• The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953)
• Them! (1954)
• Godzilla, King of the Monsters (1956)
• On the Beach (1959)
• Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1961)
• The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957)

Today, the science fiction film is often folded into the disaster film:

• Dante's Peak (1997)
• Deep Impact (1998)
• Armageddon (1998)
• Space Cowboys
• The Core (2002)
• The Day After Tomorrow (2004)

As Susan Sontag has pointed out, scifi films are about disaster: "concerned with the aesthetics of destruction, with the peculiar beauties to be found in wreaking havoc, making a mess" ( 215-6).

Note for example the balletic fights in the Matrix films and the smashing special effects in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines as well as the destruction of major manmade landmarks all over the world in Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow.

Sontag says that sf films "invite a dispassionate aesthetic view of destruction and violence--a technological view" (Sontag 218).

In disaster films such as Armageddon and Deep Impact the earth is saved at the last minute by technology wielded by a mismatched collection of selfless and imaginative heroes who "overcome or work around the . . . failures of their technology" (Telotte 120).

Alien invasion films offer social and political commentary and play on fears of both communism and nuclear war (Telotte 96-7):

• The Thing  (1951) also known as The Thing From Another World, directed by Howard Hawks and loosely based on the John W. Campbell (writing as Don A. Stuart) short story "Who Goes There?"; the film makes the alien (James Arness as a walking frozen carrot) clearly "other"; most critics classify the film as horror (Sobchack 23)
• The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)
• The War of the Worlds (1953)
• It Came from Outer Space (1953)
• Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)

Alien invasion films tend to posit a conservative ideology, a fear/suspicion of the other, and create pointedly non-human aliens (Telotte 148). Some more recent alien invasion films include:

• Alien series (1979; 1987; 1992; 1997)
• Starship Troopers (1997)
• Independence Day (1996)
• The throwback Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004)

Space exploration films presented a positive view of science and technology.

Destination Moon (1950), based on Robert A. Heinlein's juvenile novel Rocketship Galileo (1947). focused on scientific authenticity and prefigures man's flight to the moon. This was the first color science fiction film; it won an Oscar for special effects. Producer George Pal employed astronomical artist Chesley Bonestall to create the matte paintings for the set design and German rocket scientist Hermann Oberth to create authenticity.

The space age dates roughly from the late 1960s to the present.
Early films in this period began to deal with the themes which we see in current blockbusters

• Concerned with assaults on our sense of identity
• Concerned with the environment
• Concerned with a sense of wonder

It is marked at the outset by a groundbreaking film.

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) directed by Stanley Kubrick, is based on an Arthur C. Clarke short story "The Sentinel" and a novelization by Clarke.

According to J.P. Telotte: in 2001 "Kubrick created what may well be the ultimate extraordinary voyage narrative, as well as arguably the most important film in the American science fiction tradition" (Telotte 102).

• Westworld (1973)
• The Terminal Man (1974)
• The Stepford Wives (1975, remake 2004)
• Demon Seed (1977)

• Silent Running (1972)
• Soylent Green (1973)
• Planet of the Apes (1968)
• Logan's Run (1976)
• The Day After Tomorrow (2004)

Star Wars (1977) was the first true blockbuster science fiction film and an early "event" movie.

Star Wars is a hodgepodge; it borrows freely from westerns, World War II films, especially aerial fighting scenes, Japanese samurai epics, and the serials.  The entire saga is also based loosely on Joseph Campbell's concept of the monomyth and the basic arc of the hero's journey: separation, initiation, and return.

Star Wars marks the return to myth in science fiction

• Straightforward narrative of heroic feats
• Avoidance of current cultural concerns (note that the story takes place long long ago in a galaxy far far away)
• An opening epic scroll that recalls the serials

The other major science fiction film of 1977 is Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the first of Steven Spielberg's kindly alien films.

Close Encounters attempted a reasonably accurate extrapolation of what might happen if Earth were visited by aliens. It draws on alien sighting and alien abduction stories dating back through the 1940s. Close Encounters has the "ability to reveal the fantastic dimensions of the quotidian [the everyday], as well as the extent to which a popular audience is ready to accept that very otherness. . . ." (Telotte 107)

Alien encounter films posit the universe as a liberal, multi-cultural society (Telotte 148). Other films that relate friendly encounters with aliens include:

• Contact (1997)
• E.T., the Extraterrestrial  (1982)

Elsewhere anime, Japanese animated films reflect "many of the same concerns found in contemporary American science fiction, such as the recurrent focus on robotics, artificial intelligence, and the consequences of the unchecked development of these technologies" (Telotte 113)

These concerns are most evident in films about robots and androids and in films created in the style known as cyberpunk.

Films about robots and androids "chronicle" and "respond to" modern concerns with:

• Organ transplantation
• Development of protheses
• Manipulation of genetics
• Cosmetic surgery
• Industrial robots
• Artificial intelligence
• Cloning

Humans are both fascinated and repelled by these concepts (Telotte 161). "[T]he robot/cyborg/replicant/android assume the central role in our films which set about exploring a dual possibility built into all of our technological imaginings: the ability of our technology to let us, in nearly godlike fashion, craft images  of ourselves, and the correspondent possibility that these creations. . . might well overpower us and take our place. . . ." (Telotte 108).

Key robot films include:

• Robocop (1987)
• A.I.,(2001) a film conceived by Stanley Kubrick and completed by Steven Spielberg after Kubrick’s death
• I, Robot (2004), based very loosely on Isaac Asimov’s Laws of Robotics.

Major cyberpunk films include:

• Blade Runner (1982)
• Johnny Mnemomic, based on a short story by cyberpunk guru William Gibson
• The Matrix Films (1999, 2003, 2003)

Telotte, J.P. Science Fiction Film. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001.