2014's Best Sci-Fi Movies

Ticket sales at the box office may have been at a 20-year low in 2014, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t anything worth seeing. I’m a firm believer that, no matter the state of the industry, there will always be people making exciting, interesting films, you just might have to look for them. Regardless of what this means for studios and their bottom lines, sci-fi fans had a lot to dig into over the past year. There were huge, spectacle style blockbusters right along side quiet, introspective independent features more concerned with ideas than eye candy, as well as everything in between. There are a few gaps in my genre viewing for the year—I still have yet to watch titles like Young Ones, The Zero Theorem, and Under the Skin for some reason—but in this spirit, here are my top ten (actually eleven) sci-fi movies of 2014.

Do Motion Capture Performances Deserve Your Awards Consideration?

For the most part, end of the year awards are complete and total bullshit. We could go through list of films from every single year and pick out which movie should have won and Oscar, what actor or actress deserved the Golden Globe, and point out all the best picture winners that have faded into obscurity while movies that didn’t even get a nomination have become universally regarded as classics. Awards are little more than a way for the movie industry to congratulate itself, and many serious movie fans don’t put a great deal of stock into them as anything more than a curiosity. Less than a year later I barely remember who took home what trophy. Still, with the release of Matt Reeves’ phenomenal Dawn of the Planet of theApes, the subject of praise and actors wearing motion capture suits has come up quite a bit.

'Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes' Movie Review

In 2011, Rise of the Planet of the Apes rebooted the beloved franchise in a way that made many people forget about Tim Burton’s disastrous attempt to do the same thing in 2001. Rise was far better than most of us expected it to be, but the follow up, Matt Reeves’ Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is one of those rarest things, a sequel that not only tops its predecessor in every way, but straight up blows it out of the water. And I like Rise, quite a bit actually, but the follow up is simply that much better. This is up there with Edge of Tomorrow and Snowpiercer vying for the best movie of the summer. Epic and bold, it, in true Apes fashion, aims to examine the animal in man by looking at the more human side of the animals.