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A reluctant Hobbit, Bilbo Baggins, sets out to the Lonely Mountain with a spirited group of dwarves to reclaim their mountain home and the gold within it from the dragon Smaug. Director Peter Jackson Stars Martin Freeman Ian McKellen Richard Armitage. 5. The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug. 2013 2h 41m PG-13.
- 2001: A Space Odyssey. Release date: April 3, 1968. Cast: Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood, William Sylvester. Reshaped for the big screen by award-winning director Stanley Kubrick, 2001: A Space Odyssey is a novel by Arthur C. Clarke.
- Dune. Release date: October 22, 2021. Cast: Timothée Chalamet, Rebecca Ferguson, Zendaya. From Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel of the same name comes Dune. Set on an inhospitable desert wasteland of the planet Arrakis, the story follows Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) as he takes on his role of stewarding the galaxy's most dangerous planet.
- Starship Troopers. Release date: November 7, 1997. Cast: Casper Van Dien, Denise Richards, Dina Meyer. First published as a two-part serial in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction by Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers follows a young soldier, Johnny Rico (Casper Van Dien), as he joins a futuristic military unit, the Mobile Infantry.
- Arrival. Release date: November 11, 2016. Cast: Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, Forest Whitaker. Another on our list by Denis Villeneuve, mentioned before for his 2021 adaptation of Dune, comes 2016’s Arrival – a stunning visualization of a short story from Ted Chiang’s Stories of Your Life and Others.
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Critics Consensus: Playing as both an exciting sci-fi adventure and a remarkable portrait of childhood, Steven Spielberg's touching tale of a homesick alien remains a piece of movie magic...
Based on the novel: A Princess of Mars (1912) by Edgar Rice Burroughs. 9. The Adjustment Bureau. 2011 1h 46m PG-13. 7.0 (270K) Rate. 60 Metascore. The affair between a politician and a contemporary dancer is affected by mysterious forces keeping the lovers apart.
- 15 Dune
- 14 Total Recall
- 13 Slaughterhouse-Five
- 12 Invasion of The Body Snatchers
- 11 Starship Troopers
- 10 The War of The Worlds
- 9 Jurassic Park
- 8 The Thing
- 7 The Andromeda Strain
- 6 Colossus: The Forbin Project
Dune, the giant Frank Herbert novel that fans thought no one could adapt, was finally made into a successful film in 2021 by Denis Villeneuve. The movie is about a young man who must travel to an incredibly dangerous planet to embark on a quest to save his people from extinction. Although the novel had been adapted once before, in 1984 by David Lyn...
One of the best adaptations of a story by Philip K. Dick, Total Recall takes the short story We Can Remember It For You Wholesale, gives it a catchier title, and transforms it into an Arnold Schwarzenegger-starring action extravaganza. The film follows Douglas Quaid, an average laborer who dreams of moving to Mars. Realizing he doesn’t have the fun...
Slaughterhouse-Five is an adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s famous novel of the same name. It follows optometrist Billy Pilgrim as he relates his experiences in becoming “unstuck in time.” The film chronicles Pilgrim’s exploits as a prisoner of war in World War II and as a kidnapped zoo specimen on the alien planet Tralfamadore. It is an almost episodi...
Although there have been many adaptations of Jack Finney’s classic sci-fi novel The Body Snatchers, the best one is easily 1978’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Set in ‘70s San Francisco, an eclectic cast of characters is pitted against an invisible enemy of extraterrestrial origin in this Donald Sutherland and Jeff Goldblum-starring gem. The spec...
Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Trooperstakes the jingoistic, propaganda-like novel by Robert A. Heinlein and flips the story on its head, resulting in a satirical, anti-fascist science fiction masterwork. The movie portrays a distant future in which the Earth is at constant war with the Arachnids, an alien race of giant bugs. The film directly pokes fun...
The 1953 film version of The War of the Worldsis not just the best adaptation of H. G. Wells’ famous story of the same name, but it is also one of the most iconic alien-invasion films from the 1950s. It centers around a small town that becomes the crash-site of a strange meteorite. The meteorite cracks open and releases an alien war machine that wr...
One of Steven Spielberg’s most celebrated films, Jurassic Park, is a science fiction classic that does the Michael Crichton-penned source material justice. The film follows a group of scientists who are given the chance to tour a new theme park that is inhabited by living dinosaurs. When the dinosaurs break free and run amok through the park, an in...
John Carpenter’s The Thing is a classic sci-fi horror movie that updates the original 1951 The Thing from Another World and takes it in a new, body-horror direction. What many fans might not know is that the body-horror-tinged paranoia of this film version is actually more faithful to the original novella, Who Goes There?, by John W. Campbell. The ...
Like Jurassic Park, The Andromeda Strain is one of the best movies based on a Michael Crichton novel. It tells an unsettling tale about a deadly and microscopic organism of alien origin that kills the population of a small Arizona town. The best scientists available are quickly gathered together in a top-secret and high-tech research facility to id...
Colossus: The Forbin Project is a thought-provoking science fiction tale based on the novel Colossusby Dennis Feltham Jones. The film is about a high-tech defense system called Colossus that becomes sentient. The system takes control of the facility it’s contained in and seeks to use its nuclear defense programs to end war across the globe. Its cre...
- Blaine Turner
- Features Writer
Aug 12, 2023 · 8 'The Neverending Story' (1984) While fleeing from bullies, Bastian Bux ( Barret Oliver) goes into a bookstore and pilfers a book called The Neverending Story. It tells of a fantasy world called ...
Aug 18, 2021 · Shades of Magic Trilogy. Tor Books. V.E. Schwab has created a world with four Londons lying atop one another: our own dull Grey, warm magic-suffused Red, tyrannical White, and dead, terrifying ...
