Sunshine is just one of many great sci-fi films that get overlooked because of marketing.

I’ve always been a little befuddled by the average person’s resistance to science fiction as a genre. I can understand why a person would be put off by the schlockier segment of this market, but every genre of fiction has a large quantity of commercial tripe from which you have to pick the better material. I would argue in fact that some of the greatest fiction of the twentieth century would typically be categorized as sci-fi: Arthur C Clarke, Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, and other sci-fi writers wrote some of the most insightful social-commentary-as-fiction of the era, and yet other writers, like Anthony Burgess with A Clockwork Orange and Philip K. Dick’s stories like A Scanner Darkly and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? pushed the reader to explore social and psychological realms that are crucial to a modern person’s examination of life in our rapidly-evolving information and technology-driven world. In the case of Science Fiction film, the root of the problem is obvious. It’s the Hollywood marketing mindset. Blade Runner is a classic example of a brilliant film that nearly didn’t make it to market because test audiences “didn’t get it”. While Hollywood execs are (unfortunately) probably correct in their assumption that the average viewer isn’t very bright, there’s no reason to encourage their stupidity or mental laziness by focusing all the marketing dollars on dazzling schlockbusters like Avatar or the Star Wars franchise. Films like Alien, Blade Runner, The Matrix, TV productions like Battlestar Galactica, and even sci-fi comedy like Men In Black have proven that there’s a large audience with a long market life without adhering to the traditional Hollywood approach of staying in the safety zone of films with A-List actors, dumbed-down messages like Avatar’s ecotardedness, and massive product tie-ins that – in the case of films like Star Wars – generate more than twice the revenue of the films themselves. We’ll be back in part two with a look at how comedy can ease the pain of embracing sci-fi films, but below are a few more recent films you may have overlooked. Feel free to share suggestions for our expanded list in part three.

Moon	Sam Rockwell turns in a brilliant performance as Sam Bell, an employee of the energy company Lunar Industries, who gets to know himself in a surprising way as he wraps up a three-year solitary stint mining helium-3 on the far side of the moon. Kevin Spacey provides the perfect voice for his robot companion, GERTY. Directed by David Bowie’s son Duncan Jones with a budget of $5 million dollars
Cargo	Anna-Katharina Schwabroh plays Laura Portmann, a doctor who has signed an 8 year contract with a cargo ship to get away from a dying Earth and its overcrowded space stations. Although it gets panned by some critics for its flat characters, I think that’s part of what makes Cargo work. This is a slow-paced, stylish suspense film as much as a sci-fi film, and is worthy of note if only because it’s a Swiss sci-fi film, shot on a $2 million budget over eight years.
Sunshine	Although Sunshine is a stylish and well-acted sci-fi film, it’s also an interesting psychological drama, exploring another kind of power the sun seems to possess to us as humans. This film was massively undermarketed, and probably suffered from the deluge of films of the last few years with the word “sunshine” in the title. Great soundtrack too, by the way.
Primer	Primer is probably one of the best explorations of time-travel paradoxes you’ll ever see. Sort of like a non-violent “Reservoir Dogs meets Memento”, it’s tightly scripted, solidly acted, and a remarkably solid production all around, especially in light of the fact that it only cost SEVEN THOUSAND DOLLARS.