LIFE Science Fiction: 100 Years of Great Movies

By The Editors of LIFE

Explore the rise of science fiction - the land of time machines, space travel, and lost worlds - and how we became so enraptured by the mystery, wonder, and thrill of a genre. Discover the historical inspiration, creative strategy, and the behind-the-scenes scoop of classics including Star Wars, ET, Jurassic Park and Avatar in an all-new special edition from LIFE, Science Fiction: 100 Years of Great Movies.

Included in this special edition is a detailed chronicle of the 20 most iconic movies that helped forge a new identity for a new genre. Through its evolution over the years - beginning in 1902 with George Méliès's Le Voyage dans la Lune to most recent years in films such as Avatar (2009) and The Martian (2015) - Science Fiction has not only endured a changing landscape thanks to the invention of new technology, but has grown a passionate and devoted following. In this celebration of the most iconic Science Fiction films, adventure through the geniuses of Ray Bradbury, H.G. Wells, Steven Spielberg, Stephen King, and George Lucas and delve into worlds of possibility and the future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Life
• Release date: Jun 24, 2016
• ISBN: 9781683302452

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INTRODUCTION THE HISTORY OF SCI FI CINEMA

© APIC/GETTY

A LONG TIME AGO, in cinemas far, far away, the Man in the Moon showed up in French filmmaker Georges Méliès’s 1902 film, Le Voyage dans la Lune, the first science fiction movie. After World War I, Méliès was reduced to operating a toy shop in a Paris train station.

He was a magician, a toy-shop owner, and a shoe manufacturer, but first and foremost Georges Méliès was a filmmaker—best remembered today for his pioneering use of cinema to transform reality instead of just to document it. His most famous work, 1902’s nearly 13-minute Le Voyage dans la Lune, was the first science fiction film and the first to show a voyage into space. He invented everything, basically, said director Martin Scorsese, whose 2011 film, Hugo, pays tribute to Méliès. He invented it all.

Le Voyage dans la Lune was loosely based on Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon and H.G. Wells’s The First Men in the Moon. Though the two writers’ methodologies were wildly different—Verne tried to ground his novels in science, while Wells cheerfully threw facts to the wind—the novelists invented many of the tropes that underlie the genre to this day: time machines, space travel, and lost worlds, for starters.

In 1910, Thomas Edison’s 13-minute Frankenstein, based on Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel, became one of the first American science fiction films. A few years later, feature-length SF films began being produced—often fueled by gimmicks. (Dubbed The First Submarine Photoplay Ever Filmed, the 1916 adaptation of Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea featured some of the first underwater photography.)

In 1927, SF cinema took a stratospheric leap forward with the German expressionist Fritz Lang’s silent film Metropolis, then the most expensive movie ever made (over $1.2 million) and an enduring influence on the genre. (Not to mention on music videos by Madonna and Queen.) And when King Kong was released in 1933, a mob of boys went quietly mad across the world, then fled into the light to become adventurers, explorers, zoo-keepers, filmmakers, the pioneering SF writer Ray Bradbury later said.

But in the first decade of talkies, cinematic SF was often synonymous with, of all things, musicals. In 1935’s The Phantom Empire, singing cowboy Gene Autry discovers the technologically advanced civilization of Mu, 20,000 feet underground, now threatened by unscrupulous speculators from the surface. (More than 70 years later, Avatar would feature a similar plot, albeit without Autry singing That Silver-Haired Daddy of Mine.)

With this kind of cinematic fare prevailing, it’s no surprise that pulp fiction became the era’s most significant influence on the SF genre. Named after the cheap paper they were printed on, pulp publications reflected a variety of genres—from mystery to Westerns to horror. Those devoted to science fiction featured the work of Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, and future Scientology guru L. Ron Hubbard. In the 1930s and 1940s, movie serials (exemplified by the big-budget Flash Gordon productions) joined pulps and comics as seminal inspirations for such dreamers as Steven Spielberg, Stephen King, and George Lucas.

In the latter’s case, at least, an interest in experimental film fused with pop culture influences. The so-called Father of Star Wars was as obsessed with the nonlinear narratives of, say, Jean-Luc Godard as he was with lurid comics. In fact, his first student film, Look at LIFE, was nothing but a collage of images from—you guessed it—LIFE magazine. Now it’s LIFE’s turn to look at Lucas, along with (of course) his forebears, contemporaries, and cinematic children in this celebration of the best 20 SF films ever made.

UFA/HORST VON HARBOU/KOBAL/ART RESOURCE, NY

BEHIND THE SCENES of director Fritz Lang’s pioneering 1927 German silent film, Metropolis

ERNEST BACHRACH/© RKO RADIO PICTURES INC., COURTESY PHOTOFEST

Zoe Porter, secretary to director Merian C. Cooper, helps to test a mechanical Kong hand for 1933’s King Kong. Both films