The 1970s turned science fiction from a kids’-matinee sideline into the decade’s most ambitious popular art. Studios suddenly banked on spaceships, sentient planets, and parks full of androids, while European and Soviet filmmakers used the same future to ask slower, heavier questions. From The Andromeda Strain and Solaris to Alien and Star Wars, the decade built the modern sci-fi canon that later blockbusters still copy or argue with.
This list gathers thirteen essential science-fiction movies from the 1970s — lab-procedure thrillers, space operas, paranoid remakes, and two Tarkovsky films that treat the cosmos like a state of mind. Every pick includes TMDB-backed metadata and a quick guide to why it belongs on a 1970s sci-fi watchlist.
1. Sleeper
- Movie Title: Sleeper
- Release Date: December 17, 1973
- Main Cast: Woody Allen, Diane Keaton, John Beck
- Director: Woody Allen
- TMDB Score: 6.9/10
Why We Included Sleeper on This List
Most 1970s sci-fi is anxious about the future. Woody Allen’s is anxious and then it trips over a giant banana. Sleeper belongs here because it is the decade’s great comic time-capsule: cryogenics, police states, and health-food jokes treated as one continuous routine. Diane Keaton’s Luna gives the satire a partner who can match Allen’s panic. If you want proof that 1970s science fiction had a sense of humor besides the doomsday punch line, start with this one.
Quick Sleeper Summary
Miles Monroe, a clarinet-playing health food store proprietor, is revived out of cryostasis 200 years into a future world in order to help rebels fight an oppressive government regime. He does not want to be a hero, which is exactly why the underground recruits him. The future is full of gadgets, informants, and people who have forgotten what a twentieth-century neurotic looks like.
Interesting Facts or Trivia About Sleeper
Allen wrote, directed, and starred in the film during his early run of broad comedies, before the later relationship pictures. Diane Keaton’s Luna is one of their first major pairings on screen. The movie’s future gags — the orgasmatron, the underground rebels, the 200-year nap — became shorthand for how 1970s comedy could steal sci-fi costumes without losing the jokes.
2. Capricorn One
- Movie Title: Capricorn One
- Release Date: December 10, 1977
- Main Cast: Elliott Gould, James Brolin, Brenda Vaccaro
- Director: Peter Hyams
- TMDB Score: 6.8/10
Why We Included Capricorn One on This List
Peter Hyams’s fake-Mars-landing thriller is 1970s paranoia aimed at the one American institution that still looked clean: the space program. Elliott Gould’s reporter and James Brolin’s astronaut turn a public-relations miracle into a manhunt. The film sits next to Star Wars and Close Encounters in the same year and offers the opposite fantasy — not wonder, but a cover-up with a soundstage and a desert. It is the conspiracy movie that treated NASA hardware as a set decoration.
Quick Capricorn One Summary
In order to protect the reputation of the American space program, a team of NASA administrators turn the first Mars mission into a phony Mars landing. Under threat of harm to their families the astronauts play their part in the deception on a staged set in a deserted military base. When the real ship burns up on re-entry, the crew becomes a liability, and a crusading reporter is the only person still asking the wrong questions.
Interesting Facts or Trivia About Capricorn One
Hyams wrote and directed the film, folding Watergate-era distrust into a space-race plot. It arrived in December 1977, months after Star Wars had already rewritten what a sci-fi movie could sell. The staged-landing premise later became a reference point whenever people argued about whether cameras, not rockets, were doing the real work.
3. The Andromeda Strain
- Movie Title: The Andromeda Strain
- Release Date: March 12, 1971
- Main Cast: Arthur Hill, David Wayne, James Olson
- Director: Robert Wise
- TMDB Score: 7.1/10
Why We Included The Andromeda Strain on This List
Robert Wise’s lab thriller opens the decade with science fiction that looks like a briefing, not a comic book. A satellite comes home, a New Mexico town dies, and a team of scientists tries to isolate an alien organism before the bunker’s own fail-safes kill everyone. Arthur Hill’s Dr. Jeremy Stone leads a cast that treats procedure as suspense. On a 1970s sci-fi list this is the hard-science baseline: no laser swords, just a life form that does not care about speeches.
Quick The Andromeda Strain Summary
When virtually all of the residents of Piedmont, New Mexico are found dead after the return to Earth of a space satellite, the head of the US Air Force’s Project Scoop declares an emergency. A group of eminent scientists led by Dr. Jeremy Stone scrambles to a secure laboratory and tries first to isolate the life form while determining why two people from Piedmont — an old alcoholic and a six-month-old baby — survived. The organism mutates while they work, and the lab is wired with a nuclear self-destruct that was supposed to be the last line of defense.
Interesting Facts or Trivia About The Andromeda Strain
The film is adapted from Michael Crichton’s 1969 novel, the book that made his name before he started directing. Wise had already made The Day the Earth Stood Still, so he knew how to keep a sci-fi crisis sounding official. Split-screen technique and a clinical, almost documentary tone made the movie feel closer to a public-health drill than to space opera.
4. Soylent Green
- Movie Title: Soylent Green
- Release Date: April 18, 1973
- Main Cast: Charlton Heston, Leigh Taylor-Young, Chuck Connors
- Director: Richard Fleischer
- TMDB Score: 6.9/10
Why We Included Soylent Green on This List
Richard Fleischer’s overcrowded-2022 mystery is the 1970s eco-nightmare that escaped the classroom and became a punch line, then a warning again. Charlton Heston plays a detective in a city that has already lost the argument about resources. The movie belongs on this list because it is the decade’s plainest statement that the future might just be a supply-chain problem with a secret recipe. Leigh Taylor-Young and Chuck Connors fill out a New York that looks used up before the plot even starts.
Quick Soylent Green Summary
In the year 2022, overcrowding, pollution, and resource depletion have reduced society’s leaders to finding food for the teeming masses. The answer is Soylent Green. Heston’s detective starts with a murder among the people who still eat well and follows the case into the factories that keep everyone else alive.
Interesting Facts or Trivia About Soylent Green
The film is adapted from Harry Harrison’s novel Make Room! Make Room!, though the movie’s food-company twist is its own invention. Edward G. Robinson, not billed in the main TMDB trio here, took his final screen role as Heston’s older roommate and died shortly after filming. The last-line reveal entered the language even for people who have never seen the movie.
5. Westworld
- Movie Title: Westworld
- Release Date: August 15, 1973
- Main Cast: Yul Brynner, Richard Benjamin, James Brolin
- Director: Michael Crichton
- TMDB Score: 6.8/10
Why We Included Westworld on This List
Michael Crichton’s first film as a director is the vacation-from-hell story he would later scale up with dinosaurs: a themed park, human-like machines, and customers who assume the safety briefing is optional. Yul Brynner’s gunslinger android is the most famous malfunction of 1970s sci-fi, a smiling attraction that will not stay in character. Richard Benjamin and James Brolin play the guests who learn the park’s rules the hard way. It belongs here as the decade’s cleanest warning about entertainment that can shoot back.
Quick Westworld Summary
Delos is a futuristic amusement park that features themed worlds populated by human-like androids. After two patrons have a run-in with a menacing gunslinger in West World, the androids at Delos all begin to malfunction, causing havoc throughout the park. What starts as a weekend fantasy becomes a hunt through sets that were never meant to have real bullets.
Interesting Facts or Trivia About Westworld
Crichton wrote and directed the film, years before Jurassic Park reused the park-goes-wrong idea with a different species. Brynner’s gunslinger costume deliberately echoes his role in The Magnificent Seven, so the android looks like a star the guests already paid to meet. The movie is often cited as an early feature to use digital image processing for the robot’s point of view.
6. Fantastic Planet
- Movie Title: Fantastic Planet
- Release Date: December 1, 1973
- Main Cast: Gérard Hernandez, Jean Valmont, Jennifer Drake
- Director: René Laloux
- TMDB Score: 7.6/10
Why We Included Fantastic Planet on This List
René Laloux’s animated feature is the 1970s sci-fi movie that looks like a poster you would find in a dorm and then refuses to stay cute. Blue giants keep tiny humans as pets or vermin, and the design never winks. Gérard Hernandez, Jean Valmont, and Jennifer Drake voice a story about slavery, education, and revolt that adult animation rarely attempted in Western theaters. It earns a place on this list because the decade’s science fiction was not only live-action studios in California.
Quick Fantastic Planet Summary
On the planet Ygam, the Draags, extremely technologically and spiritually advanced blue humanoids, consider the tiny Oms — human beings descended from Terra’s inhabitants — as ignorant animals. Those who live in slavery are treated as simple pets and used to entertain Draag children; those who live hidden in the hostile wilderness of the planet are periodically hunted and ruthlessly slaughtered as if they were vermin. One Om raised in a Draag household learns enough to change the terms.
Interesting Facts or Trivia About Fantastic Planet
The film is a French-Czechoslovak production based on Stefan Wul’s novel Oms en série. Laloux’s cut-out animation and the alien flora give it a look that still does not resemble a Disney or anime pipeline. It won the Grand Prix spéciale at the 1973 Cannes Film Festival, a rare festival prize for an animated science-fiction feature.
7. Superman
- Movie Title: Superman
- Release Date: December 14, 1978
- Main Cast: Christopher Reeve, Margot Kidder, Gene Hackman
- Director: Richard Donner
- TMDB Score: 7.2/10
Why We Included Superman on This List
Richard Donner’s Superman is the late-1970s argument that a comic-book origin could be shot like a prestige adventure instead of a serial. Christopher Reeve makes Clark Kent and the hero feel like two different postures in the same body, and Margot Kidder’s Lois Lane is the reporter who notices. Gene Hackman’s Lex Luthor keeps the villainy talky and theatrical. On a sci-fi list it is the Krypton-to-Metropolis story that taught later superhero movies how to sell an alien as a hometown myth.
Quick Superman Summary
Mild-mannered Clark Kent works as a reporter at the Daily Planet alongside his crush, Lois Lane. Clark must summon his superhero alter-ego when the nefarious Lex Luthor launches a plan to take over the world. Donner splits the film between the science-fiction of a dying planet and the newspaper comedy of a man who cannot tell his coworker the obvious.
Interesting Facts or Trivia About Superman
The production sold itself on the promise that audiences would believe a man could fly, and the flying effects became the film’s technical headline. Reeve was a little-known stage actor when he was cast, then became the default Superman for a generation. John Williams’s march joined the same late-1970s run of unforgettable sci-fi themes that also included Star Wars and Close Encounters. The film received a Special Achievement Academy Award for visual effects.
8. Invasion of the Body Snatchers
- Movie Title: Invasion of the Body Snatchers
- Release Date: December 20, 1978
- Main Cast: Donald Sutherland, Brooke Adams, Leonard Nimoy
- Director: Philip Kaufman
- TMDB Score: 7.2/10
Why We Included Invasion of the Body Snatchers on This List
Philip Kaufman’s San Francisco remake is not a nostalgia exercise. It is 1970s urban dread with pods in the greenhouse and coworkers who smile a little too evenly. Donald Sutherland and Brooke Adams play Department of Health workers who notice the city going flat, and Leonard Nimoy’s psychiatrist is the calm voice you should not trust. It belongs on this list because alien-invasion cinema in the 1970s did not need motherships — just people who had already been replaced.
Quick Invasion of the Body Snatchers Summary
The residents of San Francisco are becoming drone-like shadows of their former selves, and as the phenomenon spreads, two Department of Health workers uncover the horrifying truth. The pods do not announce a landing. They just wait for you to fall asleep.
Interesting Facts or Trivia About Invasion of the Body Snatchers
Kaufman’s film remakes Don Siegel’s 1956 classic and relocates the paranoia from small-town America to post-1960s San Francisco. Nimoy, famous as Spock, plays against that cool-scientist image as a man who explains the epidemic a little too well. The final scream became one of the most circulated images in 1970s science fiction, a punch line and a nightmare in the same frame.
9. Solaris
- Movie Title: Solaris
- Release Date: March 20, 1972
- Main Cast: Natalya Bondarchuk, Donatas Banionis, Jüri Järvet
- Director: Andrei Tarkovsky
- TMDB Score: 7.8/10
Why We Included Solaris on This List
Andrei Tarkovsky’s space-station film is the 1970s answer to anyone who thought science fiction had to move fast. A psychologist arrives to investigate deaths and breakdowns, then the planet’s ocean starts returning people the crew cannot stop needing. Natalya Bondarchuk, Donatas Banionis, and Jüri Järvet play grief as if it were a physical law. This list needs Solaris because the decade’s sci-fi was not only American spectacle — it was also a long look at a sentient sea.
Quick Solaris Summary
A psychologist is sent to a space station orbiting a planet called Solaris to investigate the death of a doctor and the mental problems of cosmonauts on the station. He soon discovers that the water on the planet is a type of brain which brings out repressed memories and obsessions. The visitors who appear on board are not hallucinations the crew can simply switch off.
Interesting Facts or Trivia About Solaris
The film is adapted from Stanisław Lem’s novel, a book Lem later said the movie only partly captured. Tarkovsky shot it as a philosophical counterpart to Western space adventure, with long takes and almost no interest in hardware worship. It won the Grand Prix spécial du jury at the 1972 Cannes Film Festival.
10. Close Encounters of the Third Kind
- Movie Title: Close Encounters of the Third Kind
- Release Date: December 14, 1977
- Main Cast: Richard Dreyfuss, François Truffaut, Teri Garr
- Director: Steven Spielberg
- TMDB Score: 7.4/10
Why We Included Close Encounters of the Third Kind on This List
Steven Spielberg’s UFO film is the 1970s close encounter that treats wonder as a compulsion, not a invasion-of-the-week plot. Richard Dreyfuss’s linesman cannot explain why a mountain keeps showing up in his mashed potatoes, and Teri Garr has to live with the fallout. François Truffaut’s scientist gives the mystery an international, almost documentary frame. It belongs here as the decade’s gentlest first-contact movie — and still one of the strangest family breakdowns in popular sci-fi.
Quick Close Encounters of the Third Kind Summary
After an encounter with UFOs, an electricity linesman feels undeniably drawn to an isolated area in the wilderness where something spectacular is about to happen. Ordinary objects start arranging themselves into the same shape. Government teams and ordinary people converge on the same landmark for reasons they cannot fully name.
Interesting Facts or Trivia About Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Spielberg cast the French director François Truffaut as a scientist, a rare case of a New Wave filmmaker appearing inside a Hollywood effects picture. John Williams’s five-note musical phrase became the film’s language for talking to the visitors. Vilmos Zsigmond won the Academy Award for Best Cinematography. The movie opened in December 1977, the same season as Superman was still a year away and Star Wars had already changed the business.
11. Stalker
- Movie Title: Stalker
- Release Date: May 25, 1979
- Main Cast: Alisa Freyndlikh, Aleksandr Kaydanovskiy, Anatoliy Solonitsyn
- Director: Andrei Tarkovsky
- TMDB Score: 8.1/10
Why We Included Stalker on This List
Tarkovsky’s second great 1970s science-fiction film is even less interested in gizmos than Solaris. The Zone is a fenced-off landscape where physics fails and a guide walks two desperate men toward a room that is said to grant wishes. Aleksandr Kaydanovskiy’s stalker, Anatoliy Solonitsyn, and Alisa Freyndlikh make faith, cynicism, and domestic leftover life feel like the actual special effects. It is on this list because later games, novels, and films kept borrowing the Zone — and almost never the patience.
Quick Stalker Summary
Near a gray and unnamed city is the Zone, a place guarded by barbed wire and soldiers, and where the normal laws of physics are victim to frequent anomalies. A stalker guides two men into the Zone, specifically to an area in which deep-seated desires are granted. Getting there is less about maps than about whether anyone should want what they think they want.
Interesting Facts or Trivia About Stalker
The film is loosely adapted from the Strugatsky brothers’ novel Roadside Picnic, though Tarkovsky strips away much of the book’s alien-debris lore. Production was notoriously difficult, including a reshoot after problems with the original film stock. The forbidden-Zone idea later named a whole strain of games and stories, from the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series onward, that still point back to this gray, wet landscape.
12. Alien
- Movie Title: Alien
- Release Date: May 25, 1979
- Main Cast: Tom Skerritt, Sigourney Weaver, Veronica Cartwright
- Director: Ridley Scott
- TMDB Score: 8.2/10
Why We Included Alien on This List
Ridley Scott’s haunted spaceship is the 1970s film that proved science fiction could be working-class, wet, and terrifying. The Nostromo is a tug, not a flagship, and Tom Skerritt, Sigourney Weaver, and Veronica Cartwright play a crew that argues about bonuses before anyone understands the cargo. Weaver’s Ripley becomes the decade’s defining survivor without the movie announcing a heroine in reel one. It closes the 1970s sci-fi boom with a creature that does not negotiate.
Quick Alien Summary
During its return to the earth, commercial spaceship Nostromo intercepts a distress signal from a distant planet. When a three-member team of the crew discovers a chamber containing thousands of eggs on the planet, a creature inside one of the eggs attacks an explorer. The rest of the crew does not yet know what has been brought back on board.
Interesting Facts or Trivia About Alien
H.R. Giger’s biomechanical design made the title creature look unlike the rubber-suit aliens of earlier decades. Weaver was billed behind Skerritt and was not sold as a franchise lead in 1979; Ripley became one anyway. The film won the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects. Dan O’Bannon’s script and Scott’s industrial corridors turned a haunted-house structure into the template for later space-horror movies.
13. Star Wars
- Movie Title: Star Wars
- Release Date: May 25, 1977
- Main Cast: Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher
- Director: George Lucas
- TMDB Score: 8.2/10
Why We Included Star Wars on This List
George Lucas’s space fairy tale is the 1970s movie that changed what a science-fiction release could do to a studio, a toy aisle, and every adventure film that followed. Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, and Carrie Fisher play a farm boy, a smuggler, and a princess as if the galaxy already had a Saturday-matinee history. It is not the decade’s most philosophical sci-fi picture, and it does not need to be. On this list it is the one that made the rest of the industry chase spaceships.
Quick Star Wars Summary
Princess Leia is captured and held hostage by the evil Imperial forces in their effort to take over the galactic Empire. Venturesome Luke Skywalker and dashing captain Han Solo team together with the loveable robot duo R2-D2 and C-3PO to rescue the beautiful princess and restore peace and justice in the Empire. A desert planet, a stolen set of plans, and a space station the size of a moon do the rest of the work.
Interesting Facts or Trivia About Star Wars
Lucas founded Industrial Light & Magic to build the effects the existing shops would not attempt. The film won six Academy Awards, including visual effects, editing, score, art direction, costume design, and sound. Fox had modest expectations; the merchandising and sequels rewrote the business around a single 1977 release. Hamill, Ford, and Fisher were not yet the faces of a franchise when principal photography started in the Tunisian desert and at Elstree.
The 1970s sci-fi map runs from a New Mexico lab to a wish-granting Zone, with a Death Star and a xenomorph in between. If you want the next decade’s laser-and-synth sequel energy, try our list of the best sci-fi movies of the 1980s — or stay in the same grimy decade with the best crime movies of the 1970s and the best horror movies of the 1970s.
