There Are Only Two Perfect Sci-Fi Movies, According To Rotten Tomatoes

It doesn't mean anything to say a movie is "perfect" in any objective sense. Unless Rotten Tomatoes says it does, of course.

The website that Martin Scorsese considers "hostile to filmmakers" and which would have you believe that Rick Alverson's excellent "The Comedy" is a complete dud, is to many people the be-all and end-all of movie analysis. The site occupies such a vaunted position within film discourse that it has an inordinate sway over our own viewing habits. We've all been scrolling through some streaming service only to skip over a film because of a low RT score that is, for some reason, baked right into the interface. Likewise, if Rotten Tomatoes says a movie is "Fresh" then people are going to pay attention.

Look, it doesn't matter that last year a Rotten Tomatoes hacking scandal emerged, or that movie studios and streamers rely far too much on the Tomatometer as a marketing tool. It's not a big deal that the way in which RT scores are calculated is mysterious at best, or that Warner Bros. and Universal Pictures owner Comcast have stakes in the company. What matters is that Rotten Tomatoes gives us an easily digestible way to understand whether movies are "good" or not. So, if the website says a movie is "perfect," that obviously means the film is an incontrovertibly brilliant all-time classic, and everything else is not. When it comes to sci-fi — the genre to which such celebrated classics as "2001: A Space Odyssey" belongs — RT has evidently bestowed this esteemed designation to just two films. So get ready to dutifully follow the Tomatometer and only watch two sci-fi films for the rest of your life.

If you were forced to pick two perfect sci-fi movies, you could do a lot worse than "The Terminator" and "Stalker." James Cameron's 1984 breakthrough remains as remarkable and relevant today as it was when it first debuted. Cameron himself believes the events of "The Terminator" could actually happen and in today's culture where the shadow of AI looms, ready to be welcomed with open arms by Joe Russo, that perspective feels unsettlingly reasonable. But aside from the unnerving sense that it's "sci" isn't all that "fi," "The Terminator" was and is just a damn good time at the movies, melding elements of slasher horror with sci-fi to make a wholly original film that, some dodgy practical effects aside, has stood the test of time.

"Stalker," meanwhile, is similarly unnerving but in a much more arthouse, slow-burn way than its fellow "perfect" film. Like "The Terminator," Andrei Tarkovsky's 1979 effort can, at times, feel like a horror movie, but contains a big psychological thriller aspect that stems from its science fiction premise. The titular Stalker is played by Alexander Kaidanovsky, and acts as a guide to a writer (Anatoly Solonitsyn) and a professor (Nikolai Grinko), both of whom seek to enter a restricted area known as "The Zone." Just what "The Zone" is remains somewhat ambiguous, beyond it being a heavily guarded region where some calamitous event occurred, creating a room capable of granting a person's deepest wishes.

Like "The Terminator," Tarkovsky's film is often included in lists of the top sci-fi movies, and was even ranked as the 29th greatest film ever made in the British Film Institute's 2012 list. So, if there's going to be a "perfect" sci-fi film ranking, both movies are certainly worthy of consideration.