We took a trip through decades of the genre and came up with a list of the most important and best hard science fiction movies of all time. They are the essence and the foundations of the book of sci-fi rules that’s still being written as we, the audience, become much more self-aware of our relationship with technology, the future, and whatever those two will bring.
You’re not wrong there, plenty of the choices seem like what a casual person who doesn’t even really seek out Sci Fi would think of as “genre defining.”
I mean really, arrival? It’s basically just Slaughterhouse 5’s Tralfamadorians but without the existential non-meaning attached. It wasn’t a bad movie, but it’s just another good enough film from the last decade.