10 Best Space Movies

This weekend, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets soars into theaters and fans all over the world are looking forward to the comic book adaptation. Many feel it is a return to form for legendary director Luc Besson, one of the most renown filmmakers in science fiction.

It stars Dane DeHaan and Cara Delevingne as Valerian and Laureline, respectively, who are a team of special operatives charged with maintaining order within the human territories.

In the trailer, audiences can see that the city of Alpha is as lush and colorful as anything seen on film before, and we’re so excited to see it that we decided to take a look back at some of our favorite space movies from years past and compile the “10 Best Space Movies”!

Now at this point, we’ve had so many movies take place in space that you could break them down into their own subcategories: space opera, space realism, space comedies, etc.

We didn’t do that.

We’re boldly lumping ALL space movies together to compile one giant, epic Jupiter-sized list, but we do have a few simple rules to help us differentiate:

1. The movies have to spend a good amount of time actually in space, which automatically excludes movies like E.T., Men in Black, Independence Day, etc. While those movies feature aliens and space ships, the setting is still predominantly Earth.

2. We really tried to avoid filling the list with multiple movies within a singular franchise. Of course, there are exceptions to the rule which we can’t explain here without spoiling the list, but trust us, we picked the best of the best and have our reasons.

And that’s it.
Those are our rules, and honestly, putting together a list of the “10 Best Space Movies” was nearly impossible. No doubt, everyone will have their own opinion due to the sheer fact that there are so many excellent space movies from which to choose. Just know there are movies we left off of this list that truly pained us, but again, decisions were made and movies were cut (we’re forever sorry 2001: A Space Odyssey.)

Watch our video at the top of the article to see what space movies made the cut and let us know if you agree with our choices! Then make sure you go enjoy Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets!