As the buzz continues to build for the Peter Jackson-produced, alien-apartheid thriller District 9, it's been fun to see how much movie-going audiences actually love science fiction films, how excited they get at the prospect of a "good" sci-fi movie hitting their local multiplex. But, while the enthusiasm for the genre is inspiring, it's hard to deny that sci-fi is a difficult genre to pull off on film. For every Blade Runner or Solaris, there are fifty Adventures of Pluto Nash or Spaced Invaders. Maybe that's why it's so invigorating that critics have started calling out 2009 as an unusually good, perhaps transformative, year for sci-fi filmmaking. OK, fine, yes, this is the year that brought you Push, Race to Witch Mountain Redux, Knowing, and Terminator: Salvation (shudder), but it's also the year that's brought the world J.J. Abrams' Star Trek, Watchmen (they went to Mars, that counts as sci-fi), Monsters vs. Aliens, Moon, and District 9, among others - and that WILL bring us other sci-fi movies with tons of potential like Gamer, Shane Acker's 9, Pandorum, Splice, The Surrogates, Astro Boy, and, most notably, James Cameron's Avatar.

This is our one exception to our rule. You will see no other year on this list defined by one movie alone, but we just couldn't talk about significant years for sci-fi movies without discussing Fritz Lang's Metropolis. For the past 82 years, whenever anyone tries to picture a sci-fi movie in their mind, chances are, they're thinking of some aspect of Metropolis - either a direct image from the movie or an image from the thousand or so movies that have been inspired by it. Yes, Georges Melies introduced the movie world to the idea of sci-fi with A Trip to the Moon in 1902, but Lang's Metropolis pretty much defined what a sci-fi movie could be (and should be) for the next eighty years. It's moody, groundbreaking, filled with visual effects and social commentary, and packed with inventors, robots, and visions of the future - some might find it cold, but Metropolis proved for generations that science fiction movies need to be, almost above anything else, ambitious. It unquestionably put 1927 on the sci-fi map for all time.

While the 1950s was the first decade to truly embrace the sci-fi genre on film - earlier decades were marked by solitary classics like Frankenstein or goofy serials - things really started getting interesting in 1956 with the release of some of THE classic sci-fi movies of all time. For starters, Forbidden Planet, Fred Wilcox's masterpiece which stands as one of the most iconic films of all time, helped inspire Star Trek, introduced the world to Robby the Robot, and acts the best Shakespeare-in-Sci-Fi movie ever (it's loosely based on The Tempest). 1956 also gave the world the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which again is beyond iconic and proved that smart social commentary can be really, really scary, and Godzilla, King of the Monsters!, the first American release of the 1954 Japanese classic Gojira. We got one of the best known robots ever, the Body Snatchers, and freakin' Godzilla all in the same year. How amazing is that? Not to mention other B-list semi-classics like the first Rodan movie, Earth vs. The Flying Saucers (which basically defined the flying saucer image for the next half-century), and the Roger Corman-directed Day the World Ended and It Conquered the World. Not too shabby.

How can you have a list about sci-fi movies without mentioning Kubrick, right? Well, as you expected, one of the best years in science-fiction filmmaking history featured a movie with a year in its title - 2001: A Space Odyssey. Fine, we're not entirely sure we understood the Star-Child ending either, but everything about 2001 pushed sci-fi movies forward - from the depth of the material to the virtuosity of the special effects to the scope of the storytelling. Total classic. But that wasn't all that 1968 had in store for us. We also got Roger Vadim's Barbarella, which, critics be damned, is a great piece of campy sci-fi (MUCH better than 1980's Flash Gordon); Cliff Robertson's amazing performance in Charly (technically sci-fi if you think about it); one of the best Godzilla movies ever, Destroy All Monsters; and another of the most iconic movies of all time, Planet of the Apes. Granted, Apes is a little more pulpy and a bit more direct in its social commentary than 2001, but it acts as a great counterpoint to Kubrick's film, showing how the range of sci-fi filmmaking can stretch from the profound to the just plain fun.

This might be the single weirdest year in sci-fi, but you won't find many other years that really give you a sense of how experimental and unconventional the sci-fi movie genre can be. You've got A Boy and His Dog, a bizarre post-apocalyptic tale, based on a Harlan Ellison story, which paved the way for the Mad Max movies (and that we called out on our Ten Truly Underrated Sci-Fi Movies list last year); Disney's original Escape from Witch Mountain (teenage comfort food sci-fi); Norman Jewison's Rollerball (a fantastic example of entertaining social commentary with one of the worst remakes ever); Shivers, David Cronenberg's first feature film and a truly unsettling mad scientist story; The Stepford Wives (domestic sci-fi terror at its best); and - although it may seem odd to list it as science fiction - The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which is replete with transducers, UFOs, and aliens from the planet of Transsexual, in the galaxy of Transylvania. Talk about a motley crew, eh? But, say what you will, 1975 helped prove that sci-fi films can appeal to a WIDE spectrum of audiences, no matter how they like to let their freak flag fly.

Chances are, the second you read the title of this article, your mind went straight to 1977. And it's hard to blame you. Any year that witnessed the release of George Lucas' Star Wars and Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind is bound to be remembered. Much like 1968's tag-team of 2001 and Planet of the Apes, the dream team of Star Wars and Close Encounters really showed off the range of sci-fi. One film redefined modern myth for a whole generation with a pulp adventure story right out of the 1940s serials, the other created an almost-rapturous image of what it might feel like to reach beyond the stars and make first contact with a sentient alien lifeforce. It's hard to imagine the sci-fi genre without either film now and having them both in the same year made 1977 a shoo-in for this list. Not much else of note came out in 1977, except for Ralph Bakski's wild cult-classic cartoon Wizards, which has some amazing imagery and really laid the foundation for 1981's Heavy Metal.

If you haven't caught on already, the 1970s was a pretty kick-ass decade for sci-fi movies. The final year of the '70s did produce a number of science fiction-friendly clunkers - Disney's expensive flop The Black Hole, the terrible Sean Connery/Natalie Wood vehicle Meteor, and one of the goofiest James Bond movies of all time, Moonraker - but there were a number of genre hallmarks that came about that year that simply can't be ignored. First, and most significantly, it saw the release of Ridley Scott's Alien, a movie that used sci-fi to perfect the haunted house movie (Why don't they just leave the haunted house? Because they're surrounded by the vacuum of space!) and introduced one of the most recognizable and iconic movie monsters of all time, H.R. Giger's Alien. 1979 also saw the release of Cronenberg's The Brood, Robert Altman's almost-forgotten, post-apocalyptic Paul Newman drama Quintet (more notable for watching masters like Altman and Newman working with sci-fi, rather than the quality of the movie itself), and two other movies, George Miller's Mad Max and Star Trek: The Motion Picture, that are significant because they both kicked off two of the best-known sci-fi film franchises of all time and were both completely overshadowed by their far superior sequels (Road Warrior and Wrath of Khan). And, finally, 1979 also gave the world Andrei Tarkovsky's sublime Stalker, which proved to audiences that you could make compelling sci-fi solely out of words and ideas, without any of the FX baggage that bogged down failures like The Black Hole.

Yes, 1980 had Empire Strikes Back and 1983 had Return of the Jedi, but there is NO other year in the 1980s that did as much for the sci-fi movie genre as 1982. Yes, '82 did give us Swamp Thing and the Scott Baio classic Zapped!, but the rest of the year witnessed a murderer's row of sci-fi releases that almost boggles the mind in retrospect. Ridley Scott redefined future noir with Blade Runner (and kept redefining Blade Runner for about 25 more years); Star Trek stopped trying to imitate 2001 and just got awesome with Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan; John Carpenter delivered the best movie of his career, The Thing, proving that the "infection as alien invasion" concept is still downright terrifying; Cronenberg blew our minds with Videodrome; and Tron gave us a glimpse of the future of CGI animation and proved to be ahead-of-its-time enough to inspire an upcoming 3D sequel. Oh, and there was also this little movie called E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, which became the highest-grossing sci-fi movie... heck, just the highest-grossing movie of all time (in 1982), showing the world the universality of the genre and making even hardened fanboys weep into their Reese's Pieces.

This was a hard one. We almost went with 1981 as the second-best year for sci-fi in the '80s - it did bring us Escape from New York, Heavy Metal, The Road Warrior, Outland, and Scanners - but, in the end, it was too hard to ignore a year like 1984. It was a year packed with ambitious sci-fi projects, many of which didn't really work out. Films like Michael Radford's 1984, Peter Hyams' 2010, and (oh dear lord) David Lynch's Dune all swung for the fences and came up lacking, followed by a sub-tier of almost-great flicks like Michael Crichton's Runaway, John Carpenter's Starman, and Leonard Nimoy's Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. However, there were several other movies that, while not breaking the box office, became cult classic hits and sci-fi genre favorites such as The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, The Last Starfighter, Night of the Comet, John Sayles' Brother from Another Planet, and believe-it-or-not Repo Man (what was in that trunk?). And, in terms of sci-fi blockbusters for 1984, it's hard to underplay the significance that James Cameron's The Terminator has had on the science fiction genre as a whole and, if you think about it, Ghostbusters pretty much counts as sci-fi too. (Yeah, that's a hard one to swallow, but has science invented a proton pack yet? No? We rest our case.)

The 1990s was a decade of fits and starts for the sci-fi genre on film, occasionally giving us greatness like Total Recall or Terminator 2, but then sandbagging the genre with trash like Johnny Mnemonic, Judge Dredd, and Waterworld (and those all came out the same year! Hang your head in shame, 1995.). While there were some diamonds in the rough throughout the '90s, 1997 was the most consistently good year for sci-fi in the whole decade. Granted, there were some notable misses - Alien Resurrection squandered the talents of Jean-Pierre Jeunet, both The Fifth Element and Event Horizon disappointed, The Lost World: Jurassic Park was one of Spielberg's all-time worst, and Kevin Costner's The Postman was an ambitious, overlong mess - 1997 did show us a surprising depth and vitality in its sci-fi offerings at the multiplex. Vincenzo Natali's Cube took a scaled-up Twilight Zone concept and turned it into one of the most original sci-fi films of the decade, Andrew Niccol's Gattaca did an amazing job of taking modern anxiety surrounding genetic engineering and turning it into a smart, emotionally resonant thriller, and Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers was either a masterpiece or a disaster, depending on who you talked to. On the blockbuster front, Robert Zemeckis took Carl Sagan's Contact and turned into an eerily plausible (and, yes, occasionally sappy) look at the political, social, and moral implications of first contact with aliens, and Barry Sonnenfeld's Men in Black taught us that first contact is cool, provided that we have Will Smith around to kick some alien ass, need be.

The 2000s have had a lot of sci-fi missteps so far. It's been a decade of Battlefield Earth, horrible Mars movies (Mission to Mars, Red Planet, Ghosts of Mars), the beautiful/painfully dull Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, revolting remakes (Planet of the Apes, Rollerball), Jason Voorhees in outer space, two Star Wars prequels, and lots of other assorted space garbage. To date, the 21st century has been noticeably less futuristic in its sci-fi storytelling than the 20th century, which just makes our inner-nerds sob into their Romulan ale. However, then a year like 2006 comes around and gives us new hope for the genre. It was a year of ambition and experimentation, which is exactly what we thought the 21st century was supposed to be about. There was a well-intentioned (though misguided) attempt to reboot a franchise with Superman Returns; Richard Kelly's Southland Tales proved that the director could make a film even weirder than his debut feature, Donnie Darko; Richard Linklater did an amazing job of using atypical animation to bring to life the work of the atypical Philip K. Dick in A Scanner Darkly; Mike Judge tried to Beavis-and-Butthead the future with Idiocracy (which didn't work out so well); and Darren Aronofsky created one of the most beautiful, maddeningly surreal sci-fi experiences in years with The Fountain. We also got two great monster movies - the sublime Korean creature-feature, The Host, and the over-the-top, guilty pleasure Slither - and, then, we got simply one of the best and most underrated sci-fi films of all time, Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men. Yes, the failures outweighed the successes in 2006, but it still stands as the year that sci-fi started taking itself seriously again and once more began trying to go where no filmmaker had ever gone before.