Best Science Fiction Films of the 1900's

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     I was excited to go back into the 1900's mainly for one great early director of science fiction films, Georges Méliès! If you take a film class, his film, "A Trip to the Moon" is usually the first one you will see.

    Georges Méliès is very important in not just science fiction film history but in film history in general because he one of the first to experiment with special effects like substitution splices, time-lapse photography, dissolves, and multiple exposures, things we take for granted today. 

    Though the technology was primitive, he still made beautiful films that hold up well to this day. Watching his movies is like watching a dream. A Trip to the Moon is based very loosely on a book by Jules Verne. The movie is more fantastical than Verne's original story with the astronomers in the movie fighting a moon army and saving the moon people from an oppressive moon king. 




    Méliès had a few more movies that I highly recommend, Under the Seas, Long Distance Wireless Photography, and The Impossible Voyage.


    I didn't want all of my list to be of Georges Méliès movies so I added another fun science fiction movie from 1909, The Airship Destroyer. It has a German original name, Der Luftkrieg Der Zukunft, but it was made by the British director, Walter R. Booth. Though only 7 minutes long, it is an action-packed film about a German invasion of Britain by Zeppelins. It imagined an air battle before there were real air battles.  Zeppelins fill the sky, and the Germans methodically drop bombs onto the civilians below. The main character and the people below fight back using planes, gliders, a tank and an unmanned attack drone. There isn't much plot, but it is fun to watch how someone in 1909 would imagine how a battle in the air would look. My favorite scene was of the Germans robotically dropping bombs from their Zeppelins. 


Blitzkrieg 1909 Style

1909 Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicle


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