Every Steven Spielberg Sci-Fi Movie, Ranked

The one that started it all. Spielberg at his most personal, most obsessed, most brilliant. Close Encounters is not a movie about aliens -- it is a movie about the overwhelming human compulsion to seek the truth, even when it costs you everything. Richard Dreyfuss sculpting Devils Tower out of mashed potatoes remains one of cinema's most iconic images of obsession.

The five-note communication motif (D-E-C-C-G) is arguably the most famous musical phrase in sci-fi history. The parallels between this film and Disclosure Day are striking and deliberate. Spielberg has spent 50 years circling back to this moment.

The masterpiece. The highest-grossing film in the world for over a decade. E.T. transformed the alien encounter from a spectacle of light and sound into something intimate, heartbreaking, and profoundly human. A boy and his alien. Spielberg channeled his own childhood loneliness -- the divorce, the absent father -- into a story about finding connection with something from beyond.

That bicycle silhouette against the moon is the image that defined a generation's relationship with science fiction. How does Disclosure Day compare?

The film that changed cinema forever. Before Jurassic Park, CGI was a novelty. After it, CGI was the future. Spielberg understood something no other director did at the time: that digital effects needed to serve awe, not spectacle. The first reveal of the Brachiosaurus -- John Williams' theme swelling, Sam Neill's mouth falling open -- is the purest expression of wonder in blockbuster filmmaking.

It also works as a thriller. The T-Rex paddock attack, the raptors in the kitchen -- Spielberg directed tension sequences here that rival Hitchcock.

Spielberg's darkest alien film, and deliberately so. Made in the shadow of 9/11, War of the Worlds replaced wonder with raw, ground-level terror. The tripod emergence scene -- with its ash-covered survivors stumbling through streets -- directly evoked the imagery of Lower Manhattan. Tom Cruise's Ray Ferrier is not a scientist or a chosen one. He is a deadbeat father trying to survive.

This is Spielberg proving he could do alien horror. The basement scene with Tim Robbins is suffocating. The tripod horn sound is nightmarish. It is a flawed film (that ending), but its best sequences are among Spielberg's most viscerally powerful work.

The Spielberg-Kubrick hybrid that was misunderstood on release and has only grown in stature since. A.I. is the most emotionally devastating Spielberg sci-fi film -- Haley Joel Osment's David, a robot child programmed to love, spending eternity waiting for a mother who will never come back. The "Flesh Fair" sequence is Spielberg at his most disturbing.

What looked like sentimentality in 2001 now reads as prescience. In an age of AI companions and synthetic relationships, A.I. feels like prophecy.

Spielberg's most underrated film. A Philip K. Dick adaptation that functions as a near-perfect sci-fi noir thriller while simultaneously predicting gesture interfaces, personalized advertising, retinal scanning, and predictive policing. The production design team that built this world consulted actual futurists -- and they got an eerie amount right.

Tom Cruise runs. Spielberg directs. The eyeball scene makes you squirm. The jetpack chase through the vertical city is exhilarating. This is Spielberg operating with mechanical precision, every shot and cut calibrated for maximum tension.

Spielberg directing a film about pop culture nostalgia -- including references to his own work -- could have been unbearable. Instead, he delivered the most kinetic, joyful blockbuster of 2018. The OASIS race sequence is virtuoso action filmmaking. The Shining recreation is inspired. And beneath the Easter eggs, there is a genuine argument about the difference between virtual escape and real human connection.

Not peak Spielberg, but proof that at 71, he could still out-direct filmmakers half his age when it came to pure spectacle.