10 Sci-Fi Movies That Make Absolutely No Sense

Science fiction fans are experts at suspending their disbelief. The genre asks them to be open to impossible technologies, bizarre alien creatures, and worlds unlike anything that exists in reality. Sci-fi lets viewers live the thrill of alien invasions or mentally prepare themselves for an apocalyptic scenario. Fans are ready and willing to go on some pretty spectacular journeys, but occasionally a movie asks too much for even the most open-minded viewer.

Almost every sci-fi movie risks turning into total nonsense with its technological inventions or reality-warping plot devices. That risk comes with the territory, and some of our favorite sci-fi movies are completely unbelievable when you step back and consider what’s actually happening in them. A movie doesn’t necessarily have to make sense to be entertaining, and the movies we’re going to talk about here prove it. From classics of the genre to so-bad-its-good schlock films, here are 10 sci-fi movies that make absolutely no sense.

Read more: R-Rated Movies That Went Too Far

2001: A Space Odyssey

“2001: A Space Odyssey” is without a doubt one of the best sci-fi movies of all time. Legendary director Stanley Kubrick based his 1968 epic on a short story from sci-fi powerhouse Arthur C. Clarke. Clarke went on to write a series of “2001: A Space Odyssey” novels, but even though the books are great, they can’t hold a candle to the film. The initial premise of the movie is strange but straightforward enough. Thousands of years ago, a mysterious black monolith helped kick off human evolution. In the early days of humanity’s space age, they find another strange black monolith on the moon, and they send a ship out toward Jupiter to search for more.

A large portion of the movie follows the space expedition to Jupiter. Astronauts Dr. Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea) and Dr. Frank Poole (Gary Lockwood) are aboard the ship, which is controlled by an AI named HAL 9000 (Douglas Rain). Many people know about the “Space Odyssey” subplot where HAL loses its mind and turns on the astronauts, but it’s not until after that drama plays out that the movie stops making sense entirely.

When Dr. Bowman makes it past Jupiter, he travels through a series of strange lights and images that might be wormholes before finding himself trapped in a bed in a mysterious room. As he lies in bed, Dr. Bowman is an old man, but then he suddenly transforms into a giant fetus floating in space just before credits roll. The ending of “2001: A Space Odyssey” is a baffling, nonsensical sequence that every true sci-fi fan simply must experience for themselves.

Tenet

In Christopher Nolan’s “Tenet,” John David Washington plays a character known as the Protagonist who must defeat a Russian oligarch named Andrei Sator (Kenneth Branagh) before he destroys the world with a device from the distant future. And if that were the entire premise, any sci-fi fan could follow the movie. But “Tenet” isn’t content to use genre-standard time travel rules.

Time travel in the “Tenet” universe works thanks to sci-fi devices that can reverse the entropy of individual people and objects. Whoever gets reversed starts moving toward the past, i.e. they live normally while the world around them appears to be flowing backward like a VHS tape on rewind. The concept is fascinating and leads to some incredible visual moments throughout the film, but it is also extremely difficult to actually wrap your head around.

The internet has discussed the time travel rules in “Tenet” ad infinitum, and for the most part, people agree that they don’t actually make any sense at all. You don’t need to read fan discussions or look at the myriad outlines and flow charts people have created to understand that “Tenet” is total nonsense. The movie itself all but acknowledges the problem with its concept in an early scene where the Protagonist himself is learning the rules of reverse entropy. At a certain point in the scene, a scientist explaining the process to the Protagonist tells him not to try to understand it at all but to simply feel it and go with the flow. That should tell you all you need to know.

Back to the Future

“Back to the Future” might be the most beloved time travel movie ever. It’s certainly the most iconic. For decades, sci-fi fans have been unable to look at a classic DeLorean on the street without imagining it accelerating to 88 miles per hour and blasting itself into the past. When Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) takes off in Dr. Brown’s (Christopher Lloyd) car, he ends up in his parents’ high school years and goes on an adventure for the ages.

“Back to the Future” is a sci-fi delight, but its time travel rules make absolutely no sense at all. Throughout the movie, the more Marty interacts with his parents in the past, the more he changes his own future. When Marty’s actions threaten to completely change the timeline and undo his birth, his body becomes translucent. That kind of timeline warning system makes no sense, especially when we see it applied to objects around Marty. At one point he looks at a family photo he brought with him to the past and sees first his siblings, then himself fading from view. Doesn’t that imply that his parents went on to live their exact same lives to take the exact same picture just without their kids in it? Of course “Back to the Future” is full of dumb things everyone ignores, and the movie isn’t any worse for that.

Terminator: Dark Fate

The “Terminator” franchise raises a lot of questions about how time travel and artificial intelligence work, but none of the movies in the series stretch believability as far as “Terminator: Dark Fate.” The 2019 film stops making sense at the very beginning of the story. “Dark Fate” tries to give the “Terminator” series a big shake up, but in the process it introduces one of the most nonsensical time travel paradoxes ever put to film.

The story of “Dark Fate” kicks off in 1998 between the events of the second and third “Terminator” films. Skynet sends a Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger) back to the past yet again, but this one successfully kills a young John Connor played by Jude Collie, voiced by Aaron Kunitz, and computer-animated to look like Edward Furlong. John’s death lets the movie explore a whole new “Terminator” timeline, but it also doesn’t make any sense at all.

If John Connor dies in 1998, then he isn’t around to lead the human resistance against Skynet in the future. If John isn’t fighting Skynet, then why would Skynet ever think to send Terminators to the past to kill him? What’s even more confusing is that “Dark Fate” later asserts that the Terminator that killed John is still alive and living in our present, even though the timeline that led to his creation technically never existed in the first place. The plot of “Dark Fate” is just one big series of time travel paradoxes grouped together.

Sunshine

Director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland created a unique and memorable sci-fi journey in 2007 with their movie “Sunshine.” The film is set in the middle of the 21st century and imagines what would happen if the sun began to die. With the Earth slowly freezing to death, a team of astronauts is launched toward the center of the solar system with a massive bomb that will reignite the star and save the planet. Is that premise particularly believable on a scientific level? No, not at all — but that’s not the only part of “Sunshine” that makes no sense.

The last third of the movie takes a bizarre twist. The main crew in the film diverts their course to intercept a previous solar-bomb mission that never reached the sun. They eventually discover that the captain of the previous mission, Captain Pinbacker (Mark Strong) believed that God was communicating with him through the rays of the dying sun. Pinbacker’s relationship with the sun drives him into violent madness, but the movie implies that he really is communicating with a higher being. It’s a spiritual shake up in an otherwise standard sci-fi movie that makes “Sunshine” both completely unforgettable and utterly nonsensical.

Armageddon

“Armageddon” is a sci-fi classic from 1998, and roughly three decades later it remains one of the best movies of Michael Bay’s career. The director managed to take a premise that makes absolutely no sense and turn it into a movie that isn’t just entertaining but also genuinely emotional. For those who aren’t in the know, “Armageddon” imagines what would happen if a planet-destroying asteroid was hurtling toward Earth. In the movie, NASA needs to find a way to break apart the asteroid before it ends all of humanity, and the organization turns to a team of deep sea oil drillers to get the job done.

The plot of “Armageddon” only makes sense if you assume that it’s easier to teach a driller how to fly a spaceship than it is to teach an astronaut how to operate a drill. Moviegoers weren’t the first people to point out how ridiculous the premise is. In a commentary track for the movie, star Ben Affleck said that he once asked Bay why NASA wouldn’t use trained astronauts for the mission. “He told me to shut the f*** up,” Affleck said, “So that was the end of that talk” (via SyFy). Bay wasn’t willing to hear any objections, because he understood that sometimes it’s more important for a movie to be fun than for it to make sense.

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension

What do you get when you cast Peter Weller, Jeff Goldblum, Christopher Lloyd, John Lithgow, Clancy Brown, and Jonathan Banks in one movie? Well, you get “The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension,” which was not at all a hit when it debuted in 1984, but then again, those actors weren’t nearly as famous then as they are now. “Buckaroo Banzai” has since become something of a cult classic, but even fans of the movie struggle to accurately summarize what it’s about.

The titular hero, played by Weller, creates an oscillation thruster for his car and uses it to travel through a mountain. The journey carries his vehicle into another dimension, and when it returns, it’s carrying an alien passenger. The evil Dr. Emilio Lizardo (Lithgow) plans to steal the thruster, but Banzai’s band The Hong Kong Cavaliers stand in his way, and then a battle between alien races disrupts their initial conflict. “Buckaroo Banzai” is beyond confusing, and the movie itself seems to be trying to figure out what it wants to be. As one reviewer wrote in 2021, “[The movie] became a cult classic, partly due to being seen as a decent satire/mockery of science fiction movies. However, it becomes difficult to tell whether it is satire, an actual attempt at a low-budget sci-fi movie, or a mix of both.”

The movie’s plot doesn’t make any sense, and that’s why it rides the line between satire and schlock. To its credit, “Buckaroo Banzai” is incredibly entertaining, and part of the fun comes from the film’s total detachment from logic and sense-making. This is an utterly ridiculous film, but we wouldn’t have it any other way.

Dune (1984)

Anyone who’s read Frank Herbert’s “Dune” series can tell you that it’s a masterpiece of science fiction. The universe that Herbert created is thoroughly planned and has thousands of years worth of history to learn about. Arrakis and the other planets of the Imperium are worlds that readers can absolutely lose themselves within. The first onscreen adaptation of “Dune,” however, doesn’t quite live up to that standard.

To put this another way, as a standalone piece of media David Lynch’s “Dune” doesn’t make any sense at all. The film begins with a multi-minute exposition dump as Princess Irulan (Virginia Madsen) explains the universe of “Dune” in intricate detail. Despite that explanation, the film is difficult to follow, and to the uninitiated, it seems to charge wholeheartedly into nonsense territory. Experienced “Dune” fans who’ve charted a course through Herbert’s meticulously detailed fiction will probably be able to follow the story of the 1984 movie with ease. Everyone else will have their viewing experience interrupted by a constant bombardment of questions that won’t get answered.

Why are there alien-looking creatures in smoke-filled tanks? Why do futuristic combatants use swords and disappear inside blurry cubes when they battle? The movie tries to address these questions, but most of Herbert’s intricate story gets lost in translation. There’s a reason why Lynch’s “Dune,” despite the director’s undeniable talent, has a 36% approval rating with Rotten Tomatoes critics, and it’s not the bad CGI.

The Fountain

How much time would you be willing to spend figuring out the real meaning of a movie? Darren Aronofsky fans are in it for the long haul. One of the director’s fans on Reddit said, “It’s one of my favorites, I have never fully understood the message or all the metaphors.” That fan believed he’d finally gleaned the real meaning of the film after a decade and a half of repeated viewings, but naturally people in the comments immediately challenged his read on the story. If only we’d written this list earlier, we could have saved that Redditor the time because simply put, “The Fountain” doesn’t make any sense at all.

Time travel movies often struggle to follow clear rules, and “The Fountain” is no exception. The movie stars Hugh Jackman as a lovelorn time traveler named Tom searching for his life partner Isabel (Rachel Weisz) throughout different eras of human history. Even that description of the plot is a wild oversimplification that doesn’t really get at the heart of the movie. The story intercuts scenes from Mayan pyramids with speculative sci-fi sequences set in the 26th century. To its credit, “The Fountain” weaves these disparate threads together artfully, but you’ll never be able to apply straightforward logic to the story here. You could charitably say that “The Fountain” is a metaphorical or allegorical story that wants viewers to apply their own interpretations, but you could also say that the movie is a nonsensical mishmash of scenes, themes, and ideas that never come together in a satisfying way.

Moonfall

Up until now we’ve primarily focused on sci-fi movies that make absolutely no sense because the science in them is ridiculous. Time travel paradoxes, cosmic fetuses, and sun-based gods have helped launch the previous movies on this list into nonsensical territory. “Moonfall” is different because it’s not just scientifically infeasible; it’s also 100% nonsensical as a story in and of itself.

If you boil “Moonfall” down to its very basic premise, the movie almost works. The moon is sinking toward the Earth, disrupting weather patterns and causing all kinds of chaos. Director Roland Emmerich has created bigger hits with less material, but unfortunately, “Moonfall” isn’t a movie that wants to keep things simple. You see, the moon is crashing into the Earth because it’s really a megastructure created by ancient aliens that wanted to contain a life-destroying swarm of alien AI beings. Need we say more?

The sci-fi elements of “Moonfall” make no sense, but the dramatic elements are just as unbelievable. There isn’t a single character in the movie who behaves like a real human being. Most of the characters are walking plot devices, exposition machines, or agents of cheap laughs. There’s genuinely nothing for a viewer to latch onto here. The cliffhanger ending, which supposes that the aliens who created the moon megastructure want to reach out to humanity by communicating with a wild conspiracy theorist (John Bradley) pushes the movie to a new level of unbelievability. We aren’t ranking the level of nonsense in sci-fi movies here, but if we were, “Moonfall” would take the top prize.

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Read the original article on Looper.