The three modern sci-fi greats made for less than $100,000
Mainstream sci-fi tends to be fairly expensive, what with the realisation of distant planets, epic battles between hulking spaceships, and the digital and practical trickery required to bring assorted alien species to life. Of course, just because a movie set in the genre is cheap, it doesn’t mean it can’t become a classic.
Imagination and ambition have no budgetary limits whatsoever, encapsulated by a trio of modern sci-fi greats being made for a combined amount of money that would barely cover the catering budget on a studio-backed and effects-heavy blockbuster.
It might be one of the most confusing films ever made, but as far as originality and intelligence go, Shane Carruth’s Primer is remarkable. Coming in at a cost of just $7,000, the director’s debut feature leaned about as heavily into his background as a former engineer and mathematics graduate as it possibly could.
A struggle to comprehend on a solitary viewing, Primer‘s mind-bending exploration into the accidental discovery of time travel throws up limitless paradoxes, lofty questions on the nature of existence, and a deliberately dense but inarguably cerebral sci-fi unlike anything else the medium has to offer.
A spiritual bedfellow of sorts, writer and director James Ward Byrkit’s own debut Coherence asks big questions of its audience and doesn’t feel obligated to answer many of them with any degree of concrete specificity. And yet, it fractures reality through the lens of something as mundane as a dinner party to startling effect.
When a group of friends sit down for a meal, little do they know that a passing comet will give rise to a psychedelic and psychological nightmare that takes its cues from The Twilight Zone but presents them in such a naturalistic fashion that the outlandish story developments hit even harder as a result.
Compared to the aforementioned pair, Mike Cahill’s Another Earth is inordinately expensive, and yet it still only set studio Fox Searchlight back $100,000. Co-writer and co-producer Britt Marling plays the lead role in the sort of singular existential thriller that would eventually become her stock-in-trade, particularly through her recurring collaborations with Zal Batmanglij.
Freshly released from prison, the star’s Rhoda Williams sets out to locate the man whose life she’d irrevocably altered in the car accident that put her behind bars several years earlier, before getting caught up in her fascination with a mirrored version of Earth and the desire to travel there to experience it first-hand.
There’s no rule that states the biggest sci-fi movies have any right to immediately be considered among the best, then, and there are few better titles to shine the brightest of lights on that perspective than Primer, Coherence, and Another Earth, each of which endures as a testament to the unfiltered vision of their creators regardless of the fiscal restraints.
