Sci-fi movies that'll make you cry about your dad

Axios

13-06-2025

Want to feel emotional about fatherhood this Father's Day? Watch sci-fi.
The big picture: Sci-fi films often use fantastical plots to explore something deeply human: the love and heartbreak of the parent-child bond.
Zoom in:"The Empire Strikes Back" is about interplanetary war — and unresolved daddy issues.
"Interstellar" is about secret space travel — and the grief of being a dad watching your kids grow up.
"Contact" is about extraterrestrial communication — and the power of a father-daughter bond. The list goes on.
And there are plenty of sci-fi titles about motherhood, too — " Arrival" and " Terminator 2," to name a couple.
Zoom out: What better way to capture the vastness of the parent-child connection than through the language of the cosmos?
And at the same time, "parenthood is a very clean, direct way" to make stories with fairies, aliens or multiple dimensions "emotionally recognizable," says TV writer Marc Bernardin ("Star Trek: Picard," "Carnival Row").
"It also kind of lumps in with the feeling of being lost in a world bigger than you are, and trying to find some sense of comfort in that loss," he tells Axios.
You don't have to be a parent to connect with the themes.
FWIW: George Lucas wasn't a dad when he made the first couple of "Star Wars" films, and James Cameron didn't have children before the first two "Terminator" movies came out.
Between the lines: There's a pattern worth noting. Many of these stories are haunted by loss — often a parent or child.
You already know this if you watch enough movies and, in Bernardin's apt wording, "start to see the code of the matrix."
From the writer's perspective, when you're more than 30 minutes into the movie about to crest into the second act, "we need to propel our hero out of the comfort of the womb," Bernardin says, speaking metaphorically. "How do we do that? Somebody's gotta go."
Carly's thought bubble: Last year, pregnant and weepy during a sci-fi movie marathon, I realized how deeply the genre explores parent-child bonds.
"Arrival" and "Dune: Part Two" are now two of my favorite films. (Yes, I'm a Denis Villeneuve fan.) The former is my biggest personal tearjerker, and I'm convinced that the latter — which I saw in theaters twice — encouraged my baby to kick for the first time.
We're re-watching "Interstellar" for my husband's first Father's Day.
And this line from Matthew McConaughey's character lingers with me: "Once you're a parent, you're the ghost of your children's future."
OK, one more, from Anne Hathaway's character:"Love is the one thing we're capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space. Maybe we should trust that, even if we can't understand it."
Father's Day movie picks
Let screenwriter Colby Day ("Spaceman," "In the Blink of an Eye" out this year) be your personal Blockbuster salesperson with five of his recommendations for Father's Day sci-fi films:
1. "Contact" (1997)
" Based on a story from one of the fathers of modern science writing, Carl Sagan, this explores the intersection of faith and science. The hero's entire journey is at its core the story of a father-daughter relationship."
2. "Children of Men" (2006)
" What would our world look like without any children? Pretty bad! Clive Owen plays a reluctant hero and reluctant father figure in a sci-fi movie that also has enough action for the dads."
3. "Interstellar" (2014)
"Our generation's 'The Odyssey,' a science fiction myth of epic proportions about a man leaving his family behind to hopefully save the world, and in the process nearly losing himself."
4. "The Mitchells vs. the Machines" (2021)
" A really special father-daughter depiction and family film that also happens to have evil robots."
5. "A.I. Artificial Intelligence" (2001)