5 Sci-Fi Movies That Are Practically Guaranteed To Bring You To Tears

Epic sci-fi movies with their futuristic fantasies and evolved technologies of all sorts can often deliver a poignancy that even the best tearjerker dramas cannot. Whether that's on account of time travel, parallel universes, bleak dystopias, or an uncanny alien making friends with a bunch of kids in the San Fernando Valley in Southern California, these stories possess an additional element of quality that most other movies simply don't.

It's not always an easy feat to add comprehensive emotions to highly-evolved fictional worlds, universes, and unknown futures that feature relatable characters, but luckily there are visionary filmmakers like James Cameron, Christopher Nolan, Steven Spielberg, and so on, who can make that feel like the most effortless thing in the world. I mean, they're such masters of storytelling that they made half the world bawl watching robots and aliens (not even humans!). Without taking on the impossible task of mentioning all the films that achieved this, today we're selfishly picking out five of them that will make your eyes leak at one point or another.

I've never met a person who, at the very least, didn't shed a tear watching "E.T." Steven Spielberg's classic family sci-fi is the perfect demonstration of the director's overflowing sentimentality at its most affecting best. The bond audiences see develop and strengthen between Elliott (a young Henry Thomas), his friends, and a newly-found creature (voiced by the late and great Pat Welsh) right out of space is tinged with a sense of adventure, connection, and love.

"E.T." was a smash hit of the 1980s, inspiring dozens if not hundreds of movies and TV shows that came after — "Stranger Things" owing perhaps the most to it. It featured a sensational cast (including a seven-year-old Drew Barrymore, Peter Coyote, C. Thomas Howell, Dee Wallace, and Erika Eleniak, among others), heartfelt writing, and an endearingly captivating milieu dreamed onto the big screen by a 34-year-old Spielberg who was still eager to prove that he deserved a place in the pantheon of the all-time greats of cinema.

Its ending of saying goodbye to a true friend is still heart-wrenchingly beautiful, underlined by John Williams' melodic, affectionate score, and a star-making performance by Thomas alongside the immortal line "I'll be right here" and a strange finger that burnt into movie history. I dare you to watch "E.T." from start to finish with a dry eye.

Despite its divisive nature and controversial reception among viewers and critics, it's hard to argue that Jaco Van Dormael's 2009 feature, "Mr. Nobody," delivered a wide spectrum of potent emotions. Whether you appreciate or can't stand Jared Leto as an actor (for which he tends to give everyone more and more reasons), "Mr. Nobody" is arguably one of those films when he perfectly understood the assignment.

The plot follows the last mortal on Earth in 2092, Nemo Nobody (Leto), an 118-year-old man on the verge of dying, who tries to remember his life with the help of a psychiatrist while also being interviewed by a young journalist. The trouble is, Nemo didn't live just one life but many, depending on who he chose to live with when his parents divorced at the time he was only nine years old. As he tells it, Nemo lived different lives that are vastly contradictory to each other, but all of them were right and true — but which one should be believed?

"Mr. Nobody" is a convoluted and at times utterly incomprehensible film that has the ability to leave you bewildered by its intricate plot structure while also bringing you to tears in moments you'd never expect. It's eccentric, witty, and unabashedly sentimental whenever it feels like it, but if you can buy into its emotional tornado-like disposition, you'll likely find a great deal of food for thought about regrets, missed opportunities, and the unpredictable whirlwind that life often winds up being.

Riding on Will Smith's irresistible leading-man charisma during the aughts, "I Am Legend" was bleak, riveting, and innately tragic. When you're one of the few survivors of a rampant virus that eviscerated 90% of the global population and turned them into vampiric zombie mutants — and living with a dog as your sole companion in an empty New York City — you have surely seen and done horrible things that weigh hard on your soul.

It's simple movie logic in a post-apocalyptic survival horror (which is loosely based on Richard Matheson's 1954 novel of the same name) that something awful is going to happen to that dog. Sam is the only thing left of Robert's (Smith) family (after losing his wife and daughter), so when the inevitable happens midway through, the pain weighs heavily in the air on both sides of the screen. Smith plays that moment beautifully with a pair of eyes that say more than a 1,000 words ever could, leaving your heart in shatters.

Depending on whether you've seen the theatrical or the alternate ending that upset test viewers so much that director Francis Lawrence was forced to change it, the tears might return for one final time, poignantly conveying the depressing fate of both Smith's protagonist and the dying mutants. Either way, "I Am Legend" is a profoundly sad movie.

From time to time, Christopher Nolan gets criticized for his movies (which our own Andy Meek once ranked) being too cold and lacking a wide array of deep emotions. Although I see where it comes from, I don't necessarily agree with this criticism. Even if I did, I'd have to say he went above and beyond in "Interstellar" to prove he's just as adept at capturing potent and complex feelings as he is at delivering epic undertakings.

I mean, who could forget Matthew McConaughey's Cooper as he's watching the video messages recorded by his children who are now around the same age (due to time dilation) as their dad was when he left them behind to go on an Earth-saving space mission? That scene is inherently devastating and heart-shattering. To see your kids as adults without being a part of their upbringing, missing the biggest moments of their lives like graduation or becoming parents, is the cruelest price to pay in order to save them and the rest of humanity.

"Interstellar" is Nolan at his most humane and sentimental, a rare feat of combining high-concept science fiction with heart, and the ultimate proof that the director is as fluent in human sentiments as he is in ambitious and technical filmmaking. And when he shows that on a grand scale, your heartstrings won't be able to resist, that's for sure.

Michael Gondry's 2004 sci-fi romance, "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," is easily one of the gloomiest and most heartbreaking movies ever made about romantic relationships. How can it not be when it's about the erasing of memories of a passionate and tumultuous love affair with a technological procedure? Starring Kate Winslet and Jim Carrey (one of the few truly profound roles he ever played) as the (ex)couple Clementine and Joel, the plot follows the former as he undergoes the erasing procedure and relives every moments of their relationship in reverse order in his sleep, starting with their last fight — after learning that Clementine has already done so and has no memory of him anymore.

Playing on the heartstrings with an aching melancholy of true love and heartbreak, Gondry and Charlie Kaufman deliver a story deeply relatable to anyone who ever fell in love and then watched that love shatter into tiny pieces of good and bad memories. In a way, "Eternal Sunshine" makes you go through your own relationships (via Joel and Clementine) and relive their most passionate and happiest phases along with the ones that eventually ripped your heart out. Yet there's also hope in this classic that lingers between scenes, ending up being quietly uplifting. Nevertheless, you won't come away from it unscathed — emotionally speaking.