Blade Runner

The year was 1991. Actress Sean Young was trending — which in the Nineties means tabloids were dumping on her. The scandal: she barged onto the Warner Bros. lot dressed as Catwoman for an audition for Batman Returns. Two years earlier, Young was set to play Batman’s love interest in the first film, but she fell off a horse on set, fracturing her shoulder, so director Tim Burton replaced her with Kim Basinger. Young believed she deserved an audition for the sequel’s villain. After all, she was Sean Young. She played Chani in David Lynch’s original Dune (a role a not-yet-born Zendaya would reprise in a remake). She made love to future Yellowstone star Kevin Costner in No Way Out.

A decade ago, Alfonso Cuarón’s sci-fi thriller Gravity soared into theaters, to ecstatic reviews and a vast box office. Its success was all the more surprising — and welcome — because it had been dogged by reports of disastrous test screenings and production chaos, with its innovative, visual effects-heavy story apparently beset by the envelope-pushing demands of the technology that it required to depict its world. The movie could easily have been a colossal flop, but instead it seemed to herald a brave new dawn for ambitious, intelligent science fiction filmmaking that soared into the stratosphere, in both senses. Ten years on, the success of Gravity, or even Ridley Scott’s The Martian, are very distant memories.