Star Wars is unquestionably the premiere space opera saga of the past 50 years, a rollicking adventure story with enough alien creatures, lightsaber duels and interstellar dogfights to last you a lifetime. The franchise has gone through its share of ups and downs over the decades, and is about to return to the big screen after seven years away. While we wait to see whether this will be an “up” or “down” era, feel free to check these other space operas that may beat Star Wars at its own game.
Dune
Star Wars before Star Wars
We’ve got to start with Dune, because whether he admits it or not, George Lucas borrowed a lot from Frank Herbert’s epic book series when he created Star Wars. There are too many similarities to ignore: there are the desert planets of Arrakis and Tatooine, quasi-religious orders like the Jedi and Bene Gesserit, a galactic empire, and a chosen one at the center of the story. Star Wars even has its own version of “spice,” which in its case is an illicit drug, as well as giant worm creatures.
Star Wars takes the foundations of Dune and builds a much more palatable, gee-whiz sort of adventure story on top of them. Dune has action-adventure elements, but at its core is a much more serious, heavy story about politics, religion, and the dangers of zealotry. The recent Dune movies, directed by Denis Villeneuve, have been huge hits. The upcoming third movie will be based on the book Dune Messiah, which has never been adapted for the screen. Beyond that, there are Dune books set thousands of years before and after the time of Paul Atreides, so depending on how well Dune: Part 3 does, we could get to spend a lot of time exploring this universe onscreen.
In fact, HBO is already exploring that territory with Dune: Prophecy, a TV show about the early days of the Bene Gesserit. The Dune series is about as deep and dense as it’s possible for a series to be, and there are other sci-fi stories out there that go even further.
The Expanse
Expansive indeed
Not every space opera is a movie; there are great space opera stories in print and on TV. The Expanse, which ran for three seasons on SyFy before jumping to Amazon Prime Video for another three, is a great example of both.
The Expanse has often been described as “Game of Thrones in space,” which is pretty dead-on. It’s set in the 24th century, when human beings have settled on both Mars and the asteroid belt, which we mine for resources. But then as now, there’s a lot of disagreement over how those resources should be shared, and conflict brews between these three camps. So the story is definitely expansive, but the drama is more intimate and human than it is in Star Wars or Dune, with less of a focus on prophecy and destiny and more on people just trying to get by.
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That said, our heroes do also encounter an extrasolar infectious agent called the Protomolecule and mysterious ring gates that can warp them halfway across the galaxy, so there’s plenty of far-out sci-fi drama too. The Expanse brings you the best of all possible worlds.
- Release Date
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2015 – 2022-00-00
- Network
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SyFy
- Showrunner
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Naren Shankar, Mark Fergus, Hawk Ostby
- Writers
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Mark Fergus, Hawk Ostby
- Franchise(s)
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The Expanse
Avatar
Over $5 billion in ticket sales can’t be wrong, right?
If you want sweeping and explosive, you can’t ignore the Avatar movies, which try and outdo Star Wars for pure spectacle. I personally think the story of aliens fighting off human colonizers is a little uninspired, but I can’t gainsay the technological heft that director James Cameron and his team bring to this project. They’ve brought the moon of Pandora, and its people, to life in a way only possible with the latest in cutting-edge special effects, making you feel as though you’re really there on this alien world.
Plus, the series is far from over. A third Avatar movie, Fire and Ash, comes out on December 19, and promises to be just as much of a barn-burning smash as the first and second films, which are respectively the first and third highest-grossing movies of all time. A new Avatar movie is event cinema of the kind that’s becoming hard to come by these days. As in the heyday of Star Wars, a space opera is the most reliable way to pack people into the theaters.
2001: A Space Odyssey
Still spinning people’s heads nearly 60 years later
About a decade before Star Wars, director Stanley Kubrick made one of the most ambitious films of all time in 2001: A Space Odyssey, a tremendously expensive movie about a couple of astronauts who have a rebellious super-computer named HAL 9000 for a co-worker. But the movie starts long before that, in prehistoric times when primitive man first learns to use tools, and ends long after that, when we bear witness to the next stage of humanity. 2001 is about nothing less than the history and destiny of the human race. How’s that for sweeping?
There are sequels to 2001 in both movie and book form, but you’re best off sticking with the original. It’s a whole cinematic universe unto itself.
- Release Date
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April 10, 1968
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Keir Dullea
Dr. David Bowman
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Gary Lockwood
Dr. Frank Poole
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William Sylvester
Dr. Heywood Floyd
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Douglas Rain
HAL 9000 (voice)
Firefly/Serenity
From the small screen to the big
Firefly is a fan favorite TV series that ran for all of one season way back in 2002, and found such a passionate following that creator Joss Whedon was able to wrap up the story with a movie called Serenity. It’s a little more like The Expanse in that it’s about a group of more-or-less ordinary people who are just trying to make their way across the solar system one day at a time, although of course they’re eventually caught up in a vast conspiracy involving government agents, psychic experiments, and ravenous deep space cannibals.
Firefly may not have the resources of a saga like Star Wars or Dune, but it makes up for that with solid writing and likable characters, so it feels important even if the fate of the entire galaxy isn’t always at stake.
- Release Date
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2002 – 2002-00-00
- Network
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FOX
- Showrunner
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Joss Whedon
- Directors
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Allan Kroeker, David Solomon, James A. Contner, Marita Grabiak, Michael Grossman, Tim Minear, Vern Gillum
- Writers
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Cheryl Cain, Drew Z. Greenberg, Jane Espenson
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Nathan Fillion
Mal Reynolds
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Gina Torres
Zoë Washburne
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Alan Tudyk
Hoban Washburne
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Morena Baccarin
Inara Serra
A few for the road
Whether you’re tired of Star Wars or love it so much that you want more like it, you have an embarrassment of options. Why not try multi-season TV epics like Farscape or Babylon 5? There are multiple movies in the Star Trek and Stargate franchises, and great ongoing series like Foundation and For All Mankind, both on Apple TV+.
This genre still has a lot of gas left in the tank. Star Wars is just the start.
