1979 Film Was Just Crowned the 'Greatest Sci-Fi Movie Based on a Book'

While perusing the catalogue of acclaimed science fiction films, one can’t help but notice that many aren’t original ideas. For instance, the publication Collider recently compiled a list of popular sci-fi films that have plots derived from books.

The July 2026 list, titled “the 10 greatest sci-fi movies based on books, ranked,” included films like 1982’s The Thing, Children of Men from 2006, andBlade Runner, also released in 1982. Collider put Andrei Tarkovsky‘s 1979 film Stalker, which has a Rotten Tomatoes score of 100 percent, at the top of the ranking.

The film’s screenwriters, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, used their own 1972 book, Roadside Picnic, as the basis of Stalker‘s script. In a 1979 interview with Italian screenwriter Tonino Guerra, Tarkovsky shared he once believed that fellow filmmaker Giorgi Kalatozishvili would like to take on a project inspired by Roadside Picnic.

“At one time I had recommended to my friend, the director Georgy Kalatozisvili [sic], that he read the short novel Roadside Picnic, thinking that perhaps he might be interested in making a cinematic adaption of it,” said Tarkovsky, who died in 1986 when he was 54. “Then, I don’t know how, Kalatozisvili [sic] was not able to come to an agreement with the Strugatsky brothers, the authors of the novel, and so he abandoned the idea for that film.”

He then said he realized that his own film version of Roadside Picnic could be an expression of different philosophical ideas.

“Every once in a while, that idea began to come to my mind again. Then increasingly it seemed to me that from that novel one could make a film with a unity of place, of time, and of action,” said Tarkovsky while speaking to Guerra. “These classic Aristotelian unities, it seemed to me, allow one to arrive at authentic cinema, which for me is not the so-called action cinema, exterior cinema, outwardly dynamic cinema. I believed that the subject which the screenplay would be based on permitted one to express in a very concentrated manner the philosophy, so to speak, of the contemporary intellectual. Or rather, his condition.”

He also clarified that the book and the film have quite a few distinctions.

“Although I must say that the screenplay of Stalker has only two words, two names, in common with the Strugatskys’ novel Roadside Picnic: Stalker and Zone,” explained the filmmaker during the 1979 interview.