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

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 that 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."