Every day we take another step forward, into the future, where we find new scientific wonders, unthinkable discoveries, and events that boggle our minds. Sometimes these revelations are marvelous. A lot of the time they’re objectively horrifying in every conceivable way, but marketed as if they’re cool. It’s a weird future we have found ourselves in. The makers of “The Jetsons” would have trouble believing it.
Perhaps that’s why we turn to science fiction, a genre preoccupied with possibilities. Sci-fi stories ask “what if,” and they answer “then what.” Whether the film is an exciting blockbuster, a tiny and ambitious indie enigma, a terrifying horror story or a depressing work of severe introspection, science fiction prepares us for what could happen and yet rarely, it seems, do we actually listen. We keep throwing ourselves headfirst into every calamity our storytellers ever conceived, which in turn makes sci-fi stories more terrifyingly plausible.
Sci-fi films are, whenever they take place, and whether we like it or not, stories about us, here and now. We’d like to think we’d be smart enough not to destroy the planet and nuke our economy for the sake of plagiarism machines that rob us of the capacity for intelligent thought, but that’s what we’re doing anyway. (If only we’d listened to #22 on this list of the Best Sci-Fi Movies of the 21st Century (So Far), maybe we could have averted this disaster.)
So take a gander at these amazing films, depicting all manner of scientific advancements and terrifying dystopias and, occasionally, convincing messages of hope. Maybe we’ll get it right someday. Maybe these movies will help.
25. ‘Inception’ (2010) and ‘Paprika’ (2006)
Christopher Nolan’s sci-fi dream thriller “Inception” owes so much to Satoshi Kon’s anime classic “Parika” — from its premise to its key action sequences and beyond — that it’s hard to separate them. But they’re both brilliant, so they can share our top spot. Both films are about technology that lets you enter another person’s dreams, which opens new and surprising doors for criminality. Nolan’s story is an icy corporate espionage thriller about how workaholic men can’t actually hide from their subconscious, no matter how hard they try. Satoshi Kon’s original, based on a novel by Yasutaka Tsutsui, is a lively, self-aware corporate espionage thriller about a psychiatrist preventing dreams and reality from merging. The live-action film is an intelligent Hollywood blockbuster of the highest order, the anime film is a brilliant surrealist masterpiece with, perhaps, even more thrills. Both explore the dangers of men who have power, but a limited capacity for introspection.
24. ‘Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes’ (2020)
Junta Yamaguchi’s low-budget puzzler “Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes” starts out small and stays small, but it never stops blowing your mind. Kazunari Tosa plays a mild-mannered café owner who discovers that, somehow, his computer shows what’s happening on his shop two minutes into the future. Which also means that, if he’s in his cafe, he can send messages to himself in the past. Two minutes is such a limited amount of time that you might think the possibilities were limited, but Makoto Ueda’s inspired screenplay proves otherwise. And the film’s one-take visual storytelling makes even the tiniest twists look like magic tricks. And of course, since our heroes go all-in on exploring the possibilities, without much care for the consequences, danger soon follows, which can only be averted with direct action and human values.
23. ‘They Cloned Tyrone’ (2023)
John Boyega plays a drug dealer who gets murdered by the competition, only to wake up the next morning with no memory of his death. The mystery deepens when he teams up with a pimp and a sex worker, played by Jamie Foxx and Teyona Parris, and uncovers a vast conspiracy to use mind-control and cloning to keep Black communities down. Director and co-writer Juel Taylor’s fascinating, bleak social satire doesn’t just comment on the governmental and capitalist systems hurting people of color, it also accuses filmmakers who mindlessly propagate racial stereotypes — like the ones Taylor cleverly employs in the first act — of conscious or subconscious complicity.
22. ‘S1m0ne’ (2002)
Andrew Niccol wrote two of the greatest sci-fi films of the 1990s — “The Truman Show” and “Gattaca” (which he also directed) — but his 2002 masterpiece wasn’t nearly as acclaimed. Probably because nobody knew how ahead of its time it was. Al Pacino plays a struggling filmmaker who uses a high-tech computer program to simulate a movie star who won’t argue with his vision. “S1m0ne,” played by Rachel Roberts, becomes a gigantic movie star because, unlike the ghoulish monstrosity Tilly Norwood, nobody knows she’s not a real person. Eventually, the pretense overwhelms our director, who loses control of his vision and might become a lifelong pawn in the soulless studio system he wanted to defy. Niccol’s dry, dark comedy was a cautionary tale that accidentally became a blueprint. A “torment nexus” with an unconvincing smile.
21. ‘Mars Express’ (2023)
Few films have had more of a cinematic influence than Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner,” which was a critical and box office disaster in its day, but — thanks to its vastly superior director’s cut — inspired waves of dystopian cyberpunk imitators, populated by lifelike robots and existential dread. The sequel, “Blade Runer 2049,” was a handsome production with big ideas but its true successor this century is Jérémie Périn’s animated sci-fi thriller about a murder mystery on Mars, conducted by a charismatic alcoholic and her zombified robot partner. “Mars Express” asks complex questions about synthetic consciousness and the many ways it would differentiate itself from humanity, not merely follow in its flawed footsteps, with inspired, distinctive imagery and captivating, unique characters.
20. ‘Predestination’ (2014)
Before “Succession” made Sarah Snook a household name, she starred in one of the twistiest, turniest sci-fi films in decades. “Predestination” finds Snook, playing a man, having a conversation with a bartender, played by Ethan Hawke, and his extremely unusual life, involving space travel, sex work, gender transition, and eventually time travel. Written and directed by The Spierig Brothers, and based on the Robert A. Heinlein classic — “‘—All You Zombies—’” — this overlooked modern classic is a brilliant and paradoxical story about every aspect of human existence, from conventional binary ideologies to far, far beyond. Although Heinlein didn’t have the vocabulary to describe what’s really going on in a lot of it, at least from a modern perspective, it’s still ahead of its time in many ways. “Predestination” is the film that should have make Snook a star in the first place; she takes a literally impossible role and makes it beautiful, haunting and real.
19. ‘Shin Godzilla’ (2016)
It’s hardly a shock that a Godzilla movie written and co-directed by the creator of “Neon Genesis Evangelion” would take the concept seriously, but “Shin Godzilla” does more than that. Hideaki Anno and Shinji Higuchi’s blockbuster is a terrifying giant monster film and, more importantly, a brutal political screed, arguing that impenetrable bureaucracies and tedious politicking stand in the way of fixing and preventing real-life disasters. It’s comical how many meetings take place in “Shin Godzilla,” and inspiring how a younger generation of scientists and leaders take charge and actually solve seemingly impossible problems. Maybe “Godzilla Minus One” is more emotionally powerful, and maybe “Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla” and “Godzilla: Tokyo S.O.S.” are the cool ones, but “Shin Godzilla” is the most biting Godzilla since the original.
18. ‘Primer’ (2004)
Some sci-fi movies don’t take the science seriously. The ultra-low budget time travel drama “Primer” takes the science so seriously you literally do need a spread sheet to understand the plot. Written, directed by and co-starring Shane Carruth, who we haven’t heard from in a while, probably for these reasons, “Primer” tells the story of two brilliant but thoughtless men who come up with a brilliant idea, make it on a shoestring budget, but aren’t mature or smart enough to think out all the angles. It’s may actually be the nerdiest sci-fi movie ever made, but it plays like the origin of the neo-fascist tech bro. Take a brainy idea, exploit it without considering the consequences, rinse and repeat and to hell with everything else.
17. ‘The Invisible Man’ (2020)
Speaking of evil tech bros, Leigh Whannell’s terrifying reboot of “The Invisible Man” stars Elisabeth Moss as a woman escaping from an abusive marriage with, you guessed it, an evil tech bro. Unfortunately for her, this evil tech bro has invented a suit that makes you invisible, and starts to stalk her, amplifying her post-traumatic stress and leading to murder and mayhem. “The Invisible Man” takes a sci-fi concept and grounds it in horrifying human behavior. And its depiction of a wealthy man who invents a miraculous technology and immediately uses it to hurt women is, depressingly, realistic.
16. ‘Timecrimes’ (2007)
Another low-budget time travel puzzle box, this time from Oscar-nominated genre genius Nacho Vigalondo, “Timecrimes” is a freaky little film starring Karra Elejalde as a man who sees something weird in his backyard, and suddenly gets trapped in a potentially infinite loop. Hunted by a masked madman and assisted by a not-entirely-useful scientist, he finds himself wandering from one paradox to another, guided by chance, or stupidity, or the blind faith that what happened before is what must happen again, whether it makes any sense of not. “Timecrimes” is an ingenius film about the existential hopelessness of time itself, made all the more profound by focusing its attention on a regular, hapless guy instead of anyone remotely resembling a hero. We’re all trapped in a system we didn’t create, or only created accidentally, and at some point we have to deal with that.
15. ‘The Matrix Resurrections’ (2021)
Corporations own everything, and when they own art, they also own a piece of the artists’ souls. That’s the premise behind “The Matrix Resurrections,” a legacy sequel to the classic 1999 sci-fi trailblazer, and its two somewhat-less-popular follow-ups, which — in real life and in the film — was going to get made whether the original creators liked it or not. So Lana Wachowski returns to blow up Warner Bros.’ plans, crafting a challenging, self-aware film that reckons with “The Matrix’s” legacy, and what it means to the queer community, and also corrects old wrongs by centering Trinity (Carrie-Ann Moss) as the equal of the so-called One (Keanu Reeves). “The Matrix Resurrections” isn’t just a great sequel, it’s an anti-sequel. It’s a statement. Artists can and should subvert the studio system, because art and artists matter more than whichever soulless conglomerate happens to own the rights to an intellectual property. They don’t “own” a damn thing.
14. ‘Summer Wars’ (2009)
Mamoru Hosoda is one of those filmmakers who almost exclusively makes masterpieces, and “Summer Wars” his his masterpiece-iest. This sci-fi story starts out like a romantic comedy, with a beautiful girl asking a computer nerd to pretend to be her boyfriend at a family gathering, and quickly spirals into an apocalyptic thriller about rogue AI threatening the entire world. And yet Hosoda’s depiction of the world in absolute microcosm, with one extended family filling in for every possible human being on the planet, makes “Summer Wars” profoundly relatable. It’s a film about the absolute interconnected qualities of humankind, a state of being that predates the internet, and can emerge victorious no matter how many of our systems fail. It’s a sci-fi film with a convincingly hopeful message about our future, and those are in short supply.
13. ‘The Purge’ Series (2013-2021)
The original “The Purge” introduced the world to a nightmare, dystopian vision of America’s future, where a national holiday makes every crime legal for one night a year. The moral rot at the heart of this country means that people don’t just do drugs and party, they mass murder each other wearing demonic masks which, ironically, reveal their true faces. Across five motion pictures, “The Purge” explores the type of society that would allow this inhumanity to flourish, revealing that it’s only a half step removed from our own. Hatred and violence towards people of color, and the systematic subjugation of the impoverished, is a function of the American state, not a betrayal of its values, culminating in a gradually devolving chaos state that cannot be undone. These films aren’t just a window into what’s to come, although that’s how the best sci-fi often operates. They’re a mirror, and their popularity stems from our collective, contemporary acceptance that it feels plausible.
12. ‘Ex Machina’ (2014)
The problem with creating an artificial intelligence, in Alex Garland’s fascinating directorial debut, is the kind of billionaire who would invent it in the first place. Oscar Isaac plays a scientific genius who thinks he understands humanity, and specifically women, and has no clue. Domhnall Gleeson plays the tiny cog in his corporate empire, whose porn searches were utilized to create the artifically intelligent robot, Ava (Alicia Vikander), who might be conscious. She might not. She might be a woman, although that aspect of her identity may be limited to the sexist, narcissistic imagination of her creator, a billionaire who lost touch with the human condition but thinks he’s an expert anyway. Isaac and Gleeson are excellent as absolute asses but it’s Vikander, playing an enigma by design, who steals the movie and plays one of the most memorable robots in film history.
11. ‘Minority Report’ (2002)
Steven Spielberg’s pulse-pounding Hitchcockian thriller stars Tom Cruise as a cop who punishes murderers before they can commit the crime, by using psychics to predict the future. The moral ramifications are staggering on the surface, since these “criminals” never get a chance to prove these visions wrong, and sure enough our hero finds himself accused to a crime he has no intention of committing and going on the run. Spielberg has ingenious ideas that combine old-fashioned suspense with unique sci-fi technologies, but the real, recognizable horror of “Minority Report” comes in the simple fact that technological advancement almost always depends on exploitation, and always outpaces a rational society’s ability to understand and reign in the ugly consequences.
10. ‘Idiocracy’ (2006)
Sometimes a storyteller comes up with a vision of the future that just makes sense. Mike Judge’s “Idiocracy” takes place in a future where intelligence was devalued for so long that nobody can think logically anymore, and a guy of average intelligence by modern standards — awoken from cryogenic slumber, and played by Luke Wilson — is suddenly the smartest man on the planet. The idea of the United States of America being run by completely unqualified, incompetent jerks who don’t even understand that plants need water to survive is laughable, and often hilarious but it never really seemed like a joke. It seemed like an inevitability. Cut to 20 years later and the Secretary of Health and Human Services doesn’t believe in actual medicine, the Secretary of Defense cries out for mindless war, and the president is Donald Trump — again — and Judge’s predictions were spot on, and earlier than he anticipated.
9. ‘Sorry to Bother You’ (2018)
Writer/director Boots Riley has so many brilliant ideas that his debut feature “Sorry to Bother You” can barely contain them. It begins with LaKeith Stanfield getting a job where Black people are forced to code-switch to succeed, to the point that their voices are literally dubbed by comedians like Dave Cross and Patton Oswalt. Meanwhile, corporations are gradually eroding our expectations for workers rights, rolling back the clock, with advertising promoting indentured servitude as a logical extension of the life we’re all leading anyway. And that’s long before our complex, flawed protagonist uncovers the even more shocking scheme set in motion by rich white billionaires. “Sorry to Bother You” is practically every kind of movie at once, but by the end it’s all razed to its brutally damning foundations, revealing a sci-fi conceit that kicks you in the gut..
8. ‘Dune: Part One’ (2021) and ‘Dune: Part Two’ (2024)
There was a time when Frank Herbert’s intricate “Dune” novels seemed impossible to adapt faithfully. David Lynch’s heavily abridged 1984 version is borderline incomprehensible, and not just in his usual, dreamy way. Denis Villeneuve’s two-part adaptation does a lot of world-building in the first installment, so much so that it’s too dry for its own good, but all that hard work sets up an ingenious second half where all of Herbert’s religious and political critique cuts deep, and balances powerfully with eye-popping imagery and thrilling set pieces. It’s a gigantic Hollywood blockbuster about the insidiousness of colonialism and the evils of weaponizing religion, with a superficially heroic protagonist — played by Timotheé Chalamet, at his best — who is clearly destined to become the worst possible villain.
7. ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’ (2015)
There are no bad “Mad Max” movies, but “Mad Max: Fury Road” is the most badass. Not only did George Miller craft what may very well be the perfect action movie, but he infused this post-apocalyptic car chase with intricate details, unforgettable characters and one of sci-fi’s most fascinating heroes, Imperator Furiosa, played by an iconic Charlize Theron. But beyond the amazing stunts, “Fury Road” operates as an incisive sci-fi cautionary tale about the rich and powerful hoarding and dehumanizing everything and everyone they touch. They don’t just hog all the water and oil and munitions, they’ve turned women into their personal property, and then they dare to demand their freedom these monsters will do anything — even destroy everything they’ve built — to reassert their control. Oh yeah, and Tom Hardy is awesome in it too. (He’s Max.)
6. ‘The Martian’ (2015)
Ridley Scott is no stranger to the sci-fi genre, having directed the original “Alien” and “Blade Runner” besides. But those were bleak visions of humanity’s future, where life is ruled by heartless capitalist interests. “The Martian,” based on the best-selling novel by Andy Weir, refutes all that earlier negativity. Matt Damon stars as an astronaut who gets stranded on the red planet and uses all his wits to stay alive, solving impossible problems by, in no uncertain terms, sciencing the s–t out of it. Very few protagonists in movie history have ever been as screwed as this guy and he still won’t let it get him down. It turns out that smart people with good ideas can fix anything, if we’d just let them. That last part is the only thing that’s tricky.
5. ‘Her’ (2013)
Joaquin Phoenix stars as a guy who’s so isolated that he starts dating his own operating system, an AI called Samantha, voiced by Scarlett Johansson. Spike Jonze’s heartbreaking love story knows this whole thing is pathetic, but cares deeply about human loneliness, so it doesn’t read as a simplistic cautionary tale. We turn to these creations, “Her” argues, because the world around us is increasingly isolating. Which is true, and it sure does seem like it’s only getting worse every year. “Her” no longer feels like science fiction, although the real world version of this technology is far more insidious, destructive, and ill-conceived than the seemingly benign technological advancement from Jonze’s movie. In the end, of course, all we have is each other, for better or worse.
4. ‘Arrival’ (2016)
Stories about first contact with another sentient species are often a little simplistic, as though all we’d have to figure out is how to shake hands, or how to kill each other. Denis Villeneuve’s rich, nuanced “Arrival” explores the complexities of understanding a life-form whose very existence is inexplicable. How can we communicate with an entity that cannot comprehend the way we experience time, let alone our basic vocabulary? Come to think of it, how can we communicate with anyone without expanding our own perspectives? Amy Adams stars as a translator who has an impossible job, whose solution might completely unravel her consciousness. It’s heady stuff, filmed with wonder and told with a wonderfully intellectual sense of excitement.
3. ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’ (2022)
The first and, so far, only science-fiction movie with a Best Picture Oscar, “Everything Everywhere All at Once” lives up to its title. Michelle Yeoh stars as a mild-mannered wife and mother who helps run a laundromat, but who almost did so many wondrous things that there are countless alternate realities where she’s phenomenal. When the multiverse is threatened by an ominous force, it’s up to her to tap into all her unrealized potential to save her family, and the day, and come to terms with the choices she made and didn’t make. In an era where we can’t help think about how different life would be if literally anything else had happened, on the world stage or at home, this all hits hard. Written and directed by Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan, “Everything Everywhere All at Once” is a sci-fi kung fu romantic action comedy feel good tragedy about complicated sci-fi concepts and the most relatable aspects of humanity. All at once.
2. ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’ (2004)
Jim Carrey plays a sad sack whose ex-girlfriend employs a new sci-fi service that erases every memory of their relationship, so he gets it too and immediately regrets the decision. Now he’s unconscious in his bedroom, desperately trying to cling to his most important memories while fleeing the very technology he thought could fix him. Michel Gondry’s impossibly beautiful film, co-written by Charlie Kaufman, understands that humans rush to adopt any technology that seems to make life easier, even if it makes us less human in the process. And also that, no matter how hard we try, we’ll keep making the same mistakes, because that’s what life — and love — are really all about.
1. ‘World of Tomorrow’ (2015)
“Now is the envy of all of the dead,” So says a third generation clone of Emily, living in the world’s most depressing future, where human beings give birth to themselves and download their consciousness into those brains, and where love is perhaps best possible with rocks. Don Hertzfeldt’s heart-rending “World of Tomorrow” tells the story of Emily, time traveling to meet a younger version of herself. So young she can’t actually process the horrifying visions of the future she receives, to the extent that the whole visit may be pointless. It is a future where science is indistinguishable from magic, if magic hated itself, and the juxtaposition of childlike obliviousness and shocking omens is a cruel, yet oddly beautiful joke. The wonders of the universe are incomprehensible, and make us small, and yet we are all we have. Hertfeldt’s incredible short, and its two similarly bizarre sequels, is a singular work of science fiction, unforgettable and disquieting.
