Kino Lorber
Last Updated: May 24th
The sci-fi genre currently splits the difference between niche entertainment and the mainstream, providing diehard nerds and folks looking for a simple good time with a common ground on which they can unite and share in their enthusiasm. There was a time when tales of aliens, space travel, and robots were believed to be the strict province of four-eyed basement dwellers, but the truth is that everybody can find something to enjoy in the weird world of science fiction. The best sci-fi works in both universal truths and hyperspecific detail, using fantastical yet fully-realized worlds to tell stories about our own.
Netflix‘s selection of good sci fi movies isn’t exhaustive , and it errs mostly on the side of direct-to-video embarrassments, but there are still plenty of pictures worth exploring nestled among the sequels and paycheck-generators. Keep on scrolling for 10 of the best sci-fi movies on Netflix streaming to watch right now, taking you from the moon, to the farthest reaches of space, to the outer fringes of reality itself.
Related: The 10 Best Sci-Fi Shows On Netflix Right Now
10. A Trip To The Moon (1902)
Georges Meliés
This is square one for science fiction movies, the lab in which technical ingenuity first reacted with untethered imagination to open a portal to then-unthought-of worlds. French cinema wizard Georges Méliès magicked up hundreds of shorts during his illustrious career, and none was more beloved than this 12-minute space odyssey on the dark side of the moon. Audiences could scarcely believe their eyes at the minor miracles playing out onscreen, with fanciful alien critters vanishing in the blink of an eye; they had no understanding of the primitive special effects that lent this film its magic. They bore witness to the awesome birth of filmmaking-as-spectacle, where the prestidigitator behind the camera only allows his audience to see just what he wants them to.
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9. Hard To Be A God (2013)
Kino
A film so grueling that it killed director Aleksei German (well, that and the heart failure), this three-hour epic plunges audiences into an immersive world composed chiefly from grime, muck, feces, spittle, and whatever other synonyms for filth can be mustered up. A group of scientists travel to a twin planet where the human race threw the towel in during the Dark Ages and fully committed to living as fetid a life as possible instead of pushing through to the Renaissance. There, they’re forbidden from interacting with the primitive locals, and so they sit dispassionately and watch as this doomed world slowly devours itself, craps itself back out, and smears that crap on its face. By no means a pleasant experience, German’s staggering vision is still an achievement of the film form, worthy of comparisons to Bosch’s bustling visions of hell.
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8. Escape From New York (1981)
MGM/UA Home Entertainment
Few directors enjoyed a hot streak quite like John Carpenter in the years between Halloween and The Thing when he turned out one genre-changing classic after another. Escape From New York imagined a near-future New York (well, 1997 was the near future then) that’s become so ruined that it’s been turned into a prison for the country’s most-hardened criminals. Kurt Russell stars as a badass reluctantly enlisted to drop into the city to retrieve the President of the United States. It’s a bleak satire that takes the urban decay and political corruption of the post-Watergate era to an awful, but strangely logical conclusion and its dim vision of the future can still be felt in the dystopian movies of today.
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7. The Host (2006)
Magnolia
Korean director Bong Joon-Ho brought the giant monster movie into the 21st century with this story of a strange creature who emerges from the Han River and starts wreaking havoc on everything it encounters. Bong, now probably best known for directing Snowpiercer, made The Host as his follow-up to Memories of Murder, a haunting crime story. And though this is a much different kind of movie, it’s made with the same care and attention to characters, even if the monster unavoidably ends up stealing the show.
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6. The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)
Fox
Klaatu barada nikto. These three words are nonsense, but like this storied B-movie, they function as a shibboleth, a secret password separating those who get it and those who don’t. In the years after World War II wound up, drive-ins across America were flooded with low-rent sci-fi flicks just like this one, which played to rapt audiences of young nerdlings. The indoor kids who grew up on these sorts of movies would use them as silent markers to identify one another and group together, and a select few even grew up to emulate them and usher in the age of blockbusters. It’s no coincidence that The Rocky Horror Picture Show, the cult movie to end all cult movies, begins by referencing lead actor Michael Rennie.
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5. Primer (2004)
IFC
Shane Carruth scoffs at so-called “indie” filmmakers with their generous funding and well-staffed crews. For his debut feature, Carruth ponied up a paltry $7,000 of his own money and cut costs by directing, shooting, writing, starring, editing, producing and scoring it all himself. But creating an entire feature film for a fraction of the cost of a new car wouldn’t mean jack if it didn’t turn out well. It did, and big time — Carruth’s intricate thought experiment about a pair of scientists who accidentally discover time travel takes on a gripping realism by perfectly landing its many metaphysical backflips. It sounds silly to commend someone for doing the research on a movie about a physically impossible phenomenon, but for this film’s 77 excellent minutes, going back in time feels weirdly viable.
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4. E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982)
Universal
The Reese’s Pieces. The silhouette of the flying bike against a glowing full moon. “Phone home.” So much of Steven Spielberg’s sci-fi bedtime story has attained icon-status through endless repeated viewings, a testament to the enduring universality of his expressions of childlike wonder. To watch E.T. is to be transported to a more innocent time, to flash back to memories of rapt summer nights spent before flickering silver screens. Movies about children can strike a cloying or saccharine tone with one misstep, but Spielberg maintains a clear-eyed view of youth, showing the capacity for awe along with the terror of not understanding the big, scary world around you.
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3. World Of Tomorrow (2015)
Don Hertzfeldt
The latest release from animation genius Don Hertzfeldt, World Of Tomorrow leaps across millennia, creates clones of clones of clones, waxes poetic on the tragic ephemerality of memory, falls in and out love a few times, and very nearly locates the meaning of life. All of this takes place in 16 minutes. Over the course of a discursive conversation between a three-year-old girl and an adult clone of herself from the future (it makes more sense when you watch it [the third time]), Hertzfeldt crafts deeply moving monuments to sadness and salvation, and splashes it all against gorgeous expressionist abstractions. This is the sort of movie whose dialogue you get tattooed on yourself, or use as a criterion on first dates. A tremendous work of emotional power, World Of Tomorrow affirms the brutal loneliness of common life as a necessary counterbalance that creates joy. It’s really something.
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2. Metropolis (1927)
Kino
Méliès may have been the first one to break ground on sci-fi, but German master Fritz Lang was the first to realize the genre’s full potential for visual grandeur and covert commentary. With a scale as grand as the countless blockbusters it inspired (this film’s disciples span from George Lucas to Lady Gaga), Lang weaves an epic tapestry of have-nots laboring under a tyrannical society of haves, his proletarian leanings on full display. A dazzling mashup of biblical allusions, Art Deco influences, Gothic architecture, and cinematic trickery, this film is a testament to the magnificent potential of the movies. That Lang was able to assemble such a sophisticated, technically impressive feat of craft so early in the film medium’s nascency is less like the discovery of fire, and more like a Neanderthal inventing an iPod.
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1. Upstream Color (2013)
Independent Pictures
Shane Carruth took nine long years to craft this mystifying, mystical, magnificent tone poem of romance and sci-fi, but the wait was well worth it. It’s not my place to say what Upstream Color is about; that’s private business. Interpretation of this film’s loose swirl of plot elements — pigs, orchids, some sort of parasite, passages from Walden — works like a cinematic Roschach blot, each analysis a deeply personal expression of the person forming it. Continuing his rigorous DIY ethic and filling as many positions as he could on both side of the camera, Carruth assembles spectacles of breathtaking beauty worthy of comparison to his Texan countryman Terrence Malick. Watching Upstream Color is a spiritual experience, inspiring ecstasy on par with religious fervor and awe for the many wonders of the world.
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