The best sci-fi movies on Netflix right now

Netflix’s library is vast, and even when you hone down by genre, there’s still way too much for any one person to sift through.

That’s where we come in. We try and save you time by picking the best of the best, whether it’s the best thrillers, best horror, best comedies, best action movies, or just the best movies on Netflix.

Today, it’s time to get Spatial Discuss the top sci-fi films on this platform. There are neat little indie projects, big blockbusters (including two in the category of “the first big space movie from a prolific filmmaking nation”), and all-time classics.

Let’s dig in.

Skylines Beyond Skyline

Vertical Entertainment

2010’s SkylineIt was very basic, and a great alien invasion epic that had the heart of an amateur special effects reel. You wouldn’t be faulted for not seeing the sequel… but here we are, thrilledly recommending it. B-movie bruiser Frank Grillo (The Winter Soldier: Captain AmericaThe playfully evil continuation contains a slew of stars. Beyond SkylineThis video shows his LAPD detective saving his son from kidnapping, then rescue his son inside a vessel that extracts brains. Finally, rescue a hybrid human-alien baby from an army of slobbering, aliens. thenAssisting the rescue of humanity by the final wave insurgents from Laotian independence fighters. With full-bodied alien action, violent and bold (or whatever the opposite). Alien’s hide-the-creatures-in-the-shadows scariness is, this is it), Beyond SkylineGrillo, the conductor baton is given to Grillo, who orchestrates mayhem in the manner of the greatest direct-toDVD schlockfests. Raid’s Iko Uwais just enough extraterrestrial-smashing solos to qualify as a romp. Follow-up Skylines, It goes even further with a superpowered storyline that takes the series to new heights. —Matt Patches

Circle

Image: FilmBuff

The fate of 50 people is unknown. Survivor ever. Every two minutes, the participants — from across the demographic spectrum of age, race, and profession — cast psychic votes to determine the next victim of an energy-blasting alien orb. And every two minutes, the remaining men and women try to make sense of the situation, befriend their fellow prisoners, talk through their personal histories and put aside their differences to decide who’s worthy of making it out alive. This is like a sociology 101 lesson. It’s low-budget and highly effective. CircleInvestigates the morality of modern societies using horrific methods. Which would You do? —MP

The Clockwork Orange

Warner Bros.

Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 masterpiece about the delinquency, reeducation, and total ruin of a British teenager named Alex (Malcolm McDowell) remains one of the best and most unnerving movies ever made. The movie’s first half focuses on the mayhem and horrific violence that Alex causes, right up until the moment he gets arrested. The movie is not a moral tale about teenage delinquency but rather, it transforms into one. The Clockwork Orange dives into what would happen if the government gave up on ideas like imprisonment and rehabilitation and decided that breaking criminals’ brains and tossing them back on the street was easiest for everyone.

All this adds up to The Clockwork Orange one of the bleakest and most postapocalyptic-feeling movies ever made. It’s set in a near future that’s filled with brutalist concrete buildings, swells of classical music, a hodgepodge of inspirations from different decades, and an incredible amount of violence. Yet, the movie is still one of sci-fi’s most well-crafted and thoughtful horror films. —Austen Goslin

Illang: The Wolf Brigade

Warner Bros.

Based on Hiroyuki Okiura and Mamoru Oshii’s 1999 sci-fi anime thriller Jin-Roh, Kim Jee-woon’s 2018 film transports the original’s premise from an alternate 1950s Japan to a newly unified Korea circa 2029. Illang: The Wolf BrigadeFollows Im Joong-kyung, a soldier in a militarized force of police who has a moment of crisis after a chance encounter with a woman suspected of plotting to overthrow her government. Substituting the melancholy wistfulness and ennui of Okiura’s film with a blistering display of ballistic shootouts and thrilling hand-to-hand combat, Illang: The Wolf BrigadeIt is an extraordinary alt-history political thriller which eventually turns into compelling action drama. —Toussaint Elgan

Black for Men

Image: Sony Pictures

One of the best buddy comedies of the 1990s is also a blast of a sci-fi picture and features an all-time leading performance from one of our generation’s greatest leading men, Will Smith, opposite a perfectly grouchy Tommy Lee Jones. The sprawling ensemble cast also features Rip Torn, Tony Shalhoub, David Cross, and an unbelievable turn by Vincent D’Onofrio as the bug-infected Edgar. —PV

The Mobile Suit Gundam Trilogy

Sunrise

One of the first instances of an anime television series being reedited into a feature-length film, the Mobile Suit Gundam trilogy follows the story of Amuro Ray, a young boy living aboard a space colony in the future who unwittingly becomes the pilot of a prototype “Mobile Suit” known as the Gundam. Amuro flees home with his family and friends aboard the White Base spaceship. He is determined to end the war by fighting against the Principality. All three films — Mobile Suit Gundam I, Mobile Suit Gundam II: Soldiers of SorrowPlease see the following: Mobile Suit Gundam III – Encounters in space — are not only a perfectly good introduction to one of the most influential mecha series of all time, but an important work in the history of anime that took a floundering franchise and transformed it into a cultural phenomenon in Japan. —TE

Mobile Suit Gundam:

Sunrise

Do it 12 years later than the events of Mobile Suit Gundam: Char’s Counterattack, Mobile Suit Gundam: Shuko Murase (Director) directs this film as part of a continuing trilogy.Witch Hunter Robin, Blade Runner: Black Out 2022() That tell the tale of Hathaway Noa the rebel son of Federation Captain Bright Noa in the original Mobile Suit Gundam Series. Secretly leading a guerrilla war against the Earth Federation’s plot to privatize the planet, Noa pilots the experimental RX-105 Gundam into the latest battle to decide the course of humanity’s future. The story is filled with beautiful characters, intricate mecha design, and tightly-woven plotting.Mobile Suit Gundam – Hathaway is a thrilling sci-fi movie that’ll have you glued to your screen from start to finish. —TE

The Platform

Image courtesy of Netflix

It’s honestly shocking that Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia’s terrifying movie The Platform is his debut feature: It’s polished and confident in a way that suggests a lifetime of filmmaking, and it’s deeply weird in a way that suggests a director with the cachet to get any “one for me” movie below a certain price point funded. A dark near-future sees prisoners being held in a concrete facility with only one room. They are connected via a single shaft. Once a day, a magnificent banquet descends down the shaft on a floating platform — but the prisoners in the topmost cells eat everything they can, leaving a picked-over mess (or nothing at all) for those below them. It’s a simple, stark metaphor for wealth inequality, but Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia complicates it with brutal rules and clever wrinkles, then with character choices, as the inmates start arguing about how to respond to the system, and each chooses their own path. This clever and bloody movie about a metaphor is both hilarious and depressingly dark. It’s also incredibly surprising to see the true story behind this facility. —TR

Psychokinesis

Image by Next Entertainment World

From Korean animator Yeon Sang-ho — best known for his jump to live action, 2016’s zombie knockout Busan to Train (also on Netflix) — PsychokinesisShin is a borderline-alcoholic, drunken security guard. He drinks from a mountain spring infected with a meteorite, and then gains telekinetic abilities. Ryu Seung-ryong is a joy as the oaf, who’s learning to control his abilities just as his estranged daughter reenters his life and sucks him into a real-estate-driven class war. Psychokinesis plays Shin’s “fighting style” for laughs, and while it’s not as cartoonish as Hong Kong director Stephen Chow’s genre hybrids, the movie can make the flying object mayhem both cheeky and thrilling. The political edge gives weight to Shin’s superpowered decisions, but Yeon never loses sight of why everyone showed up: to push the psychic conceit to bigger and bigger heights. —MP

Space Sweepers

Image courtesy of Netflix

Space Sweepers has it all — trenchant critiques of capitalism! Space criminals come together to fight a common cause. Trans theme expressed by a cute robot Action-packed fight sequences This is the Korean Space Blockbuster that was largely considered to have been the most important. —PV

Review:

Space Sweepers manages to rise above the familiarity of its concepts, bolstered by its cast’s sheer charisma. These are the most memorable and touching moments of this film. Imagining space as an extension of earthly capitalism certainly isn’t new, but at least Space Sweepers’ cast has the collective charm to make the material feel like fresh, worthwhile viewing among the increasing detritus of streaming content.

Tau

Photo: Sanja Bucko/Netflix

It’s somewhere between an escape-room horror film and a found family movie about a girl with her AI friend. TauThere are a few formidable assets within its arsenal: The Guest’s Maika Monroe as the captive of a sleazy tech-bro genius, and sleaze extraordinaire Ed Skrein as that tech-bro genius. Gary Oldman as the AI that Monroe’s character needs to befriend to escape with her life is just a bonus. Tau This movie is the epitome of small-scale sci-fi. When Alex (Skrein), captures Julia Monroe (Monroe), he confines her at his super-tech home, which is run by an AI called Tau. The whole movie features just a few simple sets: It’s mostly about the battle of wits between Alex and Julia, and about Julia’s efforts to get Tau to acknowledge her humanity and help her escape. It’s tight, taut, efficient micro-budget sci-fi, with some memorable special effects thrown in for spice. —TR

Wandering Earth

China Film Group

Billed as China’s first sci-fi blockbuster and built on a scale meant to fully justify that title, 2019’s Wandering Earth It presents its characters with an issue out of Snowpiercer — the Earth is freezing and everyone’s going to die. Then it gives them a solution straight out of ’50s sci-fi: Humanity decides to strap a ton of rockets onto Earth and fly it like a spaceship out of the solar system and toward another sun. Too bad Jupiter’s gravity well is Right there. Like the equivalent American sci-fi blockbusters it closely resembles — Armageddon leaps instantly to mind — Wandering Earth The show features hilarious science as well as a cast of characters that aren’t very defined, each facing their own crisis atop the catastrophe that unites all. The spectacle is spectacular, the action exciting and the entire thing is great fun. Based on a brief story by Three-Body Problem author Liu Cixin, Wandering EarthThe film is focused enough on family drama that it can be relatable and easily understood. But the true draw of the film’s scope and reach, as well as all the stunning imagery that a big budget could buy, are its incredible visuals. —TR