The Best Sci-Fi Movies of the 2010s

Yes, it is an action film first — the sci-fi lives in the world-building, not the plot, and the copy here owns that. George Miller staged a two-hour chase across a poisoned wasteland and cut it so cleanly it won six Oscars at the 2016 ceremony. The moment the war rig drives into the toxic sandstorm, silhouettes tumbling through red dust, settles the practical-effects argument for the decade.

Denis Villeneuve built the decade's most patient blockbuster out of Ted Chiang's novella Story of Your Life, and it won the sound-editing Oscar for a film about learning to listen. The first walk up into the shell, gravity rotating sideways while Amy Adams' breathing fills her suit, is tenser than any battle sequence the genre produced in these ten years.

Every studio spent the decade chasing this one: an original story that earned $839.8 million worldwide off a heist structure the audience learns while it runs. Nolan gets two slots on this list and no more — the cap is deliberate, and this is the first. When Paris folds over itself above the cafe, spectacle and exposition become the same shot, a trick the imitators never learned.

A sequel arriving thirty-five years late had no business working. Denis Villeneuve's follow-up won Oscars for cinematography and visual effects, and the orange irradiated haze of the Las Vegas sequence — K walking past ruined statues toward an empty casino — justifies the first of those on its own. Slow and deliberate, it still cleared $277.9 million worldwide.

Alex Garland's directorial debut locks three actors in a glass house and lets an AI interrogate its interrogator. It won the visual-effects Oscar on a fraction of blockbuster money, mostly for Ava's translucent midriff. Nathan's red-lit disco dance with Kyoko — a tension-break that makes everything worse — is the scene everyone quotes, and the ending still reads as justice and horror at once.

Nolan slot two of two, and the decade's biggest swing at hard science fiction. The third act asks a lot; the hour on Miller's planet earns it the benefit of the doubt — a wall of water on the horizon, decades burning away back home, then the backlog of family messages watched in one sitting. Grossing $774.6 million worldwide, it proved audiences would meet it halfway.

Call it a romance wearing a sci-fi coat — that is exactly why it belongs, because no 2010s AI story has dated less. Spike Jonze wrote and directed it and took the original-screenplay Oscar. Samantha's goodbye, spoken from everywhere and nowhere at once, hits harder than any robot uprising the genre staged in ten years, and it never once shows a laser.

Paramount got cold feet and handed international distribution to Netflix, which streamed the film abroad from March 2018 — a measure of how strange Alex Garland's Jeff VanderMeer adaptation actually is. The bear that screams with a dead woman's voice is the decade's purest nightmare image, and the mirrored dance at the lighthouse trades explanation for dread. Braver than its $43.1 million worldwide gross will ever show.

Jonathan Glazer spent over a decade getting his loose take on Michel Faber's novel to the screen, and the result is this list's one true art film. The black void where the men sink — calm, silent, unexplained — is the scariest recurring image in 2010s sci-fi. It grossed $7.5 million worldwide, and its reputation has compounded every year since.

Adapted from Hiroshi Sakurazaka's light novel All You Need Is Kill, Doug Liman's loop-war film is the decade's best delivery system for a premise. Watching Tom Cruise die on the beach a dozen escalating ways turns repetition into comedy, then into strategy, and it took $381.1 million worldwide. The time-travel list can argue the mechanics; it sits here as pure sci-fi action.

Rian Johnson cast Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis as the same man decades apart and let them argue about it over eggs. The diner scene, where old Joe refuses to explain the mechanics because explanation kills these movies, is the decade's smartest time-travel writing. An original, mid-budget, released in 2012 — exactly the kind of film everyone claims to want more of.

Optimism was rare in 2010s science fiction, and Ridley Scott's adaptation of Andy Weir's novel cornered the market — $630.6 million worldwide for a film about doing arithmetic under pressure. Matt Damon farming potatoes in his own waste on a dead planet is the decade's most cheerful survival image. It is a comedy that never admits it, which is why it rewatches so well.

Purists will say it is a disaster movie in orbit rather than science fiction, and they are half right — it stays because no other film made space itself the antagonist this well. Alfonso Cuarón took Best Director among its seven Academy Awards. The unbroken opening shot, drifting from serene telescope repair into lethal debris, remains the decade's best argument for the big screen.

Bong Joon-ho made his English-language debut adapting the French graphic novel Le Transperceneige into a class war on rails. Every train car is its own genre, and the axe battle in the tunnel — night-vision goggles against torches — is staged like nothing else this decade. The premise is absurd; the anger underneath it is not, and the anger is what lasts.

James Gray sent Brad Pitt to the far edge of the solar system to talk to his father, and got a studio to spend real money on it — $127.5 million worldwide in 2019 says some audiences followed. The moon-buggy pirate chase, a near-silent gunfight on grey dust, is the decade's most casually strange action scene. The voice-over divides people; the images do not.

Fifteen entries above it cost more per minute than Joe Cornish's whole film, and none has a better monster: pitch-black aliens visible only as rows of glowing teeth. Released in May 2011, it was the film debut of both Cornish and John Boyega, and it grossed just $6.3 million worldwide. A South London tower block, one night, kids on bikes — the decade's best small-scale sci-fi.