Westerns are mostly out, superhero movies are very in, and genre trends are always coming and going in Hollywood, but if there's one style of genre storytelling that always seems to be in demand, it's the sci-fi movie. Maybe it's because it's a genre that allows for so many vast and varied styles of storytelling -- something we saw in full display in best sci-fi movies of 2019.
From pensive dramas like Ad Astra and In the Shadow of the Moon to blockbuster actioners a la Godzilla: King of the Monsters and Terminator: Dark Fate, a few superhero gems, of course, and the wtf-ery of bold swings like High Life and Serenity, the sci-fi films of the year came were delightfully varied.
With that in mind, the Collider.com staff put together our picks for the best science fiction films of 2019, from the family-friendly to the hard-R highlights. And if you're looking for more must-see movies, be sure to work your way through the rest of our Best of 2019 lists.
Freaks
A fresh take on the superhero story, Freaks offers a low-budget, no-frills character drama rooted in sci-fi mythologizing that never feels small. Lexy Kolker delivers a hell of a breakout performance as Chloe, a young girl with powerful gifts who's spent her life trapped in a house with her father, raised to be terrified of the world outside. But when an ice cream man who goes by the name Mr. Snowcone (Bruce Dern) catches her eye, Chloe starts rebelling in dangerous ways -- especially when the capricious whims of a child are back by her extraordinary abilities. Writing/directing duo Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein prove clever and resourceful in both the scripting and shooting of their sci-fi drama, building a compelling puzzle box that offers satisfying answers while hinting at an even more expansive world just beyond the frame, and weaving the character arcs into the world-building with an impressive attention to detail. -- Haleigh Foutch
Ad Astra
Don’t believe the ads that Ad Astra is some kind of space thriller. Yes, there are moon pirates and other action scenes in the abyss of space, but the film is more like a mashup of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Apocalypse Now. The film follows astronaut Roy McBride (Brad Pitt giving one of the best performances of his career), a man closed off from his own emotions and believing his stoicism makes him great at his profession. When his long lost father (Tommy Lee Jones) is suspected to be responsible for electrical surges on Earth, Roy must make his way out to Mars to send a message to his dad with the fate of the solar system riding on their communication. It’s a movie about the shortcomings of stoicism and finding meaning in a meaningless universe. The themes of the film may be cold and cerebral, but the emotions are always right near the surface of this powerful and profound sci-fi tale. – Matt Goldberg
Terminator: Dark Fate
We've been waiting a long time for another good Terminator movie, but thankfully director Tim Miller finally delivered with Terminator: Dark Fate, a sequel that gets back to basics, focusing on solid character arcs punctuated by killer action beats, and sticking faithfully to the playbook of James Cameron's genre-defining first two films. Without a doubt this is the best use of Arnold Schwarzenegger since his initial appearances, playing up the actor's easy charisma and action prowess without too much posturing, but it's also the triumphant return of Linda Hamilton's Sarah Connor, along with the introduction of standout newcomers in Natalia Reyes' Dani and Mackenzie Davis's Grace. Dark Fate is a heck of an action film, a well-constructed Terminator sequel, but it also shines because the story embraces the possibility of the sci-fi genre, spinning out a new but familiar timeline and furthering the mythology of Terminator/Human mythology in sometimes surprising, but not unearned ways. -- Haleigh Foutch
Godzilla: King of the Monsters
Was director Michael Dougherty’s Godzilla: King of the Monsters the most tightly told story of the year? Not exactly, no. Did Michael Dougherty’s Godzilla: King of the Monsters feature a souped-up Godzilla punching his massive three-pronged nemesis Ghidorah right in the goddamn face before eating his entire head for dinner? You bet your butt it did, and sometimes that’s what’s really important. We can harp on King of the Monsters’ script problems all day, possibly noting that 75% of the cast served no discernible purpose, but Dougherty’s monster mash delivered big on the Kaiju action, staging these ferocious gods with all the awe and grandeur they deserve and more. There is a crash-zoom to Godzilla’s face, for goodness sake. And, underneath it all, there actually is an interesting story being told in a grey area about modern science. Paleobiologist Dr. Emma Russell’s (Vera Farmiga) desire to stave off overpopulation for the good of the environment isn’t wrong, per se, you just probably shouldn’t resurrect an ancient winged monstrosity from outer space to get the job done. Your classic dilemma. Bonus attention must be paid to Bradley Whitford as Dr. Rick Stanton, a character and performance shuttled in from a different, much sillier movie. Bring back this man’s sarcastic cynicism for Godzilla vs. Kong, I must know his opinion on the height difference. --Vinnie Mancuso
Fast Color
If you like your superpowered stories on the serious side, you should definitely give Fast Color a shot. Julia Hart’s movie takes place in a near-future dystopia where water is scarce and it hasn’t rained in eight years. Into this picture, we see three generations of women who have the power to deconstruct and reconstruct matter, which becomes a potent symbol for trying to repair the broken bonds between them.
While serious superhero movies like Logan and The Dark Knight earn acclaim, Fast Color is equally worthy of recognition as it uses the mold of an indie family drama to explore initiate bonds that we feel may be broken beyond repair but just need work to heal. Anchored by three excellent performances from Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Lorraine Toussaint, and Saniyya Sidney, Fast Color is a movie that you shouldn’t let fly under your radar. – Matt Goldberg
Alita: Battle Angel
About halfway through the Robert Rodriguez manga adaptation Alita: Battle Angel, Rodriguez alumnus Jeff Fahey is introduced as McTeague, a grizzled warrior who is the master of a group cyborg dogs whom he loves very much. It is at this point precisely that Alita: Battle Angel made the click in my brain from “a curious, satisfyingly atypical experiment” to “a cult classic that this generation will not love but future generations will eat up like delicious genre soup.”
Rodriguez’s vision is so purposefully strange and so delightfully, lovingly earnest -- i.e., a grizzled warrior who loves his good cyborg doggos. Rosa Salazar delivers -- and I’m not exaggerating in any way -- an Academy Award-worthy performance as the title character, a cyborg with big eyes and a bigger heart. Salazar makes the curious CGI choice work, using her eyes’ enhanced absorption as a guidepost for her performance. She physically leans forward, eager to make sense of what’s in front of her, eager to help however she can, no matter if it hurts her. Her performance shook me -- and when she starts getting into some dope robo-action sequences, Rodriguez’s filmmaking shook me even more. These sequences are surprisingly brutal, favoring visceral-feeling combat rather than the sometimes ephemeral nature of sci-fi laser fights. They’re rendered in crystal-clear, fluid accessibility by DP extraordinaire Bill Pope (you know, The Matrix and Edgar Wright, no big deal), and they crunch. Alita: Battle Angel’s screenplay sometimes gets too knotted in details and franchise set-ups (looking at you, Edward Norton), but overall, its heart-on-its-sleeve gonzo pleasures are too big-eyed to ignore. -- Gregory Lawrence
Happy Death Day 2U
After the breakout success of Happy Death Day Blumhouse and filmmaker Christopher Landon could have been content to copy the same format that made their first film such a hit but instead they decided to take chances and spin the franchise in a new, sci-fi heavy direction. They may hot have been justly rewarded at the box office, but they ended up with one heck of a fun film that complements the first film beautifully while deepening our understanding of the characters and offering them new arcs. Jessica Rothe is once again electric as Tree, our sorority mean girl turned compassionate (but still sassy as all get-out) protagonist, and it's a delight to watch her puzzle her way through another time-loop nightmare that keeps ending and beginning in her death. It's looking like we might not ever see the resolution of the trilogy Landon hoped for, and that's a damn shame because Happy Death Day 2U is one of those rare sequels that refuses to play it safe without abandoning the qualities you loved in the original. -- Haleigh Foutch
In the Shadow of the Moon
Jim Mickle's sci-fi crime thriller somehow slipped under the radar this year despite being on Netflix and being a generally engrossing, well-executed science fiction tale. Boyd Holbrook stars as a police officer who stumbles into horrendous series of crimes and winds up locked in the cat-and-mouse change that will define decades of his life... and mix him up in some twisted, tragic time-travel saga that could save the future of the country. An obsessive crime drama that mostly keeps it lowkey despite the extreme stakes, In the Shadow of the Moon has an occasional unfortunate habit of thinking it's more ahead of the audience than it really is, but its still an intriguing, engrossing, and technically well-executed time-travel saga that's well worth digging into. -- Haleigh Foutch
Spider-Man: Far from Home
I don’t need Spider-Man: Far from Home to become a sci-fi leaning action film. I don’t need it to interact with the ramifications of Avengers: Endgame or any other MCU movie. Heck, I don’t need Peter Parker to ever don his Spidey suit and swing around. It’s because at the core of Spider-Man: Far from Home, like the previous Jon Watts/Tom Holland solo Spidey MCU movie, is character. As Parker, Holland continues to delight and endear, diving headfirst into the “John Hughes teen comedy” of the material with relatably awkward chutzpah. Zendaya, who with this and Euphoria is having the best 2019 ever, plays MJ as a controlled force of bemused nature, and she and Parker’s budding young love is beyond sweet to witness. Spider-Man: Far from Home could simply be a European-set teen romcom with a charming AF ensemble cast and I’d be perfectly happy. But when it does click in to being a sci-fi leaning action film: Look out!
The set pieces on this sucker are rollicking good times, bursting with imagination and visual clarity. In large part, this is thanks to the addition of Jake Gyllenhaal as Mysterio. His performance, like many of the best Gyllenhaal performances, feels a little “off.” And when his big twist is revealed, it makes all of it make sense, and gives the film an appealingly prescient commentary on what we can actually believe despite “seeing it.” One of my favorite sequences in the film is when Parker is sent, via incredibly believable forces of illusion, on a hallucinogenic dark night of the soul, taunting him with personal visions of pain and anguish. It’s a keen summary of the film’s pleasures: Action and sci-fi are good, yes. But character always comes first. -- Gregory Lawrenece
Starfish
A lovely, lonely, and avant-garde descent into apocalyptic grief, Starfish is the feature directorial debut from Ghostlight frontman A.T. White, aka Al White, that's beautifully shot, experimental and meditative. Halloween and Runaways standout Virginia Gardner stars as Aubrey, a woman who wakes up alone in a post-apocalyptic landscape after her best friend's funeral with only her dead friend's mixtapes to guide her. A visually bold piece of filmmaking that digs deep into tone and experience, Starfish doesn't always make itself easy to understand, but the emotional experience is a home run, putting you in Aubrey's headspace as she tries to puzzle out her strange experience and her even more confounding confrontation with loss and grief. It's a beautiful, sincere and elegant movie that approaches the all-too-popular apocalyptic genre with fresh eyes and delivers a heck of a first feature for White. -- Haleigh Foutch
High Life
Claire Denis is one of the most exciting and consistently challenging genre-fluid filmmaking legends in the game. From the intimate silences of her debut film Chocolat to the grisly, primal excesses of her cannibal romance Trouble Every Day, and now, the perverse and painfully human expanse of space with this year's High Life. To be sure, it is a bizarre and challenging film, which doesn't reveal itself to you in comfortable doses, but when taken as a whole, High Life is a fascinating and provocative examination of our most base instincts; violence, sex, emotion, biology -- all the messy, unpredictable ways we spasm towards intimacy. Robert Pattinson stars as Monty, a death row inmate sent to space on an experimental mission into a black hole on a spacecraft full of fellow inmates. As they careen toward their almost certain doom at an inexorably slow pace, we experience the spectrum of Monty's life in haunting flashback and flash-forwards, full of beauty and grotesquerie and uncertainty every step of the way, showing you the fine grains of a portrait that only reveals its full grace and tragedy when the entire picture is revealed. -- Haleigh Foutch
Detective Pikachu
If you're looking for some family-friendly fun with a sci-fi flourish (and more cute, snuggly creatures than you could dream of), then you can't go wrong with Detective Pikachu, the live-action Pokémon movie with the most cynical, gravelly-voiced Pikachu in the character's long, adorbs history. That voice comes from the delightfully snarky Ryan Reynolds, who grounds the adventure with his cynical-meets-heartfelt voice performance. Justice Smith co-stars as a young man grieving the death of his estranged father, who discovers he can communicate with the surprisingly sassy Pikachu and winds up investigating a conspiracy with high-reaching and world-altering implications. It's fun, light and breezy, with appropriately cartoonish sci-fi elements laced in, and a heartwarming story about the bond between fathers and sons to drive it all home. -- Haleigh Foutch
Replicas
Keanu Reeves’ inexplicable cloning drama Replicas was originally completed back in 2017, and it took bold financiers a full two years to actually release it to the public. Reeves stars as William Foster, a “research scientist,” which is a term the movie loosely tosses around to explain Foster’s genius-level proficiency in virtually every conceivable area of science. He’s working on transferring the consciousnesses of dead soldiers into the bodies of unspeakably advanced androids. In a tragic turn of events, a hilariously abrupt tragedy kills Foster’s entire family, and he enlists the help of his assistant Ed (Thomas Middleditch) to clone them new bodies so that he might transfer their minds into them. Yep, there is incidental human cloning in this film.
However, Ed only has enough clone vats for three of Foster’s dead family members, so Foster chooses to leave his youngest daughter dead and erases her memory from the minds of his wife and other two children. Despite the bonkers set-up, it’s an admittedly interesting sci-fi premise - Foster is living in a house with three clones who do not know they are clones, have no memory of dying, and do not know they used to have memories of a whole other person. That sounds like a pretty classic Twilight Zone by way of Harlan Ellison story, right? Well, the movie goes in a totally unexpected and wholly unpredictable direction from there, and while I don’t want to spoil anything, what I will tell you is that it involves way more car chases and robot fights than I had any right to anticipate. It truly must be seen to be believed. -- Tom Reimann
Serenity
Serenity is not a good movie. I want to get that out of the way immediately. However, Serenity might be the most unforgettable movie I have ever seen in my entire life because its science-fiction twist is the most cartwheelingly insane thing you could ever possibly imagine. It starts out as a straightforward thriller - Matthew McConaughey stars as Baker Dill, a fisherman living on a South Florida island whose ex-wife Karen (Anne Hathaway) suddenly shows up and offers to pay him $10 million to take her abusive new husband Frank (Jason Clarke) out on a fishing trip and drown him in the ocean. That’s the plot of roughly five hundred movies that came out in the 1990s. But about 40 minutes in, the sky opens up like Odin’s war chest and shits out the looniest sci-fi twist ever conceived, and the movie expects everyone to just roll with it. I can’t say anything else about it without ruining the glorious experience of watching it for yourself. -- Tom Reimann
Brightburn
Brightburn was one of the movies I was most excited to see this year. Produced by James Gunn and written by his brothers, I was expecting a very sharp genre film playing with established tropes, similar to Gunn’s excellent superhero deconstruction Super. Brightburn doesn’t succeed on the level of that film, but the story of an alternate-universe Clark Kent becoming a Bad Seed child murderer is still a lot of fun as a straightforward slasher movie. Jackson A. Dunn is delightfully creepy as the adolescent metahuman, and Elizabeth Banks and David Denman turn in game performances as his cartoonishly inept adoptive parents. It doesn’t go as far as I wanted, and spins its wheels a bit too much in the middle, but watching Evil Superman use every ounce of his intergalactic might to violently terrorize Smallville, Kansas is a blast. -- Tom Reimann
Avengers: Endgame
Most superhero stories are inherently science fiction to some extent, be it the extraterrestrial or chemical nature of the superpowers, the cosmic realities they're playing in, or simply the high-tech gadgetry used by non-powered heroes. But few of those stories embrace the genre so thoroughly as Avengers: Endgame, the superhero epic a decade in the making that's part apocalypse movie, part time-travel movie, and part superhero battle bonanza that embraces all three of those superhero sci-fi tropes I mentioned, and then some.
Directors Anthony and Joe Russo and screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely are hardened MCU vets by this point, having worked together on Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Civil War, and Infinity War. Their absolute command of the MCU's distinct genre demands and understanding of the world their working in is on complete display, but so are their more bold and inventive instincts. From Disney's most shocking beheading (in general, a rarity in their massive archive) to universe-altering resolutions to decades-long character arcs and extraordinary sensory-overload spectacle, Avengers: Endgame is a one-of-a-kind long-game accomplishment in genre storytelling, and lucky us, it's also a really really cool science fiction movie. -- Haleigh Foutch
I Am Mother
Like Moon and Ex Machina before it, I Am Mother examines the relationship between machine and man—or, in this case, woman. A contained drama/thriller, Australian filmmaker Grant Sputore’s debut follows an android simply called Mother, who raises a young girl, called Daughter, from an embryo to her teenage years. Mother has thousands of human embryos ready for development, as a result of a devastating human extinction event. The droid has been tasked with preserving humanity in a high tech underground facility. But as Daughter (Clara Rugaard) matures, she begins to wonder about the outside world, which she’s never seen. And when a woman (Hilary Swank) shows up outside the facility one day, everything changes. The wonderfully acted film is tense, even delving into the horrific at times. It’s beautifully shot and paced, with convincing production design, despite its small scale and limited budget. With a few rock-solid twists, the movie’s climax is potent, leaving you knowing you’ve just seen something special and, perhaps, in fear of artificial intelligence’s capability. -- Brendan Michael
The Wandering Earth
It took five writers to weave this preposterous sci-fi actioner. The result is something fun to look at, and usually an exhilarating watch. A mega hit in China (the film has grossed nearly $700 million globally), director Frant Gwo appears to have been inspired by the likes of American filmmakers Michael Bay and Roland Emmerich. This thing has shades of Armageddon, Independence Day, and everything in between. Though the character development leaves something to be desired, the dialogue rough at times, and the performances only as good as they need to be, it’s the visuals that keep you rapt. Here’s the story: thanks to a dying sun, massive planet thrusters have been built to propel Earth out of orbit and toward a new solar system, which will take thousands of years. Most of the remaining population lives in cities down near the planet’s core. Our main players then get wrapped up in a rescue mission when the thrusters begin to fail, and then the real madness begins. With unceasing action and peril, the film has a father-son dynamic at the center of it, reminiscent of Interstellar’s Cooper/Murph. This is the kind of quality shut-off-your-brain entertainment the world needs, whether in the Milky Way or elsewhere. -- Brendan Michael
Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker
In a surprise to probably no one, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is poised to become quite the divisive entry in the beloved space fantasy franchise. But no matter where you fall on it (I landed on messy but entertaining, fwiw), it's clear that J.J. Abrams and his creative team delighted in exploring the universe of Star Wars to show off as many weird and wondrous creatures and locations as possible. Creature and special makeup effects supervisor Neal Scanlon clearly had a field day with this one, and while The Rise of Skywalker's story and execution definitely leaves a lot to be desired, the joys of its space exploration are not to be missed. And the lightsaber battles are pretty darn fun too. -- Haleigh Foutch