Science-fiction offers visions of the future—and increasingly today—that can alter your perceptions. Critic Craig Mathieson has scoured Netflix for its best science-fiction movies.
See also
* All new movies & series on Netflix Australia
* All new streaming movies & series
2067 (2020)
Watch on NetflixA reverse Twelve Monkeys—the protagonist is sent into the future in the hope of finding a solution—for the climate crisis age, this Australian independent feature is a time-travel puzzle starring Kodi Smitt-McPhee as a lowly tech in a dying environment, summoned to the 25th century by an unexpected message in what becomes a bitter and besieged drama.
Annihilation (2017)
Watch on NetflixFull of inexplicable mysteries never quite matched by their explanations, Alex Garland’s follow-up to Ex Machina stars Natalie Portman as a biologist who joins an all-female mission into the unknown zone that previously consumed her soldier husband (Oscar Isaac). With the laws of science distorted, nightmarish transformations tear at the team’s psychological underpinnings.
Arrival (2016)
Watch on NetflixDirected with menacing wonder by Denis Villeneuve, this is compelling and original hard science-fiction, with Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner as two experts trying to communicate with obliquely intentioned aliens landed on an increasingly panicky planet. The story folds in on itself, so that triumph is tragedy and vice-versa in an elegiac requiem.
ARQ (2016)
Watch on NetflixIn this knotty time loop thriller, Rachael Taylor (Jessica Jones) and Robbie Amell (Upload) play a couple whose home invasion experience keeps rebooting when one of them dies. Tony Elliott’s film is a gruesome variant of Groundhog Day, with each iteration offering new information and old failings.
Black Mirror: Bandersnatch (2018)
Watch on NetflixCharlie Brooker’s celebrated science-fiction anthology series took the interactive path for this stand-alone movie about a young programmer (Fionn Whitehead) at a 1980s video games studio who starts to lose his connection to reality. The free will debate is overly familiar, but the story’s black humour gives the narrow choices a bitter spark.
Boss Level (2021)
Watch on NetflixAt first glance this time loop thriller is Groundhog Day with assassins, Frank Grillo’s former Delta Force soldier being unable to fight his way through a conspiracy connected to his estranged wife. But co-writer and director Joe Carnahan (The A-Team, The Grey) never does anything by half, so the film—with Naomi Watts and Michelle Yeoh co-starring—is satisfyingly charged with furious action sequences and philosophical dilemmas.
Cargo (2018)
Watch on NetflixFor once an Australian genre film—in this case society’s collapse after a zombie apocalypse—makes more use of this country than just the landscape. On the run with his baby daughter, Andy (Martin Freeman) finds himself in a perilous world starting anew, with Indigenous history and the crimes against it to the fore.
I Am Mother (2019)
Watch on NetflixThis tidy Australian post-apocalyptic chamber play mainly unfolds in a bunker where the teenage Daughter (Clare Ruggard) has been raised in pristine isolation by the robotic Mother (voiced by Rose Byrne). Once a human survivor (Hilary Swank) joins them, allegiances are tested and the truth drawn out with boilerplate themes given a menacing update.
Men in Black (1997)
Watch on NetflixIgnore the box office mandated sequels and disappointing reboot, the founding entry of this action-comedy franchise about the agency secretly policing aliens living on Earth is the only Men in Black movie that matters. Barry Sonnenfeld’s idiosyncrasies as a filmmaker dovetail with the dynamic of Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones as mismatched partners. It’s close to amazing how lively and self-aware this blockbuster is.
The Midnight Sky (2020)
Watch on NetflixThe end of the world is a thing of both tragedy and wonder in George Clooney’s new science-fiction film, a melancholy examination of life’s imperfect circle where the director plays a dying lone scientist on a dying Earth trying to warn a space mission led by Felicity Jones and David Oyelowo not to return. The plotting is straightforward, but the cinematography and production are exquisite
The Platform (2019)
Watch on NetflixInequality assumes a vertical axis in this dystopian Spanish-language horror movie, which is equal parts existential theatre work and science-fiction allegory. In a vast concrete prison inmates are randomly assigned levels visited by a vast banquet that travels downwards: those at the top initially feast, those at the bottom eventually starve. Left furious by the cruel reality, one newcomer tries to make a difference.
Space Sweepers (2021)
Watch on NetflixKim Tae-ri makes a convincing case for being the coolest thing in the movies right now as the sardonic, snarling captain of an orbiting salvage ship in this pleasurable South Korean update of the space opera. Jo Sung-hee’s film repeatedly puts some spit and spin on the genre’s conventions even as it pays homage to The Wizard of Oz.
Synchronic (2019)
Watch on NetflixThe team of Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead graduated from low-budget independent sci-fi films (find The Endless if you can) to this gnarly Netflix original where Anthony Mackie and Jamie Dornan play New Orleans paramedics who discover a party drug has reality distorting side-effects they must experience. The film takes a classic sci-fi trope and gives it tangible stakes, so that both the plausibility and risks are enhanced.
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