//

The Best Sci-Fi Movies on Hulu Right Now

These 12 incredible films show us utopias, dystopias, distant planets, and our own Earth destroyed.

The Best Sci-Fi Movies on Hulu Right Now
Photo: Columbia Pictures

The [sci-fi] film has never really been more than an offshoot of its literary precursor, which to date has provided all the ideas, themes and inventiveness. [Sci-fi] cinema has been notoriously prone to cycles of exploitation and neglect, unsatisfactory mergings with horror films, thrillers, environmental and disaster movies.” So wrote J.G. Ballard about George Lucas’s Star Wars in a 1977 piece for Time Out. If Ballard’s view of science-fiction cinema was highly uncharitable and, as demonstrated by some of the imaginative and mind-expanding films below, essentially off-base, he nevertheless touched on a significant point: that literary and cinematic sci-fi are two fundamentally different art forms.

Metropolis, Fritz Lang’s visionary depiction of a near-future dystopia, is almost impossible to imagine as a work of prose fiction. Strip away the Art Deco glory of its towering cityscapes and factories and the synchronized movements of those who move through those environments and what’s left? It’s no accident that some of the greatest adaptations of sci-fi novels bear only a passing resemblance to their source material. Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner simply mines some of the concepts from Phillip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? about human-looking androids, using them as the raw material for a haunting urban future-noir that owes more to visual artists like Moebius and Antonio Sant’Elia than it does to Dick himself. Then there’s Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, which transfigures Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s briskly paced novella Roadside Picnic into a slow, mesmerizing journey into an uncanny space.

Ballard may have been right that literary sci-fi has provided all the interesting themes and ideas for which sci-fi in general has become known, but he failed to grasp how cinema has expanded our understanding of sci-fi by pricking at our collective visual consciousness. The titles below (all streaming on Netflix) have shown us utopias, dystopias, distant planets, and our own Earth destroyed. Some of these depictions are humorous, others haunting. Some rely on complicated special effects, others use none at all. But they’re united by their fearlessness in breaking down boundaries and thrusting us into worlds beyond our own. Keith Watson


Alien

Alien (1979)

A film whose shadow looms darkly over subsequent decades of horror and sci-fi, Ridley Scott’s Alien is a master class in the evocation of escalating dread. Made forever distinctive by H.R. Giger’s visual rendering of psychosexual horror and biomechanical hellscapes, not to mention the unusual foregrounding of working-class and female characters, Alien is still—at its core—a prototypical haunted-house picture. It just happens to be one of the most artful, flawlessly executed examples of that type, the rationed-out shocks underscored by groundbreaking creature effects, jarring sound design, and the talents of a magnificent ensemble. It’s the stuff of primordial nightmare, mapping the infinite reaches of human anxiety—about everything from sexuality to technology—into two agonizing hours. Abhimanyu Das


Akira

Akira (1988)

Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira, based on his own 1982 manga, updates the lingering Japanese anxiety about nuclear annihilation for the cybernetic era, as the superweapons in 2019 Neo-Tokyo turn out to be gifted children whose telekinetic powers have been enhanced by a secret government program, rather than nuclear warheads. The images of mass destruction that bookend this stylish but haunting animated action film speak to a fear not only of a social apocalypse, but a human one. Between the film’s two apocalypses is an adventure that plays out in the intricately detailed world of Neo-Tokyo, perhaps the most iconic of all cyberpunk cityscapes. As Tetsuo’s motorcycle gang races through the sinews of Neo-Tokyo’s complex of highways, past its flickering screens and neon lights, we get the impression of a world—not too far removed from the real 2019—in which the proliferation of technological networks has paradoxically led to social atomization, inequity, and aimless discontent. Pat Brown

Advertisement



Come True

Come True (2021)

In contrast to Kon Satoshi’s Paprika, which revels in the anarchic freedom of lucid dreaming, writer-director Anthony Scott Burns’s Come True specializes in the sense of powerlessness that makes nightmares so terrifying, stressing the horror side of horror sci-fi. Burns trades jump scares for slow POV tracking shots, their inexorable drifting movement plunging us into shadows where Jungian archetypes hang upside down and the silhouette awaits with glowing eyes. This device reproduces the feebleness experienced by the film’s angst-ridden protagonist, Sarah (Julia Sarah Stone), during sleep paralysis, that state in which dreamers are, say, confronted by an incubus, and attempt to scream or jerk awake but find their muscles unresponsive. Rather than subjecting dreams to the logic of narrative cinema, which would neutralize their potential to both fascinate and terrorize, Burns allows his subject matter to suggest all manner of formal deviations from genre expectations. William Repass


Demolition Man

Demolition Man (1993)

Marco Brambilla’s Demolition Man presents two alternate dystopias to drive home its underlying thesis that a truly desirable society must find a way to balance the often-contradictory goals of security and freedom. First, we’re shown mid-’90s Los Angeles, which has devolved into a war zone where psychotic warlords like Simon Phoenix (Wesley Snipes) carve out their own fiefdoms through a combination of terrorism and guerrilla warfare. After Simon’s imprisoned by supercop John Spartan (Sylvester Stallone) and frozen in a cryoprison, the film jumps forward in time to 2032 and lands in San Angeles, a seemingly utopian, crimeless megacity where all vices have been outlawed in the interest of public safety and wellbeing. As Phoenix and Spartan battle over the soul of the future after being unfrozen, Demolition Man becomes an unlikely paean to the virtues of ugly freedom against the dangerous allure of clean, conformist authoritarianism. Oleg Ivanov


Little Joe

Little Joe (2019)

With Little Joe, Jessica Hausner confidently expresses a thorny and disturbing theme, though perhaps with too much confidence, as the film sometimes suggests less a drama than a persuasively argued thesis. As in Amour Fou, the filmmaker is concerned with how society governs people with mores that are communicated so early and consistently in their lives as to seem subliminal. In contemporary society, we’re conditioned to accept a ritualized alteration of work and home life that can numb us to individual desires or even render them imperceptible. In Little Joe, this numbing process is sped up with a chilling inciting incident: the invention of a flower that’s either a gift or a curse. Chuck Bowen


Looper

Looper (2012)

Rian Johnson’s Looper is a parable of self-absorption, a story of a man looking himself in the eyes and coming to the startling realization that he’s allowed himself to become a monster. Old Joe (Bruce Willis) eventually commits despicable acts that could be rationalized as potentially altering history for the better, but he’s really acting out of a desire to save the woman he will eventually fall in love with. Young Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), in parallel, is forced on a collision course by his older self that enables him to achieve a measure of social awareness earlier than initially fated, which renders Old Joe’s disgusting quest moot. It’s refreshing to see an action film this concerned with the actual consequences of violence. The loopers’ killings are jolting, and the third act pivots around the prevention of a murder that explicitly wrestles with notions of nature versus nurture. Most pop films embrace a devious form of self-gratification at all costs, but Looper slyly inserts an element of wounded longing among the instances of bloodshed. Bowen

Advertisement


Marjorie Prime

Marjorie Prime (2017)

Michael Almereyda’s Marjorie Prime derives its haunting power as much from its speculative elements as from the cozy familiarity of its mise-en-scène. Exploiting a multi-generational beachfront family cottage designed in a warm midcentury modern style as its setting, as well as comforting splashes of Beethoven and the Band on its soundtrack, Almereyda’s spare restaging of Jordan Harrison’s talky play imagines a near future where holographic simulations of dead loved ones (also known as “primes”) have placed familial relations in peril, providing unprecedented grief-coping opportunities on the one hand but enabling an echo chamber of delusion and emotional confusion on the other. Almereyda’s elliptical treatment of the script’s central existential dilemma—the havoc wreaked in transcending the absolute finality of death—is enough to justify a sly visual nod to Last Year at Marienbad. Carson Lund



Possessor

Possessor (2020)

Brandon Cronenberg’s Possessor is obsessed with tensions between mind and body, and old and new technologies. An analog man in a digital world, Cronenberg invests a narrative along the lines of his father David’s eXistenZ and Christopher Nolan’s Inception with psychedelic imagery and jolts of gouging, bone-splitting, unambiguously in-camera body horror that rival anything in modern cinema for tactility and pure outrageousness. In the process, he imbues Possessor with a disturbing irony: The film’s violence serves as a kind of relief for its perpetrators, who’re displaced by technological doodads and come to long for tangibility, corporeal terra firma, no matter how perverse. Bowen

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.