The Best Space Exploration Science Fiction Movies Ranked

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Blade Runner 2049 is a very unconventional sci-fi movie, in large part because it carries on the surprising trope from the original movie that space exploration is left to wealthy individuals and amoral corporations. All of humanity that can afford it has gone to live on Mars, and we are left following the misadventures of the humans left behind on Earth and the corporations that have inevitably remained to exploit them. 

That doesn’t mean “exploration” doesn’t occur, of course: in a keener way than Star Trek ever could, Blade Runner 2049 forces us to question our identity and our purpose in life, questions made harder by the existence of replicants that are better than humans in almost every way.

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Unsurprisingly, most of the movies on this list focus on fictional adventures of fictional characters exploring space, but what if you’re in the mood for a sci-fi movie that’s more down-to-earth (so to speak)? In that case, you should check out Apollo 13, the Tom Hanks film which dramatizes the real-life calamity of an attempted moon landing mission in which everything went terribly wrong. It’s a genuine edge-of-your-seat kind of movie as you wait to see how (or if) these astronauts make it home, and many of the nail-biting moments will likely have you rethink your own dreams of exploring everything from our moon to the red planet of Mars.

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With the recent success of the third film in the franchise, there is no time like the present to watch the original Guardians of the Galaxy film. It’s a great sci-fi movie that takes audiences from one beautiful alien vista to another, but director James Gunn always anchors scenes in the humanity of his characters (even, or should we say especially, with his alien characters). The real magic of this film, though, was its subtle transgressions against the cookie-cutter MCU formula, giving us characters who are flawed but noble and who actually have real jokes instead of the canned quips characters like Iron Man spit out in those first two Avengers films.

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If you’re having trouble deciding on a sci-fi movie based on real events like Apollo 13 or something more fantastical and fictional, you might enjoy the Ridley Scott film The Martian as a kind of narrative compromise. It’s the fictional story of an astronaut (Matt Damon) who is left for dead on a mission to Mars, and once he recovers, it will take all of his wits and all of the help of NASA to get him back to Earth. Like the book it was based on, the film pays close attention to all of the practical realities and calculations our protagonist must complete, making each victory that much more fulfilling.

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When it comes to major Hollywood movies, sci-fi movies are usually filled with large explosions, crazy CGI, and all the trappings that executives think will put butts in seats at your local movie theater. That’s part of what makes Arrival such a welcome change of pace: this film follows Amy Adams as a linguist who helps make contact with aliens, but unlike in franchises such as Star Trek, the alien language is something that humanity has difficulty understanding. What follows is an exciting story about communication, interpersonal dynamics, and even temporal mechanics that is guaranteed to leave your head spinning. 

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When the very first Star Trek movie came out, it was boring enough that critics suggested that its subtitle “The Motion Picture” should have been changed to “The Motionless Picture.” Fortunately, the 2009 remake is a sci-fi movie that has learned from franchise history, and director J.J. Abrams ensures that the movie is filled with entertaining action from beginning to end. But the real strength of Star Trek has always been its characters, and having actors like Chris Pine play Kirk and The Boys star Karl Urban play Dr. McCoy ensures that we have actual emotional depth and powerful character motivation driving each scene.

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While there are plenty of modern sci-fi movies for you to enjoy, some audiences like to focus on the classics that helped establish the genre as a whole. And 2001: A Space Odyssey is one of the most famous and influential science fiction films of them all, with acclaimed director Stanley Kubrick pioneering special effects that still look great to this day. But this film is more than just top-notch effects: it’s also a sobering meditation on whether humanity is really ready to explore the stars, especially when our lives could be threatened by creations like HAL 9000, the most lethal AI of them all.

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For better or for worse, franchise fans have plenty of Star Wars movies to choose from, but The Empire Strikes Back is still the very best of them. It’s not just a good sci-fi movie or Star Wars movie, but it’s just a great film you can recommend to anyone, and they are likely to be enthralled by the chemistry between Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher. Plus, this is the movie that gave us “do or do not, there is no try,” meaning that it’s a touchstone of our pop culture history (even if its idea of alien planets was “ice planet” and “cloud planet”).

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As you might expect, most sci-fi movies try to underscore how awesome it would be to go into space, but Gravity is a film that reminds us of just how scary real-life space exploration could be. Former Harry Potter director Alfonso Cuarón delivers a dark (metaphorically and often literally) story of George Clooney and Sandra Bullock as astronauts fighting for their lives after the destruction of their space shuttle. And the title of the film refers to the inexorable pull of gravity as it threatens to pull these characters back to the planet with all the lethal speed and intensity of runaway meteors. 

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These days, Disney seems content with mostly cranking out live-action adaptations of animated classics like The Little Mermaid, but Wall-E is a reminder of why Disney has secured multiple generations of fans over the years. Most audiences are drawn at first to the cute design of the titular robot Wall-E, who looks like what you’d get if an artist had the prompt “draw Grogu as a Transformer.” But as the film goes on, we quickly discover this is a sci-fi movie about how humanity’s greed and sloth have threatened entire planets and the species itself, which is arguably a lesson we still need to learn as we automate more of our lives each year.