In 3 parts, I will talk about some of the best science fiction movies of the 2010s. The first part will focus on films from 2010-2014, presented in chronological order. The second part will concern 2015-2019. These two parts will skip most franchise films, any film series with 2 or more entries in the current decade. We will talk though several science fiction film franchises in a 3rd part.

For a few films, we’ll also discuss some precursors within older science fiction cinema for the ideas on display.

Warning that light spoilers may follow, as the essential sci/fi premise of many of these films is sometimes a twist or late-movie revelation.

2010-2014

Inception

Christopher Nolan, 2010

Christopher Nolan has been making films for 20 years now, and very quickly became one of my favorite directors. I think Memento is one of the best films I have ever seen, and I loved his take on Batman. This decade, he made Dunkirk, one of the best war films I have ever seen, but mostly focused on science fiction, and we will see a lot of his work on this list. I eagerly await his next film, Tenet.
Inception is a thriller set within dreams, featuring criminals who steal secrets from within people’s dreams. It’s become perhaps most famous for the idea that people can dream within their dreams, making layers of fake reality. And for ending with leaving us uncertain whether we have been observing the top layer or just another dream. Are we even sure there is a reality at the top of the stack of dreams within dreams?
The question about whether reality is even real is an old one in science fiction cinema, usually accomplished through virtual reality simulations, tracing back at least to Fassbinder’s World on a Wire from 1973, an adaptation of the Daniel Galouye novel, Simulacron-3. The novel would be adapted again into Thirteenth Floor, which came out the same year as other films exploring the same premise, The Matrix, and Existenz.
The ability to enter dreams within a science fiction context had previously been explored in the anime film Paprika.

Never Let Me Go

Mark Romaneky, 2010

Never Let Me Go is a sad story about friendship under tough circumstances adapted from the novel by Kazuo Ishiguro. Friends grow up together at a strange boarding school, sometimes let love triangles come between them, and work to see if there is any way to escape their fate before eventually becoming resigned to the truth of their existence: they are clones of “real” people who exist only so their organs can be harvested.
This is a meditative tale, but the same basic premise had been used for Michael Bay’s action thriller, The Island.

Source Code

Duncan Jones, 2011

I had thought Duncan Jones was going to be the decade’s hot science fiction director. A few years earlier, he’d done the meditative science fiction movie Moon, which had lots of clever twists to it. Then he made Source Code, a thriller that combines familiar premises, basically Quantum Leap meets Groundhog Day, but that delivered them well. And the film was willing to lean in to its “quantum” explanations about the science behind it all, only to twist the understanding of that science. It was a clever film. Unfortunately, Jones has not gone on to set the world of science fiction cinema on fire as I’d hoped.

La Piel Que Habito (The Skin I Live In)

 Pedro Almodóvar, 2011

The Skin I Live In is a disturbing and unique film, which I’d prefer not to spoil. But I want to emphasize how disturbing it is, and also note that it’s been criticized by some for transphobic themes. I would caution to make sure the film is for you before you watch it.
Banderas plays an excellent mad scientist, an inventor of a synthetic skin. It leads to a movie obsessed with skin, particularly the skin of his test subject. It’s not clear at first if the scientist is the subject’s savior or captor. The true nature of the relationship is slowly revealed over the course of a twisted narrative.

John Carter

Andrew Stanton, 2012

John Carter is perhaps the most unfairly maligned science fiction film of the decade. It represented Stanton’s leap from directing masterful animated films for Pixar to the live action format, and was great work by Stanton. Adapted from Burroughs’ classic A Princess of Mars, one of the great touchpoints of science fiction literature, and the inspiration for so much that came after– John Carter is a soldier who finds himself transported to Mars and engaged in a conflict for the fate of the planet.
The book inspired everything from Flash Gordon to Star Wars, and perhaps just seemed too familiar by the time it was directly adapted to the screen. But it’s also a victim of terrible marketing on the part of Disney. For whatever reason, it found neither critical nor commercial success and may have stalled Stanton’s directorial career.

Doomsday Book

Kim Jee-woon and Yim Pil-sing, 2012

Doomsday Book is a Korean anthology of mixed quality, reminding of the film Robot Stories. The first feature is a somewhat silly zombie movie and the third is a somewhat silly movie about a meteor crashing toward earth. But that middle story– about a robot that achieves enlightenment– is everything I’m looking for in science fiction. The film is freely available on YouTube.

Safety Not Guaranteed

Colin Trevorrow, 2012

The idea of low-budget science fiction has exploded this decade, with Safety Not Guaranteed at the forefront. Evoking the sensibilities of an indie film about quirky people, while keeping a toe in the science fiction genre.
The story is based on a classified ad which appeared in a 1997 issue of Backwoods Home Magazine. The ad gives the film its title, and is used verbatim as the springboard for the film’s plot. The ad is from a time traveler who has made one successful trip, and who is looking for a companion for the next one. From the ad, the movie imagines the somewhat screwed-up guy who placed it, and the lone girl who chooses to respond. In reality, the ad was placed as a joke to fill space and received thousands upon thousands of responses over the next two decades.

Travelling Salesman

Timothy Lanzone, 2012

A real indie film made with a shoestring budget, Travelling Salesman is mostly set around a single table, as 4 mathematicians meet with a government agent to discuss their recent discovery. They have solved the “travel(l)ing salesman” problem, which asks to find the shortest route for a salesman to visit his complete list of cities and then return home.
The government wants to pay off the mathematicians and classify the information as national security information. The mathematicians debate the ethics of what they are about to sign, making passionate arguments for the importance of mathematical truth.
There are some who may not see five people sitting around a table arguing about mathematical ethics for an hour as a good time, but I don’t care to associate with those people.

The Dark Knight Rises

Christopher Nolan, 2012

Yes, I said I was saving the franchise films until a later post and this is part of a franchise; but the previous parts were not in this decade. And yes, there were other Batman films this decade, but not part of the same film series. Follow me on the technicalities here, as to why this isn’t with the coming “franchises” post.
With The Dark Knight Rises, Nolan brings his Batman movies to a close. The movie can’t quite live up to the masterpiece that was The Dark Knight, but it gives a fittingly operatic conclusion, reaching high notes of melodrama, as Batman must crawl his way out of a hole to team up with Catwoman and rescue his city from Bane’s proletariat uprising.

Dredd

Pete Travis, 2012

The star of 2000 A.D. had been adapted to screen before, with Sylvester Stallone as Judge Dredd. That film did a couple things right in adapting the world to the screen and having some suitably melodramatic lines that echo in our culture decades later, but failed to capture the character of Dredd, committed the sin of removing Dredd’s helmet, and was generally a poorly made movie.
In contrast, Dredd is a slick and tightly paced thriller. Karl Urban nails the sneer of Dredd. Trapped in a single giant building, with a criminal on the top floor, Judge Dredd and Rookie Anderson must fight their way to the top against an army of criminals, reminding of the 2011 Indonesian film The Raid.

Looper

Rian Johnson, 2012

Before he made one of the best Star Wars films ever, Johnson gave us Looper, a slick time travel thriller.
In the future, the mob uses time travel as a means of body disposal, sending their victims back 30 years to be killed off by past hitmen. The only evidence left in the present of their connection to the crime would be the hitmen themselves 30 years later. So any hitmen that live to the present are also disposed of in the same way, sent back in time 30 years to be killed by themself.
I’m a big fan of fancy time travel dynamics, whatever their interpretation of how it should work is, as long as the filmmaker seems to think it through and do clever things within their own premise. And Johnson is a very savvy filmmaker.
Lots of great time travel films this decade, so I’ll give a quick nod here to some past films that set the stage for the clever time travel dynamics: La Jetée, The Terminator, Primer, The Butterfly Effect, and Timecrimes.

Upstream Color

Shane Carruth, 2013

Carruth made Primer in 2004, an indie time travel film that became quite popular. Upstream Color is his second film, almost a decade later, much more refined than Primer. It’s confusing in the opposite way that Primer is confusing. Everybody gets the basic premise of Primer–a time machine–but they get lost in the complex graph of timelines that gets created. Whereas with Upstream Color, once you comprehend the basics of what is going on, the graph you need in your head looks like a triangle.
It’s getting to that basic understanding that took me more than one viewing and bit of reading the internet for help. But once I got the bare premise, everything clicked very elegantly into place. Every detail makes sense and together they perfectly reveal the premise… if you pay close enough attention. It’s a deliciously precise film. What seems at first to be an impenetrable film gives way to a piece of clear and smart science fiction once you get the right triangle in your head: Human. Pig. Flower.
But even if you don’t grasp what’s going on (not convinced it’s even possible with only one viewing), you still get swept away by the emotion of two people finding connection in common tragedy that neither can really understand.
I think this is the single smartest work of science fiction that I have ever seen in film.

Snowpiercer

Bong Joon-ho, 2013

Before he made this year’s most acclaimed film in Parasite, Bong adapted the classic comic Le Transperceneige by Jacques Lob and Jean-Marc Rochette into Snowpiercer. In a post-apocalyptic world, surviving humanity lives aboard a train that circles the globe. The poor people live near the back, the rich toward the front. People from the back of the train revolt and one revolutionary battles his way car by car to the front to learn the dark truths about the conductor and their world.

About Time

Richard Curtis, 2013

A time travel film that is unconcerned with the dynamics of time travel or any attempt to pretend to ground it. Richard Curtis is best known for romantic comedies such as Love Actually, and that is the sensibility he brings to his tale of a family of time travelers.
Bill Nighy makes the movie for me, and by the end when he’s explaining the secret of a happy life, I’m completely sold by the charm at the heart of About Time.
The use of time travel to succeed at romance brings to mind Groundhog Day as well as other romantic time travel films like Somewhere in Time or The Lake House.

Gravity

Alfonso Cuarón, 2013

In Gravity, Cuarón brings his visionary visual style to deliver some of the most beautiful shots of space ever filmed in the service of a mostly simple disaster movie, as Sandra Bullock must somehow survive floating alone in space, and make her way home.

Under the Skin

Jonathan Glazer, 2013

This is a weird one. The premise seems to evoke Species, but it brings a much more artsy sensibility to bear. Scarlett Johansson plays an alien in human skin, who seduces men to their demise. That Johansson could seduce men to their demise is entirely believable. Under The Skin succeeds with the character of Johansson’s alien trying to come to terms with the human skin she finds herself in.

Coherence

James Ward Byrkit, 2013

Another of these great “lo-fi sci-fi” films. Really, there have been more this decade than I could keep up with, especially with the rise of streaming venues to distribute them. This one stands out in my mind in part because I hadn’t seen Nicholas Brendon since Buffy, but it’s also an effective setting for science fiction without any need for science fiction props. Somehow, alternate realities are converging. And when you leave the house and walk back in, it may be a house from a different reality.
I’m a big fan of Twilight Zone-esque premises like this and Coherence cleverly plays with the twists that its setting allows.
I’ve never seen a film play with the concept of parallel earths quite like this film. For the idea that there are other worlds with alternate versions of yourself, Doppelgänger posits a single mirror earth on the far side of the sun. And The One uses the bare premise as a springboard to an action blockbuster.

Her

Spike Jonze, 2013

The best sci/fi romance since Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Her tells of the romance between a person and his artificially intelligent operating system. It spends a lot of the film telling a great relationship drama before really getting into the deeper science fiction aspects of what comes next for this evolving operating system.

Edge of Tomorrow

Doug Liman, 2014

Like the aforementioned Source Code or Groundhog Day, Edge of Tomorrow is about a man living the same day over and over again until he gets it right. Where Groundhog Day was about getting romance right, and Source Code was about solving a crime, Tom Cruise has to stop an alien invasion, with each death being a chance to do it better.
This microgenre was a popular one this decade, with Happy Death Day turning it into a slasher film where the goal is to learn not to get stabbed; frankly, that seems the easiest of them to get right; it’s a single killer with a knife and you know exactly where they will be and when.

I Origins

Mike Cahill, 2014

If I were to write a science fiction movie and had a little more talent, it would probably look something like I Origins. What happens when science stumbles into the spiritual, when concrete scientific discoveries give evidence concerning the human soul? Far from perfect, but I love where its head’s at. If the eyes are the window to the soul, what happens when two people have identical eyes?

Predestination

Michael and Peter Spierig, 2014

Expanded from Robert Heinlein’s classic short All You Zombies, Predestination is a trippy time travel adventure in which paradoxical loops create a seemingly impossible family tree. A lot of films are going to make this list for their clever time travel shenanigans, and I make no apologies for that.

Big Hero 6

Chris Williams and Don Hall, 2014

Based on a forgotten Marvel superhero series that wasn’t very good and I wasn’t even sure anybody but me had ever read… somehow Disney made a great movie out of Big Hero 6, largely by throwing away almost everything about the comic. Baymax has been transformed from a robot dragon to a robot marshmallow man. Upon leaving the theater, a friend remarked the movie could have succeeded just by showing Baymax walk the whole time. It keeps a foot in the superhero genre, but is more interested in the boy-and-his-robot genre, à la Iron Giant, relegating the other heroes of the team to background characters, at least for this film. It’s been 5 years– I was honestly expecting a sequel by now.

Interstellar

Christopher Nolan, 2014

Third entry for Christopher Nolan, this century’s best science fiction director.
I like to look back across cinema’s history and see the journey into space evolve. Things to Come showed us taking off into space; Destination Moon gave us a detailed glimpse of what a trip to the moon might look like; 2001: A Space Odyssey took us deeper into the solar system, and to the edge of a wormhole. But at that wormhole, the scientific grounding that had gone into the film up to that point stopped, and Kubrick gave us instead a hallucinatory experience. Interstellar worked with top physicists to show us in detail what a journey through a wormhole might look like and brought us out the other side. It took us to a planet with dense gravity to show us the effects of relativity (though the internet tells me its arithmetic is a little off here). And then it took us to the edge of a black hole. Only within the black hole did it surrender science and turn to imagination. But still, its imagination involves a wonderful visualization of higher dimensions.
All anchored in the bond between a father and a daughter, connected across the light years by faith and love. A true masterpiece.

Time Trap

Michael Shanks, 2014

There are a lot of short science fiction films this decade. I confess to having only seen a fraction of them. I considered leaving off shorts due to my ignorance, but decided people could use a pointer toward some of them.
Here’s a weird one. A spaceman is trapped on a desolate planet that seems to be Earth long after the demise of humanity. The resources he needs to repair his ship lie in the past.
You can watch it for free on YouTube.

Ex Machina

Alex Garland, 2014

I think Alex Garland is a sci/fi director to watch going into the next decade. He’d made his name as a screenwriter of science fiction, working on 28 Days Later, Sunshine, Never Let Me Go, and Dredd. Ex Machina is his directorial debut.
Just as I like time travel, I like movies about robots uncovering their own humanity. That’s already been reflected in this list. Alicia Vikander does a great turn as a beautiful robot girl who will seek to seduce her way to freedom.
Past explorations of robotic awakening in film include: Alphaville, 2001, Colossus: The Forbin Project, Alien, The Terminator, The Matrix, Star Trek: Generations, and I Robot. But it’s this decade that has had the most thoughtful explorations, with a focus on the humanity of the artificial life itself.

Check out Part 2, covering 2015-2019.