6 Underrated Recent Sci-Fi Movies That Should Be Considered Masterpieces
Simon Gallagher has worked in movie and TV journalism for more than 17 years. He has written more than 6000 articles and reviews, and edited thousands more. He is an expert in the entertainment industry, particularly in the golden age of screen superheroes. Simon is also a Rotten Tomatoes approved critic.
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It’s almost a cliché to say it at this point, but we’re currently in the middle of a golden age for sci-fi cinema and TV. No longer considered a creative space for nerds, the genre now regularly hits year-end top of the box office rankings, and iconic auteurs like Denis Villeneuve and Christopher Nolan happily play in the sci-fi sandbox.
Even more importantly, while sci-fi used to be where legendary directors in the making would cut their teeth before moving over into more “acceptable” cinema, we’ve recently seen those big names called back. 2026 alone has seen Ridley Scott and Steven Spielberg make sci-fis, and JJ Abrams is set to continue his association with the genre with his original The Great Beyond in 2027. It’s an exciting time, and the huge critical success of Project Hail Mary only helps.
But there’s more to sci-fi than the inevitable staggering box office successes of Dune: Part III and Avengers: Doomsday: the influx of new fans from this golden era should also send them backwards to reappreciate other recent releases. And when they do that, they’ll find injustice. They’ll see that sci-fi has an unfortunate history with underrating even the most beloved classics, as the negative reception of The Thing, or the tepid reactions to Blade Runner on release, prove. Both are now classed as masterpieces because fans put the work in.
There are others that deserve that sort of reassessment: since 2000, there have been some genuinely brilliant sci-fi movies that simply didn’t get fair treatment. They may not have been outright rejected, like the appalling treatment of Disney’s John Carter, but these six modern sci-fis genuinely deserve to be considered masterpieces, rather than how they were actually received.
6 Sunshine
Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s sci-fi thriller sits at 77% on Rotten Tomatoes, which is far from disastrous, but simply doesn’t match the reality of the movie. On release, it was overly penalized by some who felt the third act’s shift into a slasher-like horror betrayed the hard sci-fi of the setup. Nonsense, it’s a great payoff that shows the creative license afforded to high-concept storytelling. The audience score is even lower at 73%, which is just sad.
Sunshine does an incredible job of capturing the terrifying majesty of deep space better than almost any film since 2001: A Space Odyssey. It also has a gorgeous soundtrack, courtesy of John Murphy, that adds to the stunning visuals to create an almost mythical feel to it. Naturally, Boyle also assembled a great cast, featuring Cillian Murphy, Chris Evans, Rose Byrne, and Michelle Yeoh, who are all on top form as a team of scientists unraveling under the psychological weight of their mission to reignite a dying star.
The narrative shift is obviously a big thing, but it’s also completely intentional, and it fits how Sunshine builds its characters’ predicament up. And the idea that something being shocking and violent somehow makes it inferior art is truly baffling.
5 Equilibrium
Released in the long shadow cast by The Matrix, Kurt Wimmer’s Equilibrium was unfairly dismissed on release as an Orwellian copycat that traded substance for style. Critics wrote it off, combining to give it a 40% Rotten Tomatoes score, and they’ve rarely been more wrong as a collective.
Equilibrium might not be entirely innovative, as it embraces familiar tropes, but it is a stylish, incredibly choreographed action sci-fi with a great early career performance by Christian Bale. He’s a sort of emotionally repressed futuristic ancestor of American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman - devastatingly precise at first, and then wilder as his awakening changes everything. It’s very much a modern take on 1984, with emotional clarity banned as the means to control individuality, and while that was - weirdly - used as a major criticism when it came out, it’s not at all a problem. Perhaps because the real world feels so gleefully committed to destroying art, it’s a more important message movie than ever.
Bale is excellent, the imaginative gun kata fighting style leads to some great sequences, and it’s a zippy 107 minutes, so there’s a lot to like.
4 Tenet
Christopher Nolan’s underrated inverted spy thriller was terribly hamstrung by the fact that it came out right as the world had gone to hell. It was saddled with the impossible expectation of saving movie theaters, and when critics weren’t bowled over, the narrative shifted into a toxic, self-congratulatory vibe that still feels vulgar. So too does the 70% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes from critics that widely mentioned a poor sound mix and a complex plot.
Remove Tenet from its context, and it’s a stunning piece of storytelling that thumbs its nose to conventions, embraces confusion like an old friend, and features Nolan’s mad narrative scientist energy better than any of his other movies. There are two wolves inside the great director: one incredibly gifted blockbuster filmmaker, and one who just wants to mess with time and the audience. He’s both a master crafter of film, and clearly has a compulsion to deconstruct, and he should have been allowed to do more, even more liberally.
Tenet is like an alinear, deranged Bond movie, with incredible set-pieces, a wild time travel premise and a brilliant cast. Yes, it’s complicated, but that’s only a problem if you’ve destroyed your ability to pay attention, and the unapologetically unconventional storytelling approach should be heralded as great art, not just good.
3 Snowpiercer
Bong Joon-ho’s English-language debut was a critical darling, justifiably scoring a 94% on Rotten Tomatoes, but that didn’t quite carry over for general viewers. Instead, the audience score sits at a perplexingly low 72%, which simply doesn’t reflect the quality of the movie and adds an unnecessary stain on its legacy.
Snowpiercer is a challenging movie, satirical and brutal at times, but it’s also magnificent, stylish, brilliantly acted, and terrifically compelling as an idea. The director takes a fairly ridiculous premise - of the last survivors of humanity perpetually circling a frozen Earth and carved apart by class warfare - and makes it a claustrophobic, cinematic gem, buoyed by Chris Evans’ best performance outside of Marvel. He plays a broken, reluctant leader carrying immense guilt, and he’s genuinely excellent at the heart of a relentless, pressurized tin can of social commentary.
There aren’t aliens or spaceships or flashy effects, but this is an astoundingly impressive work of art that is important and beautifully designed, and is easily one of the best dystopian movies ever made.
2 Alita: Battle Angel
Robert Rodriguez and James Cameron’s underrated adaptation of Yukito Kishiro’s manga was undermined by pre-release skepticism, which seemed to take issue with the stylized character design of the titular hero, as well as the abundance of CGI. Critics ended up split, with a 61% score on Rotten Tomatoes, but audiences have since pushed their score up to 91%, which is a far fairer assessment.
Yes, there’s a lot of effects work, but it still holds up, and there’s not the same kind of hollow feeling as something like Green Lantern. Ultimately, Alita is excellent and captures the feel of cyberpunk better than any live-action movie, and the world-building is genuinely phenomenal. Rosa Salazar is equally as good as Alita, and she’s joined by a great ensemble, including Christoph Waltz, Jennifer Connelly, Mahershala Ali, Ed Skrein, and Jackie Earle Haley.
There are wonderful action sequences, strong emotional depth, and a classic 1990s anime feel that has rarely been so well captured in a live-action blockbuster. The fact that an Alita sequel has never arrived is a tragedy.
1 Ron's Gone Wrong
Animated sci-fi tends to get cast as simple family entertainment, with rare cases being widely classified as masterpieces, like The Iron Giant. Even genuine 5-star movies like The Mitchells vs The Machines end up seeing limited cultural footprints, and Wall-E - a truly gorgeous movie - is rarely mentioned as top tier Pixar.
The same goes for Ron’s Gone Wrong, which has a comparatively high Rotten Tomatoes score of 82%, but which flew completely under the radar on release thanks to a poor marketing campaign and the fallout from Disney’s Fox purchase. For anyone who has seen it, that 82% is precisely 18% too low. It’s a genuinely brilliant, very funny satire of tech-monopoly culture and modern social media obsession, and it manages to avoid being preachy.
Alongside Baymax, Ron (voiced by Zach Galifianakis) is one of the greatest robot companion characters in movie history, and he’s the crowning glory on one of the most unfairly overlooked sci-fi gems of the modern era
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Tenet
8/10
- Release Date
- September 3, 2020
- Runtime
- 150 minutes
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John David Washington
Protagonist
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Neil
Armed with only one word—Tenet—and fighting for the survival of the entire world, a nameless Protagonist journeys through a twilight world of international espionage on a mission that will unfold in something beyond real time.
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Snowpiercer
6/10
- Release Date
- 2020 - 2024-00-00
- Network
- AMC, TNT
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Melanie Cavill
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Mickey Sumner
Bess Till
Snowpiercer is set aboard a perpetually moving train that carries the last survivors of humanity after Earth is frozen into an uninhabitable wasteland. As passengers remain divided by a rigid class system, former detective Andre Layton is drawn into a murder investigation that exposes growing unrest and ignites a struggle over who should control the future of the train.
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Alita: Battle Angel
7/10
- Release Date
- February 14, 2019
- Runtime
- 122 minutes
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Dr. Dyson Ido
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Rosa Salazar
Alita
Produced by James Cameron and Robert Rodriguez, Alita: Battle Angel adapts the manga Gunnm to live-action, featuring Rosa Salazar as the titular cyborg who goes on a quest to rebuild her identity as she faces the dark forces that plague Iron City. With the help of Christoph Waltz' Dr. Ido and Keean Johnson's Hugo, Alita learns to play the futuristic game of Motorball, which could be her ticket to enter the floating city of Zalem. Unfortunately, not everything is as it seems in the year 2563.
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Ron's Gone Wrong
6/10
- Release Date
- October 22, 2021
- Runtime
- 107 minutes
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Zach Galifianakis
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Jack Dylan Grazer
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