If you’re a big fan of sci-fi and have an Amazon Prime Video subscription, then this is the article for you.
When we started compiling this list, we thought there’d be a tonne of sci-fi movies on Amazon Prime Video, so many that it was going to be hard to cull them all down into a ‘best’ list. To our surprise, that isn’t the case, but there are still a bunch of hidden science fiction gems on the shopping giant’s video streaming platform.
We’ve found you 11 sci-fi movies on Prime Video that we think you should watch if you’re a fan of the genre.
Best sci-fi movies on Prime Video
In no particular order, here are the best sci-fi movies on Prime Video worth your time, according to Gizmodo Australia.
Vivarium
Starring Jesse Eisenberg and Imogen Poots, Vivarium focuses on a couple that checks out a brand new neighbourhood, filled with identical homes but when they want to leave, they can’t. Now the couple have to figure out a way to escape and apparently, that’s by raising a baby boy. File this movie under: imagine if you couldn’t leave your home town-esq nightmares. Watch it on Prime Video.
Ready Player One
Is there anything else more Sci-Fi than Ready Player One? This movie focuses on Wade Watts and his crusade to find an ‘Easter Egg’ in the VR platform OASIS. The creator of the platform James Halliday is dead and has let users of the platform know that if they find this Easter Egg, they get trillions of dollars. But naturally, this hunt isn’t as easy as your usual Easter Sunday fare. This movie hits different in 2024 with the Apple Vision Pro and Meta Quest 3 garnering popularity.
Everything Everywhere All at Once
There’s no denying Everything Everywhere All at Once as the best sci-fi film of 2022. Everything Everywhere All at Once — starring Michelle Yeoh as Evelyn Wang, the matriarch of a Chinese-American family navigating the stresses of tax season for their struggling laundromat and, oh, a sinister entity carving a bloody path across the entire multiverse to erase every version of her in existence – is not a subtle film, and it demands that when you watch it, you suspend all your disbelief at the door.
The Matrix
The Matrix movie was the best one from the entire Matrix franchise, focusing the least on the leather-clad sci-fi aesthetics and the most on what really is reality. Though the original Matrix movie did have its fair share of leather, action and bullet-time (including the famous bullet-dodging scene), it also went the hardest on how we perceive reality (blue pills, red pills, black cat deja vu, all of it). But, compared to the second and third movies, it’s also the least energetic (despite being high action). While action-focused watchers may be more interested in the intense kung-fu and robot war scenes of Reloaded and Revolutions, The Matrix is the king.
65
65 takes place, shockingly, 65 million years ago, but in the future. There’s a bit on. Adam Driver, playing Mills, is the pilot of a ship, the only person awake on it (as in, not in stasis) as it is hit by an asteroid and crash lands onto a mysterious planet. He’s joined by a passenger that wakes up shortly after, in what looks to be a lone wolf and cub plot. After this catastrophic crash the pair make their way across an unknown terrain riddled with dangerous prehistoric creatures in an epic fight to survive. It’s better than the Jurassic World series.
The Mist
The Mist comes recommended by a few people in the office. It’s the 2007 movie version of Stephen King’s novella, not the TV series that then followed. The synopsis is pretty easy to follow, “David and his son are trapped in a supermarket along with some other townsfolk, when suddenly a mist engulfs the entire city, bringing along bloodthirsty creatures that devour anyone in their path”, but it’s not for the easily scared.
Samaritan
More superhero than sci-fi, in Samaritan, a young boy suspects that his mysterious and reclusive neighbour Mr Smith is actually a legend hiding in plain sight. We’ve got a lot of thoughts on this Sylvester Stallone flick that only debuted this year, mostly that it does well enough in the genre, despite not having the history many other superhero flicks do. It’s worth a watch, at the very least.
The Tomorrow War
Between its iffy concept of time travel, predictable plot points, and rather shoddy sense of internal logic, The Tomorrow War was a movie that left you feeling as if Amazon insisted on letting one of its algorithms make tweaks to the final product before launching it online. Instead of improving on the many similar films it clearly borrowed notes from like Edge of Tomorrow and Independence Day, The Tomorrow War instead phoned it in by merely invoking the general tones of those classics when it easily could have tried to one-up or reimagine them. That being said, it’s a satisfying story and has plenty of entertaining action.
Last Survivors
Last Survivors is a mystery/sci-fi movie about a father and son who live off-grid and battle to survive against that which lies beyond the barriers of the woodland Utopia they have built together. It’s a typical survivalist film, but it deals with how best to endure a crisis and it’s actually quite an engaging watch.
The Blackout
The Blackout packs sci-fi tropes in the first half and flat-out action in the second. The plot for this one is quite simple: life on Earth is rapidly destroyed except for a small area in Eastern Europe. Contact between most towns in Europe has been severed, yet there’s one place with electricity. And aliens.
Totally Killer
OK, this is a little bit of a cheat, but look at it as your Halloween treat. Totally Killer tells the tale of the infamous “Sweet Sixteen Killer” when he returns 35 years after his first murder spree.
There you go, 11 of the best sci-fi movies to binge on Amazon Prime Video. Head over to Prime Video to sign up.
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Image: Prime Video/Gizmodo Australia