The 7 Best And 7 Worst Sci-Fi Movies Of 2020

2020 will be remembered as an anomalous year for sci-fi movies because of the almost complete lack of blockbusters. A brief glance at the top-grossing movies of the last few decades shows sci-fi dominating the charts — usually in sturdy franchises such as Star Wars, Jurassic Park, or The Avengers, sometimes in one-off hits like Avatar (for now) or Interstellar. But Covid-19 shut down most movie theaters in the early spring, and with a few exceptions, such as Christopher Nolan's Tenet, studios pulled their biggest offerings indefinitely.

But sci-fi is a flexible genre. Its themes and visuals often work just as well in low-budget and even micro-budget indie films. Among many examples is the well-regarded Ex Machina from 2015. Despite having a fraction of the budget of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, it still beat the latter out for that year's Academy Award for visual effects, proof that a paucity of resources often inspires filmmakers to get creative in realizing their vision. Of course, the opposite is just as often true. The lack of an original vision coupled with subpar visual effects can make low-budget sci-fi seem goofy and derivative. With few blockbuster releases, our list is composed almost exclusively of inexpensive sci-fi flicks of both varieties — tired and inspired. Here, according to Rotten Tomatoes, are the seven best and the seven worst of 2020.

This movie set in the X-Men universe had a troubled production and distribution history. It was reshot, recut, and bounced around in the transition when Disney bought 20th Century Fox (Disney execs were reportedly unhappy with director Josh Boone's handling of the material). Not surprisingly, when the film  finally got a theatrical release date in August 2020, critics found the film underwhelming. The New Mutants, about five young mutants locked in a force field-insulated asylum until they can learn to control their dangerous powers, came in at just 35% on the Tomatometer.

Some critics found the premise "a solid, intriguing one," but others were less enthralled by the movie's execution, its silly special effects and laughable character accents. Fans liked the overall results a little better, but not much, while the The Austin Chronicle summed up the prevailing critical view, calling The New Mutants "an idiotic, nonsensical, and weirdly cheap attempt to take the stories in a new direction."

If you stumbled into the TV room, half asleep, without your glasses, to find your roommate watching Skylines at 3AM, you might — for a fleeting moment — think that it's Aliens, or Starship Troopers, or District 9, or Predator, or Edge of Tomorrow, or...you get the idea. Taking a step closer, you realize it's just a derivative melange of those much better films. You wisely decide to skip it, but not before telling your roommate to stop using the pandemic as an excuse to not look for a job.

A sequel to the critically and commercially successful low-budget Beyond Skyline from 2017, this similarly inexpensive sci-fi actioner chronicles the efforts of Rose (Lindsey Morgan), an alien-human hybrid, to travel to an alien planet and retrieve a something-or-other that will save Earth. Not content to funnel its limited funds into a handful of impressive effects, Skylines instead parades an endless procession of bad ones. You have to admire a film that knows exactly what it is and doesn't try to hide it. Morgan, bringing sci-fi cred from The 100, carries the film as well as she can, but ultimately Skylines doesn't try for even one moment to be fresh or inventive. At 52% on the Tomatometer, critics didn't revile Skylines, but nor did they particularly like it, with Nick Allen of Rogerebert.com writing, "For all the effort into making bombastic sci-fi action without a studio tentpole's budget, it just assumes that people won't miss originality."

Only chronicles yet another post apocalyptic scenario, this one featuring a space-borne virus that wipes out most of Earth's women, leaving Eva (Freida Pinto), one of the few survivors, to try to hold out against both the plague and the men who hunt surviving women in hopes of selling their ovaries to government labs. When Eva eventually catches the virus, she and her boyfriend (Leslie Odom, Jr.) take one last life-embracing road trip that provides the movie with its few moments of action and revelation.

Some sci-fi movies are crimes against art and culture (Battlefield Earth), while some are undeniable masterworks (2001: A Space Odyssey). Most, however, fall into the vast continuum in between, neither memorable nor offensive. Only fits squarely in this third category. Critics didn't consider it a terrible movie, per se — its 40% Tomatometer doesn't exactly put it into embarrassing flop territory. But neither did they find it a particularly compelling or original expression within the sci-fi genre, and they found the feminist themes muddled. Most reviews echoed that of The Hollywood Reporter: "Reminiscent of scores of previous similarly themed sci-fi efforts...Only proves more intent on establishing an ominous mood than providing thrills."

Our best and worst sci-fi movie list has thus far included most of the standard sci-fi narrative categories: dystopias, post-apocalyptic scenarios, malevolent AI, and alien invasions. But no list of any given year would be complete without at least one entry in the time travel subgenre, here represented by the Australian film 2067. Of course, a good time travel story is hard to do well. The filmmakers must create convincing time travel technology, as well as work out all the contradictions and paradoxes that time travel potentially presents, while also, you know, telling a compelling story. 2067, unfortunately, succeeds at none of these things, at least according to critics.

Opening in — you guessed it — 2067, the movie stars Kodi Smit-McPhee, a thespian well-traveled in science fiction cinema (The Road, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, X-Men: Apocalypse), who must travel 400 years into the future in a time machine invented by his father to prevent mankind's extinction by climate change. The movie achieved only 31% on the Tomatometer, with critics mostly panning the poorly executed story and subpar filmmaking. John DeFore of the Hollywood Reporter summed up the general consensus, calling the film a "sci-fi misfire," and writing, "Has a couple of interesting ideas up its sleeve but doesn't know how to reveal them."

The only sci-fi comedy on this list, Superintelligence stars Melissa McCarthy as Carol Peters, the "world's most average person," who is contacted by an AI (with the voice of James Corden) that wants to study her in the hopes of achieving greater insight into the nature of humanity. The AI has achieved the singularity, the theorized future moment when computers become sentient and more capable/intelligent than their human designers (dramatized in far better movies such as Her and The Terminator). Of course the entity starts off friendly, before revealing that it is using Carol as a test to discover whether humanity is worth continuing to survive. If she fails, well, bye bye civilization.

The premise is sufficient for a decent comedy, and the trailer has its share of passable jokes. Unfortunately critics didn't find that the actual movie reflected any of that. The movie scored a woeful 32% on the Tomatometer – and an even lower audience score — with reviewers appreciating neither the attempts at humor nor the sci-fi elements. Christy Lemire wrote, "Everything about Superintelligence seems aimed at being as insipid and forgettable as possible," while David Ehrlich opined, "The only way to outsmart the system is to watch something else instead."

Proximity tells an alien abduction story that recycles a number of sci-fi tropes from well-known sources, such as the films of Steven Spielberg (especially Close Encounters of the Third Kind), and The X-Files. Central to the story is a secret government agency that's devoted to investigating and covering up extraterrestrial phenomena, as well as a young scientist from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory who intends to find out the truth about his own abduction by otherworldly visitors. 

Proximity was written and directed by first timer Eric Demeusy, whose background in visual effects gives the movie the polished look of a much pricier production. But the story is where the film falters, according to critics, who praised Demeusy as a promising talent, but found the movie little more than a collection of spare genre parts without an original vision tying them together. As Sarah Michelle Fetters wrote in Movie Freak, "It's a lot, and Demeusy doesn't juggle it all with a whole lot of precision. It all feels like some esoteric hodgepodge of ideas culled from a variety of different cinematic sources."

Not just the worst reviewed sci-fi movie of 2020, but one of the worst reviewed movies on Rotten Tomatoes ever, with a 0% critics rating and 23% audience score. The movie is set in a near-future fascist dystopia in which crime has overrun American cities (these scenarios always seem to conveniently forget that violent crime rates have been dropping for decades). The government's solution to the uncontrollable crime wave is mind control in the form of the American Peace Initiative, described as "a signal that acts as a synaptic blocker, making it impossible for anyone to perform an act they know to be unlawful." The movie opens when the API is set to go live in a week. That gives the brutal criminal Graham Bricke (Edgar Ramirez) and his crew a week to pull off, you got it, one last heist.

There are a lot of things wrong with The Last Days of American Crime, not the least of which is that it wastes that decent premise. It's ugly to look at and narratively incoherent. It gushes clichés and revels in sadism. It features a lazy voiceover narration that even beginning screenwriting students would know to avoid. Critics found it to be not only bad cinema, but morally execrable as well. The New York Post called it "idiotic Netflix torture porn," writing, "Don't care about story, characters or words, but love violence? Even you will be disappointed."