20 Best Sci-Fi Movies On Amazon Prime

Science fiction is one of our favorite genres. It's endlessly malleable: One minute, you can watch an icy, intellectual mind-bender, and the next, you can switch over to an all-time great popcorn movie. Science fiction can do anything. And Amazon Prime has assembled a fantastic selection of the genre's best, bringing you the finest cinema has to offer in aliens, artificial intelligence, spaceships, futuristic technology, time travel, alternate realities, dystopias, and more.

With so many films to sort through, we want to make it easy for you to find the ones you should add to your watchlist. We've sorted through Amazon's sci-fi selection to come up with our 20 favorite movies available right now.

Updated on December 30, 2021: Even without the handy aid of a time machine, we're working to keep this list up-to-date for whenever you need it. Streaming catalogs may change and new releases may appear, but our dedication to bringing you the best in sci-fi is a constant.

"Archive" brings the quest for artificial intelligence together with the universal attempt to deal with grief and loss. George Almore is close to realizing his goal of humanistic AI — and his motivations are about more than corporate success or even intellectual achievement. He wants to recapture his wife Jules, whose consciousness is preserved in a decaying digital storage known as the Archive. George has brought Jules back before, each version "better" and truer than the last — and all of them coexisting in a sometimes uneasy truce. Is he finally going to succeed? Should he? The technological, philosophical, and moral questions come to the fore amid a tense and emotional story.

• Starring: Theo James, Stacy Martin, Rhona Mitra

• Director: Gavin Rothery

• Year: 2020

• Runtime: 105 minutes

• Rating: R

• Rotten Tomatoes score: 77%

Nolan Cruise can't leave his apartment. His wife's murder left him in the grip of severe agoraphobia — and possibly a host of other mental illnesses, as well. Is that why he believes that reality and time itself are playing tricks on him? Are paranoia and grief getting the better of him, or has his bathroom really turned into a kind of portal through time? Dealing with everything from time travel to ghosts to cell phone footage that clashes with what he's seeing with his own eyes, Nolan has to try to make sense of what's happening around him ... and find out whether there really is any way to change what's gone wrong in his life. "Before I'm Dead" is a smartly crafted low-budget film that offers creativity, unease, and a surprising amount of flair.

• Starring: J.R. Sawyers, Denise Boutte, Stephaun Pender

• Director: J.R. Sawyers

• Year: 2021

• Runtime: 83 minutes

• Rating: TV-MA

• Rotten Tomatoes Score: 83%

"Children of Men" opens with humanity on the brink of a slow extinction, due to mass infertility. The world is in chaos, especially once the youngest person left, 18-year-old "Baby" Diego, is murdered. In the midst of all this violence and instability, bureaucrat Theo's estranged wife, Julian, comes back into his life ... and makes him responsible for Kee, a young woman whose seemingly impossible pregnancy might just save the world. Theo and Kee are now at the center of a dangerous firestorm of competing interests. "Children of Men" deals unflinchingly with bleak material and tackles rich themes, but its propulsive storytelling keeps it incredibly exciting.

• Starring: Clive Owen, Julianne Moore, Clare-Hope Ashitey

• Director: Alfonso Cuarón

• Year: 2006

• Runtime: 109 minutes

• Rating: R

• Rotten Tomatoes Score: 92%

Widespread disaster follows in the wake of an asteroid's collision with Earth. In the midst of a plague of blood parasites (and the dangerous human efforts set up to contain them) Marine Corps veteran Malik Khan tries to get his two young sons to safety. The result is a dangerous and excruciatingly tense drive across the desert that melds horror, thriller, and apocalyptic sci-fi elements to great effect. The genre-blending is well-done and the desert cinematography is striking, but the performances are probably the biggest draw here: They provide the movie with plenty of nuance and deeply resonant feeling.

• Starring: Riz Ahmed, Octavia Spencer, Janina Gavankar

• Director: Michael Pearce

• Year: 2021

• Runtime: 108 minutes

• Rating: R

• Rotten Tomatoes Score: 63%

"Europa Report" is a sleek found footage movie about a mission to one of Jupiter's moons. The crew is traveling to this far edge of the solar system in a search for life, but this kind of quest unavoidably puts their own lives in severe peril. As storms, harsh environments, and technical failures plague the crew, eliminating them one by one, they doggedly continue their mission, chasing the source of a mysterious blue light that may have incredible significance. The found footage styling gives this an additional verisimilitude and amounts to much more than a mere gimmick, and the hard sci-fi approach is engrossing.

• Starring: Anamaria Marinca, Michael Nyqvist, Karolina Wydra

• Director: Sebastian Cordero

• Year: 2013

• Runtime: 90 minutes

• Rating: PG-13

• Rotten Tomatoes score: 81%

"Gamera: The Guardian of the Universe" reboots the series of kaiju films focused on this enormous, dangerous, but often lovable fire-breathing turtle. Here, scientists discover the ancient Gamera along with a flock of giant birds known as Gyaos — and when the creatures start wreaking havoc, the world strikes back. But there's a big difference between Gamera and Gyaos, and the psychic bond Gamera forms with young Asagi lets us know it. Gamera isn't really a threat: He's humanity's best protection against the Gyaos. With vivid adventure, a touching girl-and-her-giant-turtle emotional arc, and a whole lot of fun, "Gamera: The Guardian of the Universe" illustrates the best the series has to offer.

• Starring: Tsuyoshi Ihara, Akira Onodera, Shinobu Nakayama

• Director: Shusuke Kaneko

• Year: 1995

• Runtime: 95 minutes

• Rating: NR

• Rotten Tomatoes Score: 77% (Audience)

"Infinity Chamber" tells the tense story of Frank Lerner, who finds himself trapped in an unconventional high-tech prison cell. He doesn't remember how he got there or why he was arrested, and his only companions are Howard — an AI "life support officer" — and his own vivid flashbacks. The facility is searching Frank's brain for a secret, manipulating his memories and perceptions to try to get the answers it needs about his "crime." Meanwhile, Frank strives to escape, making an ally of a malfunctioning and increasingly human Howard. This ambiguous high-concept thriller deploys plenty of smart, mind-bending twists.

• Starring: Christopher Soren Kelly, Cassandra Clark, Cajardo Lindsey

• Director: Travis Milloy

• Year: 2016

• Runtime: 105 minutes

• Rating: NR

• Rotten Tomatoes Score: 67% (Audience)

One of the weirdest and most deliciously surreal sci-fi horror franchises around kicks off with the classic "Phantasm." Young Mike just wants to be close to his older brother, Jody, so he tags along to the funeral of one of Jody's friends ... and witnesses something bizarre. The local mausoleum is under the control of the Tall Man — played by Angus Scrimm, who brings real mystery and menace — an otherworldly figure who abducts, revives, and repurposes the dead. Working by a dreamlike logic, "Phantasm" blends unforgettable horror images with the moving theme of a boy grappling with death.

• Starring: A. Michael Baldwin, Bill Thornbury, Reggie Bannister

• Director: Don Coscarelli

• Year: 1979

• Runtime: 89 minutes

• Rating: R

• Rotten Tomatoes Score: 74%

Time travel, aliens, and military sci-fi all add up to a blast of an action-adventure movie. Critics were lukewarm, but audiences have definitely had a lot of fun. Humanity gets a sudden news alert from the future: The world will soon be attacked and effectively wiped out by creatures known as the Whitespikes. Chris Pratt's Dan, a former Green Beret, gets drafted into the future's war. The time travel gives him a chance at saving the human race — even granted that it turns out to be more complicated than it looked at first glance — but Dan also needs it to give him a heads up about how to keep his own family together in the here and now.

• Starring: Chris Pratt, Yvonne Strahovski, J.K. Simmons

• Director: Chris McKay

• Year: 2021

• Runtime: 138 minutes

• Rating: PG-13

• Rotten Tomatoes score: 53%

If you're in the mood for something deeply weird and disturbing, check out "Vivarium," starring Jesse Eisenberg and Imogen Poots as a young couple who get sucked into a kind of bizarre suburbia. After being stranded in an inescapable neighborhood of identical houses, they're forcibly conscripted into acting as foster parents for an alien child. They're desperate to escape, but the claustrophobia never lets up. And as the child grows, it gets harder and harder to even try to love — and even more impossible to control. Can they find an escape, or were they doomed the second they stepped in the house?

• Starring: Imogen Poots, Jesse Eisenberg, Jonathan Aris

• Director: Lorcan Finnegan

• Year: 2019

• Runtime: 97 minutes

• Rating: NR

• Rotten Tomatoes score: 72%