It's a great time to be a sci-fi fan, but which films should you be watching?
The past year gave us an onslaught of mind-bending adventures to choose from.
So without further ado, here are the best sci-fi movies of 2020.
Canadian auteur filmmaker David Cronenberg has masterfully merged horror and sci-fi themes
on numerous occasions throughout his career, and his son, Brandon Cronenberg, managed the
same feat with 2020's Possessor.
The film was met with rave reviews, earning widespread praise from the critics.
Possessor is the story of Tasya - played by Mandy's Andrea Riseborough, an agent of a
corporation that uses brain-implant tech to take control of people.
Victims are turned into unwilling hitmen, carrying out assassinations ordered by the
company's rich and powerful clients.
Tasya is a natural at the job, but she gets more than she bargained for when she inhabits
the body of a man whose thirst for violence eclipses even her own.
The experienced agent loses control of her host's mind and finds herself in danger of
never being able to escape it, leading to a thrilling (and highly abstract) showdown
between possessor and host.
“Pull me out.”
If any one movie was going to coax people back into theaters in 2020, it was Tenet.
Christopher Nolan's eleventh feature was the first blockbuster to play in theaters during
the coronavirus pandemic, and it certainly helped people take their minds off COVID-19 for a while.
John David Washington stars as a former CIA agent who's been recruited by a secret organization,
Tenet, which is working to prevent World War III.
He learns that weapons with "inverted entropy" manufactured in the future are somehow making
their way to the present day, and things get a whole lot weirder from there.
With help from Robert Pattinson's Neil, Washington's unnamed protagonist learns that a Russian
oligarch has been in contact with the future.
Our descendants have grown tired of the ravaged world left to them, and they intend to invert
the flow of time in a last ditch effort to change the world.
It may not be Christopher Nolan's finest film, but the slick action sequences and impeccable
performances make Tenet one of 2020's must-see sci-fi films.
If an homage to Ridley Scott's Alien set during the height of the Cold War sounds like something
you'd be interested in, you need to check out Sputnik.
This slick Russian creature feature was forced to forgo a theatrical release because of the
coronavirus pandemic, but it found lots of love on VOD in its native country.
Genre film distributor IFC Midnight secured the release rights for North America, where
critics have been raving about Egor Abramenko's stylish debut.
On paper, Abramenko's story is nothing groundbreaking, but he executes his scary alien vision superbly.
Sputnik follows a cosmonaut who gets quarantined after his vessel malfunctions reentering the
Earth's atmosphere.
What he doesn't know is that there's an extraterrestrial parasite living inside him, and when he sleeps,
it comes out to feed.
The Russian military manages to keep this a secret, hoping to separate the creature
from its host and use it as a weapon of war.
The cosmonaut's only hope is a sympathetic neurophysiologist, who begins masterminding his escape.
With suspense to spare, Sputnik is a white-knuckle thrill ride that you can't afford to miss.
Sci-fi comedy Save Yourselves! is the story of a young Brooklyn couple who decide to disconnect
from the modern world for a while.
They head out into rural New York without their phones or devices.
While they're away, aliens invade Earth, and our heroes have absolutely no idea.
As cities across America are reduced to rubble, our heroes busy themselves with un-busying
themselves.
The city-dwellers take advantage of the nearby lake and surrounding nature, blissfully unaware
that humankind is under attack from fluffy (but extremely vicious) extraterrestrials.
Gradually, they come to the realization that something isn't quite right, and their Millennial
morals are tested when they discover a gun in the cabin's basement.
When push comes to shove, they would rather bear arms than be killed by a ball of space fluff.
Writer/directors Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson didn't have a huge budget, so the majority
of the action – including the leveling of Yankee Stadium – happens off-screen.
This isn't a big, VFX-heavy sci-fi film, but it really doesn't need to be.
Sunita Mani and John Paul Reynolds are both funny and convincing as Su and Jack, and their
vacation-turned-survival mission is engaging enough that we don't need to see all the peripheral destruction.
“We need to turn our phones back on!”
“Sorry, making a smoothie.
Listen… it’s getting weird here in New York!”
Bill & Ted Face the Music was a tonic for trying times in 2020.
Alex Winter's Bill S. Preston, Esquire and Keanu Reeves' Ted Theodore Logan returned
to the big screen for a belated third adventure in late summer, though the coronavirus pandemic
meant it had an unusual theatrical release.
Box office returns were a predictably dire $3.3 million, but Bill & Ted Face the Music
was also released on PVOD, and Deadline sources suggest it made around ten times that amount
via streaming in the same period.
The simultaneous release meant critics nationwide got to see the movie, and the majority of
them deemed it most excellent.
Our titular besties are now middle-aged fathers.
As Bill and Ted go forward in time in search of their future selves, their daughters go
in the opposite direction, recruiting iconic musicians for the band that will help their
dads finally perform their universe-saving song.
Reeves and Winter slip back into their roles with ease, and their onscreen daughters are
just as watchable.
Variety called the film "a blissed-out air balloon of nostalgia" in a glowing review,
while The Hollywood Reporter called it, quote, "almost exactly as good as its two big-screen predecessors."
Archive may not win any awards for originality, but as The Hollywood Reporter put it, the
directorial debut of concept artist Gavin Rothery is a, quote, "sleek and satisfying
riff on familiar sci-fi themes."
Rothery’s film plays like a mash-up of Ex-Machina and Black Mirror, and takes place in 2038,
when a widowed roboticist named George Almore is on the verge of a groundbreaking advancement.
Almore works for a megacorporation that specializes in artificial intelligence.
When we meet him, his human-equivalent prototype is just about ready, but this isn't just a
replication of any old human - the savvy scientist has recreated his deceased wife in robot AI
form behind the backs of his bosses.
The trouble is, his creation ends up being a little too real.
We're not going to spoil it here, but trust us when we say that Archive contains one of
the best movie twists of 2020, sci-fi or otherwise.
Sci-fi adventure Love and Monsters proved popular when it was released on PVOD in October
2020, and the critics loved it too.
This dystopian teen film takes place some seven years after mankind turned its nukes
on a planet-killing asteroid that was on a collision course with Earth.
They destroyed their intended target, but nobody was quite prepared for the brutal aftermath:
the fallout caused all cold-blooded animals to mutate into huge, terrifying creatures.
Former Maze Runner star Dylan O'Brien leads the line as one of a number of survivors living
in an underground bunker.
The film was lauded as an "imaginative post-apocalyptic coming-of-age film" by the New York Times,
while Variety called it a, quote, "daffily lightweight throwback to the teen action-adventures
of the '80s and '90s."
Marvel fans will recognize some familiar faces here - Joel's girlfriend Aimee is played by
Iron Fist star Jessica Henwick.
Michael Rooker of Guardians of the Galaxy and Ariana Greenblatt from Avengers: Infinity
War also make appearances in the film..
Spontaneous was one of the most critically-acclaimed movies of 2020, scoring a near-perfect 98
percent on Rotten Tomatoes.
In Brian Duffield's directorial debut, students at Covington High School have started to inexplicably
explode at random intervals, sowing dread and anxiety among their surviving classmates.
The film's quarantine scenes drew inevitable comparisons to the coronavirus pandemic, but
Spontaneous was done and dusted before COVID-19 was a thing.
According to Duffield, his goal was to make a movie that captured what it meant to be
a kid at that moment in time.
He said, in his Looper exclusive interview:
"I'm very liberal, and for me, the movie feels like a very real thing that kids are dealing
with right now.
When we shot the movie, there were these things happening in the world where it really felt
like kids were being like, 'We need someone to help us.'
And it was really falling on deaf ears."
The writer-director also revealed that '80s classic Heathers and the films of John Hughes
were among his many inspirations.
Fifty Shades of Gray star Jamie Dornan and Avengers actor Anthony Mackie play a pair
of paramedics in Synchronic, a New Orleans-set sci-fi that made a big impression when it
premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Directed by Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, Synchronic follows Dennis and Steve as they're
called to a series of strange and gruesome incidents.
The pair believes that a new designer drug called “synchronic” is to blame for it
all, but when Dennis' daughter mysteriously goes missing, it's up to Steve to investigate further.
He soon discovers that synchronic is more than meets the eye - these mysterious pills
allow the user to travel through time.
One of the many criticisms leveled at the Fifty Shades franchise was that the co-stars
had zero chemistry, but that certainly isn't a problem here.
Dornan and Mackie sell their relationship well, delivering believable performances as
two best friends going through personal ruts.
Synchronic gets pretty trippy, but the two leads keep us invested in their modern day problems.
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