When the new millennium arrived, the pressure was on for the '00s to have great sci-fi movies. After all, one of the best and most important science-fiction films of all time, 2001: A Space Odyssey, famously took place in (what was then the future) of the '00s. Surely the actual decade would have some good sci-fi flicks to offer? It's probably fair to say that nothing as important as Kubrick's masterpiece came out in the '00s, but lots of great movies did.
Sci-fi in the 2000s showed the breadth of the genre. There were incredible works of cinema that used sci-fi premises sparingly, wielding them as a tool to explore humanity and dense themes. There were blockbuster space-age adventures, putting to use rapidly improving CGI technology. And there was also a lot of shlock—but guilty pleasures can be good!
Here are the 32 greatest sci-fi movies of the '00s.
32. Jason X
Year: 2001
Director: Jim Isaac
After nine previous movies, the masked slasher icon Jason had brutally murdered so many teenage campers that you couldn't keep track of them all. Famously, he took Manhattan in the eighth movie. So where else was there for Jason to go for the tenth film than outer space in the far future? Although the movie is breathtakingly stupid, watching a cybernetically upgraded Jason kill people aboard a spaceship in the year 2455 is also pretty fun — especially that one gnarly kill using liquid nitrogen.
31. Alien vs. Predator
Year: 2004
Director: Paul W. S. Anderson
A feature-length payoff of an Easter egg that appeared at the end of 1990s Predator 2, which featured a Xenomorph alien skull on one of the Predators' trophy walls, Alien vs Predator is hardly high art. It's exactly what it says on the tin, and that's to its credit. AvP, as it's known in shorthand, understands how contrived its premise is, and yet still manages to deliver a pretty good Alien vs Predator battle with engaging stakes and some cool setpieces in an ancient extraterrestrial pyramid buried underneath the Antarctic.
30. 2012
Year: 2009
Director: Roland Emmerich
Having already unleashed aliens, Godzilla, and climate change on the world in his previous disaster movies, director Roland Emmerich decided to go all in and trash the whole planet in 2012, a blockbuster based on the then-in-vogue Mayan prophecy that the world would end in 2012. (That the so-called "Mayan prophecy" was not actually a prophecy at all and had been soundly debunked was immaterial.) 2012 is a silly movie, and the contrast between John Cusack leading man as he tries to save his family with the literally billions of people dying as the planet goes to hell is unintentionally absurd. It's a hoot, though.
29. Treasure Planet
Year: 2002
Directors: John Musker and Ron Clements
Disney's sci-fi take on Robert Louis Stevenson's swashbuckling pirate novel Treasure Island bombed at the box office when it first came out, perhaps in part because audiences at the time weren't interested in traditional animation anymore. That's a shame, because Treasure Planet is a unique delight—and one that holds up visually a lot better than many of the other computer-animated movies of the era do. Swapping galleons for starships but keeping the (solar) sails, Treasure Planet is a nifty spin on a familiar adventure.
28. Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla
Year: 2002
Director: Masaaki Tezuka
There were five films in the Godzilla franchise's Millennium era—and some were a lot better than others—but Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla might be the most purely fun. Pitting the King of the Monsters against a third version of his iconic robot double, Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla plays like a live-action giant robot anime, full of cool, action-packed fights and city-smashing action. It also has one of the better human protagonists in any Godzilla movie, and it's to the film's credit that Lieutenant Akane Yashiro's efforts to pilot Mechagodzilla and put her past demons to rest are as engaging as the kaiju fighting. (Well… almost.)
27. The Core
Year: 2003
Director: Jon Amiel
The Core asks the question, "What if we did Armageddon but went down instead of up?" The result is perhaps the dumbest depiction of science in all of cinema history, but gosh-darn if The Core isn't as fun as it is stupid. Following Aaron Eckhart, Hilary Swank, and the rest of a crack team as they bore into the center of the Earth in an effort to blow up the planet's core to get it spinning again, restarting the planet's magnetic field in the process, The Core busts out all the tropes you'd expect from a '00s disaster movie. It rules. Take your brain out and put it on a little shelf for a couple of hours. Don't fight The Core. Give in to its dumb delights.
26. Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith
Year: 2005
Director: George Lucas
There's been an ongoing effort by certain Millennials and members of Gen Z to reclaim the Star Wars Prequels and claim that they are "Good, Actually." Let's not go that far, but the trilogy-capper, Revenge of the Sith, is the best Star Wars movie of the prequel bunch. This is the movie that shows the moment when Anakin Skywalker gave in to the Dark Side and the Galactic Republic officially fell under Emperor Palpatine's thrall. It's an admirably dark movie, and while there are plenty of flaws to be found, there's also plenty of action, excitement, and thematic weight.
25. A Scanner Darkly
Year: 2006
Director: Richard Linklater
Few movies look like Richard Linklater's adaptation of Philip K. Dick's dystopian novel. Starring Keanu Reeves, A Scanner Darkly is rotoscoped, meaning it is animation that's been traced over live-action footage. Linklater's a fan of this method; his 2001 movie Walking Life and Apollo 10 1⁄2: A Space Age Childhood, from 2022, are both rotoscoped. The technique works especially well in A Scanner Darkly, giving the entire film both a realism and uncanniness that works well with the plot, which heavily features hallucinogenic drugs that have overtaken the country, and paranoid surveillance fears.
24. Splice
Year: 2009
Director: Vincenzo Natali
A deeply messed-up movie, Splice follows Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley as genetic engineers who throw all ethics to the wind and create a human-animal hybrid. The pair name the creature Dren, and raise it together—both as a science experiment and as their daughter in some twisted sense. Things get blurrier and viscerally upsetting as Dren quickly matures. Splice crosses the line of good taste at least twice, and it's certainly not for everyone, but you can't say it doesn't go for it.
23. Moon
Year: 2009
Director: Duncan Jones
Sam Rockwell stars as a man nearing the end of a long, lonely three-year shift manning a mining operation on the moon. Just before it's his turn to go home, he begins to have hallucinations—and then encounters a very real doppelgänger with an identical job and identical memories. Moon is one of the more acclaimed indie sci-fi movies of the decade, and for good reason, as it uses its small scale and clone conceit to tell a fascinating story about humanity and individuality.
22. Atlantis: The Lost Empire
Year: 2001
Directors: Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise
The '00s were before Disney owned Marvel and Star Wars, so there were quite a few efforts by the company to make movies that "boys" would like in addition to the princess movies that were more "girl"-coded. That effort resulted in movies like Atlantis: The Lost Empire, a steampunk adventure to the mythical underwater city. Full of cool machines, big monsters, and magic, Atlantis was a bomb rather than the hit Disney so desperately wanted it to be. It has since been reclaimed as a cult classic, and rightfully so—watching Atlantis now is like taking a fresh dip in original water compared to the glut of IP storytelling that dominates the box office.
21. The Matrix Reloaded
Year: 2003
Directors: The Wachowskis
The sequel to 1999's The Matrix—one of the most innovative, acclaimed, and best action movies ever made—was highly anticipated. Yet, The Matrix Reloaded disappointed fans when it first came out. Perhaps they weren't expecting a philosophical treatise and a somewhat stagnant protagonist. While it's true that neither Reloaded nor its follow-up, Revolutions, can match the first Matrix, both are admirable, enjoyable action flicks with a lot of big ideas and exciting setpieces. If the Architect's explanation isn't your speed, Reloaded still has the highway chase, which is one of the coolest action sequences ever put to film.
20. Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust
Year: 2000
Director: Yoshiaki Kawajiri
The second film adaptation of the long-running Japanese horror-fantasy-sci-fi series, Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust, takes place in a post-apocalyptic world that features futuristic technology alongside Gothic society and grotesque monsters. It's a fascinating and effective blend of genres, and Bloodlust has the titular vampire hunter on the tail of a young human woman who has seemingly been abducted by a powerful vampire noble. It's a neat set-up, one that offers plenty of action and violence, but where Bloodlust really gets the heart pumping is with the reveal that there may be something more to the relationship between the vampire and his so-called "captive."
19. Cloverfield
Year: 2008
Director: Matt Reeves
One of the best found-footage horror movies also offers a unique perspective on the giant monster subgenre. Cloverfield, which debuted with much fanfare and secrecy, follows a group of friends in New York City when a huge kaiju attacks Manhattan. While most Godzilla movies zoom out to a bigger picture to showcase the scale of the destruction—and usually check in with the generals or scientists trying to stop the beast—Cloverfield keeps things contained to the friends' POV, as everything we see is whatever they captured with their camera. They're overwhelmed, in the dark, and have no idea what's going on, and that makes the monster attack feel more real and terrifying.
18. The Host
Year: 2006
Director: Bong Joon Ho
Of course Parasite director Bong Joon Ho's monster movie wouldn't be like any old monster movie. The Host follows a scrappy, dysfunctional Seoul family who must band together after a creature emerges from the Han River and takes their youngest daughter captive. A quirky family drama with a righteously angry streak, The Host more than delivers on the monster action, especially when the creature—some sort of mutant riverlife—emerges from the water in broad daylight, unexpectedly early into the film's runtime, and wreaks havoc. If Jaws got its power from holding back on how much of the shark viewers would get to see, The Host gets part of its from subverting that and putting the creature out in the open terrifyingly soon.
17. Interstella 5555: The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem
Year: 2003
Director: Kazuhisa Takenouchi
Daft Punk's Discovery is one of the greatest electronic albums ever released, so it's only fitting that a feature-length music video accompanying the record would be great, too. Interstella 5555: The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem is a dialog-free anime film that tells a story accompanying the album, following a band of alien musicians who are kidnapped and forced to play on Earth until they're rescued by a brave space pilot. It's stylish, exciting, and the soundtrack is awesome, naturally.
16. Star Trek
Year: 2009
Director: J.J. Abrams
The first of the rebooted Star Trek movies manages to pull off a very tricky task. It's at once a fitting continuation of the beloved Original Series' legacy (that manages to still be technically in continuity with the old show in the Star Trek timeline) while also being a new, stand-alone franchise with an exciting energy and a bright young cast, including Chris Pine, Zoe Saldaña, and Zachary Quinto. To paraphrase Captain Kirk's famous line, the '09 Star Trek feels like it's boldly going where no one has gone before while staying respectfully indebted to what preceded it.
15. The Animatrix
Year: 2003
Directors: Andy Jones, Mahiro Maeda, Shinichirō Watanabe, Yoshiaki Kawajiri, Takeshi Koike, Kōji Morimoto, and Peter Chung
As an anthology film, not every segment of this anime compilation expanding on the history and lore of The Matrix is a classic. However, the ones that are, like a story about a track and field athlete who pushes himself so hard he temporarily breaks free of the simulation, are well worth your time. The Second Renaissance, a haunting two-part segment that documents the history of the human-machine war that led to the creation of the Matrix in the first place, is almost certainly the best thing to come out of the franchise other than the original 1999 film.
14. Iron Man
Year: 2008
Director: Jon Favreau
It feels a little weird to put superhero movies on a list of sci-fi films, because the superhero genre is so established and dominant now that it almost feels like it should be its own thing. Consider, though, the plot of Iron Man: a genius inventor creates a high-tech energy source and uses it to build a robotic armor. That's a sci-fi premise right there, and Iron Man pulls it off with panache, in large part thanks to Robert Downey Jr.'s charisma, which was magnetic enough that it launched one of the biggest franchises in film history.
13. Minority Report
Year: 2002
Director: Steven Spielberg
Tom Cruise stars in this Philip K. Dick adaptation about a cyberpunk future where the police are able to arrest criminals before they even commit the crime thanks to "precogs," which can predict what's going to happen. When Cruise's police chief John Anderton is accused of committing a crime in the future, he's forced to go on the run from his own department, and director Steven Spielberg delivers one of his most exciting, genre-blending adventures of all time.
12. Signs
Year: 2002
Director: M. Night Shyamalan
The "twist" of M. Night Shyamalan's alien invasion film doesn't really matter so much as the suspense and the mood leading up to it, as former priest Graham Hess (Mel Gibson) and his family slowly piece together what the crop circles on their farm mean and begin to fear the extra-terrestrial visitors that might be lurking in the night. It's a pretty masterful chiller, and Shyamalan uses the sci-fi haunts to tell an earnestly touching story about losing—and finding—faith.
11. X2: X-Men United
Year: 2003
Director: Bryan Singer
The second and best of the X-Men movies, X2 has Hugh Jackman's Wolverine confronting his past when Brian Cox's Colonel William Stryker—one of the best supervillains in movies or TV—decides to try to eliminate Mutants once and for all. Boasting incredible set pieces like the raid on Professor Xavier's school for mutants and Nightcrawler's BAMF-filled assault on the White House, X2 is also one of the most effective instances of enemies having to work together. It's a common trope, but rarely done better than X2's uneasy alliance between Patrick Stewart's Professor X and Ian McKellen's Magneto.
10. District 9
Year: 2009
Director: Neill Blomkamp
Neill Blomkamp's scrappy sci-fi movie uses alien invasion as a metaphor for South Africa's apartheid policies, taking place in a world where an alien ship appeared above Johannesburg decades ago and broke down. The shock of extraterrestrials long since passed, the stranded aliens—known derisively as "prawns"—live in segregated townships. Things come to a head when bureaucrat Wikus van de Merwe (Sharlto Copley) becomes an unlikely central player in a discovery that will upset the status quo. District 9 has a unique verisimilitude, and Blomkamp does a lot with a little, resulting in one of the rare sci-fi movies to get a Best Picture nomination at the Oscars.
9. War of the Worlds
Year: 2005
Director: Steven Spielberg
Steven Spielberg, who teamed up once more with Tom Cruise, put a decidedly post-9/11 spin on his adaptation of H.G. Wells' seminal alien invasion story. Although rightfully knocked for a happy ending that's a little too tidy, the vast majority of War of the Worlds is viscerally terrifying. When the tripods first emerge from their capsules and start obliterating onlookers, it's hard not to make connections between the ash-covered Cruise and the infamous day just a few years prior.
8. The Prestige
Year: 2006
Director: Christopher Nolan
There's technically only one element in Christopher Nolan's Prestige—often brought up as the dark horse candidate when debating the director's best film—that qualifies as sci-fi. The majority of the story, which follows Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale as dueling Victorian-era stage magicians, is full of trickery of the astounding-but-mundane variety. When David Bowie's Nikola Tesla enters the picture, though, and presents Jackman's Angier with an invention, The Prestige jumps genres in an effective twist, one that brings "real" magic into their battle in a horrifying way.
7. Paprika
Year: 2006
Director: Satoshi Kon
The great anime director Satoshi Kon's fourth and final film before his untimely death, Paprika, is a mind-bending exploration into dreams. Dr. Atsuko Chiba is a reserved, put-together scientist working on a machine that lets users view their patients' dreams, but she has an outgoing alter-ego, Paprika, that she uses to explore the subconscious and aid those who come to her for help. When strange things start occurring and the dream world begins blending into reality, Paprika must uncover the conspiracy. It's one of the more visually dazzling and imaginative films you'll likely ever see.
6. Wall-E
Year: 2008
Director: Andrew Stanton
The cutest post-apocalyptic movie ever made, Pixar's triumphant sci-fi tale of resilience and robot romance, famously opens with a lengthy, nearly dialogue-free sequence that follows the titular robot's isolated little life cleaning up trash on an abandoned Earth. When a high-tech robot probe called EVE arrives, Wall-E is immediately smitten. Once he (unwittingly) follows EVE back to the far reaches of space where the descendants of evacuated humanity are luxuriating, Wall-E plays in a slightly different (but still effective!) register, and on the whole, it's one of the most unique and imaginative mainstream animated movies ever made.
5. Sunshine
Year: 2007
Director: Danny Boyle
This Alex Garland-penned sci-fi thriller shows what type of movie it's going to be with the reveal that the ship our heroes are riding on in a last-ditch effort to restart the sun is called the Icarus II, since the first ship was lost when it, well, flew too close to the sun. It's a devastating foreshadowing of hubris, and Sunshine manages to feel philosophical and make you feel like you're having a panic attack. (It also has an incredible cast, boasting actors like Cillian Murphy, Chris Evans, Rose Byrne, Michelle Yeoh, Hiroyuki Sanada, and Benedict Wong before their fame really blew up.)
4. Avatar
Year: 2009
Director: James Cameron
Derivative? Sure—but go ahead and call Avatar "Dances With Wolves in space" all you like, it doesn't change how visually stunning James Cameron's sci-fi epic was, especially if you've gotten a chance to catch it on the big screen in 3D. Beyond the special effects, which are worth it alone, Avatar's familiar story also benefits from Cameron's mastery of narrative. It's shocking how effectively the Titanic director transports audiences to the world of Pandora and gets them invested in a relationship between human Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and the 9-foot-tall blue cat-person alien Neytiri (Zoe Saldana).
3. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Year: 2004
Director: Michel Gondry
Compared to some other big movies of the '00s, there aren't a ton of big, outlandish sci-fi elements in this beloved Jim Carrey-led drama. That's okay, because when your sci-fi conceit is an invention that erases memories of a relationship, the mind is a more fascinating place than the farthest reaches of space. Carrey and Kate Winslet star as a couple who, after having an ugly breakup, decide to wipe the pain of their time together from their memories. But, as the memories start to go, and Carrey's Joel sees the good times, he begins to want to hold on to the past. Meditative, surreal, and brutally romantic, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind isn't just one of the decade's best sci-fi movies; it's also one of the greatest films ever made.
2. A.I.: Artificial Intellegence
Year: 2001
Director: Steven Spielberg
A.I.: Artificial Intelligence began its development as a Stanley Kubrick project, though Steven Spielberg eventually was the one to make the film after Kubrick's death. You can feel the conflict between Kubrick's colder, intellectual sensibilities and Spielberg's warmer populism throughout A.I., a sweeping sci-fi epic that follows a robot child once he's no longer wanted by the human mother who "adopted" him. It's an uneasy movie, but the gulf between Kubrick and Spielberg comes together at the end, which is both sweet and deeply upsetting in an admirably unifying way. A product of two of the great filmmakers in modern history, there's nothing else like A.I.
1. Children of Men
Year: 2006
Director: Alfonso Cuarón
The inclusion of Children of Men on this list of great sci-fi movies of the '00s might be stretching the limits of "science fiction," but the premise of this acclaimed film—mankind has suddenly, inexplicably become infertile and after two decades without a birth, civilization is on the verge of collapsing—is indeed a chilling bit of speculative fiction. Clive Owen stars as Theo, a man who finds himself tasked with protecting a pregnant woman (Clare-Hope Ashitey) who might represent the last hope for humanity. Tense, intelligent, and devastating, Children of Men uses its seemingly simple premise to explore grave ripple effects.
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