The 55 Best Space Movies Ever

Try watching 55 space movies in a row and not feeling a little short of breath. It's not the most hopeful genre, as filmmakers grapple with the existential dread inspired by the endless vacuum of the cosmos. It's almost as if, when screenwriters turn their imaginations to the heavens, they're overwhelmed by all that nothing staring back.

At least that's how space thrillers tend to go; typically, there aren't many survivors. Fantasy space operas like "Star Wars" are more chipper, and space films based on Cold War adventures can be downright optimistic. Given that the subgenre is usually just retelling the facts of history, at least that feels like a hopeful foundation.

Space can kill a hero in many ways. There are asteroids, aliens, sub-zero temperatures, a lack of oxygen, and nowhere good to eat. But, for the most part, what happens in space movies is that, despite a myriad of practical dangers, humans turn on one another and make an already strenuous situation far, far worse. If you think of Earth as one big spaceship, then it makes sense that, as humans reach for the stars, we pack all our heaviest baggage for the trip.

No space movie has better captured the tin-can-in-orbit hardships of mid-20th century moon missions. Tom Hanks leads this tale about astronauts who get their chance to follow in Neil Armstrong's footsteps just as the public has developed a serious been-there-done-that attitude towards space exploration. That all changes, though, when a small explosion makes a moon landing impossible and a return trip to Earth improbable. As the NASA ground crew in Houston scrambles to MacGyver a solution with only the supplies available on board the craft, this charismatic crew of American astronauts is put to the ultimate test.

• Starring: Tom Hanks, Bill Paxton, Kevin Bacon

• Director: Ron Howard

• Year: 1995

• Runtime: 140 minutes

• Rating: PG

• Rotten Tomatoes Score: 96%

Sigourney Weaver really is the archetype of the badass female protagonist. She's not the only member of the Nostromo's crew with smarts and guts, but she is the ultimate survivor. What director Ridley Scott accomplished in "Alien" is immortal; a deep space industrial crew accidentally brings aboard the perfect extraterrestrial killing machine, and movie history is made. It's not that Weaver's Ripley is fearless. We sympathize with her terror as the monster stalks her, but we really marvel at her ability to keep moving and keep fighting. If the terrible CGI often found in space movies has made you sick of the genre, revisit the real sets and practical effects of this timeless sci-fi horror masterpiece.

• Starring: Tom Skerritt, Sigourney Weaver, John Hurt

• Director: Ridley Scott

• Year: 1979

• Runtime: 116 minutes

• Rating: R

• Rotten Tomatoes Score: 98%

The passengers of the massive Mars-bound Aniara expected a three-week pleasure cruise. When their ship is struck with space junk, however, it becomes rudderless, and the only hope to get back on course is to run across a celestial body and use it as a gravity slingshot. As the passengers and crew realize there are no suitable spheres in their path, they begin to fear that this ark may end up just like the crumbling planet they left behind. As the years drag on, "Aniara" proposes that hopelessness might be as deadly as the void of infinite space.

• Starring: Emelie Garbers, Arvin Kananian, Bianca Cruzeiro

• Director: Hugo Lilja, Pella Kagerman

• Year: 2018

• Runtime: 106 minutes

• Rating: R

• Rotten Tomatoes Score: 71%

"Avatar" haters like to point out the story of the Na'vi tribe's plight to save their sacred tree from greedy industrialists is basically space "Pocahontas." Visually, it has aged too, like any film with this many effects. Back in 2009, though, I dragged every earthling I knew to see "Avatar" in a theater, hypnotized by these blue aliens. I felt like an overwhelmed Joe Biden in this viral clip trying to sum it up: "This new program ... You watch this science fiction thing unfold in front of you." Exactly! 

James Cameron's enormous custom 3D cameras created an immersive experience that unfortunately looks like a video game when viewed on 2D monitors. "Avatar" is pure visual wizardly, but only when you see it in the appropriate venue.

• Starring: Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver

• Director: James Cameron

• Year: 2009

• Runtime: 162 minutes

• Rating: PG-13

• Rotten Tomatoes Score: 82%

The famous astronomer Carl Sagan is the greatest science communicator who ever lived. Neil deGrasse Tyson did yeoman's work following in his footsteps — he even remade Sagan's famous TV series, "Cosmos" — but it's not possible to replace the OG celebrity scientist and his ponderous yet dulcet tones. Sagan also put his passion for thought experiments into "Contact," a novel about an encounter with advanced aliens that was adapted for the screen by Robert Zemeckis. 

When a young astronomer (Jodie Foster) finds a strange signal in the sky, it's actually a code containing instructions on how to assemble a mysterious machine. "Contact" wonders if humanity could handle an extraterrestrial awakening, but ultimately embodies Sagan's optimism about the human project.

• Starring: Jodie Foster, Matthew McConaughey, James Woods

• Director: Robert Zemeckis

• Year: 1997

• Runtime: 150 minutes

• Rating: PG

• Rotten Tomatoes Score: 67%

Seeing "Dune" in 2021 was like reading an official press release claiming that Denis Villeneuve had supplanted Christopher Nolan as Earth's best big-budget filmmaker with a knack for magisterial sci-fi. Look, David Lynch was never the right choice to adapt Frank Herbert's brilliant and expansive 1965 novel. The failure of that first attempt partially explains why George Lucas has been so deified, perhaps without deserving it; Lucas has named checked "Flash Gordon" as an inspiration for "Star Wars," but has avoided crediting the novel from which he clearly cribbed the whole evil space empire versus psychic savior premise. As such, Villeneuve's task was to remake "Dune" for a post-"Star Wars" world. Through visual innovation and his genius for portentous storytelling, he pulled it off.

• Starring: Timothée Chalamet, Rebecca Ferguson, Oscar Isaac

• Director: Denis Villeneuve

• Year: 2021

• Runtime: 156 minutes

• Rating: PG-13

• Rotten Tomatoes Score: 83%

The ad campaign for "The Fifth Element" suggested that it would be a serious space opera, so it was disappointing when this goofy blockbuster premiered in 1997. Bruce Willis is great, though, as an NYC cab driver who gets an odd fare: a superhuman savior of the universe (Milla Jovovich). She's the elemental key to keeping at bay a dark force that's a lot like the Nothing from "The NeverEnding Story." Gary Oldman is at his scenery-chewing best as the corrupted industrialist Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg, who works in service of the darkness. At the time, "The Fifth Element" was the most expensive movie in European history, and the 4K version really brings out the crisp cinematography.

• Starring: Bruce Willis, Gary Oldman, Ian Holm

• Director: Luc Besson

• Year: 1997

• Runtime: 126 minutes

• Rating: PG-13

• Rotten Tomatoes Score: 70%

"Forbidden Planet" was made only 13 years before NASA landed on the moon, but the film predicts this feat will take place in the "final decade of the 21st century." Soon after, "hyperdrive" will allow the colonization of deep space. It's interesting to see how wrong sci-fi was on that first count — and likely the second, given that physicists are pretty sure that light moves at the universal speed limit. 

Still, this is a great-looking color movie for 1956, shot in Cinescope. "Forbidden Planet" is basically like an episode of "Star Trek" with more romance and a less memorable cast, following an American crew as it investigates the mystery of a scientist and his beautiful daughter, long since missing on a far-flung alien colony.

• Starring: Walter Pidgeon, Anne Francis, Leslie Nielsen

• Director: Fred M. Wilcox

• Year: 1956

• Runtime: 98 minutes

• Rating: G

• Rotten Tomatoes Score: 96%

What was once a far-fetched sci-fi premise just keeps growing in plausibility. When "Gattaca" was released in 1997, Dolly the sheep had been cloned just one year earlier, so bio-hacking hijinks were at the top of everyone's mind. With later innovations like CRISPR, a genetically segregated human society like the world of this stylish art-deco thriller is suddenly feasible. 

In "Gattaca," Ethan Hawke plays an aspiring astronaut who borrows the genetic identity of an elite (Jude Law) to reach the stars. Before he can launch, however, an inconvenient murder brings extra scrutiny and means that he must face must down his biologically superior brother. "Gattaca" is a classic of the individual-versus-dystopian-oppression genre as it vividly imagines the cost of a world where DNA is destiny.

• Starring: Ethan Hawke, Uma Thurman, Jude Law

• Director: Andrew Niccol

• Year: 1997

• Runtime: 112 minutes

• Rating: PG-13

• Rotten Tomatoes Score: 81%

The Guardians of the Galaxy are a close-knit team both on camera and off of it. After fans launched a campaign to boot Chris Pratt from the MCU, making assumptions about the actor's religious beliefs — which the star himself has never explicitly shared — director James Gunn jumped to his defense. Gunn, of course, was briefly fired from the franchise himself over some old, off-color tweets, and the "Guardians" cast similarly rallied behind him in the aftermath. 

That's somewhat ironic, as Gunn's irreverence is what has made him the most reliably ribald director in Marvel's stable — and DC's, too ("The Suicide Squad" and "Peacemaker" also stem from the auteur's twisted mind). Still, that sense of found family translates to the final production. "Guardians of the Galaxy" is full of '70s flair, including a great vintage soundtrack. The lighter tone helps ease the visuals' inherent silliness, and totally works for this colorful crew of space-faring heroes. This is a Disney product that grown kids can enjoy, too.

• Starring: Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, Dave Bautista

• Director: James Gunn

• Year: 2014

• Runtime: 121 minutes

• Rating: PG-13

• Rotten Tomatoes Score: 92%

"High Life" seems like a space thriller, but it's French — very French — so it's arty and ponderous, but does not deign to be beautiful. The sets and cinematography are ugly, but so is the situation trapping our space-faring friends. Robert Pattinson plays a convicted killer in a dystopian future who is sentenced to be a part of a human experiment in space. The con-air crew turns on each other as their situation comes to light, but not to thrill the audience. This is a film about the human need for choice and autonomy, even in the face of annihilation. Claire Denis' strange and often grotesque film will make more sense if you watch it with that in mind.

• Starring: Robert Pattinson, Juliette Binoche, André Benjamin

• Director: Claire Denis

• Year: 2018

• Runtime: 110 minutes

• Rating: R

• Rotten Tomatoes Score: 82%

The critical consensus around "Interstellar" seems to be that Christopher Nolan took a slightly clunky kitchen-sink approach to his otherwise stunning space movie. More charitably, it's the closest modern swing at the ambition of Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey." In the film, Matthew McConaughey plays a family man on a dying Earth who is picked to pilot a last-ditch mission to find a backup planet. The physics of space travel give Nolan the opportunity to further flesh out his favorite theme: time. 

It's true that "Interstellar" has an unfortunate monologue by Anne Hathaway in which she just straight-up explains one of the film's major themes, but otherwise, this is a masterful work. Nolan's poetic yet epic filmmaking style perfectly collides with the mind-bending paradoxes of space-time.

• Starring: Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain

• Director: Christopher Nolan

• Year: 2014

• Runtime: 169 minutes

• Rating: PG-13

• Rotten Tomatoes Score: 73%

If "The Martian" feels more thoughtful and methodical than any previous stranded-in-space movie, that's because it absolutely is. Andy Weir's sci-fi novel started out as a self-published PDF that was available for free, and then sold for just $1 on Amazon. As its reputation grew, so did the plot. Weir is mostly interested in well-researched and scientifically plausible ideas about surviving in space, and Ridley Scott brought that vision to the big screen with fidelity. If Elon Musk's Mars mission ever actually takes off and the harshness of space begins to encroach on human lives, we can only hope an astronaut like Mark Watney is around to "science the s*** out of this."

• Starring: Matt Damon, Jessica Chastain, Kristen Wiig

• Director: Ridley Scott

• Year: 2015

• Runtime: 132 minutes

• Rating: PG-13

• Rotten Tomatoes Score: 91%

In "Mr. Nobody," Jared Leto plays the last living mortal. He's extremely old and suffering from amnesia as he bounces through time, waking up in his own body at different points in his life, unclear how he got there or even who exactly he is. This is an incredibly ambitious effort from auteur Jaco Van Dormael that's interested in both pop-physics-inspired philosophy and the non-linear storytelling fad that was popular in 2009. To that end, the film is cut like a disorienting montage and doesn't make complete sense, but maybe that's how space-time works without human memory to piece it all together.

• Starring: Jared Leto, Sarah Polley, Diane Kruger

• Director: Jaco Van Dormael

• Year: 2009

• Runtime: 141 minutes

• Rating: R

• Rotten Tomatoes Score: 68%

If you grew up on '80s and '90s movies, you're forgiven for thinking that exposure to outer space makes your face explode. "Outland" also hails from an era when permanent commercial space mining must have felt inevitable, as it borrows the dingy set designs from "Alien" to stage an action-oriented thriller. Sean Connery plays a security marshal on a Martian mining colony who discovers that a drug is circulating that increases productivity, but that also causes horrifying accidents. The company wants him to look the other way and his family wants him home, but he's decided to make a stand. This isn't a metaphorically deep space movie, but "Outland" is a good reminder that model miniatures and meticulous sets make the best sci-fi movie settings.

• Starring: Sean Connery, Peter Boyle, Frances Sternhagen

• Director: Peter Hyams

• Year: 1981

• Runtime: 109 minutes

• Rating: R

• Rotten Tomatoes Score: 56%

"Pitch Black" is what sold studios on Vin Diesel, and I'd argue that this critically underrated and intensely suspenseful sci-fi gem remains the brawny action star's best film — apologies to fans of those car movies. Here, Diesel plays Riddick, a muscle-bound badass on a prison transport ship who's heading off to do some hard time. He has surgically-enhanced eyes that make him look super cool, but that also let him see in the dark. That comes in very handy when the ship crashes on a mysterious planet full of screeching, winged monsters that only come out at night.

• Starring: Radha Mitchell, Vin Diesel, Cole Hauser

• Director: David Twohy

• Year: 2000

• Runtime: 108 minutes

• Rating: R

• Rotten Tomatoes Score: 59%

Director Ridley Scott has admitted that he missed the mark with "Prometheus," echoing some of the audiences' and critics' sentiments about this 2012 prequel to his 1979 sci-fi masterpiece, "Alien." It feels like it's time for some backlash to the backlash, though, because "Prometheus" is also full of big ideas, great visuals, and even better performances, like Michael Fassbender's turn as one of the franchise's notoriously untrustworthy white-blooded androids. "Prometheus" doesn't just want to backfill details about those killer aliens, but about the human race, too. Maybe this creature feature bites off more than a monster movie can chew, but we ought to applaud Hollywood any time it goes big and tries to steal fire from the gods.

• Starring: Noomi Rapace, Michael Fassbender, Charlize Theron

• Director: Ridley Scott

• Year: 2012

• Runtime: 123 minutes

• Rating: R

• Rotten Tomatoes Score: 73%

Based on the book by Tom Wolf, "The Right Stuff" is the incredible true story of the daredevils who became NASA's first astronauts. This three-plus-hour space film eventually gets into orbit, but the best section is the lengthy opening act, which follows a group of future astronauts working as test pilots at an air base in California. A quarter of these men were killed as they pushed the limits of physics. During an unfathomable stretch in 1952, seven pilots a month were lost as these fearless flyers broke first the barrier, and then the very grasp of Earth itself. "The Right Stuff" is a moving and exciting tribute to a kind of bravery you have to see to believe.

• Starring: Sam Shepard, Scott Glenn, Ed Harris

• Director: Phillip Kaufman

• Year: 1983

• Runtime: 193 minutes

• Rating: PG

• Rotten Tomatoes Score: 96%

'70s sci-fi movies could be their own genre: the shaggy mullets, the mid-century sets, and the costumes that fluctuate between leisure-style jumpsuits and hippy-commune sacks of cloth. The best feature of this era, though, was the model miniatures, which remain way more convincing than CG spaceships. "Silent Running" doesn't have the realistic, motivated lighting of films made later in the decade like "Alien" or "Star Wars," but it does feature familiarly charming robots. 

Inside a model of a base sits a botanist played by Bruce Dern. Earth has become uninhabitable, and he's the only remaining environmentalist. When he's ordered to destroy his greenhouse ark, Dern and his robot besties become the last tree-huggers in the galaxy.

• Starring: Bruce Dern, Cliff Potts, Ron Rifkin

• Director: Douglas Trumbull

• Year: 1972

• Runtime: 89 minutes

• Rating: G

• Rotten Tomatoes Score: 72%

Let's hear it for the old guys. The sheer longevity of Clint Eastwood's career has led him into a heretofore unknown genre: the nonagenarian adventure. Well into his 90s, Eastwood was still making action-oriented movies starring himself; 2021's "Cry Macho" is hard to watch, as Eastwood shuffles around chasing a rooster in a plodding western. However, way back in the year 2000, a spry 70-year-old Eastwood played Frank Corvin, a former test pilot who missed his chance to go to space when early NASA replaced his team with chimps. When an aging satellite of his own design needs repairs, Corvin insists on getting the old band back together. These crotchety rocketeers are feeling no pain at zero Gs. 

• Starring: Clint Eastwood, Tommy Lee Jones, Donald Sutherland

• Director: Clint Eastwood

• Year: 2000

• Runtime: 130 minutes

• Rating: PG-13

• Rotten Tomatoes Score: 79%

During the early years of the Cold War, the Soviet Union was doing a lot of winning in space. Sputnik 1, the first satellite to orbit Earth, was a total coup. A nuclear-armed Russia was flying over U.S. soil and there wasn't anything NASA or the Pentagon could do about it. 

"Sputnik" has almost nothing to do with this bit of regional pride, other than being set in the later Cold War of 1983. In the film, two astronauts fall to Earth, but one has brought something back. There's a creature in the hero's body, and it only comes out at night. 

• Starring: Pyotr Fyodorov, Oksana Akinshina, Fedor Bondarchuk

• Director: Egor Abramenko

• Year: 2000

• Runtime: 107 minutes

• Rating: NR

• Rotten Tomatoes Score: 88%

Captain Kirk is a little like Superman in that he has to be distanced from his powers to get the plot going. Appropriately, when Chris Pine's Kirk violates the Prime Directive in "Star Trek: Into Darkness" and interferes with an alien society, he loses his command. Fear not, as a young Khan emerges (Benedict Cumberbatch) and Kirk is reinstated. 

Two scenes in this film really stand out. Kirk and Khan do a space jump between ships, and it's one of the best green screen stunts you'll see. The other is Spock's hand-to-hand showdown with the super-abled Khan, once again proving Vulcan supremacy. J.J. Abrams really lands what his likely last turn in the captain's chair of this franchise. 

• Starring: Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Karl Urban

• Director: J.J. Abrams

• Year: 2013

• Runtime: 132 minutes

• Rating: PG-13

• Rotten Tomatoes Score: 84%

As mad as we all were at J.J. Abrams for wantonly wasting our time with years of red herrings that went nowhere on "Lost," the man has a Midas touch for retro sci-fi vibes, and his 2009 reboot of the "Star Trek" franchise is a stellar explosion of anamorphic lens flares and nostalgia. It's also arguably the best movie in the franchise. Chris Pine is the only actor of his generation who could've pulled off the cocksure moxie of a young Captain James T. Kirk. The plot includes some time travel gimmicks to revive Leonard Nimoy as Spock, but really this is a USS Enterprise origin story that serves die-hard Trekkies and newer recruits alike.

• Starring: Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Leonard Nimoy

• Director: J.J. Abrams

• Year: 2009

• Runtime: 126 minutes

• Rating: PG-13

• Rotten Tomatoes Score: 94%

King of the sci-fi reboot J.J. Abrams strikes again here with "Star Wars: The Force Awakens." Abrams was the obvious choice to fix the franchise after George Lucas' dopey digital prequels. The ironic thing is those Lucas films had little of the look that made his original trilogy great. Abrams revived the use of real sets (when possible) and of course, leaned into his love of vintage widescreen lenses. "Star Wars" regained a cool just by looking like itself again. Add some ok new characters and the sheen of updated CG blending seamlessly with practical FX and this long moribund franchise once again conquered the galaxy.

* Starring: Daisy Ridley, Oscar Isaac, John Boyega

* Director: J.J. Abrams

* Year: 2015

* Runtime: 136 minutes

* Rating: PG-13

* Rotten Tomatoes Score: 93

"Sunshine" is really the only good space movie focused on the unfathomable raw power of our solar system's star. Acclaimed "Slumdog Millionaire" director Danny Boyle has made better films, but he brings his signature kinetic energy to this extremely thermal story about a crew that's sent to revive a dying sun and save Earth from turning into a lifeless ball of ice. As a series of calamities pile up, the film starts to feel like an argument for letting robots handle crucial space missions. Human error gives way to paranoia and moral dilemmas as the crew members weigh their lives against the future of humanity. It's familiar territory, but "Sunshine" has something more sinister in store, too.

• Starring: Cillian Murphy, Chris Evans, Rose Byrne

• Director: Danny Boyle

• Year: 2007

• Runtime: 107 minutes

• Rating: R

• Rotten Tomatoes Score: 76%

Do yourself a favor and binge all of Paul Verhoeven's movies. "Total Recall" is definitely the sci-fi auteur's best film — he brings his usual love of gross-out gags to this thrilling Mars mystery adventure. Arnold Schwarzenegger plays an ordinary construction worker who discovers a secret identity as an off-world super-spy. His amnesia-driven investigation takes him to the heart of a conspiracy to control Mars, and gives Arnold a great chance to rack up a body count and deliver some of the best one-liners of his career. "Total Recall" received a remake starring Colin Farrell in 2012, which was both bad and also totally superfluous; the original is still totally radical.

• Starring: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Rachel Ticotin, Sharon Stone

• Director: Paul Verhoeven

• Year: 1990

• Runtime: 113 minutes

• Rating: R

• Rotten Tomatoes Score: 82%

"2001" is the best sci-fi film ever made, unless you don't like arty ruminations with ambiguous conclusions. Stanley Kubrick is just as methodical with Newtonian physics in this visual spectacular as he is with the classic story that pits man (a team of astronauts investigating an alien object in space) against machine (a malevolent AI named HAL that turns on its human masters). Kubrick actually explained this film's famously enigmatic ending in lost footage that was unearthed in 2018. It's more literal than you'd expect, but if you just accept that alien minds are behind that strange obelisk, the trippy conclusion makes much more sense.

• Starring: Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood, William Sylvester

• Director: Stanley Kubrick

• Year: 1968

• Runtime: 139 minutes

• Rating: G

• Rotten Tomatoes Score: 92%