By Joshua Tyler
| Published
In early 2020, the world shut down, and people were locked in their homes. For the next two years, most people would stay home. Our only form of release was whatever happened to be on streaming. However, simultaneously, Hollywood stopped producing new content.
New streaming movies were suddenly more valuable than ever. And amazing movies that should have gotten a theatrical release didn’t. Some of the best work in sci-fi was lost or overlooked, and others were overhyped beyond all reason.
Looking back now, these were the best Sci-Fi movies of the COVID era.
7. The Invisible Man | February 2020
The Invisible Man is the kind of movie where you exhale in a moment of release, only to realize you were holding your breath the entire time.
Cecelia, played by Elisabeth Moss, is trapped in an abusive marriage with rich tech visionary Adrian Griffin. When Adrian kills himself, she thinks her nightmare is over. Until she becomes convinced he faked his death, turned himself invisible, and continues to torment her. Cecelia’s friends don’t believe her, thinking she’s coming unhinged. We, however, know better. Adrian isolates her and makes everyone question her sanity.
Filled with more horror, more stress, director Leigh Whannell and Invisible Man cinematographer Stefan Duscio use wide shots full of negative space to create a creeping dread. Nothing in The Invisible Man looks as sinister as a still shot of vacant space. It’s a master class in escalating pressure.
The Invisible Man debuted in theaters only days before 2020’s initial COVID panic began, leading people to lock themselves in their homes, and far too many potential moviegoers missed it in theaters.
6. The Vast of Night | May 2020
Released at the peak of COVID terror in the summer of 2020, for those who saw it, The Vast of Night was a rare bright spot in the few and far between new releases showing up on streaming.
It’s a simple story in a simple place. The Vast of Night is set in a small 1950s New Mexico town. It follows a radio DJ named Everett (Jake Horowitz) and a local telephone switchboard operator named Faye (Sierra McCormic), as they encounter a strange signal and investigate its origins. The entire film takes place over a few hours, as the pair make phone calls and break into the local library looking for evidence, all while the entire town is busy attending a local high school basketball game.
The Vast of Night is the slowest of slow burns, comprised almost entirely of long sweeping camera movements and close-up shots with minimal editing cuts. Faye spends huge chunks of screen time working feverishly in front of her operator switchboard. When Everett takes a mysterious call, the entire screen goes black so the audience, like Everett, can fully focus on the words coming through from the other end.
There’s a payoff for everything at the end, but it’s the near-real-time experience of getting there that makes The Vast of Night a masterpiece. It isn’t for everyone, but for those with the needed focus and attention span, it’s one of the most engrossing sci-fi movie viewing experiences you can have at home alone in the dark.
5. Bill & Ted Face the Music | August 2020
Bill & Ted Face the Music had so much to live up to. Capping off a trilogy that promises to climax with a song that can unite the world and save reality.
Thankfully, Bill & Ted Face the Music knows the burden it has to carry and decides to use it to its advantage. Instead of placing the narrative stress on the plot, the film uses the framework of the plot to better explore where Bill S. Preston Esquire (Alex Winter) and Ted Theodore Logan (Keanu Reeves) are in their lives.
When the movie starts, our most bodacious protagonists are about to give up on their music careers. They’re then led on a quest through their own personal futures in an attempt to steal their reality-saving song from themselves.
Bill & Ted Face the Music is a fitting finale to the fan favorite series. It leaves the franchise with the kind of positivity and unity it always promised while reminding us all that the world is worth saving.
4. Greenland | December 2020
In Greenland, Gerard Butler plays John Garrity, an everyman trying to mend fences with his estranged wife, Allison, played by Morena Baccarin. Because every hero in every disaster movie always has an estranged wife. He also has a moppet of a son named Nathan.
When a comet with the decidedly ho-hum name of Clarke makes a beeline for Earth in what would be an extinction-level event, he has to find a way to get them to safety. That’s it. At a basic level, that’s the story. Making that work is, of course, much more difficult, and Gerard Butler’s John is thwarted at every turn.
Greenland delivers precisely the movie it promises to be. Big and booming, there’s plenty of bombastic thrills and brink-of-annihilation action, with just enough human connection to keep viewers engaged. It never veers from the disaster movie template, but everything it does, it does well, and Greenland should more than sate those looking to watch the world crumble on screen.
3. The Mitchells vs. the Machines | April 2021
The Mitchells vs. the Machines is one of the smartest and funniest family sci-fi animated films of the COVID era. It blends epic robot-apocalypse stakes with genuinely affecting family drama.
On the surface, The Mitchells vs. the Machines is flashy, bold, and hilarious. The dysfunctional Mitchell clan is stranded on a road trip when an AI uprising suddenly glitches their world. Beneath the mayhem lies a sharp emotional core and a pointed commentary on our digital dependency, right at the moment when the world was being forced into endless Zoom calls and screens.
Directors Mike Rianda and Jeff Rowe’s movie bursts with a vibrant visual style that’s equal parts comic-book energy and Pixar polish, yet grounded by the heart of their characters. The real genius here is in how Mitchells skewers our obsession with tech and control by celebrating human improv, glitches, and the beauty of real, imperfect connection.
The Mitchells vs. the Machines arrived on streaming in April 2021, just when a COVID-weary world needed it. It delivers a wildly inventive story of tech rebellion rooted in celebrating the idea that humans still matter most.
2. Free Guy | August 2021
Free Guy is a rare original IP that dodged the remake-reboot-recycle trap and gave us something fresh, funny, and sneakily profound.
At first glance, it’s just Ryan Reynolds being his charming self in a video game world. But beneath the surface, Free Guy tackles big sci-fi themes: AI consciousness, digital freedom, and the soul inside the simulation. It’s Tron meets The Truman Show, layered with modern commentary about our obsession with open-world escapism and the power structures that govern them.
Director Shawn Levy balances humor and heart with a visual style that’s bright and kinetic without ever feeling hollow. There’s real emotional weight behind Guy’s awakening, and Reynolds delivers a performance that’s more nuanced than people give him credit for. The film’s meta-take on gaming culture is sharp but never cynical, and its final act delivers the kind of crowd-pleasing catharsis audiences didn’t know they needed. Free Guy is one of a small handful of post-2000 blockbusters that actually feel new.
In a time when most sci-fi leaned dark and dystopian, Free Guy dared to be optimistic, and that hit differently after a year of lockdowns and existential dread in August of 2021, near the end of the COVID era.
1. Dune: Part One | October 2021
With COVID ending and people just beginning to get back into theaters, Dune could have been the first big thing to bring audiences back. But even in October of 2021, Warner Bros. was still uncertain about audiences’ willingness to group. So Dune received a simultaneous streaming and theatrical release.
The movie still made big money, but maybe it could have been even bigger, since Dune is first and foremost an immaculate spectacle, with cinematography that goes beyond breathtaking. Medieval imagery fights for attention against the endless, threatening stretches of sand that sweep their way across the otherworldly planet. Vaguely Catholic themes bleed through the cracks of hypnotizing battle scenes with an archaic, barbarically elegant aesthetic. Paul’s trance-like dream sequences with the Fremen are drenched in shades of burnt orange and broken into vision-like fractures.
Dune takes its time to revel in each moment and indulges itself to its fullest. There’s no rush for Dune to hurry its beauty. The sandworms that wriggle beneath the wind-sculpted desert are fantastic beasts, both terrifying and truly glorious at once. The film relies heavily on visual narrative and the means of action to propel the narrative forward, while accompanied by Hans Zimmer’s somber score. The use of telling the story at hand through physical direction and on-screen blocking invites, if not welcomes, personal interpretation of the plot.
Dune was and is an experience as much as it is a narrative, one that didn’t need words to explain itself. It’s appropriate, then, that the movie that signifies the end of the COVID era madness is also the best sci-fi film to survive it.
