The Best Sci-Fi Movie of Each Year Since 1998

We’re celebrating 25 years of Rotten Tomatoes with a look back on some of the most celebrated movies of each year, since 1998! Previously we took a stab at the horror genre, drew up an extensive guide to animation, and now we’re hitting warp speed with science-fiction. To choose the best sci-fi film of each year, we’re applying our recommendation formula, a calculation based on the Tomatometer and Audience Score that prioritizes titles that stood out among critics and fans, combined with a pinch of curatorial love from our editors.

The list begins in 1998 with Dark City, the moody, rain-drenched noir from director Alex Proyas. In a way, City feels like a precursor to the following year’s best: The Matrix (both movies even use some of the same sets). The Wachowskis’ game-changing mind-bender was an enigma that became a cultural revelation when released in 1999, and its themes and iconography resonate today. A sequel, Matrix Reloaded, appears as the most-recommended sci-fi movie of 2003. Frequency, which is featured after The Matrix, was just fine for most critics, but its high Audience Score puts it over the top for the year 2000. Should note here that superhero movies were not considered for this list. Maybe expect its own separate article exploration in the near future?

Moving on, sci-fi takes a chilling turn with the fatalistic indie cult classic Donnie Darko, and Steven Spielberg‘s post-9/11, surveillance-state missive Minority Report, based on the Philip K. Dick short story. The genre continued to grow as a playground for auteurs during most of the 2000s with some career-best works from Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), Joss Whedon (Serenity), Alfonso Cuaron (Children of Men), and Danny Boyle (Sunshine).

In tandem with the rise of the superhero, sci-fi entered its blockbuster and fan-driven era with the viral Cloverfield, produced by J.J. Abrams, who would go on to reboot Star Trek. As a Dark Knight follow-up, Inception cemented Christopher Nolan as one of few elite directors whose name alone will get audiences into theaters, with that film creating the appetite for more explosive puzzlers like Source Code, Looper, and Edge of Tomorrow.

Bouncing forward into the later 2010s, War for the Planet of the Apes (2017) was a stunning caper to the little reboot trilogy that could. And the highest-recommended sci-fi movies from 2018-2020 (Upgrade, The Vast of Night, and Sputnik) demonstrates the genre maxim of never letting small budgets get in the way of big imagination.

And it was with 2013’s Gravity that sci-fi became a regular fixture in the Oscar Best Pictures nominations inner-circle. There was The Martian, Arrival, and Dune, before Everything Everywhere All At Once became the first science-fiction movie to win it all at the 2023 ceremony.