The 10 Best Space Movies to Watch After ‘Alien: Romulus’

If there’s one thing you need to know about me, it’s that I am guaranteed to see every movie in the Aliens franchise. During a Covid lockdown fugue, I watched all four of the original quadrilogy (even the extremely French-feeling Alien: Resurrection, directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet of Amelie fame). I’ve also seen Prometheus in theaters because I simply could not get enough of Michael Fassbender’s evil android, David, and the comparatively nice android, Walter, he plays in the sequel, Alien: Covenant. Covenant was also huge for me because James Franco explodes in the first five minutes of the film.

And now, with the series’ latest entry, Alien: Romulus, dropping this month, you know I’ll be there on opening night looking to catalog all the silly retcons they’ve been doing ever since John Hurt had his date with a chest-burster all those years ago in Alien.

However, as much as I adore Ridley Scott’s long-running sci-fi series, it would be a disservice to state that the definitive dread-in-space pantheon begins and ends with Aliens. There are tons of movies that channel the fear of isolation that only deep space can provide, and I’ve outlined a number of my favorites here.

I had one major criterion for entry: Each movie must posit space not as a vector for discovery and exploration, but rather as an unrelentingly hostile obstacle that can’t be bargained with. Basically, if a movie insists that going to space is an awful mistake and not a good idea, there’s a good chance it’s going on this list.

Eagle-eyed readers may notice what seems like a glaring omission: Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Ultimately, I felt its inclusion would be a little bit of a “no duh.” Instead, I hope you discover another movie you haven’t heard of. Not to say 2001 isn’t astounding. They show it in 70mm in Chicago basically every year—go see it!

James Gray is kind of the king of daddy-issues movies, and his 2019 space film starring Brad Pitt doesn’t help him beat the allegations. Pitt stars as Roy McBride, an 22nd-century astronaut who travels to Neptune by way of the moon and Mars to investigate a series of mysterious power surges emanating from the “Lima Project,” a space station built to find intelligent life in the universe. The twist? The station was led by McBride’s estranged father Clifford (Tommy Lee Jones).

Most notable for its hard sci-fi leanings, Ad Astra does feature some fun set pieces. One is an altercation with moon-buggy-riding outlaw pirates. The other is the scariest depiction of a baboon in sci-fi film history.

Perennial favorite schlock auteur Paul W.S. Anderson directs this sci-fi horror movie, which stars Laurence Fishburne, Sam Neill, and Kathleen Quinlan as the crew of the Lewis and Clark, who bite off more than they can chew when they intercept a distress signal from the titular and derelict ship the Event Horizon. The good news is that the Event Horizon has an experimental gravity drive for faster-than-light travel, but the bad news is that it achieves FTL jumps by folding space time to cross into a hell dimension (a la Hellraiser). I guess it’s true what they say, though: You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs!

Sam Rockwell stars as Samuel Bell, an astronaut stationed on the moon in this existential horror movie directed by David Bowie’s son, Duncan Jones. When Bell discovers he’s one of many clones his employer has been using to cut down on training costs for their helium-3 mining operation, he experiences something of an existential crisis—but then again, who wouldn’t? Only slightly marred by the inclusion of Kevin Spacey as the voice of the station’s AI, Moon features an impressive premise and cast that includes Matt Berry and Benedict Wong supporting.

George Clooney stars as Dr. Chris Kelvin, a psychologist who travels to a space station orbiting the planet Solaris in order to figure out why none of the crew members stationed there want to return home. When he arrives, he finds that the planet the station is orbiting has been manifesting memories of the crew members’ loved ones, including his own deceased wife, Rheya.

I know, I know—you were probably expecting me to recommend the Andrei Tarkovsky–directed version from 1972. And that one is great, but director Stephen Soderbergh wanted his version to be closer to the text of the 1961 novel it’s based on, and Soderbergh’s version also casts Jeremy Davies, who plays my absolute favorite third-tier villain in Justified. So I’m slightly biased.

Certified freak Robert Pattinson stars as Monte, a criminal whose death sentence requires him to work as a crew member on a spaceship being used to test if the Penrose Process can really be used to extract energy from a black hole and send it back to Earth. This one is sort of a grim, greasy watch for a few reasons and I can’t really say it’s an uplifting experience, but that’s largely intentional. Director and co-writer Claire Denis famously booted novelist Zadie Smith off the script collaboration because Smith wanted to see the convict-astronauts go home at the end of the movie, to which Denis replied, “What the fuck do you mean, going home?”

An early collaboration between John Carpenter and Alien screenwriter/Return of the Living Dead director Dan O’Bannon, Dark Star is a black comedy about the crew of the scout ship Dark Star, a rapidly decaying junk vessel armed with sentient thermonuclear torpedoes it uses to blow up any planet that stands in the way of mankind’s interstellar colonization efforts. However, the crew’s main objectives are mainly to keep themselves entertained, avoid falling victim to the ship’s numerous malfunctioning systems, and talk down Bomb No. 20 from prematurely detonating itself inside the ship—in that order.

Written by Alex Garland and directed by Danny Boyle, Sunshine follows a group of astronauts as they struggle to reignite our dying sun in 2057 using a giant bomb. Cillian Murphy stars as physicist Robert Capa, whose knowledge of the stellar bomb his ship carries makes him something of a VIP when it comes to stopping the world from falling into another ice age. Although Sunshine was a box office bomb, the film features an outrageously stacked cast: Michelle Yeoh, pre-MCU Chris Evans, Rose Byrne, Hiroyuki Sanada. It’s worth a watch almost purely based on that alone.

Based on a Swedish epic poem from 1956, Aniara stars Emelie Garbers as an unnamed woman who works as a “Mimarobe,” a sort of liaison between passengers on the titular spaceship and its AI, the Mima, which is designed to project lush, verdant views of life on Earth for interstellar travel. When the Aniara is transporting a group of passengers to Mars, it’s knocked irrevocably off course and into the deep dark of space, making the Mimarobe’s job especially important (and high-stress) as the passengers and crew seek some form of respite from their new reality.

ISS astronauts have a close encounter of the third kind with a virulent and hungry organism they find on Mars and inadvertently awaken with experimentation. Jake Gyllenhaal stars as Dr. David Jordan, the station’s medical officer, with Rebecca Ferguson and everyone’s favorite mobile phone spokesperson Ryan Reynolds supporting. Another fun fact about this film: It’s the second time Hiroyuki Sanada from Shogun has appeared on this list. This guy could simply not get enough of dying horribly in space during the 2000s and 2010s.

Folks, it’s Moonfall time. You might think that the sun has set on director Roland Emmerich’s particular brand of American Disaster Movie, but I politely refer you to this film. Here, Patrick Wilson stars as a disgraced astronaut who learns that the moon is hollow and its orbit is being destabilized by a murderous swarm of nanobots that destroyed humanity’s ancestor race billions of years ago. If you’ve made it this far into the list, you probably deserve a lighter one to go out on (especially after Aniara and High Life); this pick is about as light as it gets. Sure, the moon is threatening to destroy Earth, but at least it’s getting a little silly with it.