The 6 Best Science Fantasy Movies Released Since 2010, Ranked

Image via Warner Bros. Pictures Published Sep 21, 2026, 7:21 AM EDT Sign in to your Collider account A science fantasy movie can have all the spaceships and cloned bodies in the universe, but the stuff that actually stays with you is always much smaller. It is the human stuff. A parent trying to protect their family, or an old hero trying to live with their own failures. The best modern films in this genre treat their massive scale like a pressure cooker for the characters. You expect massive explosions, but the most important moments always come down to awkward conversations and personal choices that cannot be undone. These six movies absolutely nail that balance, so let's break down exactly how they pull it off. 6 'Avatar: The Way of Water' (2022) Image via 20th Century Studios Avatar: The Way of Water gets its emotional charge from making Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) feel helpless in a world he once seemed to understand. He has built a life in the forest, raised children, led a clan, and settled into the daily rhythm of family. Everything shatters the second the Sky People return with recombinant avatars carrying the memories of dead soldiers. As a result, the safest thing Jake can do is leave everything familiar behind. That is where the movie becomes more affecting than people give it credit for. The Sully family’s move from the forest canopy to the open ocean feels huge because the children are visibly out of place. They gasp, kick awkwardly, fail to hold their breath, and look painfully small beside the reef clan’s effortless grace. At first glance, the ocean scenes just look gorgeous. But honestly, what really hooks you is how physical it all feels. You can practically feel the water on their skin, the panic of holding their breath, and the vibe of learning to move with the sea creatures. The whole movie eventually ditches the massive 'save the planet' mission. It just becomes about saving one family. 5 'Guardians of the Galaxy' (2014) Image via Marvel Studios Guardians of the Galaxy enters like the exact opposite of noble space fantasy. The story starts with Peter Quill (Chris Pratt), who is a scavenger dancing through a ruined alien temple with a Walkman, stealing an orb like this is just another petty job. That ridiculous contrast is still the movie’s secret weapon. On the surface, he acts like a charming rogue, but everything about him is built around avoidance, such as the music, the jokes, the flirting, and the refusal to sit still with grief. Once the bounty hits, the movie starts throwing broken people into each other at full speed. Gamora (Zoe Saldana), Rocket (Bradley Cooper), Groot (Vin Diesel), Drax (Dave Bautista), and Quill spend half the time shoving, insulting, side-eyeing, and threatening each other. They are a total disaster. It takes a while before they become anything close to a team. The space-prison breakout is the perfect expression of that chaos. There is no clean heroism here. Just improvised violence, bad planning, and weird trust forming under pressure. Don't get me wrong, the cosmic plot is massive, but underneath it all, these losers are lonely in very specific ways. And weirdly enough, that is exactly why they somehow become a family, completely against their own instincts. 4 'Star Wars: Episode VIII - The Last Jedi' (2017) Image via Lucasfilm Star Wars: Episode VIII - The Last Jedi is the rare franchise film brave enough to stare directly at its own legend. It follows Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill), who has become the story everyone else tells about him, and the man himself can barely stand the weight of it. On Ahch-To, he is tired, bitter, soaked by island rain, and committed to disappearing. Then Rey (Daisy Ridley) arrives with the lightsaber, the symbol, and the demand. She expects the impossible. She wants him to become “Luke Skywalker” again. The toss over the shoulder is still a brilliant shock because it announces the film’s real subject immediately. This story cares less about worshiping heroism than examining what happens when a hero survives long enough to hate the myth built around him. You can literally see it in the performance. Hamill’s slumped posture, his avoidance, his irritation with Rey, and his shame over Ben Solo (Adam Driver) make Luke feel painfully human. But despite all that baggage, he eventually finds a way forward that doesn't erase his mistakes. That is exactly why taking that stand on the salt flats is a quiet, defiant mic drop. It is just an exhausted legend choosing hope entirely on his own terms. 3 'Poor Things' (2023) Image via Searchlight Pictures Poor Things turns a coming-of-age story into something strange, funny, grotesque, and completely liberating. Bella Baxter (Emma Stone) begins inside Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe)'s controlled home, awkwardly navigating the rooms while she tries to figure out how her own limbs work. Since she is basically starting from zero, her stiff walk, blunt speech, appetite, curiosity, and total lack of social embarrassment make every early scene feel alive with discovery. She is watched, studied, guided, and contained. But she is never truly owned. The men around her just assume she is. The film snaps open once Bella leaves that monochrome world. Color floods in almost rudely, and suddenly she wants food, sex, language, travel, danger, cruelty, politics, mistakes, pleasure, and knowledge. Her body changes with her mind. That clunky Frankenstein walk smooths out into total control. She goes from being a sheltered science project to a real person. And, she is absolutely done apologizing. Seriously, that constant leveling-up is exactly why the movie hits so hard. It just keeps outgrowing its own setup. After chewing through enough of the world, she finally dictates what kind of person she is going to be. 2 'Everything Everywhere All at Once' (2022) Image via A24 Everything Everywhere All at Once starts with the least glamorous crisis imaginable. Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh) just wants to survive an IRS audit. She is exhausted, irritated, behind on paperwork, worried about her father, distant from her husband, and unable to talk to her daughter without turning love into criticism. Then Waymond (Ke Huy Quan)'s body suddenly becomes someone else’s, an earpiece appears, and the dull office building starts cracking open into a multiverse. The movie’s chaos is funny, but the reason it actually wrecks you is Evelyn’s face. She is a woman whose brain is already overloaded before reality starts splintering. Every absurd action, every fight, every alternate life, every ridiculous jump only matters because Evelyn keeps seeing versions of herself that made different choices. The IRS desk clutter becoming a martial-arts battlefield is great, but Joy (Stephanie Hsu)'s pain is the anchor. No matter how weird things get with the bagel, the rocks, the laundromat, the taxes, and the reconciliation. All of it just comes down to a mother finally choosing empathy. She lets go. 1 'Dune: Part Two' (2024) Image via Warner Bros. Pictures Dune: Part Two is the modern science fantasy epic that every other movie in the genre now has to survive being compared to. The plot kicks off with Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) in the deep desert as a displaced royal heir trying to learn Fremen ways without fully surrendering to the role waiting for him. Despite his best efforts to just blend in, he watches, listens, trains, fails, adapts, and tries to stay human while everyone around him keeps turning his survival into proof of prophecy. That gradual shift is what makes the film terrifying. Paul’s transformation is a slow burn. Instead of a sudden change, the sand, silence, rituals, and religious expectation are allowed to tighten around him scene by scene. That tension peaks during his first sandworm ride, which is completely overwhelming just because of how physical it feels before it ever becomes symbolic. It grounds you in the thumper pounding, the worm rising, and Paul fighting to stay attached under the desert sun. Then his body language changes. The hesitant student becomes a commander, and the young man terrified of a holy war suddenly starts using belief as a weapon. He becomes the myth. Once he actually starts shouting orders and seizing power, the awe has completely curdled into dread. The film is inevitably magnificent because its beauty is inseparable from the horror of watching Paul become exactly what he feared.