The Best Sci-Fi Movies You Can Stream on SYFY: From The Invisible Man to I, Robot

Stories are one of the few true magics. With the right words in the right order, you can evoke an emotion in your audience and influence the way they think. If you do that to enough people, you can shift the public consciousness and maybe even the course of the future. No genre is quite as good at that sort of narrative imagination as science fiction.

It’s there that we first envision future technologies and their potential consequences. Science fiction is a looking glass through which we can glimpse possible futures and attempt to chart the best possible course by either aiming toward them or avoiding their mistakes. It’s also just a lot of fun.

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We love science fiction so much that it’s not just our middle name, it’s the only name we’ve got. Check out some of our favorite possible futures, streaming now on SYFY.

VALERIAN AND THE CITY OF A THOUSAND PLANETS

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is a 2017 space opera from director Luc Besson (The Fifth Element). Based on the French sci-fi comics Valérian and Laureline by Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude Mézières, the movie takes place in the 28th century on what was once the International Space Station.

When the movie begins, the ISS is more or less as it actually exists in low-Earth orbit. Through a timelapse view, we see humanity adding modules to the station. Eventually, alien explorers arrive and add their own parts to the station, taking it from international to interstellar. Over time, the station becomes so big that it threatens the safety of the Earth itself and is moved into deep space. There, it becomes known as Alpha, a roving city populated by millions of aliens from thousands of planets.

The story focuses on two of the city’s inhabitants, Valerian (Dane DeHaan) and Laureline (Cara Delevingne), both United Human Federation soldiers who uncover a tragedy and cover-up that threatens the existence of an entire species.

THE INVISIBLE MAN (2020)

From 1931 through 1956, Universal Pictures released 41 movies in its classic monster series. The popular images of creatures from Dracula and the Wolfman to Frankenstein and the Mummy are defined in large part by those films. The Invisible Man is the result of science gone wrong.

In H.G. Wells’ novel and the 1933 film adaptation, the central character relies on chemistry to render himself invisible. The 2020 adaptation — directed by Leigh Whannell (Upgrade, Insidious: Chapter 3) and starring Elizabeth Moss (The Handmaid’s Tale) and Oliver Jackson-Cohen (The Haunting of Hill House) — replaces chemistry with advanced optics.

When Cecilia Kass (Moss) leaves her abusive partner Adrian Griffin (Jackson-Cohen), she thinks she’s finally free. That feeling is reinforced when Adrian is found dead, apparently of a self-inflicted injury. But when Cecilia starts suspecting an invisible presence in her home, there’s only one explanation. Adrian isn’t dead, and he’s bent on continuing his campaign of control until one or both of them are dead.

REALIVE

When a young and successful artist learns he has a terminal brain tumor, he makes the biggest, and last, gamble of his life. Instead of rolling the dice on treatment, he rolls the dice on technology and has his body frozen in cryostasis in the hope that he'll be resurrected when his body can be cured. Realive picks up 70 years in the future when he becomes the first person to be resurrected. It explores the question of what happens when you get exactly what you wanted, only to discover it isn't what you hoped.

HOVER

In the not-so-distant future, climate change has plunged North America into a persistent drought. As farmland shrinks and food production declines, the fate of humanity hangs in the balance. To make matters worse, a mysterious and fatal illness is driving a dramatic increase in assisted suicide. The only hope for humanity is the corporation Vastgrow, which not only provides seeds and farming equipment, but also the drones that are necessary for the production of a successful crop. Except that things in Hover's dystopian future aren't precisely as they seem, and the things you think will save you might actually be the things that do you in.

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NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD

You might be tempted to argue that Night of the Living Dead belongs on a horror, rather than science fiction list. To that, we say, “I mean... yeah, but also no.” There’s no arguing that zombies are scary, and that Night of the Living Dead holds a crucial position in their narrative evolution. But you can’t divorce the horror of the shambling dead from the weird and wacky science that creates them.

George Romero’s 1968 classic practically defined the modern zombie and influences everything from The Walking Dead to The Last of Us. While survivors hole up in an abandoned farmhouse, they secure themselves against the ravenous corpses at their door and listen to radio broadcasts about the developing global incident.

Scientists speculate that the strange behavior is a consequence of a downed space probe. On its way back from studying Venus, the probe exploded in the atmosphere over Earth, scattering its cosmic cargo far and wide. They might be spooky decaying monsters at the end of the day, but they are alien spooky decaying creatures. And they are very cool.

TRANSFORMERS: THE LAST KNIGHT

It’s hard not to love machines that turn into different kinds of machines and fight one another. Of course, each installment in the Transformers franchise can’t be the same as the last, they have to up the ante. Transformers: The Last Knight does that in spades.

Directed by Michael Bay and released in 2017, the fifth film in the live action series stars Mark Wahlberg, Josh Duhamel, Anthony Hopkins, and Stanley Tucci. The story builds on what came before but extends the mythos both in time and scope. The story stretches from the modern day, all the way back to 484 AD when Merlin (yes, that Merlin) encounters a group of Transformers secretly living on Earth. He enlists them to help King Arthur and his knights in their endeavors.

Humans, Autobots, Decepticons, and machines of every variety (even Grimlock and the rest of the dinobots get in on the action) are on the hunt for an ancient talisman that leads to Merlin’s staff. If it ends up in the wrong fleshy or metallic hands, it could spell the end for more than one world.

I, ROBOT

I, Robot takes us to a not-so-distant future where our hubris has outgrown our caution. It’s 2035 and advanced humanoid robots are everywhere. They take out our garbage and run our errands and do just about anything else we ask without complaint. Humanity is at the precipice of a wonderful new future filled with exploration and leisure while all of our needs are catered to by our machines.

They are, of course, much stronger than we are but we have nothing to worry about, thanks to the three laws of robotics. To paraphrase, they state that a robot cannot harm a human being or allow a human being to be harmed through inaction. They must do anything asked of them by a human, unless that action conflicts with the first law. And they must protect their own existence, unless doing so would conflict with one of the first two laws. Watertight, or so it seems.

When a controlling intelligence known as VIKI (Virtual Interactive Kinetic Intelligence) reinterprets the laws, she decides that the best way to protect humanity is to control them, even if that means some people have to die in the process. Enter Detective Del Spooner (Will Smith), the only man with the wherewithal and the skills to save us.

Looking for even more sci-fi films? Check out M3GAN and others, now streaming on Peacock.