John Cox

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Tagged sci-fi · everything

slate.com

Why Soylent Green Got 2022 So Wrong

A critic of science-and-society storytelling revisits Soylent Green on the 50th anniversary of its titular "future" year and argues the film's heavy-handed, dogmatic dystopianism actually undercuts its own message about overpopulation, corporate greed, and environmental collapse. He contrasts it unfavorably with Harry Harrison's more nuanced source novel Make Room! Make Room!, contending that preachy apocalyptic certainty tends to entrench existing beliefs rather than change minds, and champions ambiguous, conversation-opening sci-fi (Children of Men, Ex Machina) as a better model for grappling with real present-day crises like climate change and AI.

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comicbook.com

5 More Great Recent Sci-Fi Movies Nobody Talks About

Ranking of five underappreciated modern sci-fi films worth revisiting: Life, Colossal, James vs. His Future Self, Totally Killer, and The Endless, topping the list. It argues these titles deserve far more recognition than they get, having been overshadowed either by genre oversaturation, limited studio backing, or straight-to-streaming releases rather than any lack of quality. Each entry gets a short case for why it excels—from Life's effective horror execution to Colossal's blend of kaiju spectacle and personal drama to The Endless's unsettling low-budget craft—making the piece a handy watchlist for genre fans wanting picks beyond the usual 80s/90s nostalgia.

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Screen Rant

10 Best Sci-Fi Books Of The Last 10 Years

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www.giantfreakinrobot.com

Collider

The 10 Most Underrated Sci-Fi Mysteries of the 21st Century, Ranked

This article ranks ten underrated science fiction mystery films from the 21st century, from Gareth Edwards' *Monsters* at number ten to James Gray's *Ad Astra* at number one. Each entry includes a brief description of the film's plot, thematic concerns, and performances, explaining why these commercially overlooked or critically underseen films deserve recognition from sci-fi fans. The list spans from 2002 to 2019 and includes notable titles like *Equilibrium*, *The Butterfly Effect*, *Southland Tales*, and *Code 46*, positioning them as worthy alternatives to mainstream franchises that have dominated the genre.

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collider.com

10 Most Moving Sci-Fi Movies, Ranked

A Collider countdown ranks the ten most emotionally affecting sci-fi films ever made, arguing that the genre's real power lies not in spectacle but in intimate human stakes—grief, memory, love, and mortality. It moves from animated tearjerkers like WALL-E and quiet meditations like After Yang and Solaris through romance-tech hybrids like Her and Eternal Sunshine, landing on Arrival and Interstellar as the pinnacle examples of cerebral, heart-wrenching storytelling. The throughline is that the best sci-fi uses cosmic scale to sharpen, not dilute, deeply personal emotional truths.

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ComicBook.com

4 Time Travel Movies That No One Talks About, But Won't Break Your Brain From Science - ComicBook.com

This article recommends four underrated time-travel films that prioritize straightforward storytelling and emotional resonance over complex paradoxes and scientific explanations. The selections—Safety Not Guaranteed, Frequency, Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes, and The Fare—demonstrate that engaging time-travel narratives don't require elaborate mechanics or multiple timelines, but instead can explore character relationships and what people wish to change about their pasts.

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ComicBook.com

These 3 Upcoming Sci-Fi Books Have Us So Excited We Need an Adaptation (And One Is Already In The Works)

Three upcoming science fiction novels—*The Fist of Memory* by Wole Talabi, *Under Story* by Chloe Benjamin, and *Exit Party* by Emily St. John Mandel—are generating excitement for their potential as screen adaptations even before publication. *The Fist of Memory* combines hard sci-fi with a first-contact narrative featuring an assassin, witchdoctor, and astronomer racing to understand mysteriously silent alien spacecraft; *Under Story* is a character-driven love story set in Antarctica that explores parallel universes and second chances through the reunion of estranged scientists; and *Exit Party*, already in development as a television series with Emma Stone's production company attached, follows a woman navigating fractured timelines and doppelgangers in a post-collapse Los Angeles. All three exemplify how science fiction can tackle both grand concepts and intimate human stories in ways that translate compellingly across media.

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AV Club

The Dog Stars bites

Ridley Scott's adaptation of Peter Heller's post-apocalyptic novel follows a pilot named Hig who embarks on a cross-country journey after losing his dog, grappling with fundamental questions about whether to help strangers or prioritize survival through isolation. The film explores this moral tension through its characters—Hig advocates for human connection and community while his companions embrace self-preservation and suspicion—but undermines its own themes through uneven execution, cheap special effects, and a truncated final act. Scott's direction feels disengaged, Jacob Elordi's performance is flat and emotionally withdrawn, and the film lapses into troubling stereotypes when depicting marauders, making it one of Scott's most disappointing misfires.

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screenrant.com

8 Near-Perfect Time Loop Movies That Do Something Different

A rundown of eight time-loop films that twist the familiar Groundhog Day formula in distinct ways: The Endless traps each character in their own separate, coexisting loop as a metaphor for nostalgia's pull; Palm Springs and Happy Death Day complicate the trope with a community of loopers and a mortal, unmasking-the-killer stakes clock, respectively; Donnie Darko and The Matrix Reloaded obscure or truncate the loop's mechanics entirely; and Timecrimes, Primer, and Run Lola Run push the concept toward slasher paradox, hard-science realism, and kinetic videogame-like momentum. Worth keeping as a quick reference for how differently the subgenre can handle repetition, memory, and stakes beyond the standard "same day, personal growth" template.

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screenrant.com

Netflix's The Imperfects: A Dark Superhero Show Cancelled Too Soon

This piece makes the case for The Imperfects, a canceled-too-soon Netflix supernatural drama about three people—a banshee, a chupacabra, and a succubus—created by an experimental gene therapy gone wrong, who band together to hunt down the scientist responsible. It frames the show as a horror-tinged hybrid of The Boys and The Umbrella Academy, all wrapped into a single bingeable 10-episode season that ended on an unresolved cliffhanger. The real hook, though, is that it was Iñaki Godoy's breakout English-language role before he landed Luffy in One Piece, making the show a notable footnote in the career of one of Netflix's current biggest stars.

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inews.co.uk

The 14 best dystopian novels of all time

A rundown roster of essential dystopian fiction, framed by The Handmaid's Tale and its sequel The Testaments as touchstones, tracing the genre from Zamyatin's We and Kafka's The Trial through Cold War-era and postmodern entries to recent works like Station Eleven, Submission and Little Eyes. Each brief entry sketches the premise and argues for why the book endures or unsettles, whether through Ballard's collapsing tower block, McCarthy's scorched-earth father-son journey, or Alderman's gender-power reversal. Worth keeping as a ready-made syllabus of the genre's key preoccupations — totalitarianism, technology, ecological collapse, and patriarchy — spanning a century of imagined catastrophe.

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collider.com

10 Sci-Fi Books That Are Better Than 'Dune'

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www.cbr.com

6 Classic Movies Everyone Forgot Are Actually Perfect

This piece identifies six classic films that have faded from modern audiences' collective memory despite their quality: The Iron Giant, From Russia With Love, Frantic, Capricorn One, Sorcerer, and Once Upon a Time in the West. For each film, the article briefly describes the plot and explains the specific circumstances—box office failure, overshadowing by contemporaries, or shifting genre popularity—that caused it to be overlooked or forgotten. The underlying argument is that contemporary moviegoers should seek out these forgotten masterpieces as a corrective to nostalgia for older cinema and as alternatives to endlessly debating the same canonical favorites.

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Netflix Is Streaming An Overlooked British Sci-Fi Series With A Perfect Rotten Tomatoes Score

"The Lazarus Project," a British sci-fi series now on Netflix, follows George as he discovers he's part of a secret organization that rewinds time to prevent extinction-level catastrophes, forcing him and others to repeatedly relive trauma and make impossible choices. The show distinguishes itself by grounding its high-concept premise in character-driven storytelling and emotional consequences rather than relying on CGI spectacle or genre clichés. Though canceled after season two with no renewal prospects, it holds a perfect 100% on Rotten Tomatoes and represents the kind of ambitious, smart sci-fi that rivals prestige offerings on competing platforms.

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www.nytimes.com

Five Science Fiction Movies to Stream Now

"Significant Other" is a sci-fi horror hybrid about a couple whose backpacking trip in Oregon goes catastrophically wrong after a mysterious object falls from the sky, generating dread through atmospheric filmmaking rather than jump scares while exploring themes of intimacy and deception. "Infinity Pool" follows a blocked writer on vacation who escapes execution by having a clone created and executed instead, then descends into hedonistic depravity with wealthy tourists who exploit the loophole, satirizing how the rich can literally buy their way out of consequences. "Costa Brava, Lebanon" depicts a self-sufficient family's isolation shattered when a landfill is planned next to their compound, using their fragmentation as a metaphor for environmental collapse and societal breakdown.

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www.inverse.com

15 Years Ago, a Visionary Director Made a Shocking Dystopian Sci-Fi Movie That Was Ahead of Its Time

Alex Rivera's 2008 science fiction film *Sleep Dealer* imagines a dystopian near-future where a sealed U.S.-Mexico border no longer stops American exploitation of Mexican labor—instead, workers have nodes implanted in their bodies to remotely control robots performing jobs in the U.S. while their physical bodies remain in Mexico, drained of energy in networked factories. The film follows Memo, a young man who journeys to Tijuana after a drone strike kills his father, only to discover that even this technological form of cross-border employment offers no escape from dehumanization and the hollow promise of the American Dream. Rivera uses practical effects and modest cinematography to explore how systems of oppression manipulate even marginalized people into enforcing them, while ultimately suggesting that connection to the land and solidarity against common enemies might offer resistance to this new world order.

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www.inverse.com

The oral history of 12 Monkeys, Terry Gilliam's time travel masterpiece

Based on the French experimental film *La Jetée*, screenwriters David and Janet Peoples, along with producer Charles Roven and director Terry Gilliam, crafted *12 Monkeys* as an ambitious, deliberately confusing time-travel narrative that studios initially deemed unfilmable—yet it became a critical and commercial success, grossing $168.8 million worldwide on a $30 million budget. The piece chronicles the film's chaotic production through interviews with key collaborators, revealing how Gilliam assembled Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt (both of whom took pay cuts for the opportunity), navigated treacherous filming locations including an asbestos-laden power plant and haunted penitentiary, and survived creative conflicts and production disasters to deliver a film that rewarded repeated viewing in ways unusual for mainstream cinema.

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www.giantfreakinrobot.com

The 10 Netflix Sci-Fi Series With A 100% Rotten Tomatoes Score

This article lists 11 science fiction shows across Netflix and other platforms that have achieved near-universal acclaim (100% ratings on review aggregators), ranging from the comedy of Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Return to prestige animated dramas like Scavengers Reign and Pluto. Each entry briefly explains the show's core premise and why it stands out—whether through innovative time-travel mechanics in Travelers, thought-provoking themes about AI and technology in Osmosis and Pantheon, or character-driven storytelling in Cyberpunk: Edgerunners. The recommendations span different formats and genres within science fiction, from anthology series to animated dramas, all positioned as shows that transcend typical sci-fi fandom gatekeeping by appealing broadly.

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