The two standout science-fiction films of 2025

Some ideas are so convincing, so intuitive, that we would rather recycle them than take them apart to explore them. So, in 1950, Isaac Asimov turned a few mystery stories into a diabolical Agatha Christie science fiction novel set in space, Me, Robot, while in 1968, Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey setting the bar high for films about (or at least containing) artificial intelligence. There, from the point of view of ideas, the history of robots in cinema begins to repeat itself in an endless loop.

This year, The Electric State told a story about a robot rebellion, M3gan2.0 showed that you can’t keep a good killer robot down and Companion took the femmebot’s point of view to give us a decent adult-themed Asimov pastiche.

All three played with the usual notions around free will and indulged in questions about when to treat a machine like a person. I suspect Gerard Johnstone M3gan2.0 This was the most fun to work on, as the rubber-bone robot babysitter of 2023 returns from the dead (well, the save disk) to save the world from her older sister, the killbot Am3lia. The storyline is a mess, but the gags, genre callbacks, and jump scares are justification enough.

Drew Hancock Companionabout a distraught female robot discovering her true nature, seemed to want to cut a little deeper, only to lose her cool. Nine months after my review, all I remember is a wonderfully meaty cameo from Rupert Friend.

At Anthony and Joe Russo’s The Electric State got wide coverage, not least because the duo’s make-up style was so painfully ill-suited to the elegiac work of art on which their film was based. Fans of Simon Stålenhag’s illustrated novel cringed; everyone sat around for 2 hours waiting for something to justify the film’s lavish visuals. The Electric State was so outclassed in its world design and set design that one wonders if the creators didn’t build a theme park instead – that would have been a more artistically valid use of a mind-blowing $320 million budget.

Bong Joon Ho Mickey 17 promised something different: a storyline in which blue-collar Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson) is reduced to robotic servitude by being reprintable. This is something in which the director of Parasite, Okja And Snow borer could sink its satirical fangs. Alas, the film never trusted its audience and choked on its own exposition.

Science fiction filmmakers have always been able to imagine fascinating aliens: think Solaris, Arrival, Annihilation, Under the skin…2025’s predilection for monsters and satanic possession is therefore less a sign of exhaustion than the kind of horror that settles in to play in its cousin’s vegetable garden.

Director Scott Derrickson’s Hellish Hollow Men takes a while to emerge. The Gorgeswhich weakened this intriguing Cold War romance, part spy thriller, part Lovecraftian horror film. When Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy play elite snipers from different world powers, guarding a vast gorge in an unknown land, we are in for 40+ minutes of prologue.

That of Hugo Keijzer The occupant was much more successful, as Abby (Ella Balinska) fights through the isolated Georgian wilderness, aided by a disembodied voice that, whether human helper or alien owner, externalizes our hero’s guilt and grief.

We are in more solid genre territory with Ashdirected by Los Angeles musician Flying Lotus – one of those rare experiences that is truly a feature-length video, and all the more dazzling and mind-blowing for it. Riya (Eiza González) wakes up, amnesiac, in a space station full of bodies. Brion (Aaron Paul) arrives to help him, but is he what he seems? Is she? And why does the onboard AI warn of an unusual life form on the station? Again, familiar territory, but a welcome excursion.

It’s no surprise that of the two companies that stood out this year, neither had a particularly huge budget. Taking risks while attracting a large audience can be a trick Stanley Kubrick et al. taken to the grave.

Mop Altin Once upon a time in the future: 2121 It’s about a family that decides to get rid of the elders to comply with the “scarcity laws” of their hilarious and overzealous administration. Meanwhile, Joshua Oppenheimer The end is a musical about a family deciding whether or not to execute an unexpected visitor – a choice they may have faced many times before.

These two, with The occupantdisprove the idea that science fiction plots must be original. Science fiction is fiction; fiction is about people, and even in difficult situations, people are infinitely diverse.