5 sci-fi movies worth watching on Netflix in February 2023

Happy February, Polygon readers and sci-fi fans! This month, we have five excellent (inter) sci-fi movies for you to watch on Netflix as the weather warms up and we head into spring.

Our February picks include sci-fi recommendations from South Korea, China, Australia, and the United States. We have a new animation project from renowned live-action director Richard Linklater (The school of rock music), a new live-action project by famous animation director Yeon Sang-ho (Train to Busan), one of the highest grossing movies ever made and there are many more to find out!

Let’s dive in.

Oblivion

Image: Universal Image

Year: two thousand and thirteen
run time: 2 hours 4 minutes
Manager: Joseph Kosinsky
Cast: Actor: Tom Cruise Morgan FreemanAndrea Riseborough

Before Joseph Kosinsky took Tom Cruise to the sky in Top Gun: Maverickhe took him into the grim future of 2077 Earth in 2013 Oblivion, this is the genre of film that has the best experience without reading anything about its story first. Suffice it to say that Cruise begins the story as a survivor of the planet’s devastating apocalypse, left behind with his partner Victoria (Andrea Riseborough) to protect a series of energy generators from the planet. planet. But there’s a sense of ominous threat stalking him and his interactions with his space-dwelling boss, Sally (Melissa Leo), and before long, the threat is paid off. Responding with new information changes everything. Alike Maverick, Oblivion is a slick, high-tech movie with a blockbuster pacing feel and plenty of action. Unlike Maverick, it is also a series of unfolding and fascinating surprises, well worth experiencing in a wild way. —tasha robinson

JUNG_E

Image: Netflix

Year: 2023
run time: 1 hour 38 minutes
Manager: Yeon Sang-ho
Cast: Kang Soo-yeon, Kim Hyun-joo, Ryu Kyung-soo

The latest film by modern sci-fi master Yeon Sang-ho (Train to Busan, movement center, Hell is bound), JUNG_E Set in a future ravaged by climate change, where militant groups of human space colonies have been battling it out for decades. It follows a scientist (Kang Soo-yeon) who is tasked with cloning a perfect AI soldier from the brain of her comatose mother, a legendary mercenary in her day.

A great example of staging a minor conflict within a larger conflict, JUNG_E thrive on the intricate designs of the technology and robots on display. The hum of the machines brings life to the film, as does Kang Soo-yeon’s touching performance in the lead role. While touching on many of the old sci-fi elements surrounding artificial intelligence, the presence of data collection in the film represents a new twist to a classic sci-fi question. —Pete Volk

wandering earth

Image: China Film Group

Year: 2019
run time: 2 hours 5 minutes
Manager: Fran Gwo
Cast: Wu Jing, Qu Chuxiao, Li Guangjie

A big budget Chinese sci-fi project, wandering earth was a huge box office success. It is the fifth-highest-grossing Chinese film of all time (the four above have all been released in the past decade), and the sequel is currently in theaters.

That sequel is reason enough to check it out wandering earth this February, but it’s an interesting movie on its own merits.

Adapted from a short story by Liu Cixin (best known for Three-body problem), wandering earth takes place in the year 2058. With disaster lurking in the form of an expanding sun about to explode, Earth’s leaders decide to push the planet away to safety.

Director Fran Gwo said 2001: Space Adventure, Terminator 2And among the stars are his three favorite sci-fi movies and they had a big influence on the production wandering earth. It’s a big-budget spectacle with one of the biggest movie stars in the world (Wu Jing, who stars in both of the highest-grossing Chinese films of all time) — perfect for a bucket of burns. corn on a February night. —PV

I Am a Mother

Image: Netflix

Year: 2019
run time: 1 hour 53 minutes
Manager: Spokesperson Level
Cast: Starring:Clara RugaardRose Byrne Hilary Swank

Where M3GAN is the goofy, audience-pleasing, modern AI horror movie of 2019 I Am a Mother is the darker and more personal side — it’s a film that opens with all the claustrophobic and rigorous dread of a single stage play, but with creepy cinematic and visual effects. A teenager with no name other than Daughter (Clara Rugaard) raised in a shelter, raised by a cyborg named Mother (Rose Byrne), and rebellious in typical teenage ways — for until an injured stranger (Hilary Swank) comes to their door, begging for help and lifting their fragile relationship. It’s a tense, small, immersive thriller that’s heavy on character dynamics and careful revelations, but it has all the tension of a Terminator movie, as it turns out. How strong and determined the mother is, and how ruthless she is capable of. —CHILDREN

Apollo 10 1/2: Childhood in the space age

Image: Netflix

Year: 2022
run time: 1 hour 37 minutes
Manager: Richard Linklater
Cast: Milo Coy, Jack Black, Lee Eddy

Richard Linklater’s animated memoir about growing up in Texas in the 1960s may not sound like science fiction at all — at times, it’s almost like a documentary about a particular era and field. part of American life, a mixture of the general and the very specific. (Linklater’s very large family creates a plethora of accommodations for family life that might be confusing to viewers if they weren’t stemming from similar motivations.) But Linklater’s main character — Stanley, student 4th grade in 1969 in NASA’s effort to put everyone on the moon list — also indulged in the fantasies Linklater brought directly to the screen, when NASA recruited him for a secret astronaut mission that combined His real life, history unfolds around him, and his wildest dreams are to be special. It’s a strange, sweet, fascinating movie — and a beautiful, intuitively controlled movie, shot endoscopically in a lighter version of the Linklater computerized endoscope used in used in A Shadow Scanner And Life wakes up. The space scenes stand out, making it both a fun-to-face comic and a detailed, immersive adventure. —CHILDREN