The best sci-fi movies to watch on Netflix in July 2024

Summer continues, with hotter and hotter New releases are getting closer and closer on the horizon. Deadpool and Wolverine will be released next week, followed by Borderland Early next month and Fede Álvarez’ Alien: Romulus isn’t sneaking up far from behind. In the meantime, though, if you’re looking for the best sci-fi movies to stream on Netflix in July from the comfort of your own home, look no further than our recommendations for this month.

We have an underrated science fiction horror film with Ryan Reynolds And A Jake Gyllenhaal film that went unnoticed by most people when it was first released, an unfairly maligned sequel to a series based on one of the greatest survival horror game franchises of all time, and a cyberpunk classic that changed the face of Hollywood action films forever.

Let’s see what this month has to offer!

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Editor’s Choice: Life

Image: Columbia Pictures/Sony Pictures published

Director: Daniel Espinosa
Pour: Jake Gyllenhaal, Rebecca Ferguson, Ryan Reynolds, Hiroyuki Sanada

Mistaken by Reddit-brained trailer fanatics for a covert Cloverfield-Style prequel to Poison (only a franchise could pit astronauts against alien slime!!! Obviously!!!), as it turns out, the 2017 science fiction thriller Life didn’t need to be tied to comic book IP to be exciting. Written by professional genre mixers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick (Dead Pool, Zombieland), it is part extraterrestrialPart Heavyand a steady explosion of chaos. From space station disasters to violent alien encounters, Daniel Espinosa’s controlled direction really shocks, with a first hour that had me screaming out loud a few times.

Life begins with an action moment: a team of astronauts prepares to “intercept” an unmanned probe returning from Mars before it collides with the International Space Station. To avert disaster, they bring the probe aboard, but discover that one of the soil samples contains a dormant single-cell organism. A nudge from the ISS’s local exobiologist triggers the growth process, and soon the ship has a cute new alien pet they name “Calvin.” Unfortunately, Calvin continues to evolve – in strength, sentience, and a desire to kill everyone on board.

For such a top-class cast, Life is based on deglamorizing familiar faces through claustrophobic horror. Reynolds screams in fear. Gyllenhaal sweats gallons. Ferguson gasps for air as she does everything she can to prevent the alien from making it to Earth. And they all play second fiddle to Calvin, who breaks limbs like a baby Starro and uses up the ship’s electricity to accelerate his growth. The second half is familiar territory, but Espinosa keeps our blood pumping through the set pieces, while Reese and Wernick provide some much-needed twists. Life is a polished but nasty B-movie that is perfect for the summer. —Matt Patches

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Resident Evil: Retribution

Image: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment

Director: Paul W.S. Anderson
Pour: Milla Jovovich, Michelle Rodriguez, Kevin Durand

I feel like I have to give this disclaimer every time I recommend these movies, but they get an unfair bad rap. No, I have no connection to the video game franchise. Yes, I understand that the movies don’t adapt the games perfectly. But I don’t care, and you shouldn’t care either, because this franchise Regulate. Leave the expectations of the games behind and enjoy retribution as a formally daring, gloriously ridiculous sci-fi action film that just happens to be set in an exaggerated interpretation of the Resident Evil universe.

retributionarguably the best entry in the series, is a remix of the franchise itself as well as many other influences – Start

, WestworldEast and South Asian martial arts films – while staying true to its video game roots. The sci-fi concept is particularly entertaining, making it the right choice for this list. Alice (Milla Jovovich) must traverse a series of elaborate game-like simulations of various versions of the zombie apocalypse while other clones of Alice are stuck in those simulations. This makes the film feel structurally like a video game, as she advances from one level to the next, battling various monsters along the way, and even the dialogue mimics the eerie, disjointed cadence of video game language. These movies may not quite understand the Resident Evil games, but video games certainly understand them.

Both this film and 2002’s Resident Evil are leaving Netflix at the end of this month, so now’s your chance to watch them before they’re gone. And after the film opens with an entertaining action scene played backwards, retribution starts with a short synopsis so you don’t have to bother watching the previous films first – although most of them are good! –Pete Volk

The Matrix

Image: Warner Home Video

Director: The Wachowskis
Pour: Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, Carrie Anne Moss

I don’t have to tell you to watch The Matrix. If you’re a regular reader of Polygon, you’re no doubt already familiar with the Wachowskis’ masterpiece, how it revolutionized Hollywood action movies in the late ’90s and forever etched itself into the living canon of our pop culture. You’ve heard the phrase “There is no spoon,” “I can do kung fu,” or the term “red-pilled.” The Matrix

are, together with their 2003 sequels, pillars of modern science fiction cinema and their last sequel, The Matrix Resurrectionis one of the most controversial films of the 2020s among critics.

After all that has been said, why the hell am I Despite it Recommend The Matrix for you? The reason is simple: It is really The damn good, even more than two decades after its release. Trends come and go out of style. The mirrored sunglasses and black leather trench coats of the late ’90s have taken on very different connotations in the splintered cultural landscape of 2024. Rob Zombie’s “Dragula” no longer blares from the speakers of underground nightclubs, and computers are no longer clunky, seashell-shaped colored windows into a digital world of unfettered freedom and possibility.

Like all art, the most enduring films are those that not only reflect their respective eras, but whose meaning and significance continue to multiply, change and live on far beyond the radius of their initial reception. According to this definition The Matrix is still one of the best science fiction films of its generation and one of the best available to stream on Netflix. But not for much longer: The Matrix, Matrix ReloadedAnd Matrix Revolutions are all leaving the platform at the end of this month. If you haven’t seen the Matrix trilogy in a while, now is a good time to rewatch it. And if for some reason you’ve never seen it and only found out about it through cultural osmosis, I promise you it’s worth going down the rabbit hole yourself to find out why that is. –Toussaint Egan