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

The summer continues on, with hotter and hotter new releases inching closer to us on the horizon. Deadpool & Wolverine comes out next week, followed by Borderlands early next month and Fede Álvarez’s Alien: Romulus slinking up not far from behind. In the meantime though, if you’re looking for the best sci-fi movies to stream on Netflix from the comfort of your home in July, our picks for this month are the ones to watch.

We’ve got an underappreciated sci-fi horror film starring Ryan Reynolds and Jake Gyllenhaal that flew under most people’s radar 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!

Editor’s pick: Life

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

Incorrectly assumed by Reddit-brained trailer fiends to be a covert Cloverfield-style prequel to Venom (only one franchise could pit astronauts against alien goo!!! obviously!!!), it turns out the 2017 sci-fi thriller Life didn’t need to connect to comic book IP to thrill. Written by pro genre-blenders Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick (Deadpool, Zombieland), it’s part Alien, part Gravity, and a steady blast of mayhem. From space station disasters to violent encounters with an E.T., Daniel Espinosa’s controlled direction genuinely shocks, with a first hour that made me yelp out loud a few times.

Life starts on an action beat: a team of astronauts are preparing to “catch” an unmanned probe hurtling back from Mars before it collides with the International Space Station. Averting disaster, they bring the probe on board only to discover that one of the soil samples contains a dormant single-celled organism. A jolt by the ISS’ local exobiologist ignites the growth process, and soon the ship has a cute new alien pet they name “Calvin.” Unfortunately, Calvin evolves – in strength, in sentience, and in a desire to kill everyone on board.

For such a star-studded cast, Life hinges on the deglamorization of familiar faces by way of claustrophobic horror. Reynolds screams in terror. Gyllenhaal sweats a gallon. Ferguson gasps for air as she does everything possible to prevent the alien from making it Earth. And they all play second fiddle to Calvin, who, like a baby Starro, breaks limbs and consumes the ship’s electricity to accelerate its growth. The back half is familiar territory, but Espinosa keeps our blood-pumping through set-piece craft, while Reese and Wernick provide a few much-needed twists. Life is a polished-but-nasty B-movie that’s perfect for the summer. —Matt Patches

Resident Evil: Retribution

Image: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment

Director: Paul W. S. Anderson
Cast: 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 unfairly bad rap. No, I have no connection to the video game franchise. Yes, I understand the movies don’t perfectly adapt the games. But I don’t care, and neither should you, because this franchise rules. Divorce yourself of expectations of the games and enjoy Retribution as a formally bold, gleefully ridiculous blockbuster sci-fi action movie that happens to be set in an exaggerated rendition of the Resident Evil universe.

Retribution, arguably the best entry in the series, is a remix of the franchise itself as well as many other influences – Inception, Westworld, East and South Asian martial arts movies – all while staying true to its video game roots. It has a particularly fun sci-fi concept, making it the right choice to pull out for this list. Alice (Milla Jovovich) has to traverse a series of elaborate game-like simulations of different versions of the zombie apocalypse, while other clones of Alice are stuck in those simulations. This lets the movie feel structurally like a video game, as she advances from one level to the next fighting various monsters, and even the dialogue replicates the eerie disjointed cadence of video game speech. These movies may not totally get the Resident Evil games, but they sure do get video games.

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 opening with a fun action scene played in reverse, Retribution starts with a short recap, so you don’t have to worry about watching the previous movies first — though most of them are good! —Pete Volk

The Matrix

Image: Warner Home Video

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

I don’t need to tell you to watch The Matrix. If you read Polygon frequently, you no doubt already know what the Wachowskis’ magnum opus is about, how it revolutionized Hollywood action films in the late ’90s, and forever etched itself into living canon of our popular culture. You’ve heard the phrase “There is no spoon,” “I know kung-fu,” or the term “red-pilled” before. The Matrix, along with its 2003 sequels, are load-bearing pillars of modern sci-fi cinema and its latter sequel, The Matrix Resurrections, is one of the most critically divisive films of the 2020s so far.

With all that said, why the hell am I still recommending The Matrix to you? The reason is simple: It really is that damn good, even more than two decades since it released. Trends ebb and flow out of vogue. The mirrorshades and black leather trench coats of the late ’90s have taken on wholly different connotations in the fractured cultural landscape of 2024. Rob Zombie’s “Dragula” is no longer booming out of the speakers of subterranean nightclubs, and computers are no longer blocky, clamshell colored windows into a digital world of unfettered freedom and possibilities.

Like all art, the most enduring films are those that not only speak to their particular era, but whose meaning and significance continue to compound, morph, and live well beyond the radius of their initial reception. By that definition, The Matrix is still one of the best sci-fi movies of its generation, and one of the best available to stream on Netflix. Not for long, though: The Matrix, The Matrix Reloaded, and The Matrix Revolutions are all leaving the platform at the end of this month. If you haven’t seen the Matrix trilogy in awhile, now’s as good a time as any to revisit them. And if you’ve somehow never seen them, and only know about them through cultural osmosis, I promise it’s worth going down the rabbit hole yourself to find out just why that is. —Toussaint Egan