10 Great Recent Sci-Fi Movies You Probably Haven't Seen

Science fiction can be a tricky genre. It requires so much more world building than any other genre out there, plots tend to be much more complex and convoluted, while marketing tends to be harder, aimed towards niche audiences. For those reasons and more, great movies in the genre can often slip by.

Looking back at the last five years, there are a few sci fi movies which might have slipped under the radar. Some of these received semi cult status but low audience numbers, while others just didn’t get any traction at all.

Sometimes, movies don’t land because they’re just not that great. Hollywood pumps out so many movies per year, and a lot struggle with rewrites, studio intervention, phoned in performances, or just general core flaws. In the case of these ten though, they just didn’t capture an audience.

As for these movies being ‘great’, that’s relative. If these movies were Godfather, you wouldn’t have missed them. Still, these movies passed a lot of people by, and they deserve a lot more love. The past five years has given us blockbuster sci-fi releases like Star Wars and Avengers, but these lesser lights deserve a look-in too.

Okja is a film of great whimsy, revolving around the raising, capture and ultimate freeing of the titular super pig. Though the message of environmentalism and animal cruelty runs through the movie, it avoids a preachy tone, instead opting for one which frequently dissolves into silliness.

The cast represents this clash of ideas, beginning with lead child actress Ahn Seo-hyun, supported by fellow South Korean actors Byun Hee-bong, Yoon Je-moon and Choi Woo-shik, before the more recognisable Hollywood names of Tilda Swinton, Paul Dano, Lily Collins, Giancarlo Esposito and Jake Gyllenhaal come to the fray. We see Swinton playing twin sisters Lucy & Nancy, just as she did in the Coen Brothers' farce Hail Caesar!

Swinton, Gyllenhaal and Dano especially have made careers out of eccentricity, and here is no exception. In fact, Gyllenhall's Steve Irwin parody Johnny Wilcox might be his most off the wall performance in his career.

What gives Okja its most uniqueness though is the animal itself. Not only does it have an otherworldly design to it, the creature feels realistically shy and naturally introverted. Animal based movies often push the beats forward, derailing the plot, but here Okja nestles in nicely.