15 Most Visually Stunning Sci-Fi Movies

The Beach creator Alex Garland knows his way around an appealing visual—look no further than the sparse, beautiful sets of 2014’s Ex Machina to see how much the helmer can achieve even with a single location as limited as a remote house/ fortress hidden in the US wilderness.

But the director’s visual palette was given room to breathe in Annihilation, a trippy horror sci-fi from 2018. An adaptation of Jeff VandeMeer’s New Weird novel of the same name, the flick follows Natalie Portman into dangerous territory where a strange alien presence has begun to warp nature and reality.

This results in striking sights like a human corpse which has become a sprawling home to flowering buds, deer whose antlers are tree branches, and even a minor character who finds herself consumed by the fauna and becoming one with the landscape.