The best sci-fi movies to watch on Netflix this September

We’re more than halfway through September, and the release calendar is finally starting to heat up, especially for sci-fi fans. Transformers One, the animated prequel from director Josh Cooley (Toy Story 4), comes out this weekend alongside The Substance, the new body horror film starring Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley. That’s not even mentioning Megalopolis, Francis Ford Coppola’s much talked-about sci-fi epic featuring an ensemble cast led by Adam Driver, which is slated to come out next week.

If you’re looking for the best sci-fi movie you can watch right now from the comfort of your home on Netflix, though, don’t worry; we’ve got you. This week, we’ve curated a short list of the best sci-fi movies you can stream this weekend, including a beloved (and as of this writing, sadly sequel-less) action thriller starring Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt, a cult-classic satire of interstellar fascism, and an animated reboot of a celebrated tokusatsu icon.

Let’s take a look at what this month has to offer!

Editor’s pick: Edge of Tomorrow

Director: Doug Liman
Cast: Tom Cruise, Emily Blunt, Bill Paxton

“Groundhog Day, but…” is almost always a great pitch for a movie, but add in Tom Cruise, aliens, and tons of sci-fi action and suddenly you have a recipe for one of the best and most entertaining movies of the last decade: Edge of Tomorrow. 

The movie has Cruise playing all the way in type, starting out as a smarmy Army PR guy who’s quick with a smile and a charming word, but clearly finds himself above the sweat and grunt work of everyday soldiers, and way too good for a lowly life of combat. But when he suddenly gets stuck in a time loop by the evil aliens trying to destroy the world, it turns out that combat was his destiny all along. Of course, it takes a lot of training to go from spokesperson to a soldier, which is why war hero Rita Vrataski, played outstandingly by Emily Blunt, is here. 

The whole thing makes for a fantastically fun movie, perfectly blending huge action sequences with the inherent silliness of Groundhog Day’s trial-and-error format. Cruise’s character runs himself into the ground countless times, trying over and over to improve even a little bit, but failing way more often than he succeeds. In other words, it’s a perfect metaphor for what makes Tom Cruise such a perfect movie star: You get as many takes as a scene requires to get it just right. —Austen Goslin

Ultraman: Rising

Director: Shannon Tindle
Cast: Christopher Sean, Gedde Watanabe, Tamlyn Tomita

Ultraman: Rising might be the best entry point to date for anyone who’s ever been curious about Tsuburaya Productions’ iconic giant superhero. Set in a separate continuity from any of the previous Ultraman series, the film centers on Kenji “Ken” Sato, a hotshot baseball player who moves back to his home of Japan despite being on the verge of an American championship. In reality, Ken is the only son of the former Ultraman — a giant transforming superhero dedicated to preserving harmony between humanity and kaiju — and has moved to Japan in order to take up his father’s mantle.

Initially having trouble balancing his personal life with his duties as the new Ultraman, Ken is saddled with even more problems when he becomes the inadvertent adoptive parent of a baby kaiju. With the help of his AI assistant Mina and, eventually, his own father, Ken grows to rise to the occasion of being not only a responsible adoptive father, but a hero worth believing in. Ultraman Rising is a reboot that taps into the core principles of what makes Ultraman a compelling and iconic hero, builds on those foundations with a narrative that’s never been broached before in the franchise’s history, and does so with level of visual aplomb and creativity befitting a feature-length animated event. —Toussaint Egan

Starship Troopers

Director: Paul Verhoeven
Cast: Casper Van Dien, Dina Meyer, Denise Richards

Starship Troopers takes place in a far-flung future where humanity has mastered interstellar travel and uses it to do what anyone would expect: colonize any and every alien species it can find.

Sci-fi movies are full of evil empires that span across the stars. Very few of those movies, however, root us firmly in the perspective of those empires in the way that Starship Troopers does. But what makes Paul Verhoeven’s sci-fi action movie truly special is that it leaves the evil of its Earth-based empire entirely unsaid. Instead, Verhoeven plays the movie like state-sponsored propaganda, with characters screaming at the screen about the evils of the bug menace, all without saying why Earth is invading their planet in the first place. It’s masterful satire in only the way that Verhoeven could manage. —AG