Grounded Sci-Fi—8 Mind-Bending Movies That Never Leave Earth

Sci-fi movies are typically saturated with aliens, space travel, distant galaxies, and other mind-bending science fiction.

If you don’t feel like watching yet another action-heavy laser fight in space, but still want a movie with some equally cool, Earth-based science fiction, have I got a list of movies for you to stream right now.

8

Primer

If you’ve ever watched mainstream time travel movies and felt they’re too simple or too ridiculous (like rupturing the fabric of space and time if your past or future selves meet), try Primer. This 2004 film is a low-budget, indie, hard-science-fiction movie (as hard sci-fi as you can get with time travel), which has absolutely zero exposition.You’re supposed to follow the story and figure it out for yourself, which, in itself, is a fun little challenge because I’ve never seen a more confusing, complex time travel story. There are entire blog posts and video essays out there dedicated to explaining the workings of the Primer time travel machine, the timelines, or the story itself.

The film follows four engineer friends who, while trying to make a machine that lowers the mass of an object, accidentally invent a box that can send things back and forth in time. They use the box to make some stock market trades, but things very quickly get out of hand, and we get a brilliant and sophisticated sci-fi time travel story.

7

Coherence

Continuing with the theme of low-budget sci-fi,Coherenceis about a group of friends who are attending a dinner party during the passing of a rare comet. The gathering starts simply enough, but when the power goes out, things start getting weird when space and time are fractured and different versions of reality start to overlap.

Coherence is part thriller, part cosmic horror, and part drama. I watch it once a year because it scratches a particular itch in my brain that no other movie ever does. Perhaps it’s the moody suburban atmosphere, or maybe it’s the bizarre plot, but I love it nonetheless.

6

12 Monkeys

James Cole (Bruce Willis) is a prisoner in the future who is sent back in time to track down a virus that, in the present time, has almost wiped out almost all of humanity. The prime suspect is the animal-rights group The Army of the Twelve Monkeys, and Cole is sent back to collect information to try to stop it.

Right off the bat, the plan falls apart. Cole ends up in 1990 instead of the intended target, 1996, where he’s locked up in a mental hospital almost immediately. If he completes the mission, he’ll get a reduced sentence in exchange for finding the origin of the virus, which can lead to a cure. The time travel in 12 Monkeys isn’t as convoluted as Primer’s, but it still keeps you on the edge of your seat, given the absurdly high stakes.

5

District 9

From the director of Elysium and Chappie, District 9 blends the grit and dirt of dystopian slums with advanced alien sci-fi tech.Filmed in a handheld documentary style, District 9 takes place in a future where about 1.8 million aliens have been stranded on Earth after their giant mothership is rendered useless. Segregated from humans, they live in squalid conditions in the District 9 camp on the borders of Johannesburg, South Africa.

A crew is sent to District 9 to relocate the aliens to a remote location, and things start to get out of hand as the aliens fight for their freedom. The most striking part of this movie is the realism, down to the exceptionally convincing visuals and CG aliens. If you love good CGI, you’ll definitely appreciate District 9.

4

In Time

In the future, time has become the sole currency. People are genetically engineered to stop aging at 25 with a glowing timer on their arms that tracks how much time they have left. Like tapping a bank card, every time they buy something, they lose time, and when the clock hits zero, they immediately die.

They use their time as a universal currency and live in class-based time zones. The rich live in New Greenwich, where they have so much time that the people are functionally immortal. Then there are the impoverished time zones where people barely have enough time to make it through the day. We follow a factory worker (Justin Timberlake) who comes into a lot of time through a twist of fate, but after he’s accused of murder, he must go on the run, setting the story of In Time into motion.

3

Source Code

Source Code is a time-loop movie. An army pilot, Captain Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal), wakes up in the body of a school teacher aboard a commuter train that’s going to blow up in eight minutes. Every time it blows up, Colter wakes up again, eight minutes into the past, and has to figure out who’s behind it so he can stop the cycle.

Will Colter be able to identify the bomber? Will he save the passengers and himself? How many times will be explode before he figures it out?

2

Annihilation

Annihilation is one of those weird movies that’s almost impossible to pin down. It’s part sci-fi, part horror, part psychological thriller, and more. A team of investigators and scientists, including cellular biology professor Lena (Natalie Portman), is sent into “The Shimmer,” which is a strange phenomenon encompassing a large area covering a wildlife refuge on the coast of Florida. Inside the veil of The Shimmer, plant, animal, and human DNA is transformed in unexpected ways. The entity is expanding, and they need to stop it.

The effects of The Shimmer have to be seen to truly understand them. If you love H.P. Lovecraft’s stories or cosmic horror in general, Annihilation is the perfect example of the genre I’ve ever seen on screen. Cosmic horror is incredibly difficult to capture in a visual medium because the horror part often happens in the reader’s imagination, in what’s not shown, and in the mind’s inability to comprehend the horror.

1

The Quiet Earth

There’s a strange melancholy and hope in The Quiet Earth that’s hard to describe. If you’ve seen 1972’s Silent Running, where all of Earth’s plant life goes extinct and one desperate man strives to protect what’s left, Quiet Earth will evoke a familiar feeling.

The Quiet Earth starts when scientist Zac Hobson (Bruno Lawrence) discovers that an international project to create a global energy grid has gone awry, and he wakes up one morning to find that everyone except him has vanished. Zac must come to terms with his isolation and forge a new way ahead alone … or is he?

We see what total planetary isolation does to a man, and not for one second does the mystery bore. Lawrence delivers a phenomenal performance.

None of these earth-bound sci-fi titles are “turn your brain off and just have fun” kind of movies. They want your attention, but in return, they’ll stay with you a long time. They did for me.