Image via Warner Bros. Pictures
By
Jeremy Urquhart
Published Feb 8, 2026, 5:55 PM EST
Jeremy has more than 2300 published articles on Collider to his name, and has been writing for the site since February 2022. He's an omnivore when it comes to his movie-watching diet, so will gladly watch and write about almost anything, from old Godzilla films to gangster flicks to samurai movies to classic musicals to the French New Wave to the MCU... well, maybe not the Disney+ shows.
His favorite directors include Martin Scorsese, Sergio Leone, Akira Kurosawa, Quentin Tarantino, Werner Herzog, John Woo, Bob Fosse, Fritz Lang, Guillermo del Toro, and Yoji Yamada. He's also very proud of the fact that he's seen every single Nicolas Cage movie released before 2022, even though doing so often felt like a tremendous waste of time. He's plagued by the question of whether or not The Room is genuinely terrible or some kind of accidental masterpiece, and has been for more than 12 years (and a similar number of viewings).
When he's not writing lists - and the occasional feature article - for Collider, he also likes to upload film reviews to his Letterboxd profile (username: Jeremy Urquhart) and Instagram account.
He has achieved his 2025 goal of reading all 13,467 novels written by Stephen King, and plans to spend the next year or two getting through the author's 82,756 short stories and 105,433 novellas.
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There might not be too many absolutely perfect science fiction movies out there, though there are a few where, if you were to suggest flaws, some people might not take so kindly to such a statement. Like, 2001: A Space Odyssey is pretty untouchable. The same goes for Blade Runner, arguably for The Empire Strikes Back, and then the nearly 100-year-old Metropolis is also basically perfect for its time; for what it was.
So, trying to look into near-perfect sci-fi movies might well lead to rounding up a few more suspects. If something was great, and it had flaws that barely registered overall, then it’s likely to appear here. If you disagree though, that’s fine, because you're almost guaranteed to disagree with at least one of these picks. It happens this way, sometimes. It is to be. It is what it is. Maybe it too will remain. Also, do you know you can rearrange the letters in “nearly perfect” to spell “celery fart pen?” Language is wonderful. We should stop letting the robots do it.
10 'Starman' (1984)
Jeff Bridges as Starman and Karen Allen as Jenny Hayden stand beneath his spaceship before he gets beamed up in the movie Starman.Image via Columbia Pictures
The most unlikely of all the John Carpenter science fiction movies, Starman has nothing by way of body horror, action, or even all that much grit, as it’s instead a love story. And it’s the kind of love story that might well raise eyebrows, since it sounds corny on paper, as it’s about a young woman falling in love with an alien who looks like her recently deceased husband.
It’s the execution that counts, and the execution makes what might sound silly genuinely engaging and surprisingly moving.
Then they go on a road trip, and their feelings deepen, and the whole thing wraps up in a way that could well qualify as E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial plagiarism. But Starman still works, dammit! Screw whatever’s on paper. It’s the execution that counts, and the execution makes what might sound silly genuinely engaging and surprisingly moving. Carpenter has a soft side, after all (also, Jeff Bridges gives what might well be one of his best and most underrated performances here, too).
9 'Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga' (2024)
Anya Taylor-Joy in Furiosa: A Mad Max SagaImage via Warner Bros.
Hey, so Mad Max: Fury Road is the kind of movie that lots of people would highlight as something perfect, at least as far as sci-fi/action films go. It’s a wild one, and a difficult one to fault on a technical front. It’s wonderfully relentless, so well-edited, and has a bunch of action sequences that still feel like all-timers, and might well remain feeling like all-timers as the years/decades go on.
Almost a decade on from Mad Max: Fury Road, there was the almost – but not quite – as good prequel: Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. This did fill in some gaps narratively, as a prequel, all the while making Furiosa feel like more of a well-rounded character. Further, it built the world of Fury Road in some interesting ways, and still had a good bit of well-executed action where needed. It didn’t equal something that was perfect, sure, but it came pretty close to perfection again, and for a prequel/sequel/follow-up to something like Mad Max: Fury Road, maybe that’s enough?
8 'Pacific Rim' (2013)
Image via Warner Bros. Pictures
Both before and since 2013, Guillermo del Toro has made his fair share of horror movies about monsters where the monsters aren’t actually as monstrous as some of the human characters. But then in 2013, he made Pacific Rim, and in Pacific Rim, the monsters are big and undeniably antagonistic, being the sorts of destructive creatures that, for a time, actually unite most of humanity.
After uniting, the nations of the world build giant pilotable robots to battle the giant monsters, with the whole program being on its last legs during the events of the film, though. Still, you get to see a few remaining robots and pilots work together for one last, desperate mission, and it’s all incredibly simple, and maybe even a bit silly, but also charming, and difficult to resist and not feel at least a little bit entertained by.
7 'Until the End of the World' (1991)
Image via Warner Bros.
As it’s the longest movie here, Until the End of the World is likely the most underrated movie to feature on this ranking. It was designed to be the ultimate road movie, with various countries traveled to, instead of various towns within the one country or state. There are also things about technology and how it impacts people, playing out alongside the road movie adventuring stuff.
There’s more sci-fi in the second half of Until the End of the World, when things slow down and then also get quite a bit more somber, but in ways that work. And also in ways that aren’t worth spoiling. Consistent, though, is how great Until the End of the World looks throughout on a visual front, and then also, it has an endlessly great – and all-time iconic – soundtrack, too.
6 'Star Wars: The Last Jedi' (2017)
Image via Lucasfilm
Peeling the Band-Aid off. Let’s go. It’s been a long day. No time like the present. There are lots of Star Wars movies. There is an original trilogy of Star Wars movies that people tend to like. From 1977 to 1983. Those three. They’re good. They had class. They were contenders. Then, there were the prequel films. They were messy. But the third of them, Revenge of the Sith, was kind of great, pushing all the space opera stuff to its absolute limits.
Oh yeah, speaking of space operas, that’s the other thing. You're going to annoy people by talking about Star Wars when you're supposed to be talking about science fiction, because it’s technically more part of the fantasy genre, just with space and some fancy technology. But most people are going to get annoyed when you say The Last Jedi is almost perfect. That’s what was said. No elaboration. You want to get mad? Nah, you're getting no ammunition. You lose. Good day, sir.
5 'Avatar: The Way of Water' (2022)
If you wanted to be brave, you could call Avatar (2009) pretty much perfect. It does everything it needs to, and works as a broadly appealing sci-fi epic in the same way Titanic worked as a mass-appeal romance/disaster film. 13 years later came Avatar: The Way of Water, which was a more sprawling and perhaps overall messier film, but there were ways in which it improved upon the first movie.
The first Avatar doesn’t go as far with its narrative and some of the more out-there concepts, which makes it a cleaner and more efficient film, but the sprawl of the second film is both a strength and maybe a weakness, compared to the first movie. As for Avatar: Fire and Ash… well, that’s a step-down from both the preceding movies. But it’s still good; maybe even a bit better than many tend to give it credit for.
4 'Woman in the Moon' (1929)
Image via UFA
To the best of their ability, those behind Woman in the Moon tried to make things feel believable, even if the movie itself was looking at how a trip to the moon might look decades before such a trip was ultimately made. There’s that lovely sense of quaintness that sets in when you see how they thought it might've been, and you know now what they got wrong, but also, not everything was mishandled.
Even then, what this has going for it technically is still impressive much like Metropolis was, which Fritz Lang had directed two years before Woman in the Moon. Going to the moon is ambitious, and making this kind of movie 100 years ago about going to the moon was also kind of ambitious, so Woman in the Moon can be appreciated quite heartily, on that front.
3 'Time After Time' (1979)
Image via Warner Bros.
Time After Time has a conflict that involves H.G. Wells trying to track down Jack the Ripper. It’s an already playful kind of historical fiction story, but then the killer steals a time machine Wells has, because of course he does, and so Wells has to pursue Jack the Ripper into the future, catching him while also making sure his kill count doesn’t start spanning literal decades.
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2 'A.I. Artificial Intelligence' (2001)
Image via Warner Bros. Pictures
Steven Spielberg is good at science fiction movies, having made the previously mentioned E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, which is a movie you might want to try and resist, but you'll probably fail. He’s also got Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and then the more blockbuster-focused Jurassic Park, with one sci-fi film of his, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, sometimes getting a little buried under everything else, as a result.
It’s an odd watch, with the world it creates and the tone it goes for, and is also famously made to be a blend of Kubrick’s sensibilities along with Spielberg’s, since Kubrick was tied to the whole project before he died. The movie is, therefore, haunting in all sorts of ways, and it’s hard to get your head around the whole thing, though plenty of smaller scenes here do impress… as does the score, and the challengingly bittersweet(?) way the movie chooses to wrap itself up.
1 'Godzilla: Final Wars' (2004)
Godzilla in Godzilla: Final WarsImage via Toho
50 years after the first Godzilla movie, there was Godzilla: Final Wars, made to celebrate half a century of the king of the monsters being the king and stuff. The plot involves aliens using other monsters to destroy Earth, so they can take it over, and so a particularly powerful version of Godzilla has to be unleashed and made to rampage, since he has the biggest chance at more or less saving the world.
Saving the world here isn't exactly wholesome or heroically done, but it’s a whole lot of fun to watch. As an action/sci-fi/adventure movie, it just never stops. Godzilla: Final Wars feels like it’s on fast-forward pretty much the whole time, ensuring you get the feeling you’ve just consumed about three kaiju movies in the time that it takes to watch one. It’s a mess, and so it can’t be considered perfect, but of all the messes out there, found in all sorts of movies, the mess here is easily one of the most glorious.
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Godzilla: Final Wars
Action
Adventure
Sci-Fi
Release Date
December 4, 2004
Runtime
125 minutes
Director
Ryuhei Kitamura
Writers
Wataru Mimura, Isao Kiriyama
Cast
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Masahiro Matsuoka
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Rei Kikukawa
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Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
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Star Wars: Episode VIII - The Last Jedi
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