The 10 Worst Sci-Fi Movies in Film History
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Sci-fi gets a lot of room to dream big, which is also why it gets so much room to fail. A bad romance or a bad thriller can only go wrong in so many ways. A bad sci-fi movie can go wrong with the story, the effects, the worldbuilding, the dialogue, and the casting all at once.
Since there are so many things that can go wrong with a film, somehow most of these checked all the boxes. Some of these were doomed by studio meddling, some by a director who dug in on a bad idea, and a couple by a cast that clearly knew what was happening. Here they are, ranked from rough to the worst of the lot.
10
‘Battlefield Earth’ (2000)
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Image via Warner Bros. Pictures</figure>
In the year 3000, humans have lived as slaves under the Psychlos for a thousand years, and Terl (John Travolta), the alien security chief, plans to use a captured man to mine gold for him. That man, Jonnie Goodboy Tyler (Barry Pepper), picks up a fighting plan which is fast enough to lead a rebellion against his captors. Battlefield Earth is based on a novel by L. Ron Hubbard, and Travolta spent close to ten years pushing to get it made, which makes the end result hurt even more.
The director tilts the camera at a crooked angle in almost every shot, so after about twenty minutes the whole thing starts to feel like you’re watching it on a boat. The Psychlos wear dreadlocks and giant platform boots, and Forest Whitaker plays one of them, Ker, with a straight face that only makes it funnier. It won seven Razzies in its year, and later got named Worst Picture of the Decade.
9
‘The Last Airbender’ (2010)
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Image via Paramount Pictures</figure>
Aang (Noah Ringer), a young boy who can control all four elements, wakes up after a hundred years frozen in ice and sets out to stop the Fire Nation from taking over the world. Katara (Nicola Peltz) and Sokka (Jackson Rathbone) join him, and Prince Zuko (Dev Patel) chases them across the map trying to win back his honor. M. Night Shyamalan wrote and directed The Last Airbender, squeezing what was a twenty-episode season of the Nickelodeon cartoon into just over an hour and a half.
The cast drew heavy criticism before the movie even opened, since the main heroes were played by white actors and the Fire Nation villains by Indian and other non-white actors. Character names got pronounced differently than in the show, and the 3D conversion made an already dim picture look even darker. Fans of the original series have never forgiven it, and it won five Razzies.
8
‘After Earth’ (2013)
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Image via Columbia Pictures</figure>
A thousand years after humans abandoned Earth, General Cypher Raige (Will Smith) and his teenage son Kitai (Jaden Smith) crash-land on the planet, which has turned hostile to people. Cypher breaks both legs in the crash, so Kitai has to cross the wilderness alone to reach the rescue beacon. After Earth came from a story Will Smith himself developed, and Shyamalan directed it.
The father stays in a chair almost the whole movie, giving orders over a radio, while his son runs from creatures that hunt by smelling fear. The big lesson is that fear is a choice, repeated so many times that it stops sounding wise. Jaden got a Razzie nomination for Worst Actor, and for a Will Smith movie, it did poorly with both critics and the box office.
7
‘The Happening’ (2008)
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Image via 20th Century Studios</figure>
People across the northeastern United States start walking out of buildings and killing themselves for no obvious reason. Elliot Moore (Mark Wahlberg), a high school science teacher, grabs his wife Alma (Zooey Deschanel) and runs, who is trying to work out what’s causing it. Julian (John Leguizamo), a fellow teacher, travels with them for a while. The Happening is another Shyamalan film, this time with an environmental twist, and the cause turns out to be the plants.
Wahlberg’s big moment comes when he realizes he should talk to a plastic plant, calmly, so it won’t think of him as a threat. Even the characters seem unsure what to make of the dialogue, and Wahlberg himself has joked about the movie in interviews. It’s R-rated, which at least meant the suicides looked as grim as the story needed them to.
6
‘Jupiter Ascending’ (2015)
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Image via Warner Bros. Pictures</figure>
Jupiter Jones (Mila Kunis) cleans toilets for a living, and then learns she’s the genetic double of an alien queen and owns the Earth. Caine Wise (Channing Tatum), a half-wolf former soldier who skates around on anti-gravity boots, shows up to protect her. Balem Abrasax (Eddie Redmayne), her scheming alien “stepson,” wants her out of the way. Jupiter Ascending came from the Wachowskis, who had made The Matrix, so people expected a lot.
The story gets so tangled that characters spend entire scenes just explaining who owns what planet. Redmayne whispers and growls his lines in a way nobody has quite recovered from, and he won a Razzie for it the same year he took home an Oscar. At one point, bees recognize Jupiter as royalty. It sounds like a joke, but the movie is serious.
The scores below reveal how the Force sees you. Your highest number is your true alignment. Read on to understand what that means — and what it will cost you.
Disciplined, compassionate, and deeply attuned to the living Force, you have walked the path long enough to understand its demands — and accept them. You lead not through authority alone, but through example. You have felt the pull of the dark side and chosen otherwise, every time. That is not certainty. That is courage.
You are earnest, powerful, and brimming with potential — and you know it, which is both your greatest asset and your most dangerous flaw. You act before you think, trust your gut over your training, and sometimes confuse impatience for bravery. The Masters see something in you, though. The question isn’t whether you have what it takes — it’s whether you’ll be patient enough to find out.
You are not simply dangerous — you are certain, and that is worse. You have decided what the galaxy needs, and you have decided you are the one to deliver it. Your power is genuine and formidable, earned through sacrifice that would have broken lesser beings. But examine your victories carefully. Every Sith believed their cause was righteous. The dark side’s cruelest trick is that it agrees with you.
You were forged in fire and reshaped by those who found you at your lowest. You serve, because service gave you structure when you had none. Your allegiance is not to an ideology — it is to survival and to the master who gave you purpose. But there is something buried beneath the conditioning. The Jedi you hunt? You recognize them. Because you remember what it felt like before the choice was taken from you.
You have looked at the Jedi Code and the Sith Code and found both of them incomplete. You walk the line not out of indecision but out of conviction — you genuinely believe both extremes miss something essential. The Jedi don’t fully trust you. The Sith think you’re wasting your potential. They’re both partially right. But so are you.
5
‘Transcendence’ (2014)
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Image via Warner Bros. Pictures</figure>
Will Caster (Johnny Depp), a scientist working on artificial intelligence, gets shot by anti-technology extremists and has his mind uploaded into a computer before he dies. His wife Evelyn (Rebecca Hall) keeps the machine running, and the digital Will grows more powerful by the day. Morgan Freeman plays Joseph Tagger, an old colleague who is trying to talk everybody down. Transcendence was the directing debut of Wally Pfister, who had shot Christopher Nolan‘s films.
With the lead actor stuck on a screen for most of the runtime, the story never builds any real sense of danger. The script had been talked about in Hollywood for years as a hot property, which makes the final result stranger still. It lost a lot of money at the box office, and it’s a good example of a high-concept idea that never found a human story to attach itself to.
4
‘The 5th Wave’ (2016)
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Image via Sony Pictures Releasing</figure>
An alien ship parks over Earth and wipes out most of humanity in waves, an electromagnetic pulse, giant tsunamis, a deadly bird flu, and then something worse still to come. Cassie Sullivan (Chloë Grace Moretz) tries to survive and find her little brother, while Evan Walker (Alex Roe) turns up with secrets of his own. Ben, nicknamed Zombie (Nick Robinson), gets pulled into a military camp for teenagers run by Colonel Vosch (Liev Schreiber). The 5th Wave is based on the first book in a young adult trilogy by Rick Yancey.
It borrowed so heavily from other teen franchises that it felt like a checklist, complete with a love triangle nobody asked for. Schreiber does what he can with the villain role, but the script gives him little to chew on. Studios had planned to turn the trilogy into a franchise. The sequels were quietly cancelled after the first film underperformed.
3
‘Fantastic Four’ (2015)
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Image via 20th Century Studios</figure>
Reed Richards (Miles Teller), a young scientist, builds a teleportation device with his friend Ben Grimm (Jamie Bell), and the two get pulled into a trip to another dimension along with Sue Storm (Kate Mara), Johnny Storm (Michael B. Jordan), and Victor Von Doom (Toby Kebbell). Everybody comes back with powers, and Doom stays behind and comes back angry. Fantastic Four was directed by Josh Trank, who had made Chronicle.
The studio took over late in production and ordered reshoots, and you can see it on screen. Sue’s hair changes color between scenes, and the tone of the movie seems to shift each time the story moves. Trank posted a message online the day before release saying a great version of the film once existed, and the movie’s final fight lasts only a few minutes. It cost around $120 million, and the planned sequel never happened.
2
‘Movie 43’ (2013)
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Image via Relativity Media</figure>
A desperate screenwriter, Charlie Wessler (Dennis Quaid), pitches a pile of terrible movie ideas to a studio executive played by Greg Kinnear, and each pitch becomes its own short sketch. There’s a blind date where Davis (Hugh Jackman) has a pair of testicles hanging from his chin, and his date Beth (Kate Winslet) is trying not to notice. Emma Stone, Halle Berry, Richard Gere, and Naomi Watts also pop up in segments across Movie 43.
More than a dozen directors worked on it, shooting their pieces separately over about four years, and the whole thing feels as scattered as that sounds. Most of the actors reportedly signed on for a day or two of work and didn’t know what the final film would look like. It won the Razzie for Worst Picture, and a lot of the cast would probably rather it stay forgotten.
1
‘Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker’ (2019)
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Image via Lucasfilm</figure>
Rey (Daisy Ridley), Finn (John Boyega), and Poe (Oscar Isaac) race across the galaxy to find the Emperor, who has somehow come back, and stop him from launching a fleet of planet-killing warships. Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) is still torn between the light and dark sides. Ian McDiarmid returns as Palpatine, and the film tells us, in one line, that he’s alive again without really explaining how. Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker was meant to close out a forty-year saga.
J.J. Abrams had to rewrite the plan midway through, after Carrie Fisher died, and Leia’s scenes were stitched together from old footage. Rey turns out to be Palpatine’s granddaughter, a twist that undoes what the previous movie set up. Finn, in the entire film is trying to tell Rey something we never hear. It grossed over a billion dollars, but fans remain divided, and for many, it left the saga’s ending and made it rushed.
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