As any sci-fi fan knows, all moments are eventually lost in time, like tears in the rain. And sooner or later sci-fi movies on the best streaming services are lost too when contracts expire or deals are renegotiated.
That means you haven’t got long to watch three stone-cold sci-fi classics on Netflix, as they’re all leaving at the end of February 2024. The movies in question are Dune, Dredd and Snowpiercer, and they’re all firm favorites here. Here’s why.
Dune
As we said in our Dune movie review, it’s an absorbing and visually striking sci-fi epic. If you’re not familiar with the film or the book it’s based on, it’s “an atmospheric, brooding and expansive cinematic marvel [with] shades of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Mad Max and even Gladiator in its execution. It’s also a thematically dense movie that explores familial legacy, politicking, the longevity of empires and environmentalism.”
While the ending is maybe a little too focused on setting up Dune 2 than on delivering a truly satisfying conclusion, it really does justice to Frank Herbert’s novel – not an easy task given its complexity and convoluted story, something that defeated David Lynch’s previous attempt to adapt book. Although to be fair that version did have pop star Sting in his faintly frightening plastic underpants, a costuming choice that this 2021 adaptation rather wisely chooses not to replicate.
Dredd
I can bang on about this superb and exceptionally violent comic book adaptation for hours, which is why I don’t get invited to parties any more. It’s effectively a sci-fi equivalent of the equally violent The Raid, with Carl Urban as the proto-fascist law enforcer who is judge, jury and, frequently and increasingly gorily, executioner. Along with his rookie partner, played by Olivia Thirlby, Dredd has to bring justice to a 200-storey high-rise run by Lena Headley’s malevolent drug lord Ma-Ma.
Is it as good as The Raid? Maybe not, but it’s from a completely different universe than the God-awful 1995 Judge Dredd, the Sylvester Stallone vehicle that was so out of tune with the ethos of the 2000AD comic book that you have to wonder if anybody involved in the movie had even heard of the comic. This Dredd is the same Dredd we’ve loved and hated for decades, and once the film gets into its groove it’s a thrilling, balletic epic that doesn’t let up for a moment. And it’s a real tragedy that unlike The Raid, Dredd never got a sequel greenlit.
Snowpiercer
Snowpiercer – not to be confused with the 2020 series remake – is based on a French graphic novel called Le Transperceneige by Jacques Lob, Benjamin Legrand and Jean-Marc Rochette. As we said in a previous roundup of the best Netflix sci-fi movies, it’s “a brilliant allegorical sci-fi film about a train powered by perpetual motion that continually circles the globe after a climate change experiment kills all life on Earth… [when] a new class system emerges, all the poor and impoverished struggle to survive at the back of the train, while the rich live it up at the front”.
Directed by the incredibly talent Bong Joon-ho (Parasite, Okja, The Host), it was his first English language debut and received glowing reviews – it has a 94% Rotten Tomatoes score from the critics and a 72% rating from the audience. As The Wall Street Journal puts it: “Once Mr. Bong sets his monorail in motion the movie assumes an irresistible momentum, accelerated by nonstop mayhem, gallows humor and an immersive visual style that possesses a heady sense of the steam-punk Apocalypse.”
