2025 was a wild year for the science fiction genre. It gave us one of the absolute worst movies of the year in War of the Worlds. It also had one of my favorite movies of the year in Bong Joon Ho’s incredible Mickey 17. However, the two 2025 sci-fi movies that I keep thinking about are two franchise movies that shocked me: one by how much I loved it, and one by how much it disappointed me.
I Really Wanted To Love Tron: Ares, But I Did Not
I’m one of those insufferable people who is responsible for keeping the Tron franchise alive as long as it has been. I rented the original movie at the video store more times than I can count. I saw Tron: Legacy in IMAX, the first showing of a theatrical film in that format I ever saw, on opening weekend. I own both movies in 4K and the Legacy soundtrack on vinyl.
I wanted to like Tron: Ares so much. I was worried about it for basically its entire production, as I wasn’t convinced it would be good, but I wanted to be wrong so badly. There was no movie in any genre I was looking forward to quite as much this year.
But Tron: Ares was frustrating from the outset. Jared Leto’s character, Ares, just wasn’t interesting enough to carry the story. The plot itself was pedestrian, and while seeing lightcycles fly down the freeway was fun, it wasn’t enough. It never brought the wonder that Tron has already provided, and it didn’t push the limits of what we could see the way the previous films had.
Tron is essentially a franchise about aliens, just ones that come from someplace other than outer space. While aliens coming to Earth can make for good science fiction, I’ve concluded that I love visiting alien worlds far more than I like to watch aliens visit Earth. If part of the value of science fiction movies is seeing the impossible become real on screen, there just wasn’t enough that wowed me about Ares.
Predator: Badlands Is The Best Sci-Fi Movie In The Franchise
Technically speaking, all Predator movies are science fiction films. They deal with aliens, after all. Predator: Badlands isn’t the best Predator movie. I still think that honor belongs to Prey. It is, however, the most science fiction movie in the franchise.
Badlands isn’t the only film in the franchise to be set on an alien world, but never before has one been so richly detailed and full of danger and beauty as the planet Genna. Everything about the world feels strange and deadly, and I loved all of it. We get to see all kinds of interesting flora and fauna on the alien world, and it’s all quite creative and used expertly to craft the story.
The plot of Predator: Badlands isn’t any more original than that of Tron: Ares; we’ve seen it all before. However, because that plot is set in a world that we don’t know, it allows the story to be approached in new and different ways. It looks, and therefore feels, like something new, even when it isn’t.
Science fiction movies don’t require alien worlds to be great, but it certainly doesn’t hurt. In one of these cases, that world made a movie that might not have had a unique feel, completely different, while the lack of it elsewhere made a movie feel dull.
