10 Best Space Travel Thrillers of the Last 25 Years Better Than Star Trek

Star Trek had a hopeful vision for the future, and its space travel tales were built on cultural exchange and diplomacy. However, the idealism it had often led the stories to define moral good and bad, and the stakes were often too tidy, mostly to allow for more episodes to be made. Capitalism does not take a day off!

However, there are many thrillers in the past 25 years that have explored beyond the diplomatic and scientific elements of space travel. These movies not only show the dark toll it takes on humans, but also offer commentary on humanity’s nature itself through survival stories. And they do it better than Star Trek.

Here are 10 of the best space travel thrillers of the last 25 years.

10 Passengers Explores Relationships Through Space Travel

Chris Pratt is a lonely engineer on a colonizing mission who wakes up from cryosleep and feels lonely in the vast expanse of space. In a desperate attempt, he wakes up a fellow passenger, and they begin to have a relationship on their journey.

The film is an interesting take on space travel and the toll it takes on the human need for love. Star Trek has shown chemistry before, and romance is a large part of it. But Passengers does not take the ‘humans are so evolved’ route and shows us at our most desperate and vulnerable.

9 Pandorum Examines the Psychological Effects of Deep Space

Corporal Bower and Lieutenant Payton are aboard the Elysium, an ark carrying 60,000 colonists on a 123-year voyage to the planet Tanis. Waking from hypersleep with fractured memories, they find a dark, silent ship and something hunting its corridors. 

Star Trek crews rarely crack from the strain of long travel, and they have the might of the Federation with them along the way. Pandorum, named for a mental illness caused by long space travel, imagines isolation as a genuine threat.

8 Ad Astra Was a Space Exploration Tale Told Across Generations

James Gray’s Ad Astra follows Brad Pitt’s astronaut Roy McBride as he travels to Neptune to confront his missing father and a mysterious energy surge threatening Earth. Star Trek honors its explorers as heroes. Ad Astra asks what that obsession costs the families left behind, and it builds a haunting portrait of a man who has trained himself to feel nothing. Where Star Trek celebrates the dream, Ad Astra examines the toll.

7 Mickey 17 Depicts Colonization and Human Greed

Bong Joon-Ho has used various genres to make his commentary on human greed and capitalism. With Mickey 17, he creates a world that is in near-economic collapse and a charismatic leader who promises that alien worlds are the way to be saved. Robert Pattinson plays Mickey Barnes, an Expendable, who is sent to different planets to perform experiments and is printed back to life every time he dies on the mission.

As the movie goes forward, it comments on colonization, humans’ thirst for power, and our ignorance. With the world debating climate action and Mars colonies, Mickey 17 becomes a poignant tale of greed, systems, and their weak foundations.

6 High Life Poses Morality Questions Like Star Trek

Trust A24 to bring a space drama that is also creepy and horrifying in all the right ways. Claire Denis’ High Life takes place on a ship filled with incarcerated criminals who are sent into a black hole as part of a scientific experiment. Robert Pattinson, one of the said criminals, is raising his child on the ship.

Star Trek debates ethics in speeches. High Life dramatizes them through bodies, power, and confinement, making the cost of institutional control disturbing. Its unsettling treatment shows how brutal a long voyage could be when the people aboard are treated as expendable material.

5 Prometheus Maps the Origins of Humanity with Space

Ridley Scott has many Sci-Fi films where he has explored the depths of space, but with Prometheus, he delves into the origins of humanity itself and what we believe to be gods. It follows the crew of the spaceship Prometheus on a two-year voyage to a distant moon, guided by ancient star maps that archaeologist Elizabeth Shaw believes point to humanity’s creators.

Star Trek often meets godlike aliens with curiosity and tolerance. Prometheus imagines that the answer to where we came from might be hostile and indifferent, and it lets faith, ambition, and corporate greed drive its crew toward disaster.

4 Project Hail Mary Shows the Importance of Teamwork in Exploration

Phil Lord and Christopher Miller adapt Andy Weir’s novel about Ryland Grace, played by Ryan Gosling, a science teacher who wakes alone on a spaceship with no memory of his mission to stop a star-dimming threat to Earth. His encounter with the alien Rocky becomes a story of improvised communication and shared problem-solving. 

Star Trek often explains science with technobabble. Project Hail Mary makes experiments, math, and deduction the actual thrills, and it builds a first contact friendship that feels earned. Its blend of suspense, humor, and hope lands harder than most Star Trek encounters.

3 Gravity Puts Survival Over Exploration

Alfonso Cuarón’s masterpiece shows the helplessness and nothingness of space. Sandra Bullock’s Ryan Stone is on a mission when a catastrophic storm of space debris destroys her shuttle and detaches her from the rest of her crew. How she makes it back alive through instinct and limited guidance makes the story.

Star Trek: Voyager has placed its protagonists in unknown territories, but Voyager has a crew. Ryan Stone has no one, and her one guide, George Clooney’s Matt Kowalski, is wildly separated. With breathtaking cinematography and Sandra Bullock’s performance, Gravity shows the terrifying parts of space travel. Cuarón revealed recently that he was working on a horror film next, but this Oscar-winner already takes the cake.

2 Interstellar Simplifies Space-Time With the Concept of Love

Christopher Nolan has explored themes of time and its effects on the human psyche. Interstellar is his most positive outlook. When Coop, a former NASA test pilot in a starved future, goes on a mission to look for more life-supporting planets, he is faced with an odyssey of adventure.

As the crew head to galaxies unknown, the only thing that keeps them going is their love. Cooper loves his daughter, and Dr. Brand loves her father and another crewmate who went before her. Star Trek has rarely been this poignant (and cheesy) about its exploration of the human spirit.

1 Sunshine Shows the Dark Tolls of Isolation

Arguably the best on this list, Sunshine follows a crew on a mission to deploy a bomb to the dying sun in the future, in order to reignite it. Written by Alex Garland, the movie turns a rescue mission into a slow collapse of reason and a threat inside the vessel that wears everyone down. 

Star Trek crews almost always save the day with a clever plan. Sunshine shows how mission pressure, isolation, and awe at a giant star can crack professionals. Its sense of scale and dread is far stronger than anything the franchise usually attempts. 

Which recent space travel movie do you think beats Star Trek? Comment below.