Will Smith’s 5 Best Sci-Fi Movies Ranked

Will Smith is a bonafide movie star, and you don’t get to become a movie star if you’re not multi-faceted. Smith’s career is one that clearly demonstrates his versatility and then some; he’s got a physicality and swagger that lends itself easily to an action film lead, as seen in the “Bad Boys” franchise as well as movies like “Suicide Squad” and “Bright.” He has the emotional depth and soulfulness to take on a variety of dramatic roles, as in “King Richard,” “The Pursuit of Happyness,” “Ali,” and “Six Degrees of Separation.” He also has a natural comic timing — honed during his years starring on the wildly successful sitcom “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” — which crops up in many of his performances, but has also led to winning leading roles in the rom-com “Hitch” and Disney live-action remake “Aladdin.”

Despite his considerable range and his continued appeal, Smith has one genre above them all to thank the most for his career, and that’s science fiction. Smith’s appearances in sci-fi movies aren’t just examples of the actor at the peak of his stardom; they’re all notable (and, in most cases, essential) examples of the genre itself. It’s Smith’s well-rounded persona that makes him a great fit with a genre as malleable as sci-fi, as he’s able to both delve into the headier aspects of the genre while also providing enough down-to-Earth irreverence to make these stories palpable for general audiences. No wonder the Wachowskis famously wanted him to lead “The Matrix.”

There are about a dozen-odd sci-fi films in which Smith has starred, meaning that fans of both the actor and the genre are spoiled for choice. What follows, then, are the cream of the crop, the movies that Smith infused with such indelible performances as to make them must-sees for a wide range of people. They’re also, not coincidentally, some of the films that helped make Smith the star he became, too, proving that when it comes to Smith and sci-fi, the relationship is a truly symbiotic one.

For years following its publication in 1950, Issac Asimov’s book “I, Robot” had languished in development hell, with numerous writers and filmmaking teams (including the likes of Harlan Ellison) trying and failing to adapt it into a major motion picture. Part of the problem is that the core tenets of Asimov’s work (especially the Three Laws of Robotics) were so seminal, that they had already seeped into a plethora of unrelated stories and projects by the time any movie version was getting ready to go. That’s partially why 2004’s “I, Robot” is only suggested by the Asimov novel; in no way is it a direct adaptation, but instead honors just how influential Asimov’s work had become based on the fact that this wholly unrelated movie could be heavily inspired by it.

In essence, the Jeff Vintar/Akiva Goldsman script (directed with visual flair by a post-“Dark City” Alex Proyas) is a riff on 1988’s James Caan vehicle “Alien Nation,” with a cop protagonist who’s prejudiced against robots being forced to team up with a robot named Sonny (Alan Tudyk) to try and figure out the cause behind a series of mysterious, robot-related murders. The detective, Del Spooner, is played by Smith with not just a great deal of integrity, but a level of specificity that helps bolster the character’s relatable humanity. Sure, Converse may have paid for some product placement in the film, but Smith makes Spooner’s love of the shoes a character trait, not just an awkward advert.

The core premise of “Gemini Man” — a veteran military assassin discovers that a covert government program has cloned a version of his younger self for black ops purposes — is one that would be intriguing with just about any movie star, given how it exploits the public’s relationship with them on screen as well as the actor’s relationship with themselves. Indeed, “Gemini Man” was in development long enough that it shuffled through several possible leading men. Though since the project began life in the late ’90s, the dual role of Henry Brogan and Jackson “Junior” Brogan used to be thought of as a role for an older leading man and his up-and-coming counterpart, a la “The Devil’s Own” or “Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol.”

Instead, by the time Ang Lee took the reins of the movie in 2019, the filmmaker hit upon the novel idea of having Will Smith play both roles, with effects houses like Weta Digital and Park Road Post applying de-aging technology so Smith can appear as his younger self. This makes “Gemini Man” a film using de-aging tech that is deliberately having a conversation about the technology both within and without the film’s narrative (following the previous milestone, 2010’s “Tron: Legacy”). It’s a very meta, sci-fi concept, and as such, Smith is the perfect man for the job. What flaws the film has are more than made up for by this subtext, and while “Gemini Man” isn’t the best sci-fi movie Smith stars in, it’s certainly the most thought-provoking.

Fans of Richard Matheson and his 1954 post-apocalyptic novel are well aware that “I Am Legend” has been adapted to the screen a handful of times, and while none of these versions can be called definitive translations of the novel, they’re all fascinating in their own right, and worthy riffs on Matheson’s core premise. Where 1964’s “The Last Man on Earth” took the story into Gothic Horror territory with Vincent Price and 1971’s “The Omega Man” was a gritty, Charlton Heston-led social commentary thriller, Francis Lawrence’s 2007 adaptation gambled on making Smith (and his character of Dr. Robert Neville) the center of the film in a big way.

That gamble really pays off, as BJ Colangelo succinctly puts it in her piece on Smith’s 10 best movie roles:

“…’I Am Legend’ is Smith’s so-far magnum opus. He spends the majority of the film completely alone, acting against himself or his pet dog, and trades in his usual smart-mouthed snark for the determined stillness of a scientist trying to survive the end of the world. This film lives and dies through the effectiveness of Smith’s performance, and Smith’s performance is certainly responsible for the film’s massive box-office success and continued legacy.”

In addition to Smith carrying the majority of the movie with aplomb, “I Am Legend” is yet another indication of Lawrence’s prowess as a genre filmmaker, something he continued to prove soon after this with his multiple “Hunger Games” entries. Ultimately, what makes “I Am Legend” special is how it takes a story that had been done several times before and allows it to feel fresh and unique again, ironically ensuring that the source material continues to be, well, legendary.

After “Bad Boys,” the jury was still out on whether Will Smith was a genuine movie star or simply a savvy sitcom actor who parlayed his charisma into a crowd-pleasing buddy cop movie. “Independence Day” was the film to put all that chatter to bed forever, for while other luminaries within the film’s ensemble cast are beloved for their contributions to the movie (such as Jeff Goldblum’s plucky computer nerd and Bill Pullman’s rousing President), there’s no question that Smith, playing Captain Steven Hiller, dominates every scene he appears in. His presence is the vital component that makes the entire movie work as well as it does: where Pullman is vital for his earnestness and Goldblum makes the silly technobabble of the plot go down smoothly, Smith is the beating heart of a film that attempts to encapsulate the jingoistic spirit of the titular holiday without turning the movie into a polemic, which is no mean feat. In other hands, “Independence Day” could’ve felt like a thinly veiled treatise on American foreign policy; with Smith at the helm, it’s a rollercoaster “stop the evil alien creatures” ride that anyone from any nation can enjoy (and to think, he almost wasn’t in it).

This was the intention, of course, of director/co-writer Roland Emmerich and producer/co-writer Dean Devlin, to make a film which harkened back to both the ’50s alien invasion B-movies and the ’70s disaster film. If the movie is attempting to capitalize on any real-world allegory, it’s the resurgence of UFO sightings and alien conspiracy theories, as well as the general apocalyptic ennui of the 1990s as the calendar approached the millennium. “Independence Day” is an earnest, pompous, fun-loving, knowingly cheesy ode to humanity’s collective resilience and common interests, the apotheosis of the feel-good disaster movie. When an alien crash lands and Hiller’s first impulse is to march right over to it and give it a sock in the jaw, it’s entirely clear what kind of movie we’re watching and that Smith knows it, too.

It’s typical Hollywood math: take what worked before, mix it up a little bit, and hope it works again. In the case of “Men in Black,” it’s clear that some studio executives saw “Will Smith + aliens” and figured that the two went together like peanut butter and chocolate the year before, so why not repeat the formula? The irony is that “Men in Black” is far from being any sort of “Independence Day” clone; on the contrary, it may be the anti-“Independence Day,” as it espouses continued diplomacy and charity between humanity and other species within the universe. Although the premise of the film (especially the title) is drawing from material like comic books (the movie based on Lowell Cunningham’s series of the same name) and rampant conspiracy theories about secret government employees looking to cover up the existence of extraterrestrials, the world of “Men in Black” is one that keeps unfolding to discover new ideas. It is, for lack of a better comparison, the “Star Trek” to “Independence Day’s” “Star Wars.”

The joyous, insightful, satiric, and clever mixture of the film is due in large part to director Barry Sonnenfeld (who had just come off a pair of similarly insightful “Addams Family” films and Hollywood satire “Get Shorty”) and writer Ed Solomon (he of the subversively optimistic “Bill & Ted” movies), who infuse “Men in Black” with just the right amounts of sweet and sour. That combo can be applied to the movie’s leads, too: Tommy Lee Jones is grumpy, sarcastic perfection as Agent K, while Smith is all fish-out-of-water, wide-eyed wonder as Agent J, the two men lending the increasingly wacky film a mooring that’s much the same as one seen in “Ghostbusters.” “Men in Black” is a movie with a ton of ideas, heart, and wit within it, so much so that it spawned two sequels which, though they don’t reach the heights of this film, remain worthy entries nonetheless. Smith’s appearance in the movie is even more star-powered than “ID4” had been; after all, this is the film that began his semi-tradition of recording an original song for each movie (and to think, he almost wasn’t in this one too!). What “Men in Black” does more than any other sci-fi movie Smith stars in is solidify the actor’s power; when appearing in the genre, Will Smith is out of this world.