Elle Fanning's Best Sci-Fi Films (& Two To Look Forward To) 

The love affair between poet Percy Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin resulted in the creation of an immortal novel, “Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus.”

Fanning’s first brush with sci-fi came in the late, great Tony Scott’s Deja Vu. The movie, one of the director’s five collaborations with Denzel Washington, follows an ATF agent, Doug (Washington), who gets recruited into a top-secret surveillance program that allows him to investigate the past in real time. Fanning, who was just eight years old at the time, gives a brief but memorable performance in a movie that rips along like any other in the Scott canon.

For me, it’s not quite on par with other Denzel-Scott collabs like Man on Fire and Unstoppable, but the sci-fi twist gives it its own special flavour. It’s definitely worth a watch.

Having been a child actress from the age of three (often appearing as a younger version of her sister Dakota), Fanning was pretty much an eight-year-old veteran by the time she landed a role opposite Ryan Reynolds in The Nines. The movie, in which Reynolds plays three different characters who appear to be connected, is split into three sections—the first of which features Fanning. 

The movie probably won’t bother any lists of the actress's best movies, but its attempts at metaphysical profundity have a fun and undemanding energy about them. It’s the only movie John August directed, so fans of the writer’s Big Fish (one of several movies he made with Tim Burton) should have an idea of the tone here. For everyone else, let’s say that it’s very 2007. 

Fanning’s star-making turn came in JJ Abrams’ Super 8, a delightful, post-Spielberg, pre-Stranger Things, suburban sci-fi that essentially gave the then 12-year-old actress her first lead role. 

The story takes place in Ohio in 1979, where a group of kids (led by Fanning’s Alice and Joel Courtney’s Joe) get tied up in a government conspiracy after capturing footage of a train crash (and its top-secret cargo) on their Super 8 camera. It’s one of the movies I’ll always associate her with and one that I’m always down to revisit.

After the success of Super 8 and her incredible performance in Sofia Coppola’s Somewhere, Fanning signed on to make a movie with another sibling of Hollywood royalty: Jake Paltrow. Gwyneth’s brother cast Fanning to play one of the leads in his sophomore feature, Young Ones, a speculative sci-fi about a near-future world in which water has become scarce. 

The movie was not a huge success—many critics were sceptical of the minimal approach—but it allowed Fanning to play opposite the great Michael Shannon (as her father), Nicholas Hoult (her boyfriend) and Kodi Smit-McPhee (her brother). 

Shot in South Africa and told at a steady pace, Young Ones is probably more in the lineage of the American Western than sci-fi, so fans looking for a dose of the latter would probably be served better with something else from the Fanning canon.

By the end of the 2010s, Fanning had started to take on more mature roles, boldly starring in The Neon Demon for Nicolas Winding Refn and giving a performance—one I’m particularly fond of—opposite Annette Bening in Mike Mills’ 20th Century Woman, not that it put a stop to the actress’ love affair with sci-fi. 

In 2017, she was perfectly cast in John Cameron Mitchell’s adaptation of How to Talk to Girls at Parties, playing an alien teenager exploring the punk rock scene in ‘70s London. Mitchell’s movie also features Nicole Kidman as the proprietor of a rowdy pub—but Fanning shines, even next to Kidman’s star power. Imagine a little bit of Green Room mixed with Scott Pilgrim vs The World, and you’ll get an idea of what to expect.

Oddly enough, Fanning’s most similar role to Badlands was arguably in I Think We’re Alone Now, a post-apocalyptic tale from cinematographer turned director Reed Morano—and another movie in which the actress crash lands into another character’s story. 

The plot centres on a hermetic character, Del (Peter Dinklage), who believes he’s the last survivor in a world where much of the population has been wiped out by a pandemic. Fanning plays Grace, a young woman who shows up out of nowhere and becomes an unlikely friend. Critics at the time weren’t so keen on the movie’s languid pacing, but many of them praised the performances of both leads.

It’s one to check out if you enjoy the father-daughter dynamics of classic sci-fis like The Last of Us and Spielberg’s War of the Worlds—in which Elle’s sister Dakota also stars.

After narrowly missing out on an Oscar nomination for A Complete Unknown, Fanning will be quietly hoping to start making amends when Sentimental Value is released in November in the U.S. That is already looking like a busy week for the actress, as Predator: Badlands is scheduled to hit cinemas on the very same day. 

The movie, in which Fanning plays two twin Weyland Yutani “synthetics” (a clear suggestion that there might be some Alien crossover action here!), focuses on a young, exiled Predator named Dek who forms a bond with Thia, the more benevolent of the twins. They must work together to survive in a movie that already looks like another win for Trachtenberg’s Predator universe. I will be first in line.

Fanning might only be looking to further cement her place on top of the Hollywood A-List by the time this Hunger Games prequel is released in November 2026. Set 40 years after The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes and 24 years before the first movie, Sunrise on the Reaping is set to star McKenna Grace and Joseph Zada as the tributes Maysilee Donner and Haymitch Abernathy, respectively.

Unusually, Fanning currently has top billing on IMDb for her role as Effie Trinket (who was memorably played by Elizabeth Banks in the original movies), so don’t be surprised if Trinket becomes more central to the story. The movie has reportedly already started filming, so we might not have to wait too long to find out!