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5 sci-fi movies worth watching this weekend
28th August, 2026 09:07 PM
A late-August mix of endurance horror, dinosaur pulp, first-contact nerves, a looping subway nightmare, and shoestring metafiction.
This month’s streaming pile leans grim and odd rather than shiny. There is an early Stephen King novel turned into a death march, a Vietnam dinosaur movie that knows exactly what it is, a quiet film about whether to answer a signal from space, a Japanese puzzle about never finding the exit, and a desert wanderer who may only exist because someone wrote him.
The Long Walk
HBO Max
Francis Lawrence adapts the 1979 Richard Bachman / Stephen King novel. In an alternate, authoritarian United States, fifty teenage boys walk. Drop under three miles an hour and you are shot. The last one standing wins.
It is not an action movie. The centre is the friendship between Pete (David Jonsson) and Ray (Cooper Hoffman). The hopelessness is heavier than Lawrence’s Hunger Games films. Death is both pointless and loaded. That only boys walk can be read as a draft metaphor, or as a closed male ritual that collapses under its own rules.
Primitive War
Hulu
Luke Sparke’s 1968 Vietnam B-picture: a mysterious machine, dinosaurs in a valley, lots of gore, effects better than the premise deserves.
Ryan Kwanten’s sergeant radios Jeremy Piven after the unit is torn apart and describes prehistoric beasts “hungry, pissed off and chomping at the bit for their little piece of the American pie.”
Tricia Helfer plays a stranded Soviet palaeontologist. The movie stays inside genre lines and then chews the scenery on purpose.
Exit 8
Shudder
Genki Kawamura’s film starts on a crowded train. A commuter (Kazunari Ninomiya) is listening to Ravel’s Boléro.
He tries to leave the station and instead walks the same antiseptic corridors, always meeting the same man with a briefcase (Yamato Kochi).
Think Severance and the Backrooms: games with rules nobody explained. A poster tells him to look for anomalies.
The larger idea is that you have to notice the room — and other people — if you want to leave it.
Signal One
Rent or buy on major platforms
Jonathan Sobol’s tight film is set in a private lab on a Caribbean island, funded by a billionaire (Dennis Quaid).
David Thewlis is the misanthropic genius who built a machine to scan the universe for life. Something pings back.
Josh Hutcherson’s engineer wants first contact. Isabelle Fuhrman’s computer scientist does not want to announce Earth to whatever is listening.
The suspense is low-boil indecision, and the ending lands.
Lars Shrike Walks the Night
Amazon Prime Video or The Roku Channel
A man in shackles (Kelsey Grammer) staggers through a desert and only knows his name. Director Gary Walkow uses Grammer’s voice as narration.
Lars reaches a suburb, searches himself online, and finds that Lars Shrike is a character in a book called The Trouble With Dick, written by Richard Kendred. He goes to Los Angeles to meet his author.
David Clennon plays Richard — the same actor who played Lars in Walkow’s earlier film The Trouble with Dick (1987).
Walkow’s Crashing (2007) and The Trouble with Dot & Harry (2015) sit in the same loose cluster. Lars Shrike still works alone as cheap, self-aware metafiction.
That is the August 28 list: one King adaptation that hurts, one dinosaur war that grins, one contact dilemma, one endless station, and one man who may be a sentence walking around.
