From RoboCop to Minority Report to Universal Soldier, there are plenty of great sci-fi action movies out there that fans of the franchise are sure to love. James Cameron introduced his gift for coming up with simple but brilliant story ideas with his breakthrough film The Terminator. The concept of a killer cyborg going back in time to kill the mother of the man leading the charge against the machines in the future was both a great sandbox to stage sci-fi action set-pieces in present-day L.A. and a great vehicle for social commentary on the rise of artificial intelligence.
Cameron hasn’t been directly involved in the Terminator franchise in a while, and the series has suffered because of it. But plenty of other sci-fi movies and action franchises have carried the torch in the meantime. Alex Garland crafted his own cautionary tale about A.I. by way of a Hitchcockian suspense thriller. Steven Spielberg directed his own tech-noir masterpiece from a Philip K. Dick story. And Edge of Tomorrow did a better job of dramatizing Terminator’s future war than Terminator’s own Terminator Salvation did.
Based on Philip K. Dick’s short story “Second Variety,” Screamers is a chilling sci-fi thriller about machines turning on their makers (a common theme in Dick’s work). After scientists create a machine to wipe out their enemies, they unwittingly cause a catastrophe when the machine becomes a threat to everyone, including its own creators. Although it received mostly negative reviews from critics, Screamers is deeply atmospheric and curiously ambiguous. Similar to the original Terminator movie, it pulls off blockbuster sci-fi spectacle on a relatively slim budget with no big-name stars.
Cyborg combines the dystopian chills of cyberpunk with the punching and kicking of martial arts movies. Jean-Claude Van Damme stars as a mercenary fighting a band of marauders in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Like The Terminator, it uses a grim look at humanity’s future as the backdrop for an action-packed thriller. Picture Ghost in the Shell meets Bloodsport, or Kickboxer meets The Fifth Element. Cyborg was panned by critics on its initial release, but it was popular enough with audiences to spawn a franchise, and it definitely scratches that Terminator itch.
Terminator Salvation didn’t quite manage to capture the intensity of a future war between the remnants of humanity and its common enemy, but Edge of Tomorrow did. Tom Cruise stars as a soldier stuck in a time loop, reliving the day he died fighting aliens on a battlefield over and over again. Like the very best Terminator movies, Edge of Tomorrow is a pitch-perfect blend of thought-provoking science fiction and high-octane action spectacle. It’s a war movie full of alien invaders, but it’s also an interesting exploration of the inherent paradoxes of time travel.
Roland Emmerich’s military sci-fi actioner Universal Soldier stars Jean-Claude Van Damme as a Vietnam War veteran who’s brought back to life decades later and manufactured to be the perfect killing machine. Matters get complicated when the soldier starts recalling memories from his previous existence. When it was released, Universal Soldier was dismissed as a Terminator 2 rip-off, since it borrows T2’s dynamic of a feud across time between two killing machines. It may not be as thoughtful or profound as T2, but it’s another exhilarating blockbuster that has plenty of fun with its high-concept premise.
Alex Garland’s directorial debut is both a nail-biting thriller and a sharp meditation on A.I., just like the Terminator movies. Ex Machina sees a low-level computer programmer being invited to his reclusive boss’ remote home, only to learn that he’s been selected to carry out a Turing test on a beautiful android. As he falls in love with the android, the programmer’s loyalty to his boss is tested. Ex Machina is a fascinating three-hander about the tensions between three characters each trying to figure each other out, and Garland masterfully ratchets up the suspense throughout the movie.
Steven Spielberg’s sci-fi noir Minority Report takes place in a future in which the police have a gadget that allows them to predict crimes before they’re even committed. Tom Cruise plays a police chief who has to go on the run and clear his name when he’s accused of the imminent murder of a man he’s never met. He has to stay on the move while trying to figure out why he will inevitably end this man’s life. Much like the Terminator movies, Minority Report is a pulse-pounding thriller that uses a speculative futuristic technology to drive its action.
Like the Terminator series, Dredd puts its social commentary in the backseat to focus on ultraviolent action. Karl Urban plays the titular 2000 A.D. antihero, who ends up trapped in a massive high-rise contending with a ruthless drug lord and her goons. Dredd successfully translates the comics’ satire of authoritarianism and police brutality onto the screen without ever slowing down the action. The film’s fictional time-slowing drug “Slo-Mo” is used to deliver some jaw-dropping super-slow-motion shootouts, while Dredd’s role as a reluctant mentor to a rookie judge gives the movie an endearing emotional core.
In between the first and second Terminator films, Arnold Schwarzenegger starred in a different sci-fi actioner. Total Recall doesn’t just share the Terminator franchise’s headlining star; it also shares its mind-bending storytelling and gruesome violence. It’s about a blue-collar joe in the distant future who has memories of a spy mission on Mars implanted in his mind in lieu of a vacation and awakens to a mysterious conspiracy that suggests those memories could actually be real. Total Recall has all the explosive fun of a Schwarzenegger action vehicle like Terminator 2, but it’s also a surreal head trip.
A couple of years before Cameron solidified the tech-noir subgenre with The Terminator, Ridley Scott pioneered it with Blade Runner. Blade Runner revolves around a detective searching a sprawling futuristic metropolis for sentient androids that have assimilated into human society. Much like the Terminator franchise, Blade Runner explores the dangers of artificial intelligence through an action-packed story of cyborgs fighting back. The satirical irony of the story is that, in hunting down and killing all the androids lurking in Los Angeles, Rick Deckard slowly loses his own humanity and becomes more of a robot than they are.
Much like the Terminator franchise, RoboCop uses sci-fi action spectacle as a great vehicle for timely social commentary — albeit with a more overtly comedic bent. RoboCop takes place in a dystopian near-future Detroit, overrun with crime and on the brink of socioeconomic collapse. Peter Weller stars as a police officer who’s shot to pieces by a gang and resurrected as a weapon by an unscrupulous mega-corporation. Whereas most stories about robots at the time, including The Terminator, dealt with cold, emotionless robotic characters, RoboCop explores the psychological effects of the loss of Alex Murphy’s humanity.
The tone of RoboCop is decidedly more absurdist and exaggerated than the movies, but it’s just as effective in its dystopian satire. RoboCop uses the extreme scenario of a crooked corporation turning a cop into a cybernetic killer and selling him back to the police force to lampoon capitalism, Reaganomics, corporate greed, and the privatization of public services. As the real world becomes more and more dystopian, RoboCop feels less and less like science fiction.
