10 Best Sci-Fi Movies of the 1980s, Ranked

If you’re a fan of science fiction, you’re probably well aware of the fact that numerous great sci-fi movies came out during the 1980s. And, sure, great pieces of science fiction can be found in most decades (even the 1920s had the iconic Metropolis), but there was something about the 1980s – and the way movies were made back then – that just suited science fiction and the aesthetics/conventions attached to the genre.

It was the last decade before computer-generated imagery started becoming relatively common in large-scale sci-fi movies, representing significant advancement for certain old-school techniques popular in genre cinema. Plenty of great filmmakers also seemed especially interested in exploring science fiction-related ideas – sometimes complemented with action, comedy, thrills, or even romance – throughout much of the 1980s, leading to numerous classics, the best of the best being ranked below.

10 ‘The Terminator’ (1984)

Directed by James Cameron

Kicking off a mostly inconsistent series (though Terminator 2: Judgment Day is undeniably brilliant), The Terminator is a gritty, exciting, straightforward, and moving piece of science fiction cinema. It wasn’t the very first movie James Cameron ever directed, but it was his first unequivocally great film, and one that kicked off a string of generally well-received (and often highly profitable) movies by the director.

With The Terminator, the plot boils down to a woman having to be protected from a persistent killer cyborg from the future, who’ll stop at nothing to kill her so she won’t be able to give birth to someone who’ll save humanity from a machine uprising. It successfully introduces a broader, wide-scale conflict, but chooses to do so with a relatively small and self-contained sci-fi story. The Terminator functions brilliantly within its budgetary limitations, and the majority of it still holds up immensely well.

9 ‘RoboCop’ (1987)

Directed by Paul Verhoeven

Like with The Terminator, there are some lesser follow-ups to RoboCop that aren’t super essential (at best) and are genuinely quite bad (at worst). Still, the original is a classic through and through, looking at a dystopian city torn apart by crime and similarly impacted by brutal policing, and working as a great piece of satire while also delivering on the world-building and action sides of things.

RoboCop is indeed about a cop who becomes at least part robot following a near-death experience, becoming a walking instrument of death who matches the criminals he pursues when it comes to relentlessness and a capacity for violence. Paul Verhoeven seemed to be at his best when making outlandish, sometimes extreme, and often darkly funny sci-fi films, and of those titles he made that can be defined as such, RoboCop is probably the greatest.

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8 ‘The Fly’ (1986)

Directed by David Cronenberg

Working just as effectively as a body horror movie as it does a sci-fi film, The Fly keeps things nice and simple on a narrative front, having a story that only involves a small number of main characters. One of them is a scientist who is working on a teleportation device, and events kick into high gear when one experiment with the device goes wrong, having the side effect of slowly turning him into a fly-like creature.

It was a remake of an older movie called The Fly, which had its own sequels, and then this version of The Fly also got a sequel. But the series doesn’t get any better than this 1986 movie, thanks to the phenomenal performances of Jeff Goldblum (at his Goldblumiest) and Geena Davis, as well as the strong direction from David Cronenberg, who’s arguably at the height of his directorial powers here.

7 ‘Back to the Future’ (1985)

Directed by Robert Zemeckis

Back to the Future is the movie to which all other comedies involving time travel are compared, and it’s not hard to see why. It’s a breezy, easily enjoyable, and creative film, concerning one young man going back in time and risking his own existence in the future by interacting with his parents, which runs the risk of ensuring they never fall in love and eventually have him.

It’s a perfect introduction to the concept of time travel for younger viewers, given it doesn’t overly complicate things, but neither is it just a movie for a younger audience; just about anyone can enjoy Back to the Future, really. It’s a well-oiled machine of a movie that sees various parts falling perfectly into place, and it would thereby probably be difficult to find too many people out there who genuinely don’t like it.

6 ‘Akira’ (1988)

Directed by Katsuhiro Otomo

If you’re a fan of anime at all, you’ve probably seen Akira, or have at least heard of it. It’s an essential piece of Japanese animation, adapting the lengthy manga series of the same name and ambitiously condensing approximately 2000 pages into a two-hour movie. It’s set in the “future” of 2019, with a distinctly dystopian/cyberpunk feel and a story that involves criminal gangs, risky experiments, the military, and superpowers.

Akira is a movie that both looks and sounds beautiful, bringing a vivid world to life with immense detail and telling a somewhat convoluted – though still gripping and thematically interesting – story. It’s the kind of movie that’s easy to get lost in and appreciate, with it understandably having a cult following while also being one of the best international sci-fi movies of its era.

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5 ‘The Thing’ (1982)

Directed by John Carpenter

If you want to single out just one year of the 1980s as being a particularly great one when it comes to science fiction, you’d have to go with 1982. One essential release from this year was The Thing, which infamously didn’t get nearly the kind of recognition upon release that it deserved, instead taking a few more years before people started saying, “Okay, yeah, this is peak sci-fi in every way.”

The Thing takes place in a remote location with characters confined due to a blizzard, their plight worsened by the fact that a shape-shifting alien is on the loose and systematically hunting them down. This is a movie that understands how to build tension, all the while also satisfying on a more visceral and obvious level when it wants to explode. There is bombastic and gory terror paired with quiet unease in a shockingly well-balanced way, and the resulting film is an absolute rollercoaster to sit through in the best of ways.

4 ‘Aliens’ (1986)

Directed by James Cameron

Just two years on from The Terminator, James Cameron made another significant piece of 1980s science fiction with Aliens, which was a somehow more-than-worth sequel to a classic 1970s sci-fi movie, Alien. Sigourney Weaver was the lead in both, but Aliens took a somewhat different approach to its predecessor by placing more of an emphasis on action, all the while still having suspense, terror, and thrills.

Aliens is a great sequel that escalates things while still feeling relatively in tune with what came before, building upon it and doing something different while not being too out of control with its differences. It is the gold standard for how to make a sequel without feeling like a retread, and is responsible for it being surprisingly difficult to label one movie in the Alien series as the “objective” best of the bunch.

3 ‘Blade Runner’ (1982)

Directed by Ridley Scott

On the topic of Alien, that 1979 movie was directed by Ridley Scott, and he made another sci-fi classic a few years later – in the 1980s – with Blade Runner. This one is simple narratively, being about one man who’s tasked with hunting down a number of replicants who’ve gone rogue, but Blade Runner’s complexity comes from its ambiguous characters, lofty themes, and immense technical proficiency.

The world of Blade Runner is a stunning one, and it’s a film that sounds as good as it looks, thanks to the immensely great score by Vangelis. It’s a movie that endures and feels somewhat timeless, even if it’s, like Akira, another sci-fi movie that’s no longer set in the future, thanks to time in real life marching beyond the late 2010s. But other than that, age has not wearied Blade Runner at all, and there is still so much to be blown away by here.

Directed by Steven Spielberg

Picking a favorite Steven Spielberg movie is always understandably tough, but E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial would surely have to be a contender, in any event. It’s a film that sees Spielberg at his most sentimental and family-friendly, but it just works, dammit. This movie has so much heart, creativity, humor, and childlike wonder to it. It’s easy to get swept up in it when you’re a kid, and it’s somehow even more emotionally impactful when you watch it as an adult.

The story of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial is simple, following the friendship between a boy and an alien who gets stranded on Earth, with the former helping the latter to contact his home and thereby reconnect with his own family. It’s a movie about childhood, growing up, finding connections, and dealing with certain hardships, covering a huge range of emotions while also containing one of the very best scores John Williams ever composed (which is really saying something, considering that man’s body of work).

1 ‘The Empire Strikes Back’ (1980)

Directed by Irvin Kershner

Okay, sure, if you want to get technical, the Star Wars series is more of a space opera saga rather than a strictly science fiction one. You could call it closer to fantasy in feel and tone, if you wanted to, but then again, these are movies that take place in a far-off galaxy, feature weaponry that seems advanced, involve aliens, and have characters traveling between planets on spaceships, so it’s at least somewhat sci-fi, you know?

The high point of the entire series to date probably remains The Empire Strikes Back, which improved upon everything found in the already fantastic first movie from 1977. The Empire Strikes Back doesn’t hit a single wrong note for its whole duration, being immensely impressive from a technical perspective, brilliantly paced, and even more emotional than its predecessor. Calling it one of the very best movies of all time – regardless of genre – is surprisingly easy to do.

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