Best Science Fiction Movies Of The 1980s
The 1980s had their share of entertaining science fiction movies. It also had its shares of duds. If you watch carefully you can see some of the cheaper movies from the 1980s used the same stock footage in some of their space battle scenes. I say if you can’t afford to shoot a movie, don’t make it.
In 1980 The Empire Strikes Back was released. The director was Irvin Kershner and it starred the usual Star Wars cast of Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher among others. This movie deals with the rebels being conquered by the Empire on their new base and Luke Skywalker leaves to take advanced Jedi training with Master Yoda. Meanwhile the villain, Darth Vader, is chasing Luke’s friends and the rebels all over the universe. A very good movie.
Another movie which came out the same year was The Final Countdown. It was directed by Rod Taylor and featured Kirk Douglas and Martin Sheen. This movie is one of my favorites and I have seen it several times. A modern nuclear aircraft carrier enters a strange electrical storm and is transported back to World War II. At first they can’t believe it, but when they are finally convinced they have to decide whether to get into the war or not. They know if they do their overwhelming power will make short work of America’s enemies. While I can’t recall it being said, there is always the problem of changing the future. Everyone should watch this movie.
Escape from New York came out in 1981 and was directed by John Carpenter and starred Kurt Russell, Lee Van Cleef and Ernest Borgnine. With a cast like this how could it go wrong? Manhattan has been turned into a prison. The president is on his plane when it is hijacked and taken to Manhattan and now someone is needed to rescue him. Lee Van Cleef, the creepy police commissioner, suggests he has just the right person for the job and Snake Plissken a former Special Forces soldier who is in prison is given the job, but he is injected with a poison which will kill him if he can’t get back with the president within 24 hours. You just know the police commissioner can’t be trusted. Really good movie. I purposely avoided the Mad Max movies only because I felt they fit better into the action movie category and some might say so does this one.
No list from the 1980s would be complete without the classic movie Blade Runner. It came out in 1982 and was directed by Ridley Scott and starred Harrison Ford and Rutger Hauer. It takes place in the future, the year 2019. An ex-police officer now works tracking down replicants which are bioengineered beings. These beings have a life span of only 4 years and then they are retired (killed). The beings are used for work in space. A few have escaped and have come to earth to try and extend their lives. One of the women assisting the corporation which builds the replicants is one herself, but doesn’t know it. As Harrison Ford chases Rutger Hauer a replicant, he learns how precious life is to it. There are some great messages about how important life is in this movie. It should be seen by all.
That same year a real feel good movie came out titled E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial. It was directed by Steven Spielberg and starred Henry Thomas. A group of alien botanists are collecting plant life in California. Government agents appear and they flee on their spaceship not realizing they left one of their members on earth. A boy named Elliott experiences a psychic connect with the alien. The alien learns our language and starts to build a device to contact his home. E.T. is smuggled out into the woods on Halloween to avoid onlookers and makes his call from there. A cute movie.
1982 also saw the Star Trek movie, Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan. It was directed by Nicholas Meyer and starred the crew from the Star Trek original series along with Ricardo Montalban. Many Star Trek fans felt this was the best of all the Star Trek movies. It had to do with the television episode Space Seed. Genetically altered humans had been ruling the world until they were forced into space in an old nuclear powered ship. They were asleep and revived by the crew of the Enterprise and caused so much trouble they were put onto a planet of their own and left. The movie picks up with a federation ship landing on a dusty harsh planet and it turns out to be the planet these people were put on and they capture the ship’s crew and steal it. Now it is up to Kirk and his crew to catch or destroy them.
The Thing, a remake of the original, also came out in 1982 and contrary to most remakes was pretty good. It was directed by John Carpenter and starred Kurt Russell. The remake had a twist however and it was the fact the alien which had been discovered in the ice could assume the shape and looks of any biological form including human. See the 1951 movie, The Thing From Another World for more on the plot.
1983 saw another Star Wars movie come out. It was Return of the Jedi. The director was Richard Marquand and had the usual cast. Luke is creating a plan to rescue Han Solo from the crime lord Jabba the Hutt. They decide to infiltrate Jabba’s palace with the help of Dee Williams. Things never seem to go the way they are planned and the stout crew finds this out the hard way. Luke is brought to the emperor by Darth Vader. The emperor wants to turn Luke to the dark side. There are attacks and battles and Luke and Vader have a light sabre battle.
In 1984 2010 was released. It was the sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey. It was directed by Peter Hyams and starred Roy Scheider, John Lithgow, Helen Mirren and Keir Dullea. The US and Soviet Union agree to a joint mission to find out what happened when David Bowman and his ship disappeared near Jupiter. The crews discover something strange on Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons. Some strange scenes take place where Bowman reappears inside the ship in different stages of aging. The new HAL computer is working perfectly and seems aware. Problems start happening with the monoliths which are now all around Jupiter. Some thought this movie was too mysterious, but I liked it.
Dune came out in 1984. It was directed by David Lynch and starred Francesca Annis and Leonardo Cimino. It was called an epic film, but was a total failure at the box office. I still believe it was an important movie. It had to do with the universe in the future which is ruled by an Emperor and the selling of a drug called Melange which allows for instant folding of space and instant transport anywhere and the expansion of consciousness. The emperor feels threatened by Duke Leto who is getting popular and wants to ambush him. His son escapes into the desert of the planet where the Melange comes from and is perceived by the people on that planet as their savior.
A very entertaining science fiction movie came out in 1984 called The Last Star Fighter. The director was Nick Castle and the movie starred Lance Guest. The premise was aliens were installing a space war type arcade game in different places on earth. While it looked like a game it was really built to test the player’s ability to pilot a complicated star fighter the aliens had built to fight off an evil villain. A teenager in a trailer park scores the highest score and the adventure begins when the aliens contact him and ask for his assistance in the war.
One movie which many conspiracy theorists were glad to see being released was The Philadelphia Experiment. In came out in 1984 and was directed by Stewart Raffill and starred Michael Pare. The story was faithful to the legend of what happened to a ship in World War II after it was fitted out to be made invisible. The experiment takes place and the ship disappears, but it goes through time into the future and some of the crew are fused into the plates of the ship and the time trip has terrible effects on the survivors.
Star Trek: The Search For Spock came out in 1984. It was directed by none other than Leonard Nimoy and starred the original Star Trek crew with the addition of Christopher Lloyd. Spock had died and his remains landed on a planet which was being terraformed and there were signs of life on it. Could it be Spock? The Klingons are also interested, but for a different reason. The device used to terraform a planet instantly would also make an awesome weapon. Kirk and the Klingons fight it out.
Starman was another interesting science fiction movie which came out in 1984. It was directed by John Carpenter and starred Jeff Bridges. Aliens come across Voyager 2 and play the gold record it contains and take it as an invitation to come to earth. They send a small scout ship, but it is shot down. It has only one alien on it and he survives. The alien is a ball of energy and floats into a house and uses a hair from the woman’s dead husband to form into his look alike. He uses one of the devices he has to warn his fellow aliens the earth is hostel and not to send any more beings here. He gets the woman in the house to take him to a point in Arizona where his fellow aliens can pick him up. There is a lot more to this film. It is well worth looking at.
Perhaps the most famous film of the 1980s was The Terminator. It came out in 1984 and was directed by James Cameron and starred Arnold Schwarzenegger. This movie has left a lasting impression on society and the use of Artificial Intelligence in machines. Artificially intelligent machines have taken over in the future and have made cyborgs which look human, but are only there to kill us. The object is to wipe out the entire human race. A hero in the future finds out a cyborg has been sent into the past to kill his mother so he will never be born, so he goes back in time to stop this from happening. A must see film.
In 1985 a movie titled Lifeforce was released. It was directed by Tobe Hooper and starred Steve Railsback and Peter Firth. The crew of the space shuttle Churchill finds a 150 mile long spaceship hidden in the corona of Halley’s Comet. There are hundreds of bat like creatures and three naked human bodies. The three human like bodies are in glass containers. When the Churchill doesn’t return, a rescue mission finds it badly burned. The human like aliens are still in their tubes. To make a long story short, they are space vampires who come to earth periodically for their prey. The aliens take over London. I like this film and I think most of you will also.
Sometimes a cheap movie is pretty good. In 1985 Space Rage came out. It was directed by Conrad E. Palmisano and starred Richard Farnsworth and Michael Pare. A very dangerous lunatic criminal is sentenced to a penal colony called appropriately Botany Bay on Proxima Centauri 3. This film can almost be classified as a space western. It has a lot of action and good acting.
In 1986 the movie Aliens came out. It was directed by James Cameron and starred Sigourney Weaver again. It was the sequel to Alien. I felt it was just as good as the Alien and maintain a very high suspense level. Weaver is rescued from drifting through space in a small ship after killing an alien. She has been in stasis for 57 years and the company wants to know how their ship the Nostromo was destroyed and don’t believe her story. A colony had been put on the planet where the alien eggs were discovered and communication with them has been lost. The colonial marines are sent to the planet and Weaver goes with them. You guessed it, they are now in the fight for their life against the aliens. A great movie.
1986 also saw the release of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. It was directed again by Leonard Nimoy and starred the original Star Trek cast. An alien probe is moving through space disabling ships that pass it. It goes into orbit around earth. The crew of the Enterprise are living in exile on Vulcan, because of what happened in Star Trek III. They are in possession of a captured Klingon Bird-of-Prey they named the Bounty. They decide to head to earth to face the music for the theft and destruction of the Enterprise. Starfleet is warning all ships away. Spock recognizes the signal from the alien ship as the song of an extinct whale. The crew travels back in time to find a whale to bring back capable of answering the call.
Batteries Not Included came out in 1987. It was directed by Matthew Robbins and starred Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy. Old people running an apartment building come under threat from a developer. People in the building are being threatened by thugs he hired. Two tiny living spaceships enter the building and repair everything. They move into the shed. The realestator comes back and sees the repairs and finds his way to the shed where the ships scare him away. The ships have babies and one of the old people is able to save a still born one by using parts from his television. Eventually the ships leave and the apartment complex is reduced to rubble, but this is not the end.
The same year saw Predator. It was directed by John McTiernan and starred Arnold Schwarzenegger. Schwarzenegger is the leader of an elite Special Forces team which is tasked with rescuing hostages from guerrillas who have their base in the Central American jungle. They find them, but also something very unexpected. It seems a vicious alien hunter is preying on humans there and it decides to attack the team. The alien has superior technology and is almost impossible to kill. An exciting movie.
Project X came out in 1987 and was directed by Jonathan Kaplan and starred Matthew Broderick and Helen Hunt. A young Air Force officer is assigned to take care of chimps being used on a secret project. He becomes very attached to one of the chimps. It turns out the chimps are being used in a flight simulator and when they reach a certain level they are to be killed by radiation. The idea is to see how long they can last in a nuclear exchange. He just can’t let that happen.
A very violent RoboCop also came out in 1987. It was directed by Paul Verhoeven and starred Peter Weller. Weller spent many months learning how to move like a robot. A policeman is viciously attacked and left for dead. He is brought back by Omni Consumer Products, but is more machine than human. The company sees the chance for a huge profit by selling robot policemen which were once alive. Robocop starts to remember his human life which is disturbing him. Omni turns out to be evil and only interested in profits and RoboCop now decides to not only get even with his killers, but to get the people who run Omni. A great movie if you can stand the gore.
One of my very favorites also came out in 1987. It was called Steel Dawn and directed by Lance Hool and starred Patrick Swayze, Lisa Niemi and Anthony Zerbe. It is a very unusual movie and takes place sometime in the distant future. There are no more guns, but wars still exist and warriors use swords and spears. The internal combustion engine is gone and people travel in sail cars. A former elite soldier comes out of the bad lands and works for a woman on a farm making her foreman jealous, but eventually they become friends. The person running the territory wants the farm, because he knows water is under it, but the soldier helps the lady farmer protect it. The best killer in the soldier’s former regiment is hired to kill the soldier and this eventually leads to a great sword fight.
In 1988 Alien Nation came out. It was directed by Graham Baker and starred James Caan and Terence Stamp. The plot entails the Newcomers, a race of aliens who have been in quarantine for years who are now allowed to join the human race. There are 300,000 of them and they get integrated into human society. One becomes a detective and gets involved in a robbery by Newcomers upon a Newcomer shop keeper. Some Newcomers are selling a drug called Jabroka to other Newcomers. It has no effect on humans, but makes the Newcomers a lot bigger and stronger and vicious, causing problems also for humans. An interesting movie.
In 1988 a very strange movie came out. It was called Killer Klowns From Outer Space. It was directed by Stephen Chiodo and starred Grand Cramer. It was low budget, but I found it interesting and for a time it became a cult favorite. An alien ship lands on earth and disguises itself as a circus tent. The aliens come out and they are dressed like clowns. They head to the nearest small town and people begin to disappear. The police do not believe a boy who says it was clowns killing people. It seems the aliens like to eat humans. As I said it was cheap, it was strange, but it was also fun.
Another 1988 movie was They Live. It was directed by John Carpenter and starred the wrestler Roddy Piper, Keith David and Meg Foster. Aliens are on earth, but they look just like us and no one realizes they are here. Piper discovers a pair of glasses and when he puts them on he can see what the aliens really look like. He also sees many signs giving humans post hypnotic suggestions. At that point he decides to do something about it and finds others who also know. I liked this movie a lot.
1989 saw a really great movie come out, it was The Abyss. It was directed by James Cameron and starred Ed Harris. There is a drilling operation going on, on the ocean floor. An ocean habitat is down there and the miners are living in it. A UFO sinks into the ocean and a SEAL team is sent to the habitat to use it as a base of operations. There is immediate friction between the drillers and the commander of the SEALS. One thing leads to another and the SEAL commander wants to set off a nuke. It seems he has become insane and has been affected by the pressure. The habitat is being dragged toward the edge of an abyss, because there is a hurricane above them and the ship they are connected to is in trouble.
Another 1989 science fiction movie I liked was Leviathan. It was directed by George Pan Cosmatos and starred Peter Weller, Richard Crenna and Daniel Stern. An undersea mining operation discovers a Soviet shipwreck named the Leviathan. They find a log, a video detailing the deaths of the crew and vodka. One of the crew dies and becomes mutated and is growing. More of the miners are becoming sick. One crew member kills herself and when her body is taken to sick bay it merges with the growing alien organism. A creature is formed and begins to attack the survivors.
Millennium also came out in 1989. It was directed by Michael Anderson and starred Kris Kristofferson. Kristofferson is a National Transportation Safety Board investigator and is investigating the crash of two airliners. He and his assistants are confused, because when they listen to the recorder the pilot is yelling there was a fire which killed all the passengers, but there was no fire. It turns out time travelers are stealing people from doomed aircraft. They are doing this, because humans can no longer reproduce. They have to steal people who are going to die so the future is not affected.
Another Star Trek movie came out in 1989, it was Star Trek V: The Final Frontier and was directed by William Shatner and starred the usual original Star Trek cast. There is a new USS Enterprise and a renegade Vulcan has taken hostages and wants to use the ship to go to a mythical planet Sha Ka Ree which he says is at the center of the galaxy behind a barrier. He forces the crew to use the Enterprise to take him there and it is not what he thought it would be.
