5 Sci-Fi Movies Where the Villain Is Cooler Than the Hero (And Two Broke the Franchise)
The sci-fi genre is packed with great stories, especially when it comes to big-screen blockbusters. The nature of science fiction means its stories are often complex and larger than life, and often incorporate fantastical or otherwise incredible ideas into their narratives. However, as with all stories, the best sci-fi movies still need to have core characters that an audience can relate to, and — hopefully — root for. These characters usually take the shape of a protagonist, often a hero of some kind, who embarks upon a journey or quest that pits them against the forces of evil, or, in most cases, against a character whose goals and morals directly oppose their own.
Over the years, the very best sci-fi movie villains have proven not just iconic in their own right, but sometimes more popular than the heroes they face. In some cases, a sci-fi movie villain is simply far cooler or more interesting than the hero, drawing the audience’s attention in the wrong direction. What’s even worse is that sometimes this phenomenon is so obvious that it has lasting implications for the entire franchise, with the best villains’ legacies seeming to outlast almost every other aspect of their respective movies.
5) 2001: A Space Odyssey
When it comes to the Mount Rushmore of sci-fi movies, very few movie fans would argue that Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey is one of the genre’s most iconic and influential releases of all time. The movie’s vivid imagery and mind-bending ideas are great, but few aspects of the film have had the lasting impact of its villain. HAL 9000 is the sentient artificial intelligence computer that controls the systems of the movie’s spacecraft, the Discovery One.
While HAL 9000 is depicted primarily as a small red-yellow dot on a dark circular lens, he’s still the most memorable aspect of 2001: A Space Odyssey. In fact, he’s far cooler and more interesting than any of the movie’s other characters, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that he’s so simple in his design. HAL 9000 is a cold, calculating, and terrifying villain that feels both futuristic and utterly chilling, and he is by far the best and most interesting character in the entire movie.
4) Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
The Star Trek franchise is one of the biggest and most successful in the history of the sci-fi genre, and its impact and influence simply cannot be overstated. While its movies struggled to live up to the narrative quality of its TV shows, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is widely considered the strongest of the franchise’s feature-length releases. Its story pits Captain Kirk and the crew of the Enterprise against Khan Noonien Singh, a genetically engineered superhuman who first appeared in Star Trek: The Original Series.
While Captain James T. Kirk is a pretty iconic sci-fi hero, he’s nowhere near as cool as Khan Noonien Singh. In fact, Khan is often cited as one of the best Star Trek villains of all time, beating countless others from its six decades of history. He’s a more complex, interesting, and charismatic figure than Kirk in almost every way, meaning that he thoroughly outshone the hero of the movie he featured in.
3) Terminator 2: Judgment Day
While The Terminator proved to be a sci-fi success, its sequel, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, surpassed it on multiple levels. It not only raised the stakes, but it recast Arnold Schwarzenegger’s villainous T-800 in the role of its hero, as the reprogrammed future robot was tasked with protecting John Connor from the more advanced and deadly T-1000. Played predominantly by Robert Patrick as a sinister, emotionless police officer, the shape-shifting robot instantly became a classic sci-fi movie villain.
While Schwarzenegger’s T-800 was still pretty cool, audiences had already seen the many tricks he had up his sleeve in the original movie. While there are things that didn’t make sense about the T-1000, the advanced Terminator’s relentless pursuit of his quarry made him far more enthralling than the movie’s heroes. In fact, the T-1000 was a villain so good that the franchise has never fully recovered, because it has been trying and failing to recapture the magic of the creepy and bizarrely compelling villain ever since.
2) Blade Runner
Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner is often thought to be one of the greatest sci-fi movies of all time. Its neo-noir aesthetic and its story adapted from Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? made it not just visually striking, but thematically gripping, too. Harrison Ford’s Rick Deckard might have been the titular Blade Runner, but the android Replicant he was hunting, Rutger Hauer’s Roy Batty, was a much cooler character than the film’s protagonist.
A big part of what makes Roy Batty so much better than Deckard is that he’s a sci-fi movie villain who was right all along. All Batty wants is to live his short life with some modicum of freedom, and while the moral and ethical implications of Deckard’s work are ultimately at the core of the film’s story, it ultimately paints Blade Runner‘s villain as something of a martyr. Roy Batty might be marginally terrifying, but he’s actually a way cooler character than the hero who spends the movie trying and failing to catch him.
1) Star Wars: A New Hope
There is perhaps no sci-fi franchise as popular or successful as Star Wars. Since the release of the first movie in 1977, the franchise has grown and added countless new characters and ideas across several different forms of media. However, many still come back to that first movie, retroactively subtitled A New Hope, to admire the perfect way that it introduced its villain, Darth Vader. Not only was Darth Vader infinitely cooler than the movie’s main hero, Luke Skywalker, but his popularity actually broke the entire franchise.
Darth Vader’s backstory — a former Jedi seduced by the dark side of the Force — made him truly iconic, and has seen the Star Wars franchise scramble to deliver villains of a similar caliber ever since. As Darth Vader is still considered the best Star Wars villain of all time, it’s clear that the franchise has never quite managed the feat. Looking back on A New Hope, it’s plain to see that Darth Vader is so much more interesting than Luke Skywalker, and the fact that the franchise has struggled to recapture that brilliance ever since becomes painfully obvious.
