5 Sci-Fi Movie Remakes That Actually Lived Up To The Hype
Throughout movie history, there has always been a distaste for remakes, but there have been some sci-fi movie remakes that actually lived up to the hype, and in some cases, are better than the originals. This is never easy, especially when the original movies are beloved and fan favorites. However, when done right, the new movies can bring a classic story to a new generation and update things to make it even better than it was before. At the same time, it is also very easy to remake a classic sci-fi movie when the original movie is not up to par, and the new movie can finally do it right.
From a brilliant alien invasion movie to a film that flopped when released, but is now considered one of the best sci-fi horror movies of all time, here is a look at the best sci-fi remakes that lived up to the hype.
5) Dune
Dune was always going to be a hard sci-fi story to adapt, and that was proven to be true in 1984 when David Lynch struggled to get it made and then basically disowned it after the fact. Producers Dino and Raffaella De Laurentiis took Lynch’s three-hour cut down to a 137-minute run time, which made the film confusing, incomplete, and disappointing. Lynch refused to return to re-edit it into the version he wanted, and it has gone on to live as a cult curiosity.
However, in 2021, Denis Villeneuve set his sights on the franchise, and what he created was magical. Allowed to make the story into a trilogy, with the first two movies based on Frank Herbert’s Dune and the third, due in December 2026, based on Dune Messiah, Villeneuve was able to tell the story how it was meant to be told. It blew away the first movie in every way, and it remains one of the best epic sci-fi film franchises of the 21st century.
4) Invasion of the Body Snatchers
The original Invasion of the Body Snatchers was a great sci-fi movie, released in 1956 by director Don Siegel. The film tells the story of an alien invasion where the aliens capture humans and then replace them as exact duplicates known as pod people. It was a great classic sci-fi movie that was made during the Communist scare and focused on the idea that people couldn’t even trust their friends and neighbors, who might have been replaced by something very dangerous.
In 1978, Philip Kaufman remade the movie, and it was a shockingly superior film compared to the original. This version had a solid cast, with Donald Sutherland, Leonard Nimoy, Brooke Adams, Jeff Goldblum, and Veronica Cartwright, and it even had a fun cameo by Kevin McCarthy, who was the star of the original movie. The movie is not only a great remake of a sci-fi film, but it might be one of the best remakes of any sort in cinema history.
3) Dredd
Judge Dredd is a comic book character from the anthology 2000 AD comic book series and is that series’ longest-running character. While he debuted in 1977, it wasn’t until 1995 that Hollywood adapted him into a movie, but that was a colossal disappointment. Sylvester Stallone played Dredd in Judge Dredd, but there was too much comedy, and Rob Schneider brought down every scene in which he appeared. The film remains one of the worst adapted comic book stories when compared to the source material.
However, everything was made right in 2012 when Dredd came out and delivered what fans had waited decades to see. The movie was a box office disappointment, and too many people unfamiliar with the source material compared it unfavorably to The Raid since both involved a criminal overlord in a high-rise building that the heroes needed to bring down. That said, it received positive reviews, and fans are still holding out hope for a Dredd sequel.
2) The Fly
The original version of The Fly was a cheesy 1958 film starring Vincent Price about a scientist (David Hedison) who ends up turning into a human-fly hybrid when an experiment goes wrong. While this was a fun movie, and Price was fantastic in his role as the scientist’s brother, it was very much a product of its time. At its heart, The Fly was always a body horror movie above all else, and that made David Cronenberg the perfect person to step up for the remake in 1986.
A Cronenberg movie will always be an interesting release, and when he decided to take the body horror from The Fly and really deliver on the gruesome nature of a man turning into a fly, he created something that was terribly disturbing in the best ways possible. The Fly won the Academy Award for Best Makeup for Chris Walas and Stephan Dupuis, the only Oscar ever won by a Cronenberg-directed film, for the grotesque body-horror transformation effects.
1) The Thing
The best sci-fi remake of all time is also one of the best sci-fi horror movies ever made. What is most impressive is that it was a box office flop that stalled John Carpenter’s career, cost him a job he wanted (Firestarter), and then ended up becoming a massive hit on home video over a decade later. John Carpenter’s The Thing is a remake of 1951’s The Thing from Another World, but both films are adaptations of John W. Campbell Jr.’s 1938 novella “Who Goes There?”
The Thing is better than the 1951 movie in every way, and a big reason is that it is more loyal to the novella than that first movie. Kurt Russell stars in this story following a group of American researchers in Antarctica menaced by a shape-shifting alien that assimilates and perfectly imitates other organisms. Like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the theme here is a Cold War allegory that people can’t even trust those closest to them. For its special effects, acting, and storyline, there isn’t a better sci-fi horror remake in Hollywood history.
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