From Blade Runner’s Rick Deckard to A Clockwork Orange’s Alex DeLarge to the title character from the Mad Max franchise, the science fiction genre has delivered some of cinema’s most compelling antiheroes. Hollywood tends to push traditional protagonists over ethically dubious antiheroes, because it’s more likely that a movie will be a hit with a likable lead than a morally ambiguous one, but antiheroes make for much more interesting characters. Cinematic antiheroes like The Godfather’s Michael Corleone, Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle, Unforgiven’s William Munny, and There Will Be Blood’s Daniel Plainview have captivated moviegoing audiences for decades.
The best sci-fi movies reflect society and human nature, and some of them do so by exploring the seediest corners of society and the dark side of human nature. In a lawless dystopian future like those imagined by Dredd, RoboCop, and Escape from New York, trigger-happy antiheroes like Snake Plissken and Alex Murphy are the only ones who can be trusted to bring the bad guys to justice. From reluctant superheroes like Wolverine from the X-Men franchise to intergalactic pirates like Han Solo from the Star Wars saga, the sci-fi genre is full of great antiheroes.
10 Snake Plissken
Escape From New York, 1981
In the near-future setting of John Carpenter’s Escape from New York, Manhattan has been converted into a giant maximum-security prison for America’s most notorious criminals. When Air Force One crashes on the island and the President is taken captive, another one of America’s most notorious criminals – eyepatch-wearing badass Snake Plissken – is given 24 hours to save him. Kurt Russell plays Snake with the perfect ice-cool demeanor. He’s not saving the President for the glory of heroism; he’s doing it for the promise of a pardon.
9 Wolverine
X-Men, 2000
No superhero is more reluctant to spring into action than Wolverine from the X-Men movies. Whenever he has the opportunity to join the X-Men in a triumphant crusade to vanquish a supervillain, he’d rather just kick back and smoke a couple of cigars – but, despite his protests, he always ends up doing the right thing. His violent rage is as much a superpower as his adamantium skeleton, as it always comes in handy on the battlefield. Marvel will eventually recast this role, but it’s tough to imagine anyone other than Hugh Jackman getting it right.
8 Alexia
Titane, 2021
The most scandalous part of Alexia’s character in Titane is that she’s sexually attracted to cars. As a child, she suffered a severe skull injury in a car crash that required a titanium plate to be put in her head. When she grew up, she developed a specific objectophilia for automobiles. But she’s also a serial killer who’s murdered a bunch of men and women. Her first on-screen kill – an aggressive man who tries to force himself on her – is justified (albeit gruesome) and suggests that she’s really a vigilante.
7 Alex Murphy
RoboCop, 1987
In a crime-ridden futuristic Detroit, after police officer Alex Murphy is shot to pieces in the line of duty, a money-grubbing corporation eager to privatize the police force turns him into the titular RoboCop. None of Murphy’s complicated humanity remains as RoboCop is programmed to be an unstoppable killing machine. This tragic story is used to explore complex subjects like personal identity and the meaning of life while satirizing authoritarianism and corporate greed.
6 Max Rockatansky
Mad Max, 1979
Max Rockatansky is essentially sci-fi cinema’s answer to Clint Eastwood’s “Man with No Name” from the Dollars trilogy (with the Wild West setting swapped out for a gonzo post-apocalyptic wasteland). Mel Gibson’s title character is a cop in an increasingly lawless world in the timeless first Mad Max movie. But in The Road Warrior onwards, after the deaths of his wife and son, Max is a lone wolf who roams the wasteland in search of conflicts to resolve.
5 Han Solo
Star Wars, 1977
By the end of the original Star Wars trilogy, Han Solo is a full-blown traditional hero. But at the start of the first movie, when Luke and Obi-Wan meet him at Mos Eisley Cantina, he’s only interested in serving himself. He only agrees to get them to the Death Star to save the captive Princess Leia for a paycheck. However, when Han returns to help Luke destroy the Death Star, he proves he’s in this for more than just money. Over the next two movies, he becomes one of the most integral members of the Rebel Alliance.
4 Judge Dredd
Dredd, 2012
The lawmen who preside over the dystopian metropolis of Mega-City One in Dredd are judge, jury, and executioner. Judge Dredd is partnered up with rookie Judge Anderson for what initially seems to be a routine inspection of a 200-storey slum tower ruled by a drug lord. When the tower is locked down, Dredd and Anderson are on their own, facing down all the drug lord’s gun-toting goons (and some of their fellow Judges who have turned crooked). Karl Urban gives a pitch-perfect performance as the no-nonsense lawman from the 2000 A.D. comics.
3 Alex DeLarge
A Clockwork Orange, 1971
At the beginning of A Clockwork Orange, Alex DeLarge is a carefree gang leader who takes his droogs on crime sprees in a lawless future. But when he’s arrested and sent to prison, Alex is humbled by an experimental rehabilitation treatment that will shorten his sentence (and possibly destroy his life). Most antiheroes have some redeeming qualities, but Alex has none. The closest thing he has to a redeeming quality is that he’s a product of his dystopian society. The first half of the movie shows Alex to be a reprehensible sociopath who hurts people for fun, then the second half brings his brutal reckoning.
2 Sarah Connor
Terminator 2: Judgment Day, 1991
Sarah Connor is closer to a traditional hero than most of the other entries on this list, but she was perfectly willing to murder Miles Dyson in front of his children to prevent his creation of Skynet. After she narrowly avoided death at the hands of the cyborg sent after her in the first movie, Terminator 2: Judgment Day catches up with Sarah years later as she’s been training herself into a killing machine in preparation for the Terminators’ return. Sarah is a stone-cold badass in T2, and stone-cold badasses show no mercy.
1 Rick Deckard
Blade Runner, 1982
Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner blazed the trail for the tech-noir subgenre, bringing the tropes and conventions of film noir into a sci-fi setting. It’s a hard-boiled detective story set in neon-soaked futuristic Los Angeles, where androids known as replicants have escaped and integrated themselves into human society. Harrison Ford’s “blade runner,” Rick Deckard, is tasked with tracking them down and executing them. Ford’s magnetic performance gave sci-fi cinema its own answer to grizzled Humphrey Bogart detective characters like Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe.
