On the threshold of the third millennium, millions of people tried to look into the future with hope and fear. Cinema responded to this public demand with a real downpour of fantastic films. And if we discuss some of them: «The Matrix», «Terminator 2», «Independence Day» or «Men in Black» — are mentioned in almost every article, others went almost unnoticed, remaining in the shadow of their more popular competitors. In this article, we decided to recall underrated science fiction films of the 90s that are worthy of attention of true fans of the genre.
P. S. Of course, there are many more talented science fiction films from the 90s than can be described in one article. We wanted to tell you about films that are not mentioned very often now, but which you might be interested in watching. We also tried to avoid projects with a rating of 5 and below as much as possible.
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Tremors
Year of release: 1990
Director: Ron Underwood
IMDb rating: 7.2
Inspired by the giant sand worms from Frank Herbert’s novel «Dune», screenwriter Stephen Wilson has created a story about mutant underground predators that terrorize the inhabitants of a Nevada desert town. To escape from the monsters, which are called «graboids» and can attack unnoticed anywhere, the heroes are forced to develop cunning tactics with baits, traps, and homemade bombs.
The film was critically acclaimed for its original, well-designed enemies and a great mix of horror and humor, but it failed at the box office. However, this did not stop «The Shaking of the Earth» from becoming a hit at home and getting many sequels. An interesting detail: during their life cycle, graboids go through five phases of development, each of which has its own habits and poses different threats to humans.
The Rocketeer
Year of release: 1991
Director: Joe Johnston
IMDb rating: 6.6
17 years before the release of «Iron Man», Disney created a movie whose hero, like Tony Stark, soars through the sky like a rocket. The story takes place in an alternative America of the 1930s, where a stunt pilot finds a rocket pack and uses it to defeat gangsters, German spies, and save his fiancée.
The film is based on the comic book of the same name by American artist Dave Stevens and features a star-studded cast, including Billy Campbell as Clifford Secord, known as «Rocket Man». Jennifer Connelly as his girlfriend Jenny, and Timothy Dalton as German spy Neville Sinclair.
Fire in the Sky
Year of release: 1993
Director: Robert Lieberman
IMDb rating: 6.5
Stargate
Year of release: 1994
Director: Roland Emmerich
IMDb rating: 7.0
A young Egyptologist Daniel Jackson is invited to a military base where, in an atmosphere of strict secrecy, he must help unravel the secret of the mysterious artifact — «Stargate», found in 1928 on the Giza Plateau in Egypt. Jackson finds out that the «gate» opens a passage to another star system, you just need to enter a certain sequence of hieroglyphs on the rotary disk.
The project management decides to send a research expedition immediately through the gate. Daniel and a special team go to meet the unknown and, after passing through the portal, find an exact copy of the Egyptian pyramid at the other end.
Roland Emmerich’s film skillfully uses the popular theory about the extraterrestrial origin of the pyramids (by the way, it supporter is Elon Musk), became a hit at the box office and launched a franchise that includes four TV series in addition to movies.
But there is always, as they say, a «but». Despite its groundbreaking role, Stargate «Emmerich remained in the shadow of the popular TV series it spawned and is not mentioned as often as it might have been. Critics have written that the film failed to realize the amazing potential of its fantastic idea. After passing through the gate, it becomes too much like a regular 1990s action movie with all its clichés, such as the countdown on a nuclear bomb.
It is worth citing words by the influential film critic Roger Ebert: «The movie is so lacking in any sense of wonder that it rushes us from one end of the universe to the other, only to end in a shootout between the good guys and the bad guys while the Colonel’s bomb ticks away»… «Stargate» — is like an exercise in film school. Task: Think of the strangest plot you can think of and reduce it to action movie clichés as quickly as possible».
Strange Days
Year of release: 1995
Director: Kathryn Bigelow
IMDb rating: 7.2
Kathryn Bigelow’s cyberpunk thriller takes place on the eve of the new millennium in an alternate United States where FBI specialists have invented a new device for tracking criminals. It looks like a wire mesh that you can put on your hair, after which everything you see and feel will be recorded on a compact disk. Interestingly, the device works in the other direction as well — you can play the disk on a special player and for a while seem to become someone else, getting the full set of feelings of the author of the recording.
It is clear that such an invention could not remain exclusively the property of the special services for long. The device was stolen and caused a real epidemic of fascination with illegal recordings. Some people were curious about how a person in a wing suit feels after jumping off a high cliff. Others wanted to take a shower in the body of a 16-year-old girl. But there were also those who were willing to pay for violent recordings. One of these disks ends up in the hands of the protagonist, played by Ralph Fiennes, and becomes the main evidence in the case of the murder of his girlfriend.
Space Truckers
Year of release: 1996
Director: Stuart Gordon
IMDb rating: 5.4
Sci-fi films of the 1990s knew how to grab the viewer’s attention from the very first minutes: «Space Truckers» takes us to Neptune’s largest moon Triton, on whose icy surface a heavily armed special forces unit suffers a crushing defeat from a monstrous cyborg. It turns out that these were tests of a weapon created in strict secrecy. And whether the army of ruthless mechanical killers will get to Earth depends only on the experienced space trucker Neil, his charming girlfriend Cindy and his new partner Mike.
Fans of serious science fiction may find the movie too lighthearted. After all, the film, which started out as a sci-fi thriller, smoothly turns into a fun adventure action movie with the theft of a cargo of square Martian pigs. There is a chase through an asteroid field, and an attack by space pirates. But if you consider it to be an eccentric parody that recreates familiar moments from «Alien», «Star Wars», and «Remember the Day» in a comedic way, you’ll enjoy watching it.
It is worth mentioning the wonderful British actor Charles Dance, who played the pirate leader: after playing the aristocratic Tywin Lannister in «Game of Thrones», it is simply impossible to look at his, um… biomechanical villain without smiling.
Event Horizon
Year of release: 1997
Director: Paul W. S. Anderson
IMDb rating: 6.6
The official version claims that the Event Horizon spacecraft was designed to explore the outer reaches of the solar system. The entire humanity was focused on its journey, but the real mission was quite different. The creators of the ship wanted to test the possibility of traveling faster than the speed of light using an artificial black hole that creates wormholes in space.
In a safe zone away from the Earth, it was supposed to start the gravity mode and open the wormhole. The gate was created, the experimental ship went through it, and communication with it was lost for many years. After 7 years, it suddenly appeared in Neptune’s orbit and transmitted an SOS signal. A rescue mission with researchers on board is to find out what happened. But what they find surpasses the wildest human imagination.
Anderson’s film combines sci-fi, horror, and thriller, with a wonderful cast and effects that look pretty good despite their age. Despite the fact that it failed at the box office and was not very popular with critics, fans of the genre consider Paul W.S. Anderson’s project to be one of the greatest space horror films of the 20th century.
The most frequently noted allusions are to Bosch’s paintings, Christian iconography, and the influence of Fritz Lang’s ship design and Gothic architecture on the futuristic design of the ship. The director personally confirmed the latter ininterview portal Space. According to him, during a visit to Paris, the idea arose to digitize Notre Dame Cathedral and then build a conceptual Gothic ship from its constituent elements. The captain’s chair reinterpreted the altar, and high vaults reinforced the dark, religious images of the film.
Contact
Year of release: 1997
Director: Robert Zemeckis
IMDb rating: 7.5
Almost all the films in our selection explore the topic of contact with alien intelligence in one way or another. However, «Contact» by Robert Zemeckis stands out from the crowd because it is based on a novel by Carl Sagan, a prominent American astronomer who has devoted his entire life to the search for extraterrestrial life and knows its difficulties firsthand.
According to the plot, Dr. Eleanor «Ellie» Arroway joins the SETI project (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence). Fanatically devoted to her work, she spends all her time listening to the radio band. And one day, it pays off: Ellie discovers a sequence of prime numbers coming from the star Vega that is of artificial origin.
The heroine shares the news with colleagues from other countries and suddenly finds herself in a whirlwind of passions: the military accuses her of disclosing classified information, the government and the president try to use the discovery for their political purposes, and science officials want to appropriate it for themselves. In the decrypted message, the scientists find blueprints for a machine that they suspect could send humans to the aliens’ home world. This sparks a lively debate in which conflicting arguments from religious leaders, philosophers, scientists, and politicians collide.
It is worth recalling that Carl Sagan was the ideological inspirer of several messages to extraterrestrial civilizations: from the golden disks «Voyager», to the records «Pioneer» and the Arecibo message. Nowadays, this practice is being criticized by supporters of the so-called «Dark Forest» hypothesis, according to which advanced civilizations hide their existence like hunters in a dark forest who do not want to attract the attention of predatory animals. The name of the hypothesis comes from a 2008 novel by Chinese science fiction author Liu Qixin «Dark forest»and the hypothesis itself plays an important role in the series based on it «3-body problem» by Netflix.
Dark City
Year of release: 1998
Director: Alex Proyas
IMDb rating: 7.6
For some reason, the sci-fi noir directed by Alex Proyas («I, Robot», «Raven») called «Dark City» has been overlooked by most fans of the genre. At the same time, even the overly picky Roger Ebert called the film as a triumph of imagination, a visionary masterpiece and compared its originality to such cult films as «Metropolis» and «2001: A Space Odyssey».
The British actor Rufus Sewell («The Man in the High Castle», «The Diplomat») plays John Murdoch, who does not remember his name or his past. The hero wakes up with no memories in a room with a dead sex worker, covered with strange symbols and forced to flee from the police, who suspect him of murder. He is also being chased by strange vampire-like pale creatures called Strangers.
However, the viewer quickly realizes that behind the dark urban design and gloomy atmosphere lies something more than a conventional detective noir. It turns out that the Strangers are alien beings with a collective mind, possess psychokinetic abilities and are able to manipulate the environment, creating a kind of surreal semblance of virtual reality. And Murdock, although he does not understand what is happening around him, like Neo from «Matrix», can ignore its laws. And so he poses a huge danger to the aliens.
Every minute of the movie is filled with unexpected plot twists and new revelations. The characters are constantly forced to question their reality and the validity of their memories, and raise many philosophical questions about individuality, existential choices and freedom that can be traced back to films such as «The Truman Show», «The Matrix», «13th Floor» and «Blade Runner».
Soldier
Year of release: 1998
Director: Paul W. S. Anderson
IMDb rating: 6.7
In the not-too-distant future, professional soldiers are being recruited and trained almost from the cradle. Todd (Kurt Russell) — is one of the best warriors who has been through a series of bloody conflicts in his 40s. But people like him can no longer compete with genetically enhanced soldiers. And when one day Todd loses a showdown with the newly arrived replicant Kane-607, his body is simply dumped in a landfill on the distant planet Arcadia along with a load of industrial waste.
There, local colonists pick up the wounded soldier. And the harsh Todd (Russell is good at such roles), who has seen nothing but the flames of war in his life, feels human warmth and compassion for the first time. Soon, the planet is threatened. Since Arcadia is officially uninhabited, the military leadership chooses it as a training ground to train new soldiers. The squad led by Kane-607 is ordered to kill everyone they meet on the surface. But Todd stands up to defend his new home and proves that experience and motivation can defeat genetic perfection.
Sphere
Year of release: 1998
Director: Barry Levinson
IMDb rating: 6.1
The information about a kilometer-long sunken aircraft that has been lying at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean for 300 years but continues to be active raises a number of difficult questions for the US government. Psychologist Norman Goodman seems to know the answers to them. It was he who wrote the official protocol of action in the event of an encounter with aliens. And now he is leading a team of experts who will go down to the bottom and investigate the mysterious artifact.
Once inside the spaceship, the heroes make shocking discoveries that only increase the number of mysteries. And after trying to explore the huge golden sphere found in it, they start having real problems. With a great cast (starring Dustin Hoffman, Sharon Stone and Samuel L. Jackson) and a quality literary basis from the author of «Jurassic Park» Michael Crichton, the movie should have been a hit.
For the most part, it’s excellent: it attracts with its gloomy atmosphere and intrigues with unexpected plot twists. But by the end, the pace of the narrative often «sags», and the trope of materializing thoughts, known from «Solaris», works more for the horror part of the film, leaving some fantastic aspects of its premise unanswered.
Galaxy Quest
Year of release: 1999
Director: Dean Parisot
IMDb rating: 7.4
Eighteen years after the end of the once-popular series «The Search for the Galaxy», its protagonist and starring spaceship captain «The Defender» Jason Nesmith is in despair. Behind his eyes, he is increasingly being called an old loser who is parasitizing on his past glory. So when a group of fans dressed up as humanoid astronauts approaches him at a fan event and asks for help in an important matter, Jason agrees to go to their «movie studio» after a short hesitation.
There, he is struck by the detailed scenery of the spaceship, which is being navigated by aliens that look like two-meter octopuses. Gradually, Jason realizes that he really is in space. And the so-called «fans of» — are representatives of the peaceful and naive Terman race, who mistook the recordings of his series for a documentary chronicle and are now looking for help from the most famous «hero of the galaxy» to defend themselves against the warlike reptilian Serrus.
Despite the mortal danger, the idea of becoming a real, not a movie hero, is so exciting for Jason that he decides to take his entire crew to the alien ship and personally leads the war against the reptilians. «Galaxy Quest» has gained cult status among fans of «Star Trek», which it resembles in its style, as well as a prestigious award Hugo 2000.
We recently wrote about another series whose characters find themselves in the world of «Star Trek». This is the episode «Space shuttle Calister» from the anthology «Black Mirror».
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