The 1990s saw an incredible amount of science fiction movies released. In my opinion there were a lot of clunkers, but also some good ones. Here is a list of the ones I liked the best from that decade.

I Come in Peace was a movie released in 1990. It stared Dolph Lundgren and was directed by Craig R. Baxley. A policeman is stalking a gang of drug dealers who killed his partner. He finds several of the gang dead and they were killed by a flying disk. The feds get involved and the cop realizes something more is going on. It turns out an extraterrestrial drug dealer is killing people and taking endorphins from the brains of his victims after shooting them up with drugs. The policeman now goes on the trail of this alien and is determined to stop him.

Predator 2 also came out that year. It starred Danny Glover and was directed by Stephen Hopkins. While not as good as the original, it was still a good movie. A predator comes to Los Angeis during a firefight between gangs. He kills all the Columbians. Glover sees a predator on the roof, but thinks it is an illusion due to the heat. Jamaicans kill the surviving Columbian drug lord and the predator enters and kills all of them. Eventually it becomes a fight to the death between the predator and Glover.

RoboCop 2 was released in 1990 and starred Peter Weller and was directed by Irvin Kershner. One interesting point in the film was Detroit filing for bankruptcy. Omni Consumer Products wants to force Detroit into bankruptcy so they could take over the city government. The corporation wants to build a new city which the US government has no control over. They own the police and cut pensions and salaries and the police go on strike. Robocop cannot strike due to the fact he is computer controlled. A new RoboCop is being developed called RoboCop2 to replace the police. The corporation has a large scale drug dealer working for them undermining authorities with lots of cash.

Total Recall came out that year. It starred Arnold Schwarzenegger and was directed by Paul Verehoeven. In the year 2084 a construction worker keeps having troubling dreams about Mars and a strange woman. Finally he decides to go to a company named Rekall. He elects to take on a fantasy roll playing false memory for entertainment and before his trip something goes wrong and suppressed memories about Mars and the woman flood back into his brain. The company re-wipes his memories again and sends him home. On his way home a friend and co-worker tries to kill him. When he gets home his wife tells him she was never his wife and a false memory was implanted and she was there to monitor him. From then on it is downhill as attempts are made on his life and he finally gets to Mars to settle things after quite an adventure.

In 1991 Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country came out. It had the original Star Trek television crew and was directed by Nicholas Meyer. It was the last movie featuring the original cast of Star Trek. There is a problem with a Klingon moon named Praxis, it explodes. The explosion wipes out the key energy producing facility and the home world’s ozone layer and the Klingons have to sue for peace with the Federation. The Enterprise is sent to meet with the Klingon ambassador to escort him to earth. The ambassador is killed and Kirk framed and sentenced to life imprisonment. Kirk is rescued from the prison planet. It is fighting and chaos from there. A good movie.

That same year Terminator 2: Judgment Day was released. It starred Arnold Schwarzenegger and was directed by James Cameron. A terminator is sent back through time to kill John Connor who is living with his mother. The terminator is a T-1000. It is made of a liquid metal and is an advanced model which can assume the identity of anyone. John Conner, the future John Conner, has reprogrammed a terminator in the future, it is a T-800 and it is programmed to protect the past John Connor and his mother and sent back through time. A great movie.

In 1992 Alien 3 came out. All of the first 3 Alien movies were very good. It starred Sigourney Weaver and was directed by David Fincher. Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) is aboard the spaceship Sulaco when a fire starts and she is ejected in an escape pod with the android Bishop, a young girl and Hicks, the company man. The pod crashes on to a prison planet and she is the only survivor. Unfortunately an alien has gotten into the prison dog and gestates and then bursts out. There is also an alien growing inside Ripley. The fight starts and Ripley thinks the alien will not kill her because of what she is carrying.

Universal Soldier also came out that year and starred Jean-Claude Van Damme and was directed by Roland Emmerich. During the Vietnam War Dolph Lundgren and Van Damme are in a U.S. Army Special Forces Unit. Lundgren goes crazy killing civilians and wants Van Damme to do the same. He begins to shoot at Van Damme and they both kill each other. Death is the beginning of the story, because both of them are resurrected and used in a secret program called Universal Soldier and all the men there were once dead and had their memories erased. Van Damme starts to get his memories back which causes him to ignore some commands. A reporter finds out about the program and immediately she is hunted down by the units crazed Colonel Perry who even keeps secrets from the Pentagon. Trouble erupts between Lundgren, Van Damme and the Universal Soldiers.

In 1993 Demolition Man came out. It starred Sylvester Stallone, Wesley Snipes and Sandra Bullock and was directed by Marco Brambilla. A cop who was framed and put into a hibernation jail wakes up in the future along with the arch villain he was pursuing. It is a much gentler place, but there are still people with ulterior motives and Snipes sees the future as an easy place to become the crime boss, but Stallone goes after him again.

Jurassic Park also came out in 1993. It starred Sam Neill, Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum and was directed by Steven Spielberg. With this cast and director it had to be good. Dinosaurs are cloned and put onto an island for all to see, but something goes wrong, very wrong.

1994 saw the release of Stargate. It starred Kurt Russell and James Spader. An ancient round gate has been unearthed and has symbols on it no one can interpret. It is able to be moved like a combination lock. The military finds a very gifted archaeologist who figures out the symbols and when he used them to turn the gate, they realize it is a portal to other planets. Things do not go well as it seems there is a dictator or has the people on the planet they go to under his thumb and the U.S. military decides to help them.

Star Trek Generations also came out that year. It starred Patrick Stewart, William Shatner, Malcolm McDowell and Jonathan Frakes. Kirk is retired and the year is 2293 and he is attending the maiden voyage of the USS Enterprise-B when he gets killed in an accident and is lost in space. In 2371 the captain of the Enterprise is Jean-Luc Picard and he receives a distress call from an observatory in orbit around the star Amargosa. Everyone has died except Dr. Tolian Soran. Soran knock out La Forge who had found a compound called trilithium hidden in the observatory. Soran then launches a trilithium solar probe at Amargosa. The star explodes. The crew survives and gets off the observatory one way or another before the shock wave destroys it. Guinan knows Soran and tells Picard she met him in 2293 and that he is obsessed with the Nexus and wants to enter it to be together again with his deceased wife. The Nexus is an extra dimensional place where people can experience their past experiences. Eventually Picard gets there and meets James Kirk who is there and thinks it’s normal. Picard get into a battle with Soran who is there and eventually Kirk helps him.

Timecop was another Van Damme movie. It was directed by Peter Hyams. This was Van Damme’s highest grossing movie. In 1994 time travel is being used by some for illicit purposes so the U.S. government created the Time Enforcement Commission or TEC to police time travel. Walker (Van Damme) is excited to tell his wife he was accepted to the TEC. When he gets home he is attacked and thrown out of his home. Before he can get back in, the house explodes. Ten years have passed and he is ordered to stop is ex-partner from using time travel to make money on the stock market. The plot thickens as the money is being used to fund the McComb presidential run. He is ordered to investigate McComb, but the McComb from the future comes back to kill him. All sorts of things happen including younger and older forms of the same person getting into the fray.

In 1995 Johnny Mnemonic was released. It starred Keanu Reeves and Dolph Lundgren and was directed by Robert Longo. It takes place in 2021 and actually has the possibility of being possible someday in the near future. Johnny is a mnemonic courier, that is he carries data in a storage device implanted in his brain. The info is too sensitive for the internet. Johnny wants the device removed so he can get his own memories back, but needs a lot of cash for the operation. Johnny takes on a big job where so much data is to be uploaded some will go into his brain. Groups of the Yakuza are now after him and have killed the scientists who gave him the data.

Judge Dredd came out the same year. It starred Sylvester Stallone and Armand Assante. The movie was directed by Danny Cannon. In the future there are police officers who have been given the power to not only stop you from committing a crime, but to judge you and even carry out the death sentence. Earth is now a wasteland with most of the population living in mega cities. A former judge, Armand Assante escapes from prison and Dredd and Assante duke it out, along with other lesser plots.

Some might argue with me about this choice, but I think it deserves to be on the list. Species came out in 1995 and starred Natasha Henstridge, Ben Kingsley, Michael Madsen and Forest Whitaker. It was directed by Roger Donaldson. There is an alien seductress on the loose and the government along with scientists have to track her down before she mates with a human male. This all comes about, because we sent out signals into space with a welcome message and our location. The earth receives signals back telling us how to create an endless fuel supply so we believe the aliens are friendly. Another transmission is sent to us telling us how to create a certain type of DNA and splice it into human DNA. This is a big mistake.

Twelve Monkeys came out in 1995. It starred Bruce Willis, Madeline Stowe, Brad Pitt and Christopher Plummer. It was directed by Terry Gilliam. A deadly virus kills most of humanity in 1996. The survivors go underground. It is believed the virus outbreak was created on purpose by a group known as the Army of the Twelve Monkeys. In 2035 James Cole (Willis) is a prisoner who is sent back in time to collect information on the virus so a cure can be developed. He is sent to the wrong year which is 1990 not 1996. He is arrested and thrown in a mental hospital. When he is locked into a cell he returns to the future. He is then returned to 1996 and his work starts in earnest.

The 1995 movie Village of the Damned is a remake of the same film from 1960. It is still noteworthy and starred Christopher Reeve. It was directed by John Carpenter. The location this time is in California not England, but essentially everything is similar. There is also a subplot of one of the aliens not fitting in well with the rest. For more about the plot see the report on the 1960 film.

Yes I liked one of the biggest movie failures in history. It was the 1995 film titled Waterworld. It starred Kevin Costner and Dennis Hopper and was directed by Kevin Reynolds. First let me say the movie might have made money had it not been so far over budget. The story takes place in the future with the world covered by water and Costner being human, but having gills. Costner lives in a time about 500 years after the earth was flooded by melting ice caps. Dirt is precious for growing plants and he sails to a place selling it. There are groups of people living all over the earth in decrepit ships and towns made of floating junk. A group of people are searching for a girl who is said to have a map on her back of where dry land exists. The group are pirates known as smokers and the Mariner (Costner) has to take them on.

In 1996 the Arrival was released. It starred Charlie Sheen and Ron Silver and was directed by David N. Twohy. A radio astronomer (Sheen) picks up strange alien signals, but his boss won’t listen to him and he is let go. Sheen doesn’t know it, but his boss is an alien who made himself look human and is part of a group of aliens heating up the earth so they can take it over and live here. Sheen finds out their heating plants are in Mexico and goes there to stop them.

I like the 1996 movie Escape From L.A. Sure is was a little crazy, but good entertainment. It starred Kurt Russel, Stacy Keach and Steve Buscemi. The director was John Carpenter. An earthquake in 2000 turns California into an island. A new president is elected and states L.A. is sinful and is being punished by God and anyone who doesn’t obey his new laws will be sent there. Some of the new laws are no eating red meat, no using profanity and no committing non-marital sex. L.A. has a wall built around it. A remote control to a destructive orbiting weapon is given to a terrorist by the president’s daughter who believes she is in love with him and he takes it to L.A. Enter Snake Plissken again. Snake is injected with a virus which will kill him in 10 hours and sent to the island to get the remote back and promised an antidote if he succeeds.

The next 1996 science fiction movie is one of the greats, it is Independence Day. It starred Will Smith, Bill Pullman, Jeff Goldblum, Mary McDonnel, Judd Hirsch, Randy Quaid and Robert Loggia. Smith is a U.S. Air Force pilot and huge alien ships have parked above many of Earth’s major cities and have been hovering there for days. Jeff Goldblum, an engineer discovers they are on a countdown and believes they will destroy us. He is right and manages to convince the president, because his ex-wife is one of the president’s advisors. The rest of the movie is devoted to trying to defeat the aliens who have a shield around all their ships.

I give honorable mention to the 1996 movie Mars Attacks, because it was so well done, but just doesn’t fit into serious science fiction movies. It starred Jack Nicholson, Pierce Brosnan and Sarah Jessica Parker and was directed by Tim Burton.

Another science fiction movie which came out in 1996 that I liked was Multiplicity. It starred Michael Keaton and was directed by Harold Ramis. Doug Kinney is a worker whose job is in his way. He meets a scientist who is very friendly and who has developed a new way to clone humans. Doug tells him about his problems and the scientist feels sorry for him and gives him a clone of himself to help. Doug finds out his clone is going out on dates and begins to panic. He has more clones made but each is a little dumber and the scientist explains it is like a photocopy, if you keep copying copies they become less readable. The clones begin to cause all sorts of domestic problems including wanting to sleep with his wife.

Star Trek: First Contact came out in 1996. It starred the crew from Star Trek the Next Generation. It was directed by Jonathan Frakes. The Borg are attacking the Earth and Picard is ordered to take the Enterprise-E and patrol the Romulan Neutral Zone. The Federation is not sure how he might react to the Borg having been one himself. Picard hears Borg voices and tells the fleet where on the Borg ship to fire and they do and it is destroyed, but not before it releases an orb ship which goes back through time. The Borg are trying to defeat earth by changing the time stream.

In 1997 Alien Resurrection came out. It featured Sigourney Weaver, Winona Ryder and Ron Perlman. It was directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet. Ripley has a clone created of her hundreds of years after she died. She was created using blood samples taken before her death and was done by a group on a vessel named the USM Auriga. Unfortunately the alien had its DNA mixed with her and she is grown with the alien inside her. This group has been growing aliens inside humans. There have been many failed tries to previously grow Ripley and one horribly deformed one asks Ripley to kill her and she complies. Marines attack the ship and try to kill Ripley, but eventually realize she wants to help and they go through the ship tracking aliens and humans with aliens inside them.

Contact also came out in 1997. It starred Jodie Foster, Matthew McConaughey, James Woods and Tom Skerritt. It was directed by Robert Zemeckis. Foster is the head of SETI the Search for Intelligent Life and Skerritt pulls the funding, but a billionaire decides to back her. Four years late Skerritt is trying to close her down again, but a message is discovered in a signal. There are over 60,000 pages of technical drawings in the signal and they are used to build a device. One thing leads to another and finally the device is used to make contact.

The Fifth Element also came out in 1997. It starred Bruce Willis, Gary Oldman and Milla Jovovich. This was actually the most expensive European film made at the time. It cost over $90 million dollars, but earned more than three times that amount. Aliens arrive in Egypt in 1914 and leave a weapon capable of defeating a great evil which comes every 5,000 years. The year is now 2263 and a great dark ball of fire (the evil) has destroyed a spaceship and is heading our way. There were stones aboard which were recovered by scientists, which became a humanoid woman. It turns out she is the key in destroying the great evil and Willis is helping her.

The Lost World: Jurassic Park in 1997 starred Jeff Goldblum, Julianne Moore, Pete Postlethwaite and was directed by Steven Spielberg. The disaster at the park has been solved and the Bowman family takes an excursion to an island where a dinosaur attacks their daughter. It turns out this island was where the dinosaurs were engineered before being moved to their current location. There was a severe hurricane and the island was abandoned thinking the dinosaurs would die, but they didn’t. There is a lot of intrigue as some people try and capture some of the dinosaurs to bring back, especially a giant T-Rex. The hunters and scientists are attacked by dinosaurs and the fight is on.

Yes it was funny and yes I said I was leaving a lot of science fiction movies off the list because they weren’t serious, but there is a movie for which I have made an exception and it is the 1997 movie Men In Black. It starred Tommy Lee Jones, Will Smith and Linda Fiorentino. It was just so good it had to be listed. The idea is the earth has a secret organization which deals with aliens coming and going to earth and they go after misbehaving aliens and when one starts to kill the fun begins.

The next movie also came out in 1997 and is borderline science fiction, but really good. It was Mimic and starred Mira Sorvino, Jeremy Northam and Josh Brolin. It was directed by Guillermo del Toro. It has to do with a certain kind of insect which has not only grown to the size of a man, it looks like a man from the back and is killing people. The insect was developed when scientists tried to create a bug which would kill the cockroaches which were spreading a deadly disease throughout Manhattan. The insects are released and accomplish their task, but then grow into the mimic insects. A couple of kids catch a weird bug from the subway system and sell it to a scientist who realizes what happened and now they must kill off all the mimics.

The Postman came out in 1997 and starred Kevin Costner and Will Patton. It was directed by Kevin Costner. It takes place in 2013 after an apocalyptic event destroyed much of the United States. The event also destroyed much of the world’s technology. The movie was a total failure at the box office but it really was pretty good for what it was. A nomad (Costner) is impressed into a military group, but escapes. He finds a dead postman’s uniform and puts it on and starts carrying the mail bag. He makes up a story saying he is a postman for a newly restored U.S. government and swears others into the postal service. He picks up mail left at the town post office and takes it with him. The military group is fighting everyone. Postmen start springing up everywhere. Eventually the postman rallies his troops for war.

A rather unusual science fiction movie came out in 1997 called Starship Troopers. It starred Casper Van Dien, Dina Meyer and Denise Richards. It had a very unusual feeling about it, but was very good. It was directed by Paul Verhoeven. Earth has a military force which is fighting with another planet whose inhabitants are intelligent bugs and the bugs are winning. The search is on for the leaders, the brain bugs and many battles ensue.

1998 saw the release of Armageddon starring Bruce Willis, Billy Bob Thornton, Liv Tyler, Ben Affleck and Will Patton. It was directed by Michael Bay. This was the highest grossing film of the year. A rogue asteroid his heading for earth and if it isn’t destroyed it will wipe out all life on the planet. The problem is they can’t shoot a nuclear missile at it, because that will not completely destroy it so they recruit a team of drillers who are supposed to put the nuke deep into the asteroid to vaporize it when it explodes. Now the drillers have to be trained as astronauts and then launched toward the asteroid.

Dark City also came out the same year. It starred Rufus Sewell, Kiefer Sutherland, Jennifer Connelly and William Hurt. It was directed by Alex Proyas. People are living in a city where it is always night time. There are advertisement for a place called shell beach but no one knows where it is. Murders are being committed and one person (Sewell) wakes up in a hotel bathtub and has amnesia. He gets a call from Sutherland to get out before men come to get him. The men are known as the Strangers. He notices murdered people in his apartment and flees. The Strangers are aliens and every night wipe people’s minds and have a power called tuning and they want to kill Sewell, because he is developing these powers. There is a lot more to this film which has become a cult classic.

1998 was a good year for science fiction and another film which came out was Deep Impact starring Robert Duvall, Tea Leoni, Elijah Wood and Morgan Freeman. It was directed by Mimi Leder. It didn’t do as well at the box office as Armageddon, but grossed 349 million dollars on a budget of about 80 million dollars. A comet is discovered heading toward earth. A year later a reporter who is investigating the resignation of the Secretary of the Treasury thinks it is linked to his mistress Ellie, but finds out Ellie is not a woman. It is E.L.E. which stands for Extinction Level Event. So what is to be done? A lottery selects 80,000 Americans under 50 years of age to join 200,000 pre-selected individuals along with animals and seeds to be put into underground shelters.

Soldier came out in 1998. It starred Kurt Russell and was directed by Paul W.S. Anderson. In the future there are troops who were raised by the government to be unfeeling killers and superb physical specimens. They fight in wars throughout the solar system. These soldiers are being replaced by enhanced humans and Russell manages to get away on a garbage scow which dumps him on a planet where junk is sent. It turns out there are humans living there and he just has a very hard time getting along and the humans are scared of him. Eventually the humans living there are found out and the commander of the enhanced humans decides to test his troops against the humans to see how long it would take to wipe them out. There is only one problem, the soldier doesn’t want this to happen. I love this movie.

Star Trek: Insurrection also came out the same year. It starred the Star Trek Next Generation cast again and again was directed by Jonathan Frakes. The Federation is observing a culture on a planet using invisibility, but they are discovered and it turns out the culture is far more advanced than they thought, but gave up their technology. The planet can rejuvenate those living on it and keep them alive. When some in the Federation find this out they plan to move the population off of the planet. They want to use a hidden holodeck ship to make them think they are still on the planet. Picard and his crew help the people living on the planet to escape an attack.

The X-Files also came out in 1998. It starred David Duchovny, Gillian Anderson and Martin Landau. Rob Bowman directed the film. Two cave men in 35,000 B.C. stumble across an extraterrestrial and attack him. Forward to the current date and there is a community near the site and a boy falls into a hole and those who try to rescue him are attacked by a thick black liquid which was inside the dead alien and they become unconscious. There is a scene where a bomb is found in a building which is discovered by Mulder, but after that Mulder and Scully find out about the hole which is now being hidden and scientists are conducting tests on the humans when an alien kills the lead scientist. Molder is blamed for not handling the exploded bomb correctly and Scully is asked to testify before a panel about it. This is a very complicated plot, but the bottom line is there is a group of elites who want to get in good with the aliens, because they believe they will be allowed to survive normally while everyone else will be killed.

In 1999 Bicentennial Man was released. It starred Robin Williams, Sam Neill and Embeth Davidtz. It was directed by Chris Columbus. In 2005 a family gets a robot to perform housekeeping and maintenance duties. Some in the family hate it. He breaks a figurine and carves a replacement. The family is stunned by his creativity and takes him back to the company to see if other robots are like him. The company wants to scrap it, but the family won’t allow this and take him back and allow him to pursue his own development. Over the years he educates himself and becomes more human. He wants to become a real human. A very touching movie.

The same year saw the great science fiction movie The Matrix released. It starred Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne and Carrie-Anne Moss. It was directed by the Wachowski brothers. Neo is making money by hacking and selling info. Neo is Reeves. Trinity is even a more famous hacker (Moss) and is being chased by agents who can do fantastic things. It turns out the world is not what it seems and Neo is enlisted to help show what is really going on. A great movie.

Another great movie came out that year it was Star Wars: Episode 1 – The Phantom Menace. Let me say even though I said it was great, I did this because most people felt that way, but I was not as big a fan of Star Wars sequels. The movie starred Liam Neeson, Ewan McGregor and Natalie Portman. Again it was directed by George Lucas. The film is a prequel and Obi-Wan Kenobi is the apprentice to Jedi Master Qui-Gon. They are trying to negotiate a trade agreement to end a blockade around the planet Naboo. The Trade Federation is secretly going to try and kill the Jedi and invade the planet with battle droids. The ruling queen escapes in a damaged ship and stops at a planet for repairs. The queen is in disguise. Anakin Skywalker is a slave, but will be free if he wins a pod race which he does. Qui-Gon asks the Jedi Council to train Anakin as a Jedi and they decline. Qui-Gon decides to train Anakin himself. A fight ensues with the Trade Federation.

The last good science fiction movie of the decade was The Thirteenth Floor. It starred Craig Bierko, Armin Mueller-Stahl and Gretchen Mol and was directed by Josef Rusnak. It actually was nominated for the Saturn Award for Best Science Fiction Film but lost to the Matrix. A computer simulation of Los Angeis in 1937 has been developed and is filled with simulated humans who believe they are really humans. The owner of the company is killed. Hall is heir to the company and there is strong evidence against him, even though he is innocent. Hall enters the simulation to retrieve a message the owner of the company left for him in it. A message was left with a bartender in the virtual world telling him he was a simulation and he is angry and tries to kill Hall who barely escapes. Hall then finds out the Los Angeles he lives in is also a simulation.