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By
Luc Haasbroek
Published 40 minutes ago
Luc Haasbroek is a writer and videographer from Durban, South Africa. He has been writing professionally about pop culture for eight years. Luc's areas of interest are broad: he's just as passionate about psychology and history as he is about movies and TV. He's especially drawn to the places where these topics overlap.
Luc is also an avid producer of video essays and looks forward to expanding his writing career. When not writing, he can be found hiking, playing Dungeons & Dragons, hanging out with his cats, and doing deep dives on whatever topic happens to have captured his interest that week.
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The science fiction and noir genres have a lot in common. Both genres are obsessed with human weakness, moral ambiguity, and pessimistic, often outright bleak futures that feel a little too close for comfort. When they collide, the result is often intoxicating. The best sci-fi noir gives us neon-drenched dystopias, morally torn heroes, and a cautionary vision of technology.
With all these qualities in mind, this list ranks the very best movies that balance sci-fi and noir. Each of the cinematic gems below blends the philosophical chill of speculative fiction with the shadowy fatalism of classic detective tales. Some of them remain uncomfortably relevant for our current moment, adding a layer of discomfort to what are already deep and thought-provoking narratives.
10 ‘Minority Report’ (2002)
Tom Cruise as Chief John Anderton standing in front of a screen in Minority Report (2002).Image via 20th Century Studios
"Everybody runs." Set in 2054 Washington, D.C., Minority Report imagines a world where murders are stopped before they happen. Tom Cruise plays John Anderton, a "PreCrime" officer who hunts potential killers using psychic predictions, until he’s accused of a future murder himself. This premise, though pulled from Phillip K. Dick, could easily have come across as goofy and ridiculous in a lesser filmmaker's hands, but Spielberg pulls it off, serving up moral complexity alongside the blockbuster thrills.
The movie is fast-paced and action-packed, loaded with chases and then-cutting-edge visuals. Yet it's also a noir tragedy: the protagonist is a man betrayed by the system he helped perfect, all of his principles yanked out from under him. Through him, Minority Report engages with themes of determinism, guilt, and faith in flawed institutions, making for a surprisingly haunting vision of the future. The whole thing is suffused with a deep sense of paranoia.
9 ‘Upgrade’ (2018)
Logan Marshall-Green as Grey Trace in 'Upgrade'Image via Universal Pictures
"Not man, not machine. More." A high-tech revenge thriller that feels like Blade Runner crossed with Death Wish. Upgrade centers on Grey Trace (Logan Marshall-Green), a mechanic left paralyzed after a mugging that kills his wife. He’s implanted with an AI chip called STEM, which restores his movement... and gradually takes control. Director Leigh Whannell (who wrote the original Saw) turns this conceit into a sleek cyberpunk noir about technology's seductive danger. What begins as revenge becomes an existential nightmare: who’s really in charge, man or machine?
The world of Upgrade is grimy and near-future believable, a place where justice is automated and free will is obsolete. At the heart of it, Marshall-Green’s performance is astonishing. His body moves like a machine, yet his eyes always look human and terrified. As tech bros in real life discuss implanting people with computer chips, Upgrade's speculative ideas look more and more prescient.
8 ‘Looper’ (2012)
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An older man holding a younger man while pointing a gun at someone else in Looper - 2012Image via TriStar Pictures
"This time travel crap… fries your brain like an egg." Time travel meets noir fatalism in Rian Johnson’s Looper, a taut thriller where assassins kill targets sent from the future. Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Joe, a hitman whose life implodes when his next target turns out to be his older self (Bruce Willis). This pulpy plot becomes a surprisingly bleak meditation on fate, choice, and the moral cost of survival.
Johnson knows how to combine thoughtful themes with propulsive action. His worldbuilding is on point here, too. The dusty backroads and decrepit cities feel less futuristic than broken, a plausible outcome of the trends underway today. This aesthetic complements the themes. Looper’s noir spirit lies in its moral decay; everyone’s compromised, everyone’s desperate, and redemption comes only through sacrifice, if it comes at all. All in all, a fun, smart sci-fi romp of the sort you don't see much of these days.
7 ‘Strange Days’ (1995)
Ralph Fiennes looking ahead in a dramatically lit close-up for Strange Days.Image via 20th Century Studios
"Memories were meant to fade. They were designed that way for a reason." Strange Days takes place in the final days of 1999, in a Los Angeles simmering with tension and decay. Ralph Fiennes leads the cast as Lenny Nero, a black-market dealer selling virtual-reality recordings that let users relive other people’s memories. When he stumbles upon footage of a murder, he’s thrust into a conspiracy. From here, the movie fuses noir sleaze with sci-fi prophecy, drawing on paranoid classics like Blow-Up, Blow Out, and The Conversation.
Notably, Strange Days was directed by Kathryn Bigelow and written by James Cameron, meaning there was some serious creative power both in front of and behind the camera. The tale becomes an allegory for voyeurism, surveillance, and moral numbness. It bombed hard at the box office; perhaps it was all a little too weird for 1995 audiences. In the decades since, however, Strange Days has been embraced as a cut film.
6 ‘12 Monkeys’ (1995)
Bruce Willis as James Cole looking offscreen in 12 MonkeysImage via Universal Pictures
"The world’s not ending today. It’s already ended. It just hasn’t cleared the system yet." 12 Monkeys is Terry Gilliam’s vision of time-travel noir: dark, surreal, and heartbreakingly human. In it, Bruce Willis plays James Cole, a convict sent back from a post-apocalyptic future to stop the release of a virus that wiped out most of humanity. But the past proves as unstable as his mind, and the line between sanity and delusion blurs. This approach extends to the movie's looping narrative structure, which constantly keeps the viewer guessing.
Brad Pitt’s manic supporting performance adds chaotic brilliance, but it’s Willis’ weary humanity that gives the film its soul. It's a reminder of his willingness to take on left-field roles, even at the height of his action stardom. 12 Monkeys uses his character to ask whether we can ever change fate or if we’re just ghosts in a prewritten timeline. It's a genuinely troubling question.
5 ‘Gattaca’ (1997)
Ethan Hawke as Vincent Freeman in 'Gattaca'Image via Columbia Pictures
"There is no gene for the human spirit." Gattaca envisions a future where genetics dictates destiny. Ethan Hawke turns in a strong performance as Vincent, a naturally born man in a world of engineered perfection, who assumes another’s DNA identity to pursue his dream of space travel. Andrew Niccol’s minimalist world feels chillingly plausible. It's clean, beautiful, and morally sterile, a place where the rich have edited away all their health problems and the poor must struggle with the realities of biology.
Beneath its sleek surfaces, Gattaca is deeply melancholy, its mystery less about murder than meaning. Few sci-fi films are this poetic or this relevant to our current moment in time. Gene editing technologies continue to progress in leaps and bounds, raising the plausibility of a future where the wealthy literally use science to make themselves biologically superior to everyone else. It would be the grim, logical endpoint of extreme social inequality.
4 ‘Blade Runner 2049’ (2017)
Ryan Gosling as Officer K in Blade Runner 2049Image via Warner Bros. Pictures
"You’ve never seen a miracle." Denis Villeneuve’s sequel to Blade Runner shouldn’t have worked; the shadow of the original was too great. And yet it did, magnificently. Set decades after the original, 2049 follows Officer K (Ryan Gosling), a replicant tasked with hunting his own kind, who stumbles upon a secret that could change civilization. It's essentially a detective story stretched across a dying planet, one that manages to feel monumental and intimate at the same time. And, at its core, the question: what makes something real?
Gosling’s performance, stoic and wounded, anchors the film’s slow emotional bloom, and Harrison Ford’s return deepens the tragedy rather than repeats it. The visuals and music are stellar as well. Roger Deakins’ cinematography is grimly gorgeous, shooting shadowy skylines and ruined landscapes like they were cathedrals. While not its director's finest sci-fi, it's still one of the best of the 2010s.
3 ‘Brazil’ (1985)
"We’re all in this together." Terry Gilliam strikes again. Brazil is bureaucracy as a nightmare, basically 1984 rewritten by a surrealist. He shows us a world of crumbling machinery, endless paperwork, and impossible dreams, where a low-level clerk named Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce) escapes his totalitarian reality through fantasies of flight and romance. It’s both absurd and tragic, with humor that's black-hole dark. The film’s noir roots show in every frame: the drab trench coats, the conspiratorial whispers, the doomed yearning for escape. Gilliam’s visuals are overwhelming, grotesque, and, occasionally, oddly beautiful.
Brazil endures because it’s both a farce and a sharp political statement, perfectly capturing the suffocating logic of modern bureaucracy. Its ending is ambiguous, haunting, and deeply cruel, cementing it as one of cinema’s great dystopian noirs. Hope, here, is just another form of insanity. Unsurprisingly, all this Kafkaesque sci-fi rubbed most viewers the wrong way back in 1985, but Brazil is now widely regarded as a classic of its time.
2 ‘Dark City’ (1998)
Image via New Line Cinema
"There is no escape. The city stops here." Dark City begins with a man waking in a bathtub beside a dead body, his memory erased. From that noir setup, Alex Proyas (director of The Crow) spins a cosmic mystery where reality itself is being rewritten by unseen beings who rearrange the city each night. Rufus Sewell plays John Murdoch, hunted by detectives and haunted by false memories, as he searches for truth in a world without sunlight. His story is a unique hybrid of pulp and philosophy, easily one of the most atmospheric movies of the 1990s.
The whole thing looks like an Edward Hopper painting. The production design is unforgettable, consisting of shifting architecture, artificial nights, and deep shadows, very much channeling the spirit of Gotham City. 1940s noir was a conscious influence, with Proyas paying particular homage to The Maltese Falcon. The themes and ideas, meanwhile, hark back to sci-fi classics like Metropolis and 2001: A Space Odyssey.
1 ‘Blade Runner’ (1982)
The iconic image of a holographic advertisement projected on a building in Blade RunnerImage via Warner Bros. Pictures
"I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe." Everything begins here. Blade Runner broke ground by fusing film noir with cyberpunk aesthetics, influencing so much that would follow. In a rain-soaked neo-Los Angeles, Harrison Ford’s Deckard hunts rogue replicants, bioengineered humans searching for life beyond their expiration date. It's a classic noir story structure, a detective chasing clues through moral fog, his search becoming an inquiry into existence itself. The difference is that the setting is populated by advanced robots and flying cars.
The cinematography is immersive and striking, all neon and chiaroscuro, lightyears ahead of its time. The characters are also much more layered and interesting than most found in '80s sci-fi. Rutger Hauer's Roy Batty, in particular, is three-dimensional and fascinating, his "Tears in Rain" monologue making for one of the greatest moments in sci-fi cinema. Forty-three years later, Blade Runner is still the benchmark.
Blade Runner
R
Sci-Fi
Thriller
Drama
Release Date
June 25, 1982
Cast
Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, Sean Young, Edward James Olmos, M. Emmet Walsh, Daryl Hannah, William Sanderson, Brion James, Joe Turkel, Joanna Cassidy, James Hong, Morgan Paull, Kevin Thompson, John Edward Allen, Hy Pyke, Kimiko Hiroshige, Bob Okazaki, Carolyn DeMirjian, Ben Astar, Dawna Lee Heising, Alexis Rhee, Judith Burnett, Leo Gorcey Jr., Sharon Hesky, Kelly Hine
Runtime
118 minutes
Director
Ridley Scott
Writers
David Webb Peoples, Hampton Fancher, Philip K. Dick
Genres
Sci-Fi, Thriller, Drama
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