From Ex Machina to Ghost in the Shell, there are plenty of great sci-fi movies like Blade Runner for fans of Ridley Scott’s seminal masterpiece to enjoy. Blade Runner is a groundbreaking work of science fiction cinema. With its tale of Harrison Ford’s grizzled cop Rick Deckard hunting down androids that have assimilated into human society, Blade Runner mixes sci-fi elements into a classic film noir.
There’s no other movie quite like Blade Runner, but there are films that share similarities with it. There are other movies about the dangers of A.I., other movies that put a sci-fi spin on a typical detective noir, and other movies based on the works of Philip K. Dick. From Scott’s other sci-fi efforts to different cerebral tech noirs, there are a ton of other cinematic gems that scratch the same itch as Blade Runner.
10
The Terminator
After Blade Runner introduced the “tech noir” genre to the big screen, James Cameron’s The Terminator solidified it as a new subset of science fiction; he even named the film’s nightclub setting Tech Noir to hammer home the invention of this sci-fi subgenre. The Terminator takes place in contemporary Los Angeles, where a killing machine from the future has been sent to find and kill Sarah Connor. Sarah will become the mother of the revolutionary leading the charge against the machine uprising — but when the Terminator finds her, she’s just a regular person living a regular life.
Throughout the movie, Sarah transforms from an everywoman into a badass, and Linda Hamilton nails that transformation. Both Blade Runner and The Terminator are cat-and-mouse thrillers, but take the chase in opposite directions. Where Blade Runner is about a human hunting down cyborgs, The Terminator is about a cyborg hunting down a human.
9
Ex Machina
Tonally, the closest thing in recent sci-fi cinema to Blade Runner is Alex Garland’s existentialist gem Ex Machina. Domhnall Gleeson stars as a low-level programmer named Caleb, who wins an office contest to visit his eccentric tech-bro boss, played by Oscar Isaac, at his remote compound. However, it turns out to not be such a random visit; Caleb’s boss wants him to perform a Turing test on his latest creation: Ava, a humanoid android, played by Alicia Vikander.
Both Ex Machina and Blade Runner see their protagonist get seduced by a robotic femme fatale. Although the robotic femme fatale in Ex Machina has much more sinister motives than the one in Blade Runner, they’re both a tragic figure deep down. Ava and Rachael’s stories are a poignant sci-fi metaphor for men controlling women in society.
8
Alien
Blade Runner wasn’t Ridley Scott’s first foray into the science fiction genre; he’d previously helmed the classic sci-fi thriller Alien. Whereas Blade Runner is a sci-fi version of a detective noir, Alien is a sci-fi version of a haunted house movie. After unwittingly inviting a bloodthirsty extraterrestrial onto their ship, a crew of space truckers are picked off one by one. The ship’s tenacious warrant officer, Ellen Ripley, becomes determined to vanquish the star-beast from the ship.
Although Alien and Blade Runner belong to very different subgenres, they share a unique aesthetic and a unique perspective of the future. Both Alien and Blade Runner view the distant future through the eyes of blue-collar workers. Scott pioneered the now-popular “used future” visual style; a grimy, lived-in look at the future to contrast the usually clean and polished vision of tomorrow.
7
Minority Report
Blade Runner was the first movie adaptation of a Philip K. Dick story, but it was hardly the last. Dick’s works have also been adapted into Total Recall, A Scanner Darkly, and The Adjustment Bureau. The best adaptation since Blade Runner — and the most similar to Blade Runner in terms of tone and style — is Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report. Tom Cruise stars as the head of a police unit that can predict future crimes. He has to go on the run when his department determines that he will kill a man he’s never even met in a couple of days.
Just like Blade Runner, Minority Report is a classic film noir set in the distant future. It uses speculative futuristic technology to enhance the mystery storyline. Minority Report is a typical fugitive story, but the crime hasn’t been committed yet, and the perpetrator needs to figure out why he does what he’ll inevitably do.
6
Brazil
Brazil is a much quirkier, more comedic vision of a dystopian future than Blade Runner, but they both take a bleak approach to humanity’s fate. Brazil is essentially Nineteen Eighty-Four as seen through the eyes of Terry Gilliam. Jonathan Pryce stars as Sam Lowry, a miserable bureaucrat searching for the woman of his dreams while working a dull, mind-numbing job in a futuristic world that relies on unreliable machinery.
As is to be expected from a Monty Python alum, Brazil is a razor-sharp satire of a wide variety of topics. It lampoons bureaucracy, technocracy, capitalism, oversurveillance, and corporate statism. Much like Nineteen Eighty-Four itself, Brazil has proven to be surprisingly prescient as capitalism, surveillance, and reliance on technology have only gotten more prevalent in society. While its satire is Orwellian, Brazil’s gonzo execution is veritably Kafkaesque.
5
The Matrix
The Wachowskis’ The Matrix has a lot more action than Blade Runner, but they both revolve around the eternal struggle between man and machine. Keanu Reeves plays Thomas Anderson, a bored office worker who’s reborn as the messianic Neo when he learns that what he knows as reality is just a computer simulation created by humanity’s robotic overlords. The Machines are using human bodies as batteries as they lead a blissfully ignorant existence in a digital recreation of 1999.
Blade Runner and The Matrix each belong to a different action subgenre; Blade Runner is a police noir and The Matrix is a martial arts movie. But they just use their genre formula to dress up a deep sci-fi study of existentialism and personhood. They’re both warnings about the dangers of A.I. that were sadly ignored.
4
Dredd
Blade Runner combines a futuristic sci-fi epic with a gritty urban police thriller. Pete Travis and Alex Garland took a similar approach to their 2000 A.D. adaptation, Dredd. In a reimagining of the Dirty Harry movie The Enforcer, Karl Urban’s Judge Dredd mentors a young rookie — Judge Anderson, played by Olivia Thirlby — on her first day on the job. It ends up being a pretty eventful day as they take on a ruthless drug lord and her goons in a locked-down high-rise.
Dredd is much more violent and action-packed than Blade Runner (it’s essentially a version of The Raid set in 2080), but they’re both a riveting street-level exploration of a dystopian future. They both take place in a city with corrupt cops and uncontrollable crime rates. They both view the crime-ridden future through the eyes of a grizzled veteran lawman.
3
Alphaville
Blade Runner was one of the earliest movies to bring the tropes of film noir into a sci-fi setting, but it wasn’t the first. Nearly two decades earlier, Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville put a sci-fi twist on a classic detective noir. The story revolves around private eye character Lemmy Caution, a staple of British crime fiction, played by one of his usual portrayers, Eddie Constantine. But this is no regular case for Caution; in a dystopian future, he’s sent to destroy Alpha 60, a sentient computer that controls an entire city.
Typical of the French New Wave, this was a radical concept; it’s as if someone made a movie sending Philip Marlowe to a galaxy far, far away. As the story of a detective taking on a powerful A.I., Alphaville is a forerunner to Blade Runner. It’s also a disturbing look at a world where everyone is brainwashed by a machine.
2
Ghost In The Shell
If Dick’s story had been adapted as an anime as opposed to a live-action movie, it would look something like Mamoru Oshii’s cyberpunk gem Ghost in the Shell. Set in the fictional New Port City in 2029, Ghost in the Shell follows cyborg cop Major Motoko Kusanagi and her quest to bring down an elusive hacker known as “The Puppet Master.” Ghost in the Shell got a disappointing live-action remake in 2017, but the original 1995 anime remains a masterpiece.
Both Blade Runner and Ghost in the Shell have a similar visual style. They both explore a sprawling, neon-soaked metropolis in the near-future through the eyes of a cop. They both dig into similar themes, too: they both take place in a world ruled by technology and examine the concept of self and identity through the subject of artificial intelligence.
1
Blade Runner 2049
The sci-fi movie that’s most similar to Blade Runner is its own sequel, Blade Runner 2049. Scott passed the baton to fellow visionary Denis Villeneuve to continue his story and expand his world. Picking up 30 years after the original film, Blade Runner 2049 stars Ryan Gosling as Officer K, a blade runner who discovers a shocking secret that could rock the fabric of civilization.
Rather than just rehashing the original story like most legacy sequels, Blade Runner 2049 expertly flips the first movie’s central conflict on its head. While Blade Runner is about a human detective who begins to suspect he’s a replicant, Blade Runner 2049 is about a replicant detective who begins to suspect he’s a human. The sequel is a much bigger movie than Blade Runner — more epic in scope — but it’s every bit the thoughtful, philosophical opus its predecessor was.
