The sci-fi genre is packed with amazing characters, but not all of them get the attention or treatment that they deserve. There aren’t many genres that can boast the broad appeal and remarkable longevity of science fiction, and much of that success has been built upon a foundation of incredible characters. The best sci-fi movies aren’t just those that offer audiences the chance to follow a compelling protagonist, but also feature exceptional villains to oppose them. Sci-fi antagonists can take many forms, with aliens, robots, supervillains, and various other forms of life commonplace within the genre. Some of these villains ultimately prove to be iconic in their own right; such is the power they can command over audiences.
Some sci-fi movie villains are even cooler than the hero, but that doesn’t necessarily translate to them being made as important as they deserve. Unfortunately, even amazing science fiction antagonists are sometimes treated poorly by their respective franchises. Whether handled poorly from the off or unfairly ignored by subsequent entries, the following incredible sci-fi villains simply deserved to be treated far better than they ultimately were.
We’ve seen many DC movie villains over the years, and some have been far better and more accurate than others. However, there are perhaps none that were handled worse by a sci-fi franchise than Doomsday, who appeared in the DCEU movie Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. The movie bizarrely revised Doomsday’s origin story, connecting him to Lex Luthor, and simplified an iconic narrative arc into less than an hour of underwhelming big-screen action. While Doomsday succeeded in killing Superman just like his comic book counterpart, the DCEU’s handling of the character was nowhere close to what the villain deserved. Considering the source material establishes Doomsday as an incredibly powerful and dangerous villain, adapting him as an apparent afterthought and then never mentioning him again was actually borderline insulting. While Doomsday wasn’t treated as at all important by the DCEU itself, the wider DC Universe had long since established the character as a major and incredibly dangerous antagonist for Superman, so the sci-fi franchise severely bungled his iconic story.
Of all the best sci-fi movie villains of the 1980s, few stood out to be quite as compelling as Blade Runner‘s Roy Batty. The main antagonist of Ridley Scott’s 1982 neo-noir adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was a rebellious android replicant being hunted by the titular LAPD Blade Runner Rick Deckard. Rutger Hauer’s performance combined with the thought-provoking nature of the source material so perfectly that Batty’s story — and ending — are remembered as one of the most profound moments in the history of science fiction on the big screen. While Roy Batty’s story was always destined to end in a single movie, his actions in attempting to liberate replicants deserved to have far-reaching implications, especially as Deckard wasn’t actually able to stop him. Instead, the Blade Runner franchise simply moved on from Batty, with subsequent entries focusing more on Deckard and other characters and neglecting to so much as mention the iconic villain’s legacy.
No list of the best Star Wars villains would be complete without Darth Maul. Introduced in The Phantom Menace as Darth Sidious’ Sith apprentice, Maul’s distinct design and impressive lightsaber skills swiftly cemented him as an iconic fan favorite character. His duel with Qui-Gon Jinn and Obi-Wan Kenobi remains one of the best battles in the entire franchise, but his unceremonious death left very little room for the franchise to capitalize on the villain’s popularity. Star Wars has since partially redeemed its poor treatment of Darth Maul by better exploring his story across various TV shows and other projects, but to do so required a certain amount of retconning that should never have been necessary. Had the franchise simply trusted the strength of the character from the beginning, the iconic villain could easily have played a much bigger role in Star Wars’ story, but instead, his potential was wasted before being retroactively explored in a hasty piece of backpedalling in response to his popularity.
