Science fiction movies allow us to experience a world that is either thinly connected to our own or far removed from it. Either way, we go in to experience something that, here on our Earth, simply isn’t possible. Horror can work when it’s fully grounded in our reality as can, of course, drama and comedy, but science fiction needs to show the audience something new. And, when it does so successfully enough to become a franchise, it’s typical for the first time to be the best time. After that, the audience has already seen this particular group of creatives’ vision of the future, alternate reality present, or what have you.
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Then, of course, there’s the simple fact that some scripts are better than others. What follows are sci-fi franchises that, for a variety of reasons, peaked with round one. But did any of their sequels come close to measuring up? Let’s unpack them all.
5) Jurassic Park
We’re seven movies into the Jurassic franchise by this point, and not one of the six sequels has come close to recapturing the magic of Steven Spielberg’s original film. Jurassic Park so perfectly encapsulated awe, wonder, and adventure that there’s no chance that a sequel will ever mirror its effect.
After all, the veil has been lifted. The audience has now seen dinosaurs convincingly brought to life on the big screen. The Lost World: Jurassic Park feels connected to the original movie because it came out not long after and had much of the same team behind it, and Jurassic World did bring some awe to the table in terms of there actually being a functioning dino theme park, but even still the first is the best by a mile.
4) Men in Black
Like Jurassic Park, Barry Sonnenfeld’s Men in Black succeeded in being both a fast-paced adventure and an introduction of something fantastical into our society. It’s just, instead of dinosaurs being brought into our world, we come to learn that there are both aliens among us and those who allow and police their cohabitation with us.
The original Men in Black undoubtedly succeeds in bringing some kooky aliens into play, and a nice balance between funny, docile ones (e.g. the birthing scene and Frank the Pug) with sinister ones, but it’s really the narrative that allows it to excel. It’s a fantastic passing of the torch movie. Then that was undone with Men in Black II, a sequel so light on plot it’s over before it even gets off the ground. Men in Black 3 did manage to be a worthy sequel thanks to the work by Josh Brolin, but even then, it wasn’t exactly an excellent summer movie as much as it was a pretty good one. Then we get to the predictable reboot, Men in Black: International, which never justifies its reason to exists and lines up with the ultra-poor quality of film two.
3) The Matrix
It must have been tough for the Wachowskis to follow-up their The Matrix. It became far more of a cultural sensation than anyone was expecting, introducing plenty of key elements into cinema history: bullet-time, Neo, Trinity, Morpheus, the Agents, the backward-bending bullet dodge. It set an extremely high bar.
To that point, The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions were bound to fall short. And, while they’re not quite disastrous, they sure do. Everything new brought to the table doesn’t come close to iconic territory and everything we’ve seen before isn’t done as well as it was the first time. The Matrix Resurrections tried to recapture the first film’s magic, but the way it went about it was somehow both too different and too similar. It felt like a meta remake that wasn’t sure if it wanted to stick to that path all the way through.
2) Alien
Right off the bat let’s say, yes, James Cameron’s Aliens is wonderful. In fact, it’s only really just a hair or too below Ridley Scott’s franchise opener. But the fact remains, Scott’s is still the best one.
The cast is uniformly perfect, the chestburster scene is right up there with “I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse,” the Xenomorph design is terrific, the pacing is perfectly modulated. Everything it should have done, it did, and it was a seminal addition to sci-fi movie history. The second film may be a refreshing one-eighty from the first film’s direction (as Cameron has been known to do with sequels), the third film is underrated, and Alien: Romulus is solid, but it’s still the original Alien for the win.
1) Back to the Future
The Back to the Future sequels are solid because they sprinkle in just enough new details to be worthy of existence. But they’re still primarily copying the framework that made the original film a classic.
To put it in star terms, Back to the Future is a five-star movie while the second and third are solid threes. They’re just above the full averageness that is implied with a two and a half star rating. It’s fun to continue spending time with this well-assembled group of characters, but they were still more interesting in film one, when time travel felt like something magically new and the stakes were both high and intimate to Marty McFly.
What other sci-fi movie franchises do you think peaked with film one? Leave a comment below and join the conversation now in the ComicBook Forum!
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