10 Best Techno Thriller Movies Of All Time, Ranked

There’s an obvious reason techno-thriller movies continually resonate within an ever-evolving society: they directly speak to that very notion of change. The type of sci-fi and cyberpunk movies that become enduring objects, however, further associate that change with an internal endeavor toward growth and self-actualization — you may notice how many films on this list feature bodily transformation, or otherwise act as allegories for the transition of identity. 

These movies typically literalize these ideas through plot mechanics that manifest in ambitious, heady story components and impressive makeup effects work. You can be certain that all the movies on this list endure from multiple perspectives: that of tangible filmmaking and artistic craft, and the sharp, penetrating thematic elements that speak to a fluctuating world perpetually on the brink of a new collapse.

These are the twelve best techno thriller movies of all time, ranked.

Fritz Lang’s 1927 pioneering German expressionist silent sci-fi film “Metropolis” may not be the first movie you think of when faced with the words “techno thriller,” but it deserves a shout-out for how it helped shape the foundations of the sci-fi and tech genres. Written by Thea von Harbou and based on her novel of the same name, “Metropolis” addresses many of the same themes that future sci-fi classics would abide by: class, industry, capitalism, and the advancement of technology in lockstep with a march toward dystopia.

That’s right, “Metropolis” is so influential that it even shares a climax with Tim Burton’s “Batman.” Lang manifests this story of a struggle to achieve class solidarity in the face of working-class exploitation with a dark, fairy-tale-like quality, largely due to its evocative set design and drearily fantastical mood. Its visual effects and set design hold up to this day, and the striking, theatrical use of angled structures and Art Deco cityscapes eclipse the artistic merit of plenty of contemporary mega-budget films. Cinematographer Eugen Schüfftan even conceived an entirely new filmmaking technique, known as the Schüfftan Process, which allowed for the illusion of actors existing within true-to-life sets that were actually built as miniatures.

But really, the wondrous cinematic achievements of this film, which is nearly 100 years old, are too abundant to count. “Metropolis” set the stage for engaging with humanity’s relationship to technology and ourselves on screen, and filmmakers have been chasing the film’s enigmatic beauty ever since.

Dystopian futures were on the minds of filmmakers in 1999, which is why David Cronenberg’s tech-dream-noir-thing “eXistenZ” continues to garner comparisons to “The Matrix.” They’re kind of like two different sides of the same record, with “The Matrix” built on the foundation of the Wachowskis’ flashy, innovative action filmmaking, and “eXistenZ” existing on a much colder, stranger plane, in keeping with the aberrations of Cronenberg’s mind.

“eXistenZ” is led by Jennifer Jason Leigh as Allegra Geller, a groundbreaking game designer for virtual reality video games that connect to players through the spine via organic “game pods.” When she’s wounded by a member of an insurgent group trying to dismantle the power structures of companies developing virtual reality games, she enlists security guard Ted Pikul (Jude Law) to enter and quality check her new game eXistenZ. Soon, the two find themselves on the run and at the center of a futuristic corporate conspiracy.

 “eXistenZ” mirrors some thematic preoccupations of Cronenberg’s earlier film “Videodrome” but updates them for the new groundbreaking technological vanguard of 1999. It remains, of course, a strikingly prescient film in its anxieties about the development of immersive tech and humanity’s further absorption into the digital world that has now transcended simply watching screens, becoming a tangible element of the artificial environs with boundaries that are increasingly fading. 

Established sci-fi and horror screenplay writer Alex Garland made his directorial debut with this contemplative 2014 sci-fi drama about the perils of technological innovation, the boundaries between humanity and artificial intelligence, and Oscar Isaac tearing up the dance floor. His character, pioneering tech CEO Nathan Bateman, invites programmer Caleb Smith to his secluded estate to test the physical, behavioral, and ethical frontiers of his latest invention: Ava (Alicia Vikander), a humanoid android being analyzed to determine the limits of her true consciousness.

Garland’s film hits on many familiar anxieties about advancing tech, though “Ex Machina” may be more concerned with the sense of alienation and disconnect we feel with our own technology than with true A.I. alarmism. Its sedate approach to humanity’s vulnerability to artificial intelligence may read as slightly subdued amid today’s heightened conversation about the technology. Still, the movie speaks to a persistent, simmering apprehension regarding the quick march of advancing tech that has always existed in human society.

More than anything else, “Ex Machina” is a great actor’s showcase and character piece, operating as a claustrophobic chamber drama with as much immediate conflict between its human characters as between them and Ava. “Ex Machina” distills the philosophical argument about the world into a single house setting: What are our limits in a world of advancing machinery that is becoming beyond everyday comprehension?

With “Enemy of the State,” director Tony Scott owes as much to Hitchcockian wrong-man-style thrillers as to paranoid ’70s American conspiracy-espionage movies. He seems to know as much: starring alongside Will Smith as Robert Clayton Dean, the unwitting owner of a videotape documenting the assassination plot by NSA agent Thomas Reynolds (Jon Voight), is Gene Hackman — a very pointed bit of casting — as a subversive conspiratorial renegade who’s acutely aware of the country’s imperious, invasive surveillance state. The history here is clear: You can think of him as an undercover rebel version of Harry Caul from “The Conversation,” Francis Ford Coppola’s best film.

“Enemy of the State” is, naturally, concerned with many of the same overarching themes as that Coppola film. But, ever the rousing action director, Scott realizes David Marconi’s script through his typical brand of frenetic propulsion and motion, zealously following Smith as he’s turned from an everyday husband and father into a fugitive by a corrupt government that doesn’t even realize it’s chasing an innocent man.

The movie feels a little lopsided as it switches from urgently organizing its various catalysts into place to, eventually, its unlikely team-up dynamic between Smith and Hackman that makes up the groove of the back half. You also likely won’t be convinced by the likes of Jack Black, Jamie Kennedy, and Seth Green as NSA tech lackeys keeping an eye on Robert. But it speaks to the strength of Scott’s dynamic energy behind the camera that you’ll be invested regardless.

It speaks to the command of director Steven Spielberg, and our collective ability to take him for granted, that “Minority Report” can regularly be forgotten when talking about his greatest movies. This adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s novella “The Minority Report” takes an interest in the types of governmental and social critiques regularly found within Dick’s writing, following Tom Cruise as a “Precime” cop, working for an agency that arrests individuals based on crimes that are yet to occur, who finds himself on the run when he is newly accused of committing an infraction in the future.

With a premise primed for the kind of dystopian foresight that catalogs gloomy truths about the state of the developed world’s police state, Spielberg effortlessly transmutes such ideas into a rousingly effective chase movie, which never loses sight of its overarching ideas as it keeps up with Cruise’s sprinting lead as he tries to clear his name of something he’s merely presumed to do in the future. “Minority Report” plays with film noir as much as with sci-fi, with Cruise serving as the kind of helpless protagonist found in classic cinema’s greatest whodunits.

It’s that fluidity of genre and lively variability of tones that makes “Minority Report” such an engaging romp despite its more overtly depressing truths. The greatest tech thrillers can bridge that dissonance, and no matter how distressing its ideas are, Spielberg never lets up in delivering an entertaining movie.

Before she was regularly making socio-political dramas custom-made for promotion on the awards circuit, Kathryn Bigelow was crafting genre fiction that took a different tack to diagnosing our societal woes. “Strange Days” was a notorious bomb on release, with audiences rejecting its bleak, harrowing subject matter, but it has since built a cult following that has solidified it as one of the most penetrating sci-fi films of the ’90s.

With a script written by James Cameron and Jay Cocks, “Strange Days” is set in a dystopian vision of 1999 Los Angeles and stars Ralph Fiennes as Lenny Nero, a trafficker of SQUID recordings: logs of feelings and memories transposed directly from an individual’s brain that other users can then experience for themselves. After he comes across a recording featuring the murder of an acquaintance, Lenny is thrust into a paranoid conspiracy, as the world sits 48 hours away from the turn of the century.

“Strange Days” is now, unfortunately, extremely hard to watch on streaming — a shame, given the prescient immediacy that inhabits Bigelow’s film and how easily recognizable our current society is in this hellish vision of LA. That’s because the script takes real-world social and political adversity and takes them to a heightened, but still logical, endpoint of American cataclysm: the film’s overtones of racial tensions, police resentment, and societal violence are in direct response to the Rodney King riots. “Strange Days” refracts real-life inequalities into a movie of grounded cyberpunk horrors.

David Cronenberg’s “Videodrome” is one of the most enduring techno thrillers ever made, with themes that are of their time yet persist with rigor, making this erotic body-horror-noir transmission freak-out feel just as urgent as ever. It’s a movie about the lives we live through our screens and how they inevitably collide deeply with our real ones—a premise that remains achingly significant.

“Videodrome” follows James Woods as Max Renn, president of the Toronto UHF CIVIC-TV television station, looking for any new lurid novelty to entice the viewers of his excessive station. He soon finds and becomes obsessed with a channel being broadcast from an unsanctioned signal called Videodrome, which consists purely of graphic depictions of violence and torture.

“Videodrome” then becomes a surreal spectacle of salacious urges and bodily transformation, as Max teams up with characters from fetishistic radio hosts to softcore pornographers to find the source and meaning of his new obsession. Cronenberg expertly examines the delicate thresholds of the human experience right on the line between the organic and the digital—you can be sure that “Videodrome” has some amazing special effects work, and is likely the only movie you’ll ever see in which a VHS tape is inserted into a big fleshy mouth that has grown out of James Woods’s torso.

The Japanese sci-fi anime classic “Akira” takes place in the faraway future of… 2019. Written and directed by Katsuhiro Otomo, and based on his 1982 manga of the same name, it follows Shōtarō Kaneda (Mitsuo Iwata) in the dystopian aftermath of atomic fallout. Kaneda finds himself on a quest within the cyberpunk gleam of Neo-Tokyo to protect his telekinetic friend, Tetsuo Shima (Nozomu Sasaki), as he rages through the staggering masses and corrupt institutional forces threatening the fabric of the world.

That’s all fine and good, but there’s so much bubbling beneath the surface and populating the outskirts of the frames of “Akira” that it always threatens to overtake the pure immediacy that accompanies the experience of watching the film. “Akira” is the type of movie where an ending explainer really is justified to make sense of the overwhelming qualities that Otomo packs into the feature. But that’s what makes it such an exciting and beautifully rendered piece of dazzling speculative fiction, built on a nation’s everlasting trauma of nuclear annihilation staring them directly in the face. These days, “Akira” transcends its cyberpunk status and is often referenced as one of the greatest animated features of all time — watching the film, it’s hard to argue with its potency.

Back in the ’80s and ’90s, Paul Verhoeven was Hollywood’s resident virtuoso at helming seemingly thin, trashy genre pulp and turning in a product that both delivered on a base template while underlining it with subversive, heady ideas about violence, oppression, and humanity. With “Total Recall,” he directs a script based on the 1966 short story “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” by Philip K. Dick that follows Arnold Schwarzenegger as Douglas Quaid, a construction worker who starts to believe his current life may have been fabricated by false memories implanted within his brain, and that his real life was one as a government secret agent.

That outline is all Verhoeven needs to make one of the greatest sci-fi thrillers of the ’90s, which is just as much of a savage shotgun blast of B-movie, practical splatter movie mania as it is a genuinely engaging treatise on what it means to perceive an image of yourself, and who profits by selling you a particular idea of who you’re supposed to be. As an effects showcase, “Total Recall” is absolutely nut, replete with all the blood splatter and eyeball pops and crazy mutant creatures your lizard brain could hope to see. As a reflection on the predatory economy focused on the vulturous control of the individual, it’s searing and insightful. Verhoeven remains an esteemed master of the craft in how he could indulge those competing identities to their fullest potential.

Sure, maybe you’d prefer that this entry go to this film’s fan-favorite sequel, “Terminator 2: Judgment Day.” For my money, you can’t beat the intense, violent, sci-fi-noir-horror cocktail of “The Terminator,” the film that truly launched director James Cameron’s career and may hold up as the best of his films. Inspired by the slasher sensibilities of “Halloween” but integrated with the obsessions of a tech fetishist, “The Terminator” gives you the best of both worlds: a manically pulpy, futuristic action thriller that feels as nerve-shredding as it does exhilarating.

“The Terminator” would also mark the beginning of Cameron’s ever-so-reliable career as a box office titan. Made on a budget of around $6 million, the film would go on to gross $78 million. It would also help to certify Arnold Schwarzenegger’s leading man status for the majority of the ’80s and ’90s, though he may have never topped the visceral intensity that he brings to The Terminator, as seen here—you can see him lose himself within the unfeeling, unflinching inhumanity of the character as he chases after Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Connor.

“The Terminator” would, of course, launch a franchise of films that would eventually go the way of IP-mining exhaustion. But that reflects the desperation to achieve something so inimitable in “The Terminator.” Cameron’s sleek direction, a tight script, compelling performances, and impressive practical visual effects all combine to make the type of ’80s action movie that acts as a poster child for its decade.

The second Paul Verhoeven film on this list is arguably his masterpiece, and it’s one of the great American sci-fi action movie satires. “Robocop” is a caustic treatise on ’80s America, both its capitalistic excesses and its governmental overreaches, but it continues to expose deep truths about our contemporary circumstances, perhaps because we never really left the Reagan years behind.

Its conceit couldn’t be any more blunt: In a dystopian future, the vicious corporate conglomerate Omni Consumer Products takes over the Detroit police force, leading their governance with the development of crime-stopping cyborgs and mechs, hoodwinking low-level cop Alex Murphy (Peter Weller) to engage in a fatal conflict that allows his body to be exploited as a test subject for their RoboCop prototype. Beginning as a new, unfeeling servant of law enforcement and OCP, Murphy gradually regains his memories and begins to work against his directives.

“RoboCop” is the perfect incisive takedown of an America destroyed through hostile corporatism and gentrification, where CEOs and criminal gangs are one and the same, told through delirious exploitation that’s by turns morbidly funny, desperately sad, and shockingly violent. Its keen critiques of a society perpetually on the edge of total collapse are almost eclipsed by the stunningly grisly practical effects work, led by visual effects legend Phil Tippett. You’ll never see a film so attuned to the vulgar garishness of American policing and corporate industry that features quite as many gory bullet lacerations, snapped limbs, and toxic waste mutations as “RoboCop.”

What else could top this list? With “The Matrix,” Lana & Lilly Wachowski reinvented the rules of sci-fi and action cinema and cultivated a legion of fans who would punctually turn on them in the wake of three sequels that continued to defy audience expectations. (All of the “Matrix” movies are good, by the way!)

No matter the divisiveness the sequels would bring, “The Matrix” holds up as a timeless classic of brain-bending, boundary-pushing cinema that tested the conventions of screenwriting and the cinematic form. You know the story by now: Keanu Reeves plays an ordinary office worker who discovers the world around him is an elaborate simulation crafted by an oppressive computer network that harvests the bodies of sedate humans. He joins a rogue group of subversive rebels featuring the great Carrie-Anne Moss and Laurence Fishburne to aid the fight for a free future.

The Wachowskis take batty dystopian sci-fi signifiers and turn them into something full of irresistible power and inventiveness. “The Matrix” is known for its creation of the “bullet time” action style of stylish, sensorial slow-mo, but its foundation of keen character interiority, by which it works neatly as the ultimate metaphor for living as a transgender individual, heightens the film far above so many of its peers. “The Matrix” is an unassailable classic, with an influence that continues to reverberate.