10 Most Iconic Sci-Fi Movie Characters Of All Time

A character is the audiences’ way into a world. We live their lives, feel their pain, celebrate their elation. Whenever a film strikes that satisfying chord, becoming a staple of pop-culture, the characters can become as memorable as the world they live in. And when you live in worlds of Jedi, time travelling robots, and simulations, that memorability becomes harder earned.

We all remember the first time we were tasked with choosing the red pill or blue. When we decided that a plasma rifle would look really nice with a complimenting flamethrower. The choices and stories of characters in their certifiably awesome sci-fi worlds, that allow us to embody them in a way that leaves them emblazoned in our brains.

These are the inspirational, the fearful, the insane, the unforgettable and the definitively iconic characters of sci-fi movie history.

There is nothing like a good character to hold up two highly divisive movies. David the Android was the unnerving guardian of the Prometheus crew, and the most fleshed out of all the synthetics to partake in the Alien franchise.

As we are first introduced to the android, he has spent decades harvesting knowledge from humans and beyond and is even influenced in appearance by Peter O’Toole. Yet it was his infatuation with creation that elevated David to the elaborate puppet master, using the crew he was tasked with protecting as his unwilling test subjects.

His undoubtable knowledge and heightened philosophical ideology meant that David was hurtled forward by the drive of becoming a creator, much like his “father” Peter Weyland. Across his two-film arc, David went from quiet manipulator to delusional egomaniac, believing that his human-like sentience and unfaltering intelligence made him better than all those surrounding him, allowing him to become as big a villain to the franchise as the Alien itself.