The Essential Paranoid Political Thrillers of the ’90s

In the 1990s, America had no enemies. So we had to make up new ones.

Okay, that’s a very simplistic way of looking at the Clinton era, and certainly all manner of suffering existed within and without the country’s borders. But there’s no denying that the U.S. embraced an End of History ethos, the belief that Western liberalism and free-market capitalism had become the height of civilization.

But because good stories require good conflicts, Americans weren’t done with bad guys. Instead of external, obvious threats, we told stories about secret bad guys, hidden evils lurking within our schools, our neighborhoods, and our governments. Where the immediacy of Watergate and the gritty aesthetics of the New Hollywood movement kept the paranoid political thrillers of the 1970s grounded in some sort of reality, the 1990s version were big and glossy and often unrealistic, befitting a world that wanted to believe all battles had been won.

To be sure, this isn’t a bad thing. However questionable their origins, many of the decade’s paranoid thrillers are excellent movies, the type of smart, crowd-pleasing blockbusters that we don’t often get anymore. So let’s take a look at some of the standout movies that made us look over our shoulders thirty years ago.

The Hunt for Red October (1990)

Owing to its origin as a 1984 novel that Tom Clancy published with the Navel Institute Press, The Hunt for Red October is very much a product of the Cold War. The Berlin Wall had fallen by the time the 1990 film adaptation from John McTiernan hit the theaters. But the story of CIA analyst Jack Ryan (Alec Baldwin) trying to help a Soviet sub captain (Sean Connery) defect before his countrymen can catch them.

As with the source novel, The Hunt for Red October treats the U.S. government as largely good and the USSR as largely bad. But it’s still a film about governments keeping secrets from their people, even when those secrets involve vehicles to convey weapons of mass destruction.

Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991)

Despite the presence of Iowa’s favorite son James T. Kirk, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country isn’t about the United States of America. Well, not directly about the US. However, it doesn’t take much imagination to see the early negotiations between the United Federation of Planets and the Klingon Empire as an analogue for the U.S. and USSR under Mikhail Gorbachev.

The Undiscovered Country bids farewell to the Original Series crew by sending them on an adventure to uncover attempts to sabotage peace talks between the Federation and the Klingons. While Kirk’s own bitterness toward the people of Qo’noS presents a challenge, he doesn’t go nearly as far as a trio of war mongering Starfleet admirals who try to keep hostilities going.

JFK (1991)

The assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy has captured the American imagination ever since the 35th president was murdered in 1963. Leave it to Oliver Stone to bring to the screen the mounds of narrative and theory surrounding the assassination.

JFK stars All-American Kevin Costner as district attorney Jim Garrison, tasked with investigating Kennedy’s death. As he uncovers more information, the more convinced he is that Kennedy’s death was the result of a conspiracy. Convinced as he is, we viewers are only more confused by the preponderance of plot and information, compounded by an all-star cast that includes Tommy Lee Jones, Kevin Bacon, Gary Oldman, and more.

Mission: Impossible (1996)

Way back before the franchise became about a billionaire doing incredible stunts and risking his life for our entertainment, Mission: Impossible was about spies who went on secret missions. In the original film, directed by Brian De Palma, that mission involved Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) trying to find a list of IMF agents.

Surrounding the film is a conspiracy that leads to the death of Hunt’s team and sends the agent on the run. By this point, the final reveal that the TV series’ protagonist Jim Phelps (Jon Voight, stepping in for original actor Peter Graves) is the big bad is no surprise. However, that doesn’t make the actual plot of Mission: Impossible easy to understand, and confusing plots are a true hallmark of a conspiracy thriller.

Conspiracy Theory (1997)

As one might guess from its blunt title, Conspiracy Theory isn’t the most complex film on this list. Directed by action stalwart Richard Donner, Conspiracy Theory stars Mel Gibson as Jerry, a troubled cabbie who bombards everyone he encounters with his rambling tales of shadowy governments. Turns out, Jerry is right, and his apparent knowledge draws the attention of secret agents led by Patrick Stewart as the evil Dr. Jonas.

Conspiracy Theory has its twists, but it’s clear that Donner just uses the tropes as set dressing. Instead, he’s more focused on a traditional thriller, with a love story between Jerry and a beautiful lawyer played by Julia Roberts. That’s not a critique, however, as the more straightforward narrative gives Donner more room to craft some fun sequences.

Absolute Power (1997)

Perhaps inspired by the Whitewater scandal surrounding the Clinton administration, 1997 saw the release of two movies about a murder involving the President of the United States: Absolute Power, starring Clint Eastwood as a cat burglar who sees the president (Gene Hackman) kill a billionaire’s wife, and, two months later, Murder at 1600, in which a homicide detective (Wesley Snipes) takes his investigation all the way to the top.

Between the two, Absolute Power is the better film, not necessarily because it’s more respectable. It’s just as pulpy and outrageous as its slightly younger brother. But established screenwriter William Goldman knows how to make a blockbuster sing and as a director Eastwood hadn’t quite developed the self-seriousness that cripples the second half of his filmmaking career. As a result, Absolute Power is a pleasing bit of silliness.

Mercury Rising (1998)

On one hand, Mercury Rising has a portrayal of autism that makes Rain Main seem nuanced and well-researched. Young performer Miko Hughes is asked to play preteen Simon in broad, embarrassing gestures, as an autistic savant who cracks a secret NSA code embedded in a magazine.

However, anyone who can forgive that colossal misstep will find Mercury Rising to be an enjoyable thriller, anchored by prime Bruce Willis as FBI agent Art Jeffries. When the NSA sends agents to kill Simon and stop the code’s leak, Jeffries becomes the boy’s reluctant caretaker. Director Harold Becker, working from a script by Lawrence Konner and Mark Rosenthal, doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but Mercury Rising hits all the right crowd-pleasing notes, dumb science and all.

The X-Files (1998)

As compelling as each of these movies certainly are, the true home of 1990s conspiracy thought wasn’t the movie theaters—it was television, namely the Fox series The X-Files. Premiering between seasons five and six of the series, The X-Files movie continues the show’s overarching narrative about the U.S. government’s collusion with alien overlords, which FBI agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) have been hunting throughout the series.

As much fun as it is to see regulars like Skinner (Mitch Pileggi) and the Cigarette-Smoking Man (William B. Davis) on the big screen, the movie fails to realize a truth of the series: the mythology episodes were never as good as the monster-of-the-week episodes. Add in creator Chris Carter’s sloppy screenplay and director Rob Bowman’s pedestrian direction, and The X-Files feels more like a mediocre episode of the show than it does a major movie event.

Enemy of the State (1998)

In 1974, Gene Hackman perfectly embodied the paranoid mind as surveillance expert Harry Caul in Francis Ford Coppola‘s The Conversation. Hackman plays a similar character for the Tony Scott film Enemy of the State. As the secretive man known only as “Brill,” Hackman once again dons Caul’s thick glasses and brown slicker, and his character makes enough oblique references to the past to make one think that he is in fact Caul, now operating under a different name.

Yet, the more Enemy of the State tries to draw similarities to The Conversation, the more it points out differences. To be clear, it’s not a bad thing that the newer film, which stars Will Smith as a lawyer caught up in a government conspiracy, is more flashy and exciting than Coppola’s mediative character drama. It’s just that Enemy of the State shows how paranoia was bigger and more mainstream in the Clinton era.

Arlington Road (1999)

For a long time, the domestic terror depicted in Arlington Road felt quaint, overshadowed by the monumental events of September 11, which occurred just two years after the film’s release. Today, with domestic terror back on the rise, Arlington Road has regained an immediacy that it hasn’t had since it first hit theaters.

Directed by Mark Pellington and written by Ehren Kruger, Arlington Road features Jeff Bridges as a Georgetown professor who begins to suspect his wholesome new neighbors (Tim Robbins and Joan Cusack) aren’t what they seem. Although often simplistic in its depiction of terror, and far too dependent on using lectures by Bridges’s character to expound on the movie’s themes, Arlington Road gets a lot of mileage out of its cast.