6 Greatest Action Movies About Super Soldiers

Published Sep 6, 2026, 9:00 PM EDT

Shawn S. Lealos is an entertainment writer who is a voting member of the Oklahoma Film Critics Circle. He has written for Screen Rant,  CBR, ComicBook, The Direct, The Sportster, Chud, 411mania, Renegade Cinema, Yahoo Movies, and many more.
 

Shawn has a bachelor's degree in professional writing and a minor in film studies from the University of Oklahoma. He also has won numerous awards, including several Columbia Gold Circle Awards and an SPJ honor.

He also wrote Dollar Deal: The Story of the Stephen King Dollar Baby Filmmakers, the first official book about the Dollar Baby film program. Shawn is also currently writing his first fiction novel under a pen name, based in the fantasy genre.

To learn more, visit his website at shawnlealos.net.

A brand-new action thriller called Onslaught has just hit theaters, and it features a mother fighting to protect her daughter when three seemingly unstoppable super soldiers arrive in her town and start killing everyone around her. Luckily, she is a military veteran and a former sniper, and she has the weapons needed to defend her family from these killing machines.

The idea of super soldiers is not new in movies, and the idea actually goes back to comic books. In real life, scientists have used weapons and technology to attempt to enhance the abilities and powers of soldiers, and this led to an early sci-fi version of this idea with Captain America. Created in 1940 by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, they took it to the next step and had Steve Rogers genetically altered into a powerful super soldier.

This idea of genetically enhanced soldiers has been the subject of several movies over the years. While the idea spread to superheroes, with names like Iron Man, Captain Marvel, and Wonder Woman having superhuman powers, the idea of using this for actual soldiers remains a fascinating sci-fi idea. Whether it is the military turning their soldiers into ultimate killing machines or experiments going wrong, the idea of soldiers with superhuman skills appears throughout sci-fi and action movies.

6 Onslaught (2026)

The 2026 movie about super soldiers is called Onslaught. Directed by Adam Wingard, Onslaught follows a former Army sniper named Celeste (Adria Arjona) who lives in a trailer park with her daughter. She deals with PTSD and trauma from the war, but she has to put it all behind her when three super soldiers arrive in town and start a massacre, killing anyone in their path.

The idea here originates from an older Wingard movie called The Guest, which itself was about a super soldier who kills people to protect his identity. This movie takes it one step further when these former military soldiers start killing everyone in the town, something they were programmed to do in enemy territory before they escaped from their facility. It takes the idea of super soldiers and delivers a horror tale that feels like Terminator meets Die Hard.

5 Soldier (1998)

Released in 1998 by director Paul W.S. Anderson, Soldier is a sci-fi action movie starring Kurt Russell. The plot follows an experimental military program that raises orphaned infants to be highly disciplined, ruthless soldiers. The idea is to turn these infants into adults who are ultimate fighting machines, super soldiers without needing any modifications.

The movie then moves forward in time 40 years, and Sgt. Todd 3465 (Russell) is one of these soldiers, a hardened veteran, who learns the military is going to replace them with actual genetically engineered super soldiers without emotion. When these new super soldiers start killing people, it is up to Todd to return to action to stop them. The movie was a box office failure, but it has become a cult classic.

4 Universal Soldier (1992)

Directed by Roland Emmerich, Universal Soldier is a cult classic guilty pleasure movie that pitted two of the biggest action movie stars of the 1980s against each other. These two stars were Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren. In the movie, Van Damme plays Luc Deveraux, a member of a U.S. Army team in the Vietnam War who finds his squad dead and villagers murdered. He realizes his sergeant, Andrew Scott (Lundgren), is responsible, and the two men kill each other.

The story then moves to the future, where the two bodies had been cryogenically frozen and had been revived with their memories repressed in a Universal Soldier program, part of an elite counter-terrorism effort. They were given enhanced skills and sent out on missions before Scott once again lost control. The movie was a box office success and launched a franchise, although nothing matched this first release.

3 The Guest (2014)

The Guest is a 2014 movie by Adam Wingard, and it takes place in the same universe as Onslaught, this year's super soldier movie. In this movie, Dan Stevens stars as David Collins, a former U.S. Army sergeant who served in Afghanistan. He arrives in a small town to visit the family of a man he served with who had died in the war. However, when the dead bodies start to pile up, all signs point to David.

This is an interesting super soldier movie because David is not physically enhanced. However, he is a trained, almost unstoppable killing machine who was programmed by a group called KPG to kill anyone who learns his identity. It is a tragic tale, as David isn't killing people because he wants to, but because of his programming. The KPG is the same group that created the super soldiers in Onslaught.

2 Hanna (2011)

Hanna is a super soldier movie that goes against the grain by making the super soldier here a teenage girl. Hanna Heller is 15, and she has been trained all her life to be a skilled assassin by her own father. However, the reason for this is that he had rescued her from a secret government organization that was developing child super soldiers who were created using pregnant women.

Saoirse Ronan was magnificent in her role as Hanna, and Cate Blanchett was the perfect choice to be her government adversary. Directed by Joe Wright (Pride & Prejudice), the movie was a modest box office success, but it received positive reviews and was rebooted as a Prime Video streaming series in 2019.

1 Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014)

Captain America was one of the first-ever genetically enhanced super soldiers in fiction when he debuted in comics in 1940. His story was retold in a movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe in 2011, Captain America: The First Avenger. However, three years later, Marvel released one of its best movies in the entire franchise with Captain America: The Winter Soldier.

This movie showed the far-reaching results of using genetic experiments to create super soldiers, as Captain America fights Bucky Barnes, who was created by the Russians, while teaming with Black Widow, who was part of the Red Room program. With three super soldiers in one movie, it opened the MCU to the idea of these government-controlled assets in a terrifying revelation.