Best Sci-fi movies

[orogenicman]

Two of my favorite sci-fi films are Blade Runner and Aliens. However, my favorite sci fi film of all time isn't out yet, but is currently planned to start production in the summer of this year. It is the Hyperion series of books by Dan Simmons. Another that is in development that, if it is done as well as I hope, will be one of the best ever will be Greg Bear's "The Forge Of God" and the sequel "Anvil Of Stars". These promise to be outstanding and are among my favorite sci fi books.

[Erinome]

Here's one that's pretty out there, but a cult classic, nonetheless:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWYuIe8ftHA

[passionatefool]

Contact the movie infuriated me, because I read the book. The book is a million times better, trust me!

I actually started on the book and got side tracked because of final but i could already tell that it was really different. I should et back to reading it. But thats always the case when movies are made from books, never as good. The only pretty good and accurate one i know is To Kill The Mocking bird.

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Here's one that's pretty out there, but a cult classic, nonetheless

you sure thats scifi? Seems more like fantasy or fairy tales

[5thHorseman]

Has no one said Star Wars?

If not what the fuck is wrong with you heathens?

[passionatefool]

Has no one said Star Wars?

If not what the fuck is wrong with you heathens?

funny story...but I actually never watched a Star Wars movie? Atleast not completely,

[Minimalist]

If you see one you've seen them all.

[Oldandeasilyconfused]

If you see one you've seen them all.

A great line from Debbie Reynolds to Gene Kelly in "Singin' in The Rain"

(that girl had a pleasant, corn-fed kind of face, but was actually kinda stumpy and always looked as if she needed a good fuck)



OR if you prefer "as the actress said to the Bishop"

[Cyberman]

It is true, or at least arguable, that Star Wars had a sort of dumbing-down effect on the sci fi genre; though that's not to say that the original trilogy itself was dumbed down sci fi (if that makes sense). Prior to the original film, we had more 'hard' sci fi such as Soylent Green, Logan's Run, 1984 and the like. Star Wars did so well at the box office that producers - and more specifically studios - decided they wanted a piece of it themselves so begetting a whole slew of space operas. It's well known that the pilot script for what would have been a new Star Trek series was reworked into The Motion Picture as a result of someone at Paramount deciding they needed their own Star Wars, essentially saying "well, what have we got that we can use?"

I don't think I could choose which are my own favourite sci fi films, there have been so many of them and my tastes have changed over the years such that a film over which I raved at the time would probably not rate five minutes of time now. I do have a soft spot for some of the black and white classics of the fifties, particularly ones such as The Day The Earth Stood Still*, Howard Hawks' The Thing From Another World, any of the Quatermass series (Quatermass and the Pit most notably and memorably), even the two Doctor Who adaptations starring Peter Cushing although I prefer their TV counterparts if given the choice.

2001 (and to a lesser extent its sequel 2010, though for personal reasons I've gone off it more than somewhat), the original Planet of the Apes, all the Star Treks up to and including The Undiscovered Country, John Carpenter's The Thing, Alien and the film which spawned it called Dark Star (also by John Carpenter) - so many to choose from. Modern classics, if the word can properly be applied? I saw the new Tron and was only mildly impressed. In my opinion the original was much better and much more believable as an electronic world, even if it was a snailpaced retelling of The Wizard Of Oz. I've read an earlier draft of the Tron: Legacy script which was not only a different story, in my opinion it would have made a much better film. Similarly, I've read a few earlier drafts of what became Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and believe me, we got off lightly; it could have been a lot worse (in one, Indy spends almost the first hour, after accusations of being a communist sympathiser, getting drunk, smashing up his own museum and stealing the artifacts. Later he gets eaten by a snake about the size of a bus.)

Anyway, this is just a sample of my favourite sci fi films and views of same. There's bound to be tons more that I've missed.

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*Apparently, the director Robert Wise (I believe) said that a more appropriate title would have been The Day The Electricity Went Off For Half An Hour.

[Rev. Rye]

It is true, or at least arguable, that Star Wars had a sort of dumbing-down effect on the sci fi genre; though that's not to say that the original trilogy itself was dumbed down sci fi (if that makes sense). Prior to the original film, we had more 'hard' sci fi such as Soylent Green, Logan's Run, 1984 and the like. Star Wars did so well at the box office that producers - and more specifically studios - decided they wanted a piece of it themselves so begetting a whole slew of space operas. It's well known that the pilot script for what would have been a new Star Trek series was reworked into The Motion Picture as a result of someone at Paramount deciding they needed their own Star Wars, essentially saying "well, what have we got that we can use?"

And quite honestly, I think it didn't just dumb down sci-fi. I honestly think it had the unintended effect of dumbing down American Cinema itself; look at what came in the ten years before. After Star Wars, and also Steven Spielberg's movies, film producers just decided that they didn't want to wait for Coppola or Scorsese to create a new masterpiece. They wanted to make the next Star Wars, and when the great directors of the era began to falter, they just decided to castrate their great artists and make them create ungodly expensive movies with absurdly simple premises, and maybe a couple sequels that nobody put any effort into.

Sorry, but I tend to get very emotional about the end of the New Hollywood era.

[Cyberman]

Actually, this is one thing that can, in one sense, be blamed on the Devil; or at the very least superstition. In the mid seventies, 20th Century Fox was in a sorry state financially and I understand was in danger of going under, when a horror film script which was doing the rounds of the Hollywood studios came to the attention of Alan Ladd Jr, president of Fox at the time. The script, working title The Birthmark, came hard on the heels of films such as The Exorcist and Rosemary's Baby, and Ladd Jr gave it the green light.

One sequence was set, and filmed, in a hospital where expectant mothers objected to the signs dotted around declaring the cameras were rolling; they felt that signs talking about birthmarks were too much of an omen for their impending offspring. Out of sensibility, the film was thus renamed as The Omen, the box office receipts went through the roof, and Ladd Jr felt that the studio's finances were now sufficiently strong to produce another script that had been bouncing around Hollywood: a little sci fi story called The Star Wars. The rest is the proverbial history.

(Source: Behind-the-scenes documentary on DVD release of The Omen. Specific details subject to my leaky memory but substantially accurate.)