My Top 10 Sci-Fi Movies

[Alex K]

Ok I'm going to rant a bit. Interstellar isn't a bad film. But - could have been much better.
In hindsight I can't really grog the feeley-lovey BS in interstellar. Loving father connects to his daughter's bookshelf via spacetime rift in order to save the world. As a science nerd, this to me is simply one more scifi movie ruined by liberal artsy types who couldn't bear the thought of having a film about cool spacetime phenomena without it all being a heavy-handed metaphor for human feefees. The no-nonsense plot of the Martian is a breath of fresh air in comparison. Don't get me wrong, a good space movie can absolutely reflect on the human condition, and love, and loss and all that. But why can't you let dead cold space simply be dead cold space - why does the wormhole have to be a daddy-loveotron. That's BS by people lacking the imagination to do anything but love stories. That's the same reason why Lem hated the new Solaris movie - because the director and writers were too dumb to understand the astonishing philosophical point of the novel and made a love story out of it.

I kinda liked that they made scientists as just more than these frizzy haired guys in lab coats that talk about data and nothing else. I like how they made them human characters that had families, and so on. We have enough science fiction that is cold and dry just talking about the science stuff. Now we have a sci-fi movie that does that while also writing in some appeals to emotions. It allows for a bit more depth in the characters, which allows for more than just geeks to enjoy and relate to the film.

By all means, scifi characters and movie scientists should have real depth, and the films shouln't just talk about science stuff - what annoyed me was how the grandeur of space, in the end, to me was reduced to be a somewhat trivial prop in a love story. I think the movie is absolutely great in the first half - the idea that moon landing denial would be a near mainstream belief because believing otherwise would show how far we have fallen, that was pure genius, and the portrayal of the characters coping with life on this desolate earth was top notch.

I see that I really need to write my own scifi novel - I want personal depth and emotion, but I want space to be grand and cold, a magical yet uncaring monstrosity into which the characters find themselves thrown and, in the face of the absurd, struggle with what it means to be human. That's the stuff of great scifi in my book. Having the wormhole be a glorified telephone to your daughters toy shelf kind of negates all that.