Best Sci-fi movies

[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.