Meatloaf is hanging outside your door. He wants to know if you want to do the time warp again.
Brazil certainly counts. It’s a satire, but it’s a projection of the future, and very much part of the 70s New Wave style.
I’m going to note the Back to the Future trilogy as an effort worthy of serious attention, thanks to its clear establishment of ground rules, and strong and solid implementation, with heavy attention to continuity. Clearly not only SF, but good SF.
Destination: Moon was good solid HARD SF.
Forbidden Planet only loses points from being adapted from Shakespeare. The movie was not about the science, while Back to the Future was.
The Shape of Things to Come was highly predictive… but not accurate.
Seeing as you’re a guest, I guess it’s natural to call LotR science fiction. If you eventually join, you’ll notice that it’s actually an Epic Fantasy. No, you don’t need to read the books first to understand what’s going on.
As for the best SF movie… Armageddon.
I"M KIDDING!!!
I’d go for 2001 or Bladerunner myself.
What does being a guest have to do with anything? I’m serious. That’s what my idiot friends keep telling me. I can’t see myself paying to post on a forum, but so far, I do really like this place. I tend to read more than post anyway.
The guest part was an (apparently lame) joke. There were several guests arguing that LotR was SF and several members were disagreeing.
But seriously, you do not need to read the books first. When I saw the first movie, I saw it with my mother and brother. I thought that both of them had read the books, they hadn’t… but loved the movie. They both saw the movie because they knew how much I loved the books. Now, they both own the extended version of all 3 movies. Neither of them could get through the first book though. My brother did cheat and got the series on CD. I guess someone reading it to him made it easier for him and that’s how he got through the books… sorta.
Oh. I see. Maybe I will check it out. So you wouldn’t call it Sci-Fi? What is the difference between SF and Fantasy or w/e else you might call LOTR?
Science fiction would probably need some sort of science in it, wouldn’t you think?
lol, yeah, I suppose… but I don’t even know very much about LOTR as it is. Just that it was a must see Sci-Fi flick.
I disagree: If the movie is incomprehensible and needlessly difficult, why gloss over that by saying it ‘demands more’? Since when does a movie get to ‘demand’ anything?
And here is where I more seriously disagree with you. Clarke was a skilled storytellter and Kubrick was an artiste in the worst, most obscurantist sense of the word. Clarke had what it took to present stories that not only make sense on first reading, but can give you back a depth of meaning if you choose to look for it. Kubrick played with film in a way that was stunning (at the time), fresh, and occasionally quite beautiful, but in the end that’s all he had. Analysis of one of his films falls quite flat because there is often very little there.
The best Kubrick could ever do was bring a true author’s work to the screen, and even then he couldn’t keep the storytelling pure or even fully intact.
Hey, no one has meantioned Starsh…
<Poster slain by the ghost of Heinlein>
Sure, a movie that is incomprehensible or needlessly difficult is a poor movie. 2001 is neither of those things. It’s not easy, by any means, but I don’t think anything truly worthwhile is easy. 2001 is not the sort of movie where you can turn off your brain and indulge in some escapism. It requires an attentive, inquistive, thoughtful viewing to properly appreciate. I love mindless escapism as much as the next guy, but I recognize that movies like 2001 are infinitly more valuable. Like all great art, it doesn’t merely entertain, but it enriches.
Wow. We’ve pretty much got totally aposite takes on these two artists. Clarke had some great ideas, but his approach to them was uniformly shallow, and his writing was mostly flat and uninvolving. While an important and influential figure in the science fiction genre, his impact outside the sf ghetto is very limited, and with good reason. He was, at best, a competent, journeyman writer.
Kubrick was a genius, and 2001 is perhaps the best example of his rich, visual vocabulary. Clarke labored with getting his deeper concepts across with words, and was at best imperfectly succesful. Kubrick could get volumes across in a simple contrast of images. The most frequently cited of these is the transition from the bone to the space station, which describes the entire history of tool use among man in the space between two frames of film. And that’s the most facile, easily understood of his imagery. There’s simply no comparison between these two men. It’s the difference between William Shakespeare and Aaron Spelling.
Again, I object to the implication that Clarke “owns” the ideas behind 2001. The book and the movie came out of a collaboration between the two men: Kubrick no more created a movie version of the book, than Clarke created a novelization of the movie.
In the Top 10 list would be:
Them!
Gripping movie, still holds up.
Film is not supposed to keep the storytelling intact. It’s a different medium, which is meant to interpret film, not be a slave-like scene-by scene and sentence by sentence translation.
I’d look at Kubrick’s version of the Shining (a cinematic masterpiece which Stephen King supposedly hated) versus the dreadful Stephen King scripted version which kept the story intact, to see why cinema should interpret books, not try to recreate them.
I agree that 2001 is not escapism, but not that you can only enjoy it being intellectually involved. It is beautiful as art, and I am thinking particularly of the rendezvous scene a half hour in. 2001 is such a great movie because it works on both levels. All the druggies who saw it stoned from the front row weren’t appreciating it intellectually, after all.
May I remind you that Childhood’s End was reviewed on the front page of the NY Times Book Review, something unprecedented for a science fiction book before then? He is not a stylist, I give you that, but I find his writing very clear and clean. And his writing (and his ideas) sure involved me.
Yes, Clarke is a writer and Kubrick was a filmmaker, and they were wonderfully complementary. I learned in a screenwriting class that you should open with little or no dialog - Kubrick went a half hour, telling a clear story, without any. (Even more of an achievement in my book than that wonderful cut.) Sometimes, though, purely visual things are vaccuous - Clarke gave the intellectual meat behind the pictures - not that Kubrick was an intellectual lightweight either.
I’d say their collaboration was more between Shakespeare and Rembrandt.
Again, I object to the implication that Clarke “owns” the ideas behind 2001. The book and the movie came out of a collaboration between the two men: Kubrick no more created a movie version of the book, than Clarke created a novelization of the movie.
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