Cold Lazarus.
Another vote for Dark Star - it’s a very long time since I saw it, but I seem to remember loving the philosophical bomb. Plus, it had a very good beer named after it, although I admit that this may not be the reasoning of a true cineaste.
I have to go with Terminator and Alien for pure enjoyment. Space Odyssey for artistic integrity.
A BOY AND HIS DOG.
How can you go wrong with Don Joh…ok scratch that.
Most of the ones I would have picked have been mentioned (Star Wars trilogy, Contact, The Matrix), but I haven’t seen Gattaca mentioned yet. Kinda surprising since it was just a Mailbag.
Dear lord, someone liked Mission to Mars? Ugh.
Many good movies already named but I would add to the list
Forbidden Planet
The day the Earth stood still
Them (but any movie with Edmund Gwenn in it I like)
if you want to go with that definition, then neither are many others in this thread.
i vote for fantastic planet.
Bladerunner is number one for me, but just for the sake of completeness, allow me to give some props to a few movies that haven’t yet been mentioned:[ul][li]Invasion of the Body Snatchers- The original B&W version. This movie really stands the test of time. Still a creepy and entertaining flick today.[/li][li]The Thing- John Carpenter’s version. Beautiful adaptation of perhaps the best SF short story of all time. The B&W 1950’s version is very entertaining as well.[/li][li]Silent Running- Gave us some quirky, funny robots that were the forerunners of R2D2 and C3PO.[/li][/ul]
And please! Let’s not get all nerdy about what is and isn’t science fiction. If it’s got alien critters, it’s SF in my book.
Oh yeah, and with all due respect to the OP, 2001: A Space Odyssey is a deadly boring movie.
Unless you’re on acid. 
Has anyone seen any of the live action Manga that came out of Japan in the mid-90s ?
Strange, dubbed films, with half of the actors speaking in English, half of them dubbed into English for US/European releases.
‘GunHed’ springs to mind - effects are pretty appalling by today’s standards, but it has the atmosphere of cult science fiction, the way Blade Runner does. Well worth a few minute’s hunt down your local video store.
‘Sphere’ has a neat twist on the usual sci-fi nonsense, ‘The Abyss’ could have been good (although Mary whassername in wet outfits raises its score in the watchable stakes), but for me, nothing touches the film noir appeal of Blade Runner.
I’m still waiting for some of Greg Bear’s books to be turned into the celluloid stuff, but as Sagan’s Contact was dumbed down and curtailed for the cinema, the same would happen here. SF fans know where to go for their fix… and that’s to the bookshop, not to the cinema.
…will allways be the best. But, coming in with the closest second in a long time is defiantly The Matrix, the first sci-fi for a while with a more than decent plot and ulto-special effects.
How could I have forgotten these two masterpieces, "DOH!
For all of you who find 2001 to be boring, please read the book. It was a devilishly difficult ending to portray. A few years back, I found a book that showed all of the different endings (with some stock scenes) that Clarke and Kubrick had considered. It remains the technical masterpiece.
I especially liked Aliens because it was the first science fiction movie where all of the equipment was beat up and looked as though it had been there a while. This “everyday” approach to space travel was a real breakthrough for its time. Didn’t hurt to have a terrifying critter running around munching everyone either.
Starship Troopers was written for thirteen year old boys, and sadly, the movie was too. I busted up the theater audience when, just as the humongous hoarde of aliens comes pouring over the hill, I bellowed out, “Raaaiiid!”. The newscasting schtick got to me after a while and the last ten minutes of the movie had SEQUEL plastered all over it like a billboard.
In the riotous category; anyone ever see Dagora, The Space Monster, a really rotten Japanese flick? Let’s post some of the all time losers too. I’ll get Plan Nine From Outer Space out of the way right now!
Keep 'em coming folks.
Make that Alien, and not Aliens. DOH!
Great choices. Ditto on Edmund Gwenn (even Mr. 880).
There was more good SF in the 50s that most people recall and there was a lot of meat to it (not like pseudo-philosophical claptrap like Gattaca). Another great one from the period was It Came From Outer Space.
No one’s mentioned Metropolis yet, either.
The most influential early SF film was Just Imagine in 1930 – influential because it lost so much money that Hollywood avoided the genre. The most influential of all time is Star Wars.
Just to add a few more to the discussion, let’s not leave out The Andromeda Strain, directed by Robert Wise who also gave us The Day the Earth Stood Still and one of the Star Trek movies, and another Stanley Kubrick gem, A Clockwork Orange.
I would also include Dr. Strangelove, but that might get a debate going about whether or not it is science fiction.
As far as the losers go, it would be hard to do better (or is it worse) than Logan’s Run.
My choice for best science fiction film varies between 2001: A Space Odyssey and Forbidden Planet. People have already given their reasons fr choosing 2001 – to my min it’s tyhe bes translation onto the creen of 1950s WRITTEN science fiction. Frbiden Planet is the best celluloid expression of good 1940s written science fiction. From this we can conclude that the movies are , a best, a decade behind literary forms.
I don’t think most eople appreciate how good and how evolutionary Forbidden Planet was. It is emphatically NOT just Shakespeare’s The Tempest tanslated into space. It is exceedingly well thought-out. The logic of it hangs together beautifully. When you dig deeper into it, you find that there is a wel thought-out and consistent background. It is not a superficial gloss, like (shudder) Battlestar Galactica. Even after almost 50 years the specal effects still look good.
It is full f firsts – the first major movie with an electronic score. The first science fiction flm in which earth people ride a starship that doesn’t look like a cigar. The first to feature FTL travel and deceleration pods. The first with a robot that obeyed Asimov’s Laws of Robotics (And Robby really is a robot – not a metal person like R2-D2 and C-3PO. A lot of the humor is derived from the contrast between Robby’s robot nature nd his apparently human reactions.)
Star Trek borrowed heavily from FP. Just take a close look at it – military starship, comunicators, blasters = phasers, the captain goes around with the doctor and his second-in-command.
Everybody is forgetting to make mention of a classic: This Island Earth.
Okay, I know that was just the best spoof done on MST3K but in a comical capacity, it was definitely one of the most hilarious. Of course, Starship Troopers had that propaganda and senseless violence that were so reminscint (sp?) in Robocop and The Running Man.
Anyway, I found The Fifth Element to be one of the best sci-fi movies out there. It struck a nerve because it was not solely focusing on all the advanced technology. It actually showed an exotic and elaborate society that had its oddballs and commoners.
—>excuse me? Star Wars? Part of what makes star wars so visually arresting is the contrast between the gleaming white and black of the death star and storm troopers and so forth, and the beat up, held-together-by-gum, Millenium Falcon.
(Unless, of course, Alien came out before Star Wars. But that can’t be right…)
Anyhow, am I the only person who had some reasonably serious reservations about The Matrix? Or at least one, namely that the whole “use humans as batteries” idea was so incomprehensibly stupid as to nearly ruin an otherwise fantastic movie? In a movie that is in many other ways solid and hard science fiction (although I could have done without the whole old-black-woman oracle thing), to have an idea which was so stupid that it either (a) makes the whole movie seem dumb, or (b) takes the whole movie out of more-or-less-hard-sci-fi into big-metaphor-land, well, it just really pisses me off.
(Also, there are various parts of The Matrix that seem to me like they want to be a lot more profound, deep and original than they really are… for instance, the conversation about the vase that Neo breaks, and would he have broken it if she hadn’t said anything… I guess that’s kinda neat and thought-provoking, and it might strike someone as fantastically original, if they’d never read a decent sci-fi book about the paradoxes of time travel ever in their whole lives.)
(ok, end of rant)
I prefer the Mystery Science Theatre 2000 take off of the above. Hilarious.
Unfortunately, it was billed as being based on Heinlein’s work. I don’t know how they could have claimed that as the screen writer had obviously only ever read the back cover of the book. I am always amazed that the makers of a film change the film so far from what made the book popular in the first place. Just look at the abortion ‘BattleField Earth’.
*Starship Troopers only “merit” was that it allowed horny 12-year-olds without Internet access the chance to see naked women. Otherwise, the movie stunk, with a bunch of morons running around and pretending to be heroic. As far as the ridiculous claim that it was “satire,” Verhoeven wouldn’t know the term if it came up and bit him in the ass.