I have Never ever seen a sci fi movie.
ANyone want to recommend a good one for my first time?
I guess I’m a 50’s guiy-I still think that “FORBIDDEN PLANET” (directed by George pal) is one of the best Sci=Fi films. I loved the uniforms, and for the late 1950’s , the special effects were pretty good. I’d also vote for 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea-James mason as captain nemo was a good choice.
Another old on I liked: “THE TIME MACHINE”-some thing about Victorian England and the future seemed like a nice mix to me.
EGkelley:
George Pal didn’t direct Forbidden Planet – Wilcox did. George Pal produced and/or directed Destination Moon and Conquest of Space and War of the Worlds in the 1950s, then went on to other sf works in the 1960s.
As for beaten-up stuff in space ships, I believe that John Carpenter’s Dark Star (1974 beats Star Wars to the honor of the “lived-in look” by at least three years. (It was a stuent film before 1974, so it clocks in a little earlier.)
huh?
i won’t even bother challenging the fact that you called it a gem… but science fiction?
Future Society, rampaging toughs, alternative solutions to imprisonment (brainwashing), etc etc etc.
It does not have to be “look at the wierd alien and his laser gun” to be sci fi.
Burgress and Kubrick both did extrodinary work in both mediums when they did A Clockwork Orange. Real champions of everything Sci Fi can be
future society? how is their society any different from ours?
does the fact that the teenagers speak nadsat make it sci fi? does this mean anyone who uses contemporary slang is walking science fiction?
alex was the first test of the ludovico technique. the society in that book uses traditional imprisonment much like us.
if i write a story about a psychologist that uses an alternative method to help his clients, does that make it sci fi?
12 Monkeys (the best time-travel movie I’ve seen)
Buckaroo Banzai (a holiday classic at my house)
Brazil (“1984” through the brain of Terry Gilliam)
And I’ll add one I haven’t seen mentioned yet - “The Arrival”, which I found to be a very engrossing and well-thought-out alien invasion movie, free of the sort of treacly sentiment or gung-ho kill-the-monsters attitudes of most in the sub-genre. I liked the paranoia, the way the aliens thought and looked, the infiltration at JPL and Cal Tech, etc. I even like Charlie Sheen as the protaganist.
Re The Matrix - what a relief to find I’m not the only persone who thought it was silly and overrated. Nice visuals, but not good enough to make me ignore the plot and logic holes you could drive a freight train though.
Your teacher is using The Matrix as part of the English class syllabus? The mind boggles.
Most of the movies I love have already been named, bu tI’ll include a few that deserve honorable mention:
[list]
[li]Soylent Green-Scary dystopian tale of a dying Earth, and we all know what Soylent Green is made of, don’t we?[/li]
[li]Village of the Damned-The 1960 George Sanders version, not the 1995 crapfest.[/li]
[li]The Stand-OK, it was made for TV and delves too much into the supernatural, but the initial segment with the world dying of superflu qualifies as SF IMNSHO.[/li]
[li]The Omega Man-A terrific last-man-on-earth flick.[/li]
Slaughterhouse Five-Kurt Vonnegut, Valerie Perrine, and a Glenn-Gould-plays-Bach soundtrack.
I will agree with Goboy “the Omega Man” kicked butt. I also liked a bunch of the movies listed here.
As a matter of fact I would like to see a few of them again. Like “Westworld” that was a cool movie.
Now my vote for the best Sci Fi is cross between Terminator 2 and Aliens. Can you believe both of my all time favorites are sequels? Wierd huh?
Aliens just totally cracked me up. The whiney guy was my favorite. He was so realistic. Saying all the time “we’re all going to die man.” My favorite line is when Ripley told him to look at the little girl that has survived so long as an example and he said “well, let’s put her in charge then” I laughed so hard that guy is great. He was also funny in “Weird Science” You can’t leave that one one out making a good looking girl out of a barbie when your a teenage boy. Now that is good science fiction.
GKittridge wrote:
Hey!
visit the highly unofficial Logan’s Run FAQ at http://www.netcom.com/~rogermw/LogansRun.html
What??!??! No one’s mentioned Galaxy Quest yet???
heeheehee
{{ducks and runs for cover}}
Max Torque wrote:
I did.
Bioelectricity is measured in milliVolts. The amount of electric energy you can get out of a human, even a human whose neurons are all sending frantic signals to one another 24 hours a day, is a tiny, tiny fraction of all the energy a human body uses. And to generate that energy, you have to feed the human.
You would generate more electric energy by burning the foodstuffs you would otherwise feed to the human, and using the heat to drive a steam engine connected to an electric generator, than you would by feeding the foodstuffs to the human and draining off all of his bioelectricity.
And, by the way, how do you grow food without sunlight?
Zenster wrote:
It’s been a while since I watched it, but I believe Silent Running (1971) was the first movie on the scene featuring beat-up, malfunctioning equipment. (As well as the R2D2 prototypes.) Lucas was apparently a fan of this film.
I really did like The Matrix. There have been quite a few debates about it on this Board, but I still love it. I’m willing to give the Humans-as-Batteries angle a pass, because it’s clearly only an excuse for the existence of the Matrix itself. The idea of the world only being an imaginary universe is downright ancient, long preceding cyberpunk. One could argue that it goes back at least to Socrates’ parable of The Cave, and maybe even farther than that. What’s good about The Matrix is he way they handled this, making those koan-like sayings seem reasonable. The film was wonderfully set up, and even after the premise was explained it continued to devlop the idea and expand on it. I found it gripping and intelligent.
Just another quick word about This Island Earth. I grew up on this film (I had an 8mm copy of it as a kid long before vieotape), and it’s where I stole by Board name from. But the movie is terrible. I’ve recently read interviews with those responsible for it in the magazine Filmfax. Although they describe toiling to make a wrkable film, and I do respect their efforts, it seems to me that they jettisoned a piece of first-rate scence fiction in Raymond F. Jones’ novel “This Island Earth” an replaced it with a rather juvenile story concocted from cover paintings of the more outrageous sf pulps. If you have not done so, read Jones’ originl book. It used to be impossible to get, but it’s now back in print, in paperback, no less (although a tad pricey). If nothing else, you’ll learn what the title means – something the movie doesn’t do. But if you want good sf from the same vintage, watch Forbidden Planet. In fact, watching the two movies one after th other will give a good idea of what makes for a good sf movie. This Island Earth, for all its vaunted effects (“2 1/2 years in the Making!” boasted the movie posters upon its release)it’s not as convincing nor as adult as FP.
QUOTE] Originally posted by CalMeacham
** The idea of the world only being an imaginary universe is downright ancient, long preceding cyberpunk. One could argue that it goes back at least to Socrates’ parable of The Cave. **
[/QUOTE]
I believe that was Plato. By the way, I too liked the Matrix. A lot! As a mater of fact, I am about to defend it from MaxTorque’s heretical claims! But before, what is cyberpunk? I have heard it in relation to the Matrix and Neuromancer but don’t quite know what it is.
My take on Neo’s resurrection:
From the moment of their “conception” on the fields to the time when they were first plugged into the matrix, they experienced firsthand, however brief–and unconscious–that experience was, the carcasses of the real world. It is therefore reasonable to assume that during that brief moment they acquired the necessary perception of the underlying reality that would eventually, and under the right set of conditions, trigger a flashback - “a splinter in the mind” - that would plant the seeds of doubt and provide the necessary doses of awareness needed to comprehend the crudeness of the occulted reality.
That would explain how Neo, a superior being with a higher perception of his surroundings, began to unfold the dark secret of the Matrix, thus laying the groundwork for his future encounter with Morpheus and the materialization of his destiny. It is arguable, however, that, hadn’t Morpheus intervened, Neo would had eventually found his path and uncovered the reality by himself. After all, he is The One, the digital savior of the virtual world.
One scenario under which that might had happened arises if we consider déjà vu in the traditional meaning of the word and not in the context of the matrix. It is then reasonable that, since Neo is the reincarnation of The One, somehow the voice of Trinity served as a catalyst for a semiconscious déjà vu during his brief death–perhaps it matched a similar event during his previous incarnation, a déjà vu that brought back the memories of his previous existence, of his previous manifestation as The One, thus providing him the realization of his real persona and the restoration of his control of the matrix.
Of course you would still have to deal with the problem of how reincarnation occurs inside the matrix? Do dead people memories get stored in the central mainframe hard drive and, due to a bug in the system, are occasionally downloaded into a particular humans brain?
Also, how can a deterministic destiny be established? How is it defined? How can the oracle foresee it? Has she traveled to the future–in the virtual timeline of the Matrix simulation, of course?
All those speculations reside in the realm of fantasy and there is where they shall remain. They are axiomatic premises upon which the movie’s story line revolves. Just like in our “real” world gravity is a force that acts upon us setting limits to our action–our freedom to do as we please, the determinism that dictates the curse of events inside the Matrix restricts its inhabitants of their free will, they are commanded by superior, incomprehensible forces. Same as greek mythology. Thus, much to Neo’s dislike, the macroscopic events governing their lives are, to a point, already determined.
Okay, you are reading WAY too much into a fairly shallow movie and creating your own mythology to fill in gaps that should have been filled by the filmmakers. If you have to concoct an explanation for something in the movie that doesn’t make sense, someone (re: writer, director) isn’t doing his job.
An addendum to the “humans as batteries” thing: it was said in the movie, as I recall, that the dead humans were basically pulped and fed to the living via their many tubes. So, that would take care of some small portion of their food needs, although the system would rapidly collapse as the machines sucked energy from the burning of the nutrients. Who knows, maybe there were still fish or something. But, see, even thinking about that means that I’m making excuses for the filmmakers, and I ain’t gonna.
The Matrix is solidly a two-star movie. Nuff said.
It is impossible to present all the laws governing the matrix, its main residents, the circumstances upon which it evolved, and then, to top it off, proceed to explain in detail the events transpiring in the story in a complete, gap-free fashion. The two-hour timeframe of the movie pretty much limits that possibility. So, gaps must remain, and is up to the spectator to alertly speculate, via rational processes, in order to fill in the plot holes according to his/her interpretations. Remember that a revered classic such as 2001 does the same, the philosophical inquisitions it stimulates being one of the strong points it has to offer.
Also, don’t forget about the message of the movie, the plea it makes to humanity to look back and evaluate its path. The Matrix itself is the oracle that alerts humanity of its impending doom. Amends to our way of life, our politics, our misuse of technology, must be made if we want to allow for the preservation of our species.
The immediate threat of our fall doesn’t come from exogenous sources–menacing asteroids or invading aliens, rather, it is an endogenous one, a self-created inferno, of which nature Dante wouldn’t have dared to speculate. The proverbial Damocles sword hangs patiently over ourselves, its sharp blade screaming with the macabre sound of inevitability as it cuts decisively through the air, tearing apart the imperceptible barrier that separates us from the terror that is our destiny.
The Matrix could indeed be our destiny, moreover, it could be our present…
Personally, I can’t see why they’d want to get out of the Matrix. They nuked (or whatever) the sky, rendering the world a barely inhabitable wasteland. The Matrix offered them the glorious past, and so they tried to destroy it. There was nothing inherently bad about it, one could even make the case that the Matrix had the best interests of humans at heart and tried to protect them from the “real world”. Morpheus, Neo and co are just trying to be anarchists by blowing up the ordered world and living in a run down wasteland. I can see where Cypher was coming from…
And yes, I have no idea why we used the Matrix for English, especially when we were supposed to be studying an “Australian Text”. I think the most Australian it came was having some scenes done in Sydney.
sigh…I hope the filmmakers are paying you to make excuses for them, because it can’t be easy.
It takes a lot of gall to compare The Matrix to 2001. There’s an immense philosophical chasm between “man begins to fathom his place in the universe” and “merrily merrily merrily merrily, life is but a dream”.
When I want to be preached to by Keanu Reeves, I’ll…what am I saying, that’ll never happen. In any event, the “message” of the movie, being such a minuscule percentage of the whole, is largely ignored in favor of the eye candy. If the filmmakers actually wanted the audience to GET a message from the movie, they should have taken the time to examine and present it. But, they couldn’t do that, there was helicopters that needed blowin’ up!
Spare me, you drone. You drank in their cereal-box philosophy like a fish. That’s fine and dandy, for you. But don’t insist that it’s a good movie when, to enjoy it, you had to write half of it yourself.
RE: Matrix
Hehehe. The movie would have made so much more sense if they had been using people’s brains as computers instead of power sources. It would have explained how the good guys could have enough access to the main computer to make any difference to the program.