Hasn’t there been a rumor about Matrix 2 that one of the major plot points is that Morpheus’ “battery” story was SUPPOSED to be utter nonsense? In other words, humans are kept in the Matrix for some totally different reason, and Morpheus was either lying or deceived.
So either Morphius was an imbecelle, or Neo was for beliveing him. Right. The word is Protoculture, ladies and gentlemen. It was silly in the 80’s, and it’s gotten even siller in the interem. I think they used a bit of hand-waving (infinite life energy, or something) back then, too.
That was orginally a similar similar story floating around for Highlander 3, that it started with Connor waking up in a warehouse, surrouned by empty scotch bottles, saying “What the HELL?”
Just out of curiosity, is there anyone out there who both liked the matrix and was an anime fan? Ignoring the (valid) “every good scene was ripped off” compliaint, the Matrix managed to combine the worst aspects of both american SF movies (spectacually pigeonholed characters, moronic science, utter predictablitiy) and anime. (Mid-movie info dump, touchy-feely “I love you!” hystrionics, weak ending)
I havn’t found one yet. I liked most of the Matrix’s scenes better the first time I saw them. And don’t even get me started on the oracle . . .
–
“Ah, something else created by Satan: Japanimaion!”
So, did anyone besides me like Stargate? I only had a chance to watch it once, but it stuck with me like few other movies have. And that was before the TV series came out. I’ve always thought that the essence of good science fiction was that it examined how society would react to something like the discovery of a Stargate. Movies like Star Wars, Star Trek, The Matrix, are what I would call science fantasy, while movies like Stargate, Blade Runner, 2001, and ET, to name a few, show how we would react to scientific breakthroughs and discoveries, and what the results would be.
I’d say “Contact.” It’s real science fiction (as opposed to space opera or space action), and you don’t need to be a nerd or sci-fi fan to appreciate it. “Gattaca” and “Bladerunner” are also good.
Star Wars series are great movies, but it’s not real science fiction.
Matrix? great special effects, but such huge plot holes, that I could suspend my sense of disbelief and get into the movie.
Alien? it is not science fiction. It is a horror/slasher film that is set in a spaceship. Putting “halloween” in a spaceship does not SF make.
2001 was great, but it is hard to watch now.
Starwars, for all its faults, revolutionized the entire film industry. Not just SF, all film. ILM was the equivilant of adding words, ie “talkies”.
And, I think Episode 1, was pretty damn good. True, I could have done with less JarJar, and more Jedis, but the Jedi’s complete confidence was wonderful.
If Alien is a horror movie set in space, Star Wars is a samurai movie set in space. 
Yes, Star wars has the overall PLOT of a western or samurai movie, but not the background of those genres. The robots, the lightsaber, the deathstar, and the force were all critical parts of the movies, not just background on which to overlay the genre. Heck, Shakespeare wrote about 90% of all the plots we use today, but unless they follow real close, it’s not considered a Shakespearian homage.
Alien was a slasher flick, with nothing besides the spaceship setting it off. Look at the “cliches”: crew going off one-by-one, to be killed by monster lurking around corner. Monster is unkillable, but despite that, spends most of movie hiding & lurking. (This is to buid up suspense- the adult is perfectly capable of walking right into the whole group of them, all together, and killing them all, but it kills them one-by-one) They get killed in order of ethics, the best goes last. Monster knows exactly where they are at all times, and can apparently “teleport” to where ever is best. Is there any real difference between Myers and the Alien? Both are invisible & silent when required, unkillable, have no real reason to kill folks off, but still do, and no motives or emotion. Alien just has more vaseline.
I disagree. The robots could be replaced by peasants, the lightsabers with swords, the spaceships with boats and the deathstar with a shipment of guns without altering any portion of the plot, and almost no dialog. The force was zen by another name, and could be easily replaced with martial arts training sequences. In addition to the plot, the tone, was very samurai-movie-ish, and the characters were samurai movie architypes. I’d argue that Star Wars is MORE of “another genre in SF clothes” than Alien was.
If you REALLY want, I suppose I could point out all the samurai movie cleches in Star Wars. I mean, come on. A pesant turning out to be a samurai by birth, the old hermit turning out to be a famous, wise but weakened by age warrior, who trains our hero in swordsmanship and spirituality before dying, the rough, bitter, but good at heart bandit, the powerful, cold-hearted but loyal to his master villian, who was also a student of the heroes master, who mastered the swordsmanship but not the ethics, the spoiled but spunky princess . . .
Alien is usually considered a SF/Horror movie, but I’ve never heard Star Wars described as a SF/Samurai movie. Genre’s arn’t absolute, after all. Unforgiven was radically different than most westerns that proceded it, but I’ve never heard anyone argue that it should be considered a “historical drama.”
It’s a HUGE strech to say that Star Wars is “science fiction” in the same way that 2001, Gattica, or even Blade Runner is. (Yeah, BR was a detective movie, but it was at least partially about technology, which Star Wars wasn’t)
It did have great atmosphere, but so did Alien. Alien also had some terrific “man mixing with technology” scenes, (That bit when they all emerge from the crysalis like sleep beds, and five minutes later are eating cerial and bitching was absolutly brilliant) which star wars didn’t. It also had fairly well thought out “real world” technology, which star wars didn’t. Not a criticism of Star Wars, but I seriously can’t see how you can include one as SF without including the other.
I’d argue that they got killed in order of ethics, too. So Bishop was the second “best” character? The reason Weaver was the last one left was because she was the main character, not because she was a virgin, and she was hardly a “final girl” type. The alien had a perfectly good reason to kill people. It was hungry.
I’m not sure the alien could have just waded in and killed everyone. It wasn’t very bullet or fire resistant. Even in Aliens, which was more of an action movie, they still went down pretty quick once they could locate them. And unlike Myers, it was essentially an animal, so can be forgiven for using poor overall strategy. If it did so.
Only a barbarian would point out that Shakespeare didn’t write those plots himself, he adapted them. So I won’t.
“Now Worf is gonna pop out, and they’ll be a space/time thing . . .”
I have to give my top 5; I simply cannot limit it to just one.
In no particular order:
- 2001: A Space Odyssey (Which I saw at the theater when it was NEW).
- Star Wars
- Fantastic Voyage (Fabulous premise)
- Forbidden Planet (Best of the 1950s)
- Blade Runner (The future had never before been so convincingly portrayed and has yet to be topped)
So many more (four Star Trek movies; The Empire Strike Back; Terminator II: Judgment Day; War of the Worlds; The Conquest of Space; Metropolis; Jurassic Park; ET; Aliens; The Rocketeer; and on and on and on…) but those five stand out.
The best comedic SF movies are:
- Back to the Future One and Two (“The damage may be confined just to our galaxy.”) (Three wasn’t as funny as the first two.)
- The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy miniseries
- Inner Space (“I’m possessed!”)
- Galaxy Quest (“Never give up, never surrender!”)
No other SF comedies stand out in my memory at the moment.
A few more that haven’t shown up yet:
1.) Brother from Another Planet – John Sayles wrote and directed. thought I heard that Spielberg had him writing early screenplays for what eventally turned into E.T., although they evolved far away from the initial concepts. If true, then this is Sayles’ take on E.T. Also, I haven’t seen anyone else take notice of this fact – the last shot of the movie is a visual pun. Watch it and maybe you’ll see what I mean.
2.)Dr. Jeckyll and Mister Hyde – The 1930s Rouben Mamoulian version starring Fredric March. It has some of the most innovative camera work and effects I’ve ever seen – the kind of thing Hitchcock was famos for. It’s never dull. Far better, in my opinion, than any of the other versions.
3.) The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. This is it! The very first 1950s “creature eature”. The first one to feature all of the elements associated with 1950s monster films – the creature iberated/created by the atomic bomb, the handsome young scientist who no one believes, the older scientist with the beautiful female assistant, the Beast attackin the City, with people fleeing in terror before it, and the only have one shot to kill the creature. But this is the FIRST time i was done, so it wasn’t a cliche! The film is also intelligently wrtten, atmospherically shot, and uses state-of-the-art specia effects, ather than a man in a rubber suit (Ray Harryhasen invented new techniques for this film, mainly because he couldn’t afford to do it the way they’d shot King Kong and oher epics). And it was (at least ostensibly) based on a story by Ray Bradbury! It was copied a LOT, especially by “Godzilla” (and I note that the recent remake of Godzilla really resembles The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms more than the Japanese Gojira in its plot.).
Then you must’ve noticed that in the scenes set in the conference room on the Moon, everyone walked around as if still on Earth, in Earth gravity, rather than in the Moon’s one-sixth gravity. I realized this error the fourth or fifth time I saw it, during the scene where a photographer (wearing a hideous plaid suit) walks around taking pictures of everyone. (BTW: Why was he taking pictures if the meeting was supposed to be SECRET?!)
Even the best of them have scientific errors and plot-holes.
You must’ve missed the scene where he was programming the computer to take the place of the operator. When Neo “scares the bejezuz” out of Cypher by coming up behind him, you could see the numerous screens showing the “matrix chairs” lit up. All were red except for one, which was green. When he was startled by Neo, the first thing he did was look back behind Neo to see if anyone had come with him. When he realized Neo was alone, he casually turned off the screens showing the chairs. He did not turn off the screens showing the Matrix, because he knew that Neo would have no idea what the code was showing.
Cypher went into the Matrix for his rendezvous with Agent Smith at some point after Neo left him.
first i really don’t enjoy this concept of THE BEST because i usually like different movies for various reasons that aren’t logically comparable, but i couldn’t resist throwing my 2 cents into this.
The Abyss (directors cut), the standard Abyss was great until the end when it fell kind of flat. the directors cut had the aliens sending giant waves to the coasts of the world to get humanity to stop acting stupid. fat chance.
Forbidden Planet, great timeless plot and decent effects for its day.
NO to 2001 - the effects were phenomenal but the acting was dead, couldn’t get interested in the characters. couldn’t really understand the ending without reading the book.
Dal TimgarHey, while we’re at it, how could anyone see anything in all those 1s and 0s? Most computer savvy people realise that even a basic (colour) picture can take up a minimum of around 30,000 bytes, and that’s for a single frame. Yet the viewscreens in the Matrix had around, say, 200 numbers on it, and so it could barely convey even a basic picture at a rate of 1 every 15 seconds… let alone their whopping 2fps or whatever they were getting… Kinda annoying.
Cinefantastique magazine pointed out how similar this was to the film The Day the Earth Stood Still.
The “dead,” mechanical acting style was deliberate. Kubrick feared that people were getting too dependent on technology and were losing their essential humanity and becoming more and more like machines, with no feelings or emotions. He wanted to show what this would look like. He contrasted their behavior (especially that of the astronauts) with that of HAL, who, most critics observed, correctly, that “he” was more human than the humans. And one could say the same about the “Dawn of Man” characters.
Sure I do. Soybeans and lentils (in the book, that is).
Bravo, Equipoise! That is a very convincing picture you just painted. Which endorses my argument even further; the clues to deCYPHERing the movie are all there. Congruency, for the most part, accompanies the plot. What limits the viewer and prevents him/her from correctly grasping what’s going on it is his/her inability to perceive, which goes to show the similarities between the residents of the Matrix and ourselves: both of us are unperceptive, to a varying degree, of the underlying reality.
If we want to comprehend the movie then we must FREE OUR MINDS. Conventionalisms, common sense, dogma, etc. are all paradigms that blind our conceptions and perceptions, they nullify our objectivity and thus restrict our capacity to reason. Take the case in point, I’m pretty sure that most everybody imagined, as did I, that an operator must be needed in order to send someone to the Matrix.
PARADIGM ALERT! The need for the operator was a paradigm impairing our vision, just like the MATRIX was the paradigm blocking Neo’s perception of reality. Once paradigms are overcome and objectivity sets in, clarity resurfaces and perception sharpens.
Further analyzed, the film itself constitutes a critique on the way we are being manipulated by advertisers, politicians, demagogues and whomever gets a chance to sell us their crap. We are being feeding bullshit by the minute, suckers by nature we are. And, carried to the extreme, this manipulation could extend to altering the totality of our perceptions, to reshape our conceptualization of reality. A Matrix-like scenario is progressively gaining control of ourselves. Slowly but (possibly) surely the dark future the movie posits might become real, if it hasn’t yet.
Of course, that is too dramatic a scenario the one I’m presenting. Unlikely that is true it is. Remember though, difficult to see the future is, always in motion it is. Yoda’s wise words give as a glimpse of hope, we are not yet doomed to fulfill the Wachowsky’s prophetic vision, through the guidance of the force free from the evil domain of the Matrix we shall become.
And, as might be patently clear by now, I need to go to bed. Nonetheless, tomorrow I will be addressing other matters regarding some of MaxTorque’s comments. By for now, my fellow coppertops.
Any more of this “Matrix” stuff and we might have to start a thread in Great Debates - it’s starting to sound like it is a religion for some posters.
It’s just a movie, guys. It’s only meant to attract viewers and make money. Hmm, on second thought, maybe it is a religion…
A few more flicks:
2010: The Year we Made Contact – I don’t think this one gets enough credit. It’s a pretty good flick. If only they cut out the inane voice-overs by Roy Scheider it’s be twice as good.
Robocop – This one does get credit, but I’ve got t mention it. It’s a lot better than I thought it would be from the ads.
The Last Starfighter – very good-natured send-up of the genre. One of the firstr movies to make extendive use of computer-generatred effects. Great “Music Man” like erformance by the Musc Man himself.
quasar was being sarcastic. I think.