All of them except “Solaris” with George Clooney? I’m still waiting for the day when Hollywood realizes that sci-fi fans can handle a little plot and thinking in their flashy entertainment.
Yes, the Bimbo-wear in the film was pretty damn good.
Yeah, the spaceships were real models. A friend of mine, who turned me onto Kurosawa, worked as one of the model builders. She said it was the last ‘big’ movie to use physical models.
What is the distinction? I know all the Lord of the Rings movies used miniatures extensively.
Well, it might be a matter of scale. The models used for StarShip Troopers were as big as eighteen feet long. 
- STARSHIP TROOPERS: absolute crap, but funny. The giant insects were cool, plus the giant tick-like thing that liked to suck out human’s brains! Plus, the coed showers made up for a lot.
- MARS ATTACKS: good visuals, and the demented US president was hilarious! The martians-destroyed by country and western music-stupid!
I actually liked this movie enough to write a one-minute summary.
Yes, I know it was lame. Give me a break, I was sober!
For people who hated Van Helsing (well, for anyone who watched it), I offer up this little treat.
(That link SHOULD work. If not, mention it and I’ll fix it somehow.)
Barbarella was Groovy, Man!
Alien and The Matrix. You can’t get more brain dead than those, but they do look impressive.
I have to agree about Alien, but I thought there was more to the Matrix than mere surface glitz.
When I saw the thread title I figured that had to be listed in the OP. There couldn’t be a film series that more perfectly fit that description. The original had some huge plot holes and the sequels have so many holes there’s not even a consistent run of anything resembling plot. But the looks were so awesome everyone and his kid sister copied from then on.
I like Wing Commander, but admittedly, it doesn’t have the strongest of plots.
And, most of most of The Matrix was a real snooze, with all potential for drama completely eliminated (why show us the traitor? And why the phony suspense about whether Neo was the chosen one – if he’s not, then no movie?) and a bunch of very superficial and elementary “philosophical” points thrown in that were treated as though they were grand revelations. The final fight sequence (starting in the subway station) was very impressive, as were the first sequence, but all the rest was just filler.
The sequels were even worse, with no logic at all and rules that changed at the whims of the filmmakers.
I got a tour of LucasArts offices the other day, and there was a “minature” of the house from The Spiderwick Chronicles that was seven feet tall, and ten feet across. I suspect adam yax’s anecdote might be obsolete.
Well, it WAS in Post #4…
I have to add another to this list. I just finished watching 10,000 B.C./ I knew what I was getting into, having seen the trailers, but I wasn’t prepared for how nonsensical this film is. I kept hoping that *something[/i[ would happen that would sorta make it make some kind of sense, but of course it didn’t happen. Nordic people living on a northern glacier folow slave traders across swamps and deserts, through lands popuilated by blacks (and some random whites) to an Eqypt-clone being run by the last of the pseudo-Atlanteans who’d building pyramids and a Sphinx in a pseudo-Egypt that seems to lack any actual plants. (What the hell are the people and all those wooly mammoths eating??!!!). There’s only one blue-eyed woman anywhere. The few language clues I could pick up on came from Mesopotamia (“Uru-Anna” = “Orion” there) and Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings (“Mammak” is just too damned close to “Mumakil” for the Mammoths). There’s even less sense and consistency than in Robert E. Howard’s Hyborian Age, which this looks like it’s trying to be.
But it sure looks good…
Wanted to mention Silent Running (1972). Absolutely ludicrous premise, but great to look at: directed by Doug Trumbull, so there’s a fantastic model spaceship and visual effects.
Watching the DVD with the commentary is educational about making a movie look good on a modest budget. The robot drones were inhabited by bilateral amputees; the interiors were shot aboard the decommissioned aircraft carrier USS Valley Forge; the largest interior was the hangar deck, which would have cost a fortune to build as a set. And, you’ve got Bruce Dern gettin’ all crazy, and Joan Baez singin’ hippy-dippy tree-hugger songs.
Hippy-dippy tree-hugger songs written by PDQ Bach, no less!
I think the 1999 remake of The Haunting, though admittedly a horror film, is quite sufficiently brain-dead and special effects-laden to earn it a mention in this thread. Some of the visuals are genuinely striking; the exterior of Hill House is represented by the opulent Baroque architecture of England’s Harlaxton Manor, while the brooding interior sets run the gamut of styles from Criminally Insane Gothic to Late Victorian Pointy Thing.
Unfortunately the technology used to create the multitudinous CG ghosties was rather conspicuously unconvincing even by the standards of the film’s release date. Fortunately their shortcomings in versimilitude are cleverly mitigated by the fact that they are on screen at all times, until the audience is forced to avert its eyes in shame. I believe that director Jan de Bont was hoping that the spirit of Robert Wise, who directed the original 1963 version, would rise up in vengeance so they could film it. Unfortunately for this plan, Wise wasn’t dead yet; and somehow de Bont’s film didn’t kill him.
There’s one particularly remarkable scene where a bedroom’s walls and ceilings come alive to pursue its victims, so the viewer is treated to the spectacle of one room of the house chasing people through other rooms of the house. I hear that Jan de Bont owns a dictionary in which the definition of the word ‘subtle’ glows in the dark.