Remember when Spielberg had that “Amazing Stories” TV show going, and he had a budget of (roughly) thirty dumptrucks full of money for each episode? Remember what he did with the stories? Did he hire real SF writers, or use any of the wonderful existing short stories and novellas that would translate easily into teleplays? No, of course he didn’t do that. Instead, he wrote many of the episodes himself, or recycled schlock plot lines into “gee-whiz” stories and made the whole thing look like a 10th grader’s first comic (“Look guys, I did this myself!”).
And I think that’s a perfect illustration of why Hollywood doesn’t make many good SF movies. Every successful producer —and the more successful they are the truer this is— believes that nobody knows the audience better than they do. So the thinking becomes “Sure, the writer’s good, but I know what the fans really wanna see!” Not to mention the fact that good SF generally explores concepts and ideas that are a little radical for Hollywood moguls.
Having said that, I think we can at least be optimistic enough to apply the Corrollary to Sturgeon’s Law: 10% of SF (and everything else) rises above the muck and sometimes even rocks!
Sis: Sorry to hijack again, but you don’t want either of the above. You want THE GOLEM: HOW HE CAME INTO THE WORLD (1920). The 1915 film was just a dry run for this one(it’s set in the contemporary world, and the Golem falls off a tower and gets smashed up), and the 1917 film was a spoof. The 1920 version is period piece, depicting the creation of the Golem by Rabbi Loew, and a classic.
Every evil alien species has to have dreadlocks for hair. The alien in Predator sported dreadlocks. The aliens in the Alien movies has these tentacles hanging down with them that were highly reminiscent of dreadlocks. The aliens in Independence Day had dreaedlocks and tentacles. And the evil John Travolta aliens in the newly-released Battlefield Earth have dreadlocks.
Maybe Hollywood is trying to draw on some ancient, primal fear of Jamaicans.
I don’t know if it can be classified SF but what about Brazil?
As far as ‘best’ movie goes I tend to separate between best ‘rollercoaster’ movie (i.e. put brain in neutral and enjoy the ride) and best ‘brain food’ movie (i.e get lots of sleep or smoke something before watching) and ‘terrible but liked anyway’ (i.e. probably had been smoking something to enjoy them).
Rollercoaster:
Star Wars
Independence Day
Terminator/Terminator 2
Aliens (forget III and IV)
Starship Troopers (when it wasn’t downright stupid)
5th Element
Armageddon
The Matrix
Robocop
Star Trek II: Wrath of Kahn
Brain Food:
2001: A Space Odyssey
Blade Runner
Brazil
Contact
Metropolis
Gattaca
The Day the Earth Stood Still
Terrible but Enjoyed Anyway:
Dark City (maybe not so bad but unsure wherelse to put it)
Darkstar (truly cheesy)
Dune (grows on you some but read the book instead)
tracer, you forgot the scariest film rasta of all: Jar-Jar.
Heebie-jeebies!
Whether or not you think 2001 is great sci-fi (I do), you can not call it Hollywood. Kubrick produced the film himself.
He was no friend of Hollywood and his few run-ins with L.A. producers and studios never went smoothly (e.g., Spartacus) due to his fiercly independent, controlling nature.
But I’d certainly agree that most SF movies suck big time. Even the handful of good “SF” movies are usually some other genre disguised with robots and space ships rather then genuine SF (Alien was a horror film, The Matrix was a fantasy, Outland was a western, etc). As Billdo wrote, real SF is about ideas and few movies get made about ideas.
I think the problem is too many movie producers who don’t know their own level of stupidity. They mistakedly assume they’re smarter than the people who watch their movies. So when they are confronted with ideas that they find difficult, they assume the the movie viewers will find these ideas impossible. The result is the moviemakers dumb down their product to the level they feel their audience can understand.
The Raven, that sounds like an interesting course. I’d be interested to know what college professors these days think are the ‘Classics of Science Fiction’. Any possibility of posting (or e-mailing) the reading list from the class?
Tracer: Aliens don’t have dreadlocks! Where have you seen this? They’ve got 4 (sometimes 5) spikey protuberances on their backs, but no dredds that I’ve seen, and I’ve seen probably 98% of all available Aliens material (looks lovingly at 1/12th scale Queen model, reads another 4 Aliens comic books, and hisses).
</aliens geekery>
My votes go with T2: Judgement Day, Aliens, and 12 Monkeys, though T2 and Aliens are more action/horror flicks than sci fi, IMO. Blade Runner was good from what I remember, but I haven’t seen it in years. I really don’t class Star Wars as Sci Fi at all, as there are practically no science elements at all - all scientific facts and concerns go out of the window in the name of a decent story (not that this is a bad thing). I always thought that Harlan Ellison (i think) story about the company that offers prehistoric Dinosaur safaris and screws the timeline would make a decent movie, or at least, the first 20 minutes of a decent movie.
I’ve got a copy. Illustrated. Quite good. Took a few of the key stories from the collection, and tied them together well.
Quoting Smeghead quoting someone (can’t find the original message…is it from another thread?
That is probably not Ellison, but rather Ray Bradbury’s A Sound of Thunder. It was adapted for the Ray Bradbury Theater TV series - quite well, despite the Early-80s effects.
On a side point, Bradbury leaves Ellison in the dust, IMO. And many of his stories adapt very well.
Jim Danforth (who animated When Dinosaurs Rule he Earth, Jack the Giant Killer, and sundry other moves) tried to get a project going about a dinosaur safari company. I forget the name of it, but the roduction sketches looked pretty good. The hunters were to be carried in a spider-legged hing that looked like some of the items in the last Star Wars movie. It was an original story, not an adaptation. Unfortunately, the money never came through.
L. Sprague de Camp’s “A Gun for Dinosaur” is another dino-safari story. I believe he wrote it as a response to Bradbury’s “Sound of Thunder”. It, too, would make a good flick. It’s already been adapted as a radio drama and a comic book. (And de Camp has since written a series of sequels to his much-anthologized short story. A collction is entitled “Rivers of Time”.)
Then there’s always the Richard Boone TV film “The Last Dinosaur”…
No problem Bildo, we’ve been going thru plenty of reading material so far, and its all almost over! I guess I’m lucky that this course actually counts as an english elective instead of just general BS…
Well, let me see here. We’ve read three novels:
Farenheight 451 (not what I initially thought of as science fiction, no alien space rays and so on…but made sense later)
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Naturally this was listed as ‘Blade Runner’, but I like the original title much more. I liked the initial images it suggested)
Beggars in Spain (I’d never heard of this before I took the class. Its not too bad, but I still felt certain that some other book would be more ‘classic’. Couldn’t think of one though, maybe Starship Troopers…)
And then we read several short stories from a collection, um, The Norton Book of Science Fiction by Ursula LeGuin and Brian Attebery. I’ll do a run down of the ones we’ve read:
The House the Blakeneys Built: All I’ll say about this is how much a horror story it is, though its the reason we watched that X files episode…I didn’t mind too much.
Day Million: Hey, a science fiction story about futuristic sex…um. Well, it is a lot more, but I think that’s ok for a quick note.
Good News from the Vatican: A story about a robot pope, rather dull compared to some others.
The Women Men don’t See: Bizarre feminist type story. My teacher is a wee bit too much into that, but she’s getting better at least.
Strange Wine: Harlan Ellison, do I have to say anything more? Good story.
Out of all them Bright Stars: A good story about prejudice and aliens.
Speech Sounds: What would happen if suddenly we all lost the ability to communicate? Here’s one idea.
Midnight News: Another feminist thing, really not sci fi at all. Not a real good example of anything.
Invaders: My favorite in the book, had to be read to appreciate it. Cocaine snorting aliens and all.
And also we’ve read The Pedestrian by Ray Bradbury (a forerunner to Farenheight I think) and Frozen Journey by Philip Dick (My teacher likes his work).
There’s more, but I have to go finish my final for that class, so I’ll check in later…
I think it may have been Ray Bradbury on Dino Safari, actually, although I’m not positive. I remember the guy in question steps on a butterfly, comes back, and the spelling on the company’s window is different, and no-one is too pleased with him. Years since I read it though, I must have been <10 when I did. Great yarn. Actually, the L. Sprague De Camp suggestion may be correct, as I was reading a lot of his stuff back then, lots of dodgy Conan novels and so forth. Hopefully the bits I remembered will help someone pin it down.
I thought Blade Runner kicked DADOES’s arse as a title, but only because it sounds cooler. DADOES doesn’t really roll off the tongue either.
I thought Starship Troopers sucked as SF, but rocked as a monster movie/over the top action flick with plenty of funny bits. Or at least, bits that make me piss myself.
“Welcome to the Roughnecks!”.
“RICO’S ROUGHNECKS!! UHH!”
and
“We’re going back - to P”, but that’s only because I have a childish sense of humour. I bet they meant it to sound funny though, in a Beavis and Butthead sort of manner.
How about HHGTTG as SciFi? The TV series didn’t cover it all, but if you ripped out all the funny bits, the half page that remained would be pretty SFish.
::: Trying to get this into debate rather than list of favorites :::
I suggest that the reason it is difficult for Hollywood to turn out great science fiction is that they put all the thought and effort into special effects, and very little into the human interaction. What makes some science fiction great is NOT the special effects or idea, but the characters… and this hasn’t sunk in yet.
I’d put FAHRENHEIT 451 (the movie by Truffaut) in the list of great science fiction movies, but there were almost NO special effects in that movie. The emphasis was on the human beings. I’d also put THE BIRDS in that category. And the original THE THING (1950s version).
Ground-breaking special effects are hot for a while – thus JURASSIC PARK, for instance. But a film like STAR WARS succeeds because the special effects (ground-breaking and fantastic though they were) are background to the characters and story, not the be-all and end-all of the film.
I’d argue that the same is true of science fiction books. A book about a man who becomes invisible is not interesting; a book about the psychological effects on him and on those around him, that’s interesting.
STARSHIP TROOPERS is a good example of a feeble attempt to make the characters interesting, but they were inherently uninteresting to begin with. And once they went off into special-effects land, the characters became irrelevant.
12 Monkeys
Aliens
Men in Black
2001 A Space Odyssey
Alien
Ghostbusters
Planet of the Apes (despite what came after) Silent Running
Star Wars
Slaughterhouse 5
Buckaroo Bonzai (Hey! Back off.) The Thing
The Fly (Cronenberg’s) T2
Waterworld (just seeing if you’re paying attention)
*Charlie
The Day the Earth Stood Still
Blade Runner
*
My point is: I do not believe that Hoolywood is any more inept at making Science fiction movies than they are at making any other type of movie. Yes, there is considerably more chaff than wheat in the mill, but the same is true for any other genre you care to name.
