12 Monkeys, TV show version.
The recent film Arrival was mentioned upthread. I’d also add The Arrival, a 1996 film starring Charlie Sheen, before he went off the rails. Also, all three films by Neill Blomkamp; District 9, Elysium and Chappie.
I’d say that science fiction, space opera and fantasy are all different variations of the same theme. In effect, it’s all fantasy stories. Some just have a bit more science in it than others. That’s why the best “science fiction” authors cared little for the distinction between SF and fantasy, moving freely between both genres. Whatever allowed them to tell the story that was in their heads.
The way I see, anything that could not exist in the world as we know it, and states that its unnatural elements are science- rather than magic-based, is science fiction. It’s a fairly broad definition, but it’s worked for me so far.
You can make a movie with special effects without making a movie about special effects.
I don’t think today’s “special effects” movies are about special effects, either. Think about it: when was the last time you saw something onscreen and thought, “Wow, how did they do that?” Nobody thinks that anymore, because the answer is always “computers”. To the modern audience, special effects are essentially invisible, as people assume that whatever the filmmakers want to put on the screen, will be onscreen. The very fact that it’s there doesn’t impress anyone any more.
I have a DVD copy of Citizen Kane with a commentary track by Roger Ebert. In the commentary, Ebert mentions the various special effects used in the making of the movie and says something like that it’s the equivalent of Star Wars of its day. The point is that special effects have always been used in movies (and theater before) and not always in things like SF films that we identify as special effects movies.
Some science fiction movies with modern special effects are good. Some are bad. The Star Trek reboot film was an example of horrible science fiction dressed up in lots of special effects.
I maintain that The Day the Earth Stood Still (the original, not the awful remake) sets a standard for how good science fiction can be, even if the special effects are cheesy.
Personally, I thought the first one was a good science fiction movie with some bad science.
I took the other side of the OP, stating that we’re in a great run of screen-based SF movies.
https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=811018
In it I name check:
Arrival
Ex Machina
The Martian
Gravity
Europa Report
Moon
Sunshine
Looper
Inception
District 9
Primer
Her
And at this point I’d add
Safety Not Guaranteed
Attack the Block
Under the Skin
While there’s a certain amount of high-concept effects in these, a lot of the best of them were very spare on the FX and just went with idea+actions=movie and were brilliant. That’s some of the best SF around.
…which makes it so frustrating when they come up with high-budget visually glorious nonsense like Prometheus. It’s understandable if some of the science is unrealistic in deference to key elements of the drama of the story. But it’s unforgivable when the science (and most of the plot) is gratuitously incoherent. With so little work and at minimal cost they could have worked with scientific consultants and polished it into something that’s reasonably consistent with reality.
Avatar had a plot that was not essentially a science-focused plot, but did depend on science. But the star of the film was the special effects. Even though we knew it was computer-generated, it was still, “Wow, look at that!”
But it was “look how beautiful that is!” That’s the reaction most filmmakers have always tried to evoke, whether they use special effects, lighting, sets, locations or good-looking actors.
I believe we are in violent agreement.
The problem I have isn’t CGI per se. That is fine when it works for the story, like it does in 2001, for instance. I object to where a large chunk of the story comes from the ability to do special effects - like the last part of the “Day the Earth Stood Still” remake. Or lots of ST:TNG, where they wrote scripts involving blowing up things just because they could. There were also episodes where the effects supported the story rather than vice versa, those were better.
I will say that Hollywood seems to have finally realized that science consultants work for cheap, and largely seem to have taken the attitude that if it’s nearly as easy to make it right as to make it wrong, they might as well make it right. It’s not universal, of course, but most of the time nowadays when you see a board full of equations in the background, or the like, the equations are real equations, from a field that’s at least tangentially related to what the characters are supposed to be doing with it. A great example of this was Interstellar, which featured the world’s first accurate visualization of what a wormhole would look like: The special effects guys had some really fancy ray-tracing computer programs, into which they could feed any equations they wanted, and the equations they fed in were Kip Thorne’s actual wormhole equations, and so they got a wormhole.
(Aside: I’m not saying anything about the quality of Interstellar as a story. I’ven’t seen it myself, and I’m no better judge of story quality than anyone else, anyway. But they did yeoman’s work on the science.)
I know where Little Nemo’s going though; back when effects were expensive and labor intensive, the story and acting tended to be the primary focus. That’s not to say that there weren’t spectacular effects, but they were typically integrated into the stories better- think “Blade Runner”. Good effects, but the story isn’t dependent on them to get where it’s going. Or for that matter, “Alien” is a good example; great effects, but the meat of the story is in the suspense and tension and Ripley getting away, not in crazy effects-heavy fight scenes or anything like that. By contrast, you have movies like the Star Wars prequels, where 25% better writing and 25% less awesome effects would have paid huge dividends.
Ideally you want both; “The Fifth Element” is a good example of a movie with stunning effects and a fun story. And in some cases, you just can’t really tell the story on the screen effectively without a lot of modern-day effects “The Expanse” comes to mind as a sci-fi series that couldn’t be done well if the effects budget was small.
I think I can safely say there was not a scrap of CGI in 2001. Not even in the trippy bits.
In your first stentence did you mean SFX rather than CGI, because the effects in 2001 were all practical.
I agree with the rest of the statement, and since I’m going through TNG right now, I am appalled at the number of arrogant diplomats they had to haul around. The definition of “Diplomacy” must have drifted a bit by the 24th century.
Not even on the computer screens. Those were all back-projections.
I like sci-fi but not fantasy or super hero.
I echo my esteemed colleagues who have mentioned Moon, *Primer *and The Martian.
Does Mad Max:Fury Road count as sci-fi? We watched it (and the original MM) at the sci-fi film marathon I go to. It was excellent!