Okay, the special effects are interesting and I usually love the costumes and make-up but the story lines are just silly.
Watching the new Matrix movie yesterday (SOs revenge for me dragging him to my type of movie - not usually Hollywood crap) I was full of ‘but why did he…’ and ‘couldn’t she just have…’
I just don’t get it and I don’t understand why the story lines have to be silly - my dog could write better scripts. I have a creative mind, do art work and write stories etc, but for example, I just don’t understand why Keanu Reeves would spend hours (well it seemed like hours and lost its appeal after the first 2 minutes) fighting off the clones and then fly away like Superman, when he could have done this to start with. It ends up being purely for benefit of seeing a long fight scene, and nothing to do with a story line.
I fell asleep through the latest Star Wars movie, have to leave the room during all Sci Fi TV shows, usually love comedy novels but couldn’t get past chapter one of Hitchhiker’s Guide.
What’s wrong with me?
What is the appeal - I know very intelligent and interesting people who love this stuff. Why? Is there a certain personality type that loves this shit and I will never come to appreciate it?
Is the appeal in deciding what the storyline was and why things happened the way they did? Then what is the fucking point?
Sci Fi sucks big time.
Nah. Hollywood shit sucks. Good SF (which you have to read) is much clearer and easier to understand.
Then again, I liked “Twelve Monkeys.” Maybe I dunno what the fuck I’m talking about …
I couldn’t get into the Hitch Hiker’s Guide books either, and then, on a whim, happened to listen to the radio series. That’s when it blossomed into comic genius, or at least for me. YMMV.
And I wish you wouldn’t generalise - “sci-fi sucks big time?”
Um, no. The Matrix Reloaded may not have done anything for you (I should know, I felt similarly about it) but did you ever see ET? Close Encounters of the Third Kind? 2001: A Space Odyssey? Hell, the BBV TV series of the Hitch Hiker’s Guide?
And even if you saw all those and none of them did anything for you, well, fine. You like other stuff. Good for you. But sci-fi does not “suck big time.” There’s some wonderful sci-fi (or SF, as the purists would have it) out there. You just don’t happen to like it, that’s all.
Well, you have to understand that what your average script writer knows about computers can be summed up by “They have to be plugged in”, “Almost no one else knows how they work either”, and “If you shoot a computer it explodes”. This is mostly wrong and is still approximately twice what the average studio executive knows about computers. This allows them to take what is a brilliant premise and do absolutely nothing interesting with it. Furthermore, there’s almost no payback in getting the details right, because the Matrix (and Hollywood movies in general) are all about style, not substance.
You can take the above and apply it to pretty much any scientific domain. The writers and directors don’t really understand the underlying concepts well enough to extrapolate them to their logical conclusions which is why most cinematic science fiction degenerates into some other genre, e.g. Event Horizon (Slasher Flick in Space), Jurassic Park (Slasher Flick with Dinosaurs), or the Matrix (generic Fantasy in Cyberpunk Goth).
Even the rather well-reviewed Minority Report devolved into a rather lame police procedural rather than coming to grips with the potential of a new technology.
This is a little like going to the ballet and asking why they wasted so much time with all that dancing instead of getting on with the plot. The whole point of the movie is the fight scenes. The plot is secondary at best. Which is why the plot is so bad in the Matrix films. In this case, if you really want a rationalization, Neo stayed for the fight because he wasn’t simply trying to survive the encounter, he was trying to win it. He’d already “killed” Smith once, at the end of the first movie, and he certainly didn’t want this guy running around, screwing up his plans and killing his friends again, so he tried to beat him. It was only when he realized it was hopeless that he took off. But it doesn’t really matter, because the real reason for the scene was to have Neo fight off fifty guys who all look identical.
Reading your post, my knee jerk reaction was, “How can she not like science fiction?” Reading your examples of stuff you didn’t like, though… I tend to agree with you. Hitchhikers was very clever, but not terribly interesting. It was more about getting characters into goofy-surreal situations than exploring them or their settings. And the latest Star Wars movie was just terrible. Simply awful. The theater I saw it in (opening night), the audience was laughing, long and hard, through the love scenes. “Amidala, I love you.” “HAHAHA!” Beyond belief. One of the worst movies I’ve ever seen, and that’s including low budget schlock. Robot Monsters looks good in comparison.
Which brings us to your closing line, “Sci Fi sucks big time.” No argument from me: sci fi is at best stoopid fun. Shut off your brain and watch the nifty special effects. Not that there’s anything wrong with that: I just watched Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan last night for the umpteenth time. Watching William Shatner act is an experience not unlike watching those two big-rigs in Matrix: Reloaded hit head-on in slow motion. It’s not really a good thing, per se, but it sure is interesting to look at.
Science fiction, on the other hand, is something else entirely. There are damned few real science fiction films out there: movies that take piece of theoretical technology and extrapolate from that what the world will look like in fifty, a hundred, or a thousand years. 2001 is probably the best of them. Dated in some respects: Kubrick overestimated the life span of '60s fashion, but no other film has created as seamless and plausible a vision of the future. Of course, since you’ve got a bit of an anti-sf vibe going already, the ending is likely to just piss you off. Because it doesn’t explain anything to you, it just mindfucks you and leaves you to sort out the pieces. I love that sort of shit; YMMV.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind is another good one. Not many movies explore the concept of a peaceful first contact with an advanced alien race. Either you get aliens who want to blow us up, or you get aliens who want to be our friends who get blown up by paranoid government agents. CE3K is great because it’s so optimistic. It’s premise is that reasonable, good-willed people can communicate peacefully no matter how different they are. And if that’s not science fiction, I don’t know what is.
Anyway, I’m digressing. I’m more than willing to trot out a list of “must-see” science fiction (or better yet, “must-read”. Sf’s true home is in literature), but I’m not sure that’s what you want. You want to know why I like it, and why I like it’s retarded little brother, SciFi. Simple: I want to see something I never will, that I never could see in real life. I want to see the moons of Jupiter, up close and personal. I want to see a space station the size of a small moon. I want to see attack ships on fire off Orion. I want to see C-Beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. Stuff that I’ll never see in real life, no matter how long I live.
Sorta the same reason I watch porn…
The H.G. Welles movie. A Tale Of Things To Come"? “Things to Come”? Good SF. Destination Moon is good SF.
Blade Runner… maybe.
Surprisingly, I’d call Back to the Future good SF… it takes a long hard look at Time Travel and paradoxes. It may be a little loose here and there, but most of it is the shorthands of the medium.
Thanks for the suggestions - I have read or watched all supplied thus far and I’m still left with ‘man, was that silly!’
Like I said, it’s not that I don’t appreciate some aspects of Sci Fi ie the costumes, special effects and with some novels, the writing.
And thanks for the attempted explanations - I guess I can have empathy if I think about it as the same as liking B grade westerns
(which for some inexplicable reason, I do).
The Matrix isn’t Science Fiction, it’s a Martial Arts movie.
As it hasn’t been said yet let me pipe in with this.
Science Fiction in general deals with imagining a new technology and then extrapolating what effects that technology will have on humans. This will usually include sociological impact as well as the impact on particular individuals.
As such Science Fiction does not tend to include character development or traditional plot lines to as great an extent as other fiction.
So as you imply in your post some people find this whole “what if” thing absolutely facinating. Others just don’t care. They would prefer a story that explores the nuances of character confict, plot development and character development. Some people appreciate both.
I love hard Science Fiction. My wife detests it. Other subgenres we both enjoy. So while we both like Heinlein she would not enjoy Greg Bear.
Sometimes it is just a matter of changing a mind set and reading / watching anything through a genre filter. Go in expecting the piece to be what it is and try to enjoy it on that basis. Or just accept that Science Fiction is not your thing.
I hold a similar regard for most SciFi I’ve come across, MelC. I have found some good books – Ursula LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness and Isaac Asimov’s Foundation books (just the first four; I haven’t read the others). Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee… might qualify, too. The thing about these stories is that they are good stories that happen to deal in the context of Science Fiction. I find that the books and movies that are more interested in Science than in Fiction can be dull to me.
The majority of the SciFi movies I’ve seen haven’t been intellectually worthwhile, IMHO. I liked the first Star Wars movies (because they were fun) and the M. Knight Shaylaman films (because they were well-done). But I haven’t been too mind-stimulated by the rather enjoyable films already mentioned. I suppose it depends on your expectations.
Note: I still haven’t seen Dark City or Strange Days.
[slight hijack]
My sister really is a Sci-Fi fan, but that didn’t keep her from naively repeating her husband’s smart-ass remark about “looking forward to seeing The Matrix II for the money shot”. She thought he was serious & that it referred to the expensive special effects. So that’s what she told her colleagues, all day long.
I should mention she’s a psychologist.
[/slight hijack]
I’d have to say the finest recent science fiction movie I’ve seen was Contact. Some over-the-top visuals but it did a great job of exploring SETI and the consequences. And the explorations of belief are worthwhile.
But I take issue with ‘imagining a new technology and then extrapolating what effects that technology will have’. Too much of it is the Campbellian ‘technology focus’. Science fiction can be about any trend or science. It’s easy to focus on technology but futuristic ideas can come from any discipline, not just hardware.
Farenheit 451 count?
“The matrix…is a martial arts movie”
:rolleyes:
Maybe a wannabe martial arts movie, but it takes people who really know what the fuck they’re doing to make a martial arts movie. Even some of the absolutely rubbish Jackie Chan movies I’ve seen are still better martial arts movies; they have martial artists in them!
Although I appreciate that to the layman there isn’t a lot of difference.
Yes, it does. As do Brave New World, 1984, Wizard of Oz, Slaughterhouse 5 and a lot of other books, generally not with words like ‘science fiction’ on the cover. There is a distinct lack of BEM’s, laser guns and space ships too.
When people talk about SciFi and how childish and boring, they find it, they usually think of Space Opera. While I enjoy that subset of the genre, I can certainly understand why some poeple don’t like it.
I dunno, buddy. I have severe doubts about ‘Wizard of Oz’ fitting in there. That’s much closer to fantasy.
If you use Sci-fi to refer only to science fiction in films and television, then you most definitely have a point. Where science fiction novels and stories are meant to extrapolate inventive plots and “what-if” scenarios from the known laws of science, Sci-fi (or “skiffy” as Harlan Ellison calls it) dumbs down its stories for the level of comprehension of the average studio executive, leading us to such abominations as V and Buck Rogers.
Sure, the occasional thought-provoking film, such as 2001: A Space Odyssey or The Day the Earth Stood Still gets made, but because the producers and studio heads who greenlight movies think that their own dimness represents the IQ of the movie-going audience, crap will always continue to drown out the occasional gem. Just look at the opposition two intelligent TV shows, Babylon 5 and Futurama, faced from their own companies.
V was an abomination? I have Michael Ironside running around with that Mac-10 still burned into my brain. 
Psst: I mean the movie, Gaspode.
I don’t rememeber the movie, F451.
And I was refering to the Oz books, and not the technicolor fest that seems to be so embedded in American minds.