I feel the best scince fiction film of the last 10 years was the Matrix
It was the first time i walked out of threater (i’m only 21 now) and I knew i had scene a movie that I knew would still talked about in 20 years. I can only gusse that this is how some of the you older dopers must have felt walking out of Star Wars, Planet of the apes or Blade runner.
Matrix was great.
For CGI, don’t overlook all the Jurassic Park shows. Even tho the stories lacked, the animals were intense.
Contact was also pretty good and an important concept getting new awareness.
I guess I’ll let someone else post some others…
My vote would be for “Ghost in the Shell” aka “Kokaku kidotai”.
Like “The Matrix” its one of those films that wows you with visuals while also freaking your brain out. It explores the issues of the soul and what makes us human in a world where humans are becoming more artificial and robots are becoming more human-like. AI, hacking, robots, government conspiricies, and cool music, its got it all.
Awesome.
The best science film of the 1990s was probably an episode of Nova on PBS. 
If you’re right, man, that says something bad about the state of science fiction movies in the 1990s.
Matrix was OK. I liked the first half but I thought the movie fizzled out pretty badly afterwards.
My vote would go for Ghost in the Shell as well.
Who said anything about science fiction movies? I mean, look at the Topic: line for this thread…
My picks for the best sf films of the 90’s:
Considering the recent developments in the completion of the Human Genome Project, cloning, etc., I can’t think of a more important science fiction film from the 1990s than Gattaca.
“Who said anything about science fiction movies? I mean, look at the Topic: line for this thread…”
But the original post was about “The Matrix” a science fiction film. Besides, the topic is misspelled, so how can I trust it?
“Paranoia will detroy ya”
i think the best “scince” film was that one about bugs. I can’t remember it’s name for the life of me.
That would be Microcosmos, Tars.
Re the OP: Good SF, to me, has always been about ideas. While The Matrix is a pretty kickass piece of bubblegum entertainment, it doesn’t really have any new ideas; it just assembles off-the-shelf elements in a unique and fairly entertaining package.
So, instead, I’ll second the nomination of Gattaca, a movie chock-full of ideas and solid speculation about human nature in a radically new (but plausible) setting. Honorable mention to Contact, for the opening shot if nothing else, and to Pi, a movie that doesn’t totally hold together but that still demonstrates it’s possible to be intellectually thrilling without a single visual effect.
Am I the only one who thought **Gattaca **was boring? It wasn’t terrible, but one viewing was enough to last me a life-time.
eXistenZ and Strange Days are the best ones I saw from the 90’s. I don’t watch a lot of sci-fi, though(I’ve yet to see The Matrix, for example, and only saw 12 Monkeys for the 1st time this year). I love the idea of taking virtual reality and video gaming to extreme levels like they did in these films.
Dark City gets my vote. . . even though it was made in the late 80’s, I think, it is a film the carried me well through the 90’s.
My problem with almost all of the sci-fi films made are that though directors will unfailingly mix futuristic themes with action / violence, the intricate weaving of philosphical themes is very often not incorporated. It’s not enough for me to see men in silly suits firing blaster cannons and “fighting some force of evil that is just is there and is evil and you have to fight it because you are the good guy and people paid good money to see you kick his ass.” (And yes, George Lukas I do mean for you to paying attention here.)
I want to see a sci-fi film that creates a world, a viable world with depth and politics, art and music. I want intelligent movies with back-structure and realism. I want to believe that the movie world will continue beyond the movie; that the movie itself was just a briefly opened window. Bladerunner did this well. Fifth Element did not.
I want less action (for action’s sake) and more slowly built tension. If you are a sci-fi fan and haven’t seen Dark City, then rent or buy it today. It has a similar retro-noir feel as Bladerunner, but takes the theme of “aliens running amok society” that was also present in Bladerunner to a whole new level.
George Lucas did a lot more than “Blasters in Space.” Though if you don’t look atr it very hard, thats about all you can get out of it.
I would say that Contact probably tops the list, followed by Deep Impact (note: Not that other meteor movie released the same summer). And if we’ll let some historical fact sneak in the back door, then Apollo 13 deserves mention as well. Does it show that I judge SF by scientific accuracy?
The Matrix was overall far from the worst movie I’ve seen, and the action and effects scenes were worth the ticket price, but the plot was cliched and the premise was severely flawed in places. And don’t even get me started on Dark City, which didn’t even have good special efects.
And Ghost in the Shell was from the nineties? I had thought it was older than that.
Dark City was 1998, and Ghost in the Shell 1995.
Confession time. I’m a good skeptic. I love Carl Sagan. And I thought Contact was just tedious. I know, I know, I’m supposed to admire everything about it, but I just found it hard going. And especially getting through all that for that terrible, terrible cheap ending.
I’m not sure what I would nominate from the 90s. Not a whole lot stands out to me. I remember the 90s as the time when I realized that I didn’t have to go see every Sci-Fi movie that came out, because most of them were crap. And I supposedly LIKE science fiction.
The only thing I didn’t like about Contact was the fact that, throughout most of the movie, Jodie Foster looked like she was about this close to biting your head off.
The City of Lost Children was better than all this English-language stuff mentioned thus far (though I never really considered After Life sci-fi).