I thought The Matrix was super boring. The sequel was plain awful. I didn’t see the 3rd.
*2001 *I had seen a few times as a teenager and fell asleep every time. I watched it a couple years ago as an adult and was really blown away. It’s especially good if you remember that it was made in 1968, almost 10 years before Star Wars. The special effects are crazy good - for its time.
I’m over 35, saw all the movies in the theater when they came out, and think Star Wars is over-rated. I guess I can see how it was influential technically but it was a B-movie plot at best and the characters and dialogue are as cheesy as it gets. I also don’t think the OT has aged well, it really feels like a 70’s movie to me. People’s hair and clothes (not armor), and the computers (big bulky things with big flashing lights and buttons) really date the movie. I liked SW, don’t get me wrong, but it wasn’t the be-all, end-all childhood experience for me that it seems to have been for a lot of people, and to me it’s aged poorly. I’d like to see a re-make of the OT at some point to modernize it, movie making has advanced so much since then (in part due to the sucess of the OT).
So I can see it’s influence from a technical aspect but not a story or character perspective. Obviously I’m going to be in the minority with this view though. :dubious:
I’m going to say Blade Runner although I think it is a good, enjoyable movie, I am not into the awesome praise it gets. I think it hasn’t aged well because its vision of the future, this dystopian dark Los Angeles, which is one of its defining characteristics is not even close to reality. That isn’t Ridley Scott’s fault, that he couldn’t predict the future, but it does take much of the appeal of the movie away, IMO.
I’m going to have to go with which ever of the Star Wars movies took place on the Teddy Bear Planet. I loved the first movie, but I checked out after the ewoks took on the Empire, just stupid.
ETA: I’m not sure Star Wars counts as SF.
I don’t think you can complain about that yet because we’re still a long way from perfectly manufactured humans. By the time we get there, new energy sources could have arrived and dozens of architectural movements could have come and gone.
But the movie takes place in 2017.
Stargate sits at about 6.9/10 stars on IMDB. IMO, it’s at best a 2/10. I have no idea how it spawned multiple TV series and other stuff.
Starship Troopers sits at 7.1/10, and it’s maybe a 3 at best, IMO.
I’m with you (saw it in the theater during its original run, as well). I liked it at the time (I was 7), but every subsequent viewing made me realize how boring much of it is, and how poorly acted. Does not hold up when viewed from an adult perspective, IMO.
Close encounters gets my vote.
AVATAR was written by some PETA loon-it was basically a condemnation of the US, Western Science, and anything connected to dead white men. It was a celebration of the cult of Gaeia, and the characters were so black and white that it was lagable. Although those blue chicks were pretty sexy.
When I was a substitute teacher (before the sun burned hot in your sky) I heard a room full of high school students decide unanimously that the greatest science fiction movie ever was…The Last Starfighter.
“Don’t you agree?” they asked me.
Nope.
Actually, I pretty think Avatar was pretty much a Tarzan movie with blue people. The white guy is able to drop in and be better at all aspects of tribal life than the natives and he leads them to victory.
2001 was remarkable for the look and feel of the space ships and environment. This was all done in 1968 and the people walking up walls, turning to re-orient themselves to walk on the floor, were amazing for the time. The second half after Dave goes through the worm hole or whatever it was could have been done better and not left so many wondering what it was about. As in many cases, the book did not translate well to the screen.
Avatar is just a horrible piece of propaganda attempting to be a major film, and failing.
Star Wars, all of them, are essentially comic books with real live actors. More in the line of the original TV series of Batman with Adam West. You know what you are seeing is campy, but it isn’t pretending to be something else, so you can enjoy it as it is.
The two for one bad Sci-Fi goes to A.I. and Minority Report. Both are convoluted enough to make the stories emotionally and intellectually unappealing. Too many eye rolling moments in each.
Gahan Wilson had a cartoon out around that time of the two little grey aliens inside the ship looking up at these gigantic, slavering, grey monsters. The caption was “Alright children, you can bring the humans in now…”.
I saw Star Wars in its original run. I was nineteen or twenty, and was extremely dissatisfied with it. The movie had a huge buildup in the press, and I was expecting really good SF. What I got was cheesy sci-fi. Going into the second movie, I had my expectations set correctly, and enjoyed it thoroughly.
The Star Trek reboot has enough plot holes to drive every starship in Star Fleet, plus every warbird in both the Klingon and Romulan navies through. BUT, it was just plain fun, something that had been pretty well drained from the series at that point.
The book WASN’T translated to the screen; the book and the move were created at the same time.
My understanding is that 2001 followed a lot of cheesy giant tarantula “sci-fi” movies, and caused such a stir in movie history just because of the special effects and the vision of the future, regardless of the groovy light show and the mysterious flat ending. “He winds up as an old man in a fancy hotel room? And… a baby??”
My vote would go for E.T., but I’m not even sure if that’s really SF. It’s a kids’ adventure movie propped up by John Williams’s soaring music.
So I’ll just go along with Close Encounters of the Third Kind, a lumbering title if ever there was one. Not that it’s a bad movie, but it builds and builds and builds to this climactic scene at the top of the Devil’s Tower, and then the movie is over. It’s really about this ordinary schmoe who thinks he might be losing his mind. The scene where his wife finds him crying in the bathroom, with the shower running to cover the sound, and the kids being frightened to tears by Mom’s hysterics, is really moving. Also the early scenes where the grownups are beginning to grasp that Something Is Going On Here, the same way they did in Jaws: the Indians chanting the five tones and, when asked where they heard these tones, pointing straight up; the traffic controllers talking to the pilots who saw… something… but no, they don’t want to file a report; little Barry’s toys animating themselves, and Barry running out of the house and disappearing, as the sky boils with strange clouds; the scene at the railroad crossing with Roy in his truck, waving the cars around him as he consults his road map, and one of the cars goes straight up; a few people from all over the country get these strange compulsions to leave home, and the government tries to frighten them off with slaughtered livestock and birds. Good stuff, very understated, but then! Big Climactic Scene! The aliens land! Pictures and video are taken! The five tones are played and recorded, we exchange some hand gestures, and Roy and a bunch of other people we’ve never seen before get on to the ship and fly away. What?? That’s the movie, right? This other stuff was just the introduction… and now the movie is over. What?? 
:mad:
I saw SW when it first came out on the big screen. It’s extremely cheesy SF…and it was better film SF than I’d ever seen before. Bad writing, bad acting, and SF terms were thrown around when it was clear that nobody connected with the film had any idea what they meant. And still, it was better SF than most visual SF. I enjoyed it. I also enjoyed the British TV comedy Red Dwarf, though it too is cheesy as hell.
It’s quite possible that there are some great SF films that I haven’t seen, because I generally won’t see a movie if it’s labeled as SF or even fantasy. I’ve watched too many “SF” movies that had great reviews, and found them sorely lacking. I can enjoy some SF films if they’re mostly fun adventure stories. But if the movie takes itself very seriously, it had BETTER be great SF as well as having a good story.
This was going to be my pick. This film is an action-picture cliche–no better than, say, it’s contemporary Timecop–with a sheen of Egyptian mystique, yet it somehow spawned multiple TV series, books (comic and paperback), video games… A perfect example of how bland inoffensiveness seems to lead to an overrated popularity.
To be fair Timecop also spawned a TV series, which I believe withered and died in a matter of hours after its 1997 debut.
I’ve always maintained that you can’t truly appreciate 2001 unless you’re viewing it as it was meant to be seen…in a big screen movie theater, which is absolutely filled with pot smoke. Then it makes sense. 