I remember seeing it on a college campus, and the scene where the flight attendant (space attendant?) walks down the aisle, then walks up the wall until she is upside-down and walks off, got a round of applause!
Last Starfighter was pretty good when it came out and I liked it a lot back then. I don’t know how well it holds up now, but I’d think it’s worth watching again. But yeah, not the best science fiction movie ever.
My nomination for overrated is the Nolan Batman trilogy. In his movies, Batman is just another angry action star who got Iron Man’s armor and painted it black. A lot of people called Dark Knight one of the greatest movies ever, not just the best superhero movie ever, but something that transcends the genre and all that. I found it overblown with too much side stuff with the guy who figures out Bruce Wayne’s identity, the side trip to Asia, Two Face suddenly deciding to go bad because the Joker visited him in the hospital, the Joker’s intricately overplanned war of chaos, the ferryboat scene, and Batman’s too stiff and too growly.
I’m going with Blade Runner as well.
Visionary filmmaking and art direction, but the sleepy, noiresque story just doesn’t match the epic backdrop.
FWIW, I consider 2001 and Close Encounters to be two of the best SF films ever made.
E fucking T
I’m out bitches
<drops microphone>
Yeah, Alien was stupid, but it at least it was fun stupid. It was for me anyway.
Looking over the list of top-rated SF films on IMDb, I’d say it’s a tie between The Matrix and Brazil.
There are two SF films that fans talk about in hushed voices…one is 2001. but I think in many ways it deserves much the respect, for the chances it took and the innovations it introduced. The other one is Forbidden Planet and while I love the film (and Ann Francis, of course) the adulation it receives is probably a bit much. It was a B movie dressed up (or down in Francis’s case) to look A. It had one fading A-list star and a couple of rising B-listers (who knew Neilson was going to discover comedy in his golden years? Or that Taz [come on, don’t tell me you didn’t notice the resemblance to the ID] would discover cartoons).
But the worshipful cult status?..I don’t know.
Okay, using that list, ones that I think are bad films and find bafflement in their popularity (and that I’ve seen, of course) is…
- Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind - though I’m not sure if it was a bad movie or just an unwatchable one, since the camerawork was making me nauseous, so I’ll skip that one.
…
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Star Trek (2009) - terrible film, written by someone with no knowledge of (and possibly active disinterest in) plot logic or standards of military behaviour.
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Avatar - deserves mention just for the awesome amount of money it made and clearly did not deserve.
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Children of Men - an irritatingly stupid film.
And I’ll stop at the first 50.
I really enjoyed every film mentioned in this thread. Apparently my taste exactly lines up with conventional wisdom.
2001 “wins” over Blade Runner by a nose.
Of course, the Most Overrated Science Fiction Movie Thread could well be this one. 
I’m going to go with The Matrix. Now, let me make this clear, I liked The Matrix. But I still think it’s overrated. The problem is that so many people think it’s this incredibly deep philosophical statement. It’s not. What it is, though, is big explosions, slow-motion gunfights, and Carrie Ann Moss in a catsuit, and it does a really good job at that.
Checking the list…Inception is at #2 - so I will go with that. I love Memento and Nolan’s overall thoughtfulness and approach, but Inception felt, to me, like it was a big set-up for the layered-dreams set piece, which was cool but does not, in and of itself, warrant “great movie” status. I found the characters wooden, and DiCaprio flat. I don’t see this movie aging well.
2001 should not be seen at home. It needs to be seen on the big screen. Not just because of the spectacle, but mainly because it’s an immersive experience. You want to get sucked into it, without being distracted by the cat or the phone or whatever’s on the stove.
It is very slow. But that’s a feature, not a bug.
Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker.
Probably too obscure to qualify as ‘the most overrated,’ but no other film has such a gaping chasm between its reviews as one of the greatest films ever made and my experience of it as utterly dull, overlong and with a barely existent plot.
The bug is that Kubrick apparently could not decide what movie he was trying to make. There’s this cosmic theme at each end about ETs influencing human evolution, and sandwiched in between there’s this completely unrelated, entirely different kind of story about an AI going crazy. Both good stories, but they don’t belong in the same picture. It’s like the studio just had a script or pitch for the latter story lying around and Kubrick needed some filler. I hope that’s how it was, because I’d sure hate to put that crime on Clarke.
It’s kinda like From Dusk till Dawn in that regard – classic Tarantino story with crazy-dangerous criminals on the run morphs midway into a goreschlock vampire movie – but, at least there’s a clean break in the middle and it remains a vampire movie to the end.
I was refering one of the films mentioned, to my friend:
Me “As a movie, it sucked.”
Friend “Yeah, but as device for getting a whole bunch of people to sit together in a dark room, it was a success!”
Ya know, I was about onboard with tomcar, because A.I. was wretched dreck, but having sat thru Stalker once, I think I have to agree with you that this is absolutely the worst supposedly-SF movie that has ever been made, and/or that could ever be made.
I second 2001 A Space Odyssey and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. But I must add Soylent Green; Silent Running; The Matrix; and of course Avatar.
I believe that the most popular interpretation (uniting the middle and ends) is…
The beginning Dawn of Man sequence shows the monolith inspiring proto-humans to invent the first tool. The bone segues to a spaceship. The colonization of the moon trips an alarm to the culture behind the monoliths. Shortly thereafter one of man’s tools (HAL) turns against humans and begins to usurp them. The concluding Starchild sequence implies humans have moved (again with the help of the monolith) into a post-tool stage of development – a new, necessary progression. The stories are connected.
I love CE3K. The film ending is perfect and I don’t need to see the inside of the spaceship or “what happens next.” 
Since the thread is about “over-rated” and not just “bad”, I’ll go with Blade Runner.
ID4 Independence Day What ever you want to call it.
Also Bladerunner. I don’t care which version.
And To Kill a Mockingbird. Where is the sci-fi?