I’m gonna nominate the first Star Trek movie, which because it was such a disappointment was the last movie I ever waited hours in line for to see it on opening night. Dreadfully dull.
My second nomination is Avatar, which was getting stellar reviews, and while it was visually interesting was a diaper load of cliche-ridden script shit.
Yes, Dances With Smurfs sux. Especially as, you know, SF. On Pandora, every vertebrate-analogue is born with the neural equivalent of a USB port that allows it to connect directly with the nervous system of any other vertebrate-analogue including those of different species. What evolutionary process could produce that?!
Planet of the Apes, for me. That or Soylent Green.
I’m sensing a common thread, there…
Well you lose. I am 60 and I saw it on first release. Fuck special effects. I liked Science Fiction that told a good story and gave me something to think about. That included most print science fiction (I mean words, not comics), and stuff like Star Trek (TOS). Star Wars did not give me any of that. The storyline is simplistic and clichéd, and there is nothing thought provoking at all, just explosions and heroics, but in spaceships rather than on horses.
I am sure you are right that it has had a huge influence on science fiction movie making since. Not for the better.
I agree. The parts of 2001 are great (especially visually), but they do not seem to go together, and the whole is less than the sum of them. If there was an underlying, unifying theme in Kubrick’s or Clarke’s mind, it really was not brought out at all well.
I am a Starwars fan, but I think it’s really overrated.
The Empire Strikes Back was an excellent excellent film, but all the others had flaws. Return of the Jedi was disorganised and most scenes either failed to work or were painful.
The film most people regard as the “Best of the Prequels”, Revenge of the Sith had massive plotholes, and characters who acted with little logic and a lot of obedience to the needs of the plot.
The Empire Strikes Back was an excellent excellent film, but all the others had flaws. Return of the Jedi was disorganised and most scenes either failed to work or were painful.
Empire Strikes Back had one of the best twists at the end of it; I agree that Return of the Jedi was a letdown, but COME ON! Princess Leia’s scenes with Jabba the Hut are PRICELESS! I wonder what George Lucas had on his mind when he conceived those scenes.
I can think of two small things…
Stalker is such a curve ball to the genre. Tarkovsky used the film medium in such a different way. It is much more of an abstract, art film, than a Scifi film.
The book it is based on (Roadside Picnic), is a good, quick scifi read that is really cool. Movies like Stalker and The Man Who Fell To Earth are just to arty to be Scifi.
2 of my favorites.
I’m going with Star Trek on the basis that it’s unwatchable dross and I honestly cannot understand why so many people think it’s a good film. I suspect Avatar would be up there but I had the good sense not to watch it.
And how can you seriously suggest Blade Runner as the most overrated Sci-Fi film? It must be the only one you’ve ever seen! There are so many other examples of over-hyped films that are not just bad Sci-Fi but terrible, terrible films.
Thanks for writing my post for me. I would never consider CE3K one of the most overrated Sci-Fi films, but I totally agree that all the interesting stuff occurs well before the Mothership finally shows up. After that, it’s nothing but a special effects orgy, with little rhyme or reason.
I’m going, like several others, with the Star Trek reboot. Yes , there are a few clever scenes, and the leads do pretty good riffs on the Kirk/Spock/McCoy triangle, but the film itself is ridiculous from beginning to end.
I suspect a lot of people have a fanatic love for Star Wars, without thinking it’s Great Cinema. I know I think of the movies with great affection, and I can see how the leaps in special effects combined with a decent story and lovable characters made it special at the time, but I can also admit that there are plenty of awfully clunky elements. I think it helped immensely that I was 4 when IV was released and 10 when VI came out.
But also, it’s not really science fiction, is it? It’s a swashbuckling adventure a la 1938’s Robin Hood, set in a spacey, futuristic world.
For something that was allegedly Deep and got great reviews, but I thought sucked, how about Prometheus? The characters in *Alien *did dumb stuff that humans might actually do, whereas the Prometheus crew did dumb stuff that no one would ever do, merely to serve the plot. And the big questions that supposedly get raised never get any real treatment.
I read a35362’s comment to mean that he would have preferred the buildup to be cut to about 30 minutes of film time, and the rest movie dedicated to showing what Roy Neary experienced inside the ship, where the aliens came from, etc. Not that the “interesting stuff occurs well before the Mothership finally shows up”, but the exact opposite, really.
I could be mistaken, though…
Inception.
I win.
What prize to I get? 
She, not he! 
I was just saying (in a typically rambly way) that while I did find a lot of the movie interesting, it did seem to be building up to a Big Reveal that never came, really. Like the end (meeting the aliens face to face) was REALLY where the story begins, and… it wasn’t.
A lot of overrated SF stuff seems to act like the audience, not to mention the characters in the movie, have never seen or read any SF before. I mean, really: if we actually made contact with living, breathing space aliens, how would we react? Would we even be able to communicate with one another? Every single person on the planet would know about it, rumors and panic would run rampant, everything else would be put on the back burner while we tried to figure out what we can or should do, people would question God, the meaning of life, people would insist it was a hoax or an invasion, etc. Okay, so that’s not the movie Spielberg was going to make and that’s fine. But the hype surrounding the movie’s release made it sound like nobody has ever addressed the issue in SF before.
Oh, and Blade Runner: yes, she’s a droid. Who smokes. Get over it already! And turn some lights on, I can’t see a thing! 
The actual date isn’t important IMO. 1984 isn’t substantially less powerful just because its expiration date passed. (It has become a bit less relevant with the weakening of the big totalitarian regimes.) Nothing has happened to make Blade Runner’s vision of a future metropolis less likely. 2017 is just an arbitrary number. Like 2001.
Almost no one contends Avatar was more than a gorgeous film with a hackwork story. Star Trek films are mostly loved by Star Trek fans, but again, few see them as great movies. In my experience many people regard Blade Runner as a great film, – so it has a right to get nominated here. ( I sorta like Blade Runner, but view it as not much deeper than Avatar.)
You may be right. Typically I get pissed when someone contends that a best selling novelist (e.g. Vonnegut) isn’t science fiction, just because the style isn’t pulpy. But it may be possible for director’s concerns to be so personal as to make the SF elements of a story inconsequential. It’s might make a decent thread topic.
Similarly, I’ve been watching Miller’s Crossing on Netflix lately, and it’s so self aware that it’s as much about making a gangster movie and the joys of noir dialog as telling a story.
See my post at the top of this page…
Would it help you if they changed the year to 2087 instead of being this decade?
Star Wars is a definitely a movie that should be seen in context to be appreciated it. When I saw it the week it came out, I thought, Finally! A science fiction movie that got the effects right. I had never seen a science fiction movie before that looked exactly as I would have pictured it if I had read it.
If I saw it the first time today? Meh.