Oddly enough, I saw the movie as a kid (and without chemical enhancement 
) and I got the “point” right away: the monolith-makers were basically making people evolve, as they had from apes to humans, and space-baby was just the next step. The trip to Jupiter was the graduation-exercise, to see if humans were ready to take that next step.
Interesting. I love Blade Runner, and I think it’s one of the best art-pieces created to ask questions about artificial consciousness and its philosophical implications. Definitely watch the non-voiceover version, though, IMO.
I’ll go with the Star Trek reboot. The plot holese in it were so big, and the McGuffin was so goofy, that I was unable to enjoy it. Overall I’m just not impressed with JJ Abrams’s work.
I saw 2001 A Space Oddessy in L.A.'s CineramaDome, the way God intended you to see it.
My 3 friends fell asleep. 
I’m a big Phillip K. Dick fan, so my feelings about Blade Runner may contain some “I read the book first” disdain. But I don’t really believe so.
I think it’s possible to make a rich, profound film about the conflict between technological and non-technological cultures… but Avatar wasn’t it. And I think it’s possible to make a profound film based around the question, “If a manufactured being is indistinguishable from a human, how do you define human?” …but I didn’t think Blade Runner was it. The question itself was pretty old hat for book science fiction. And there was the scene where a female android attacks Decker by turning flips toward him that struck me as really stupid – not as bad as Legolas shield surfing in Return of the King, but indicative of a director trying to be cute instead of honest.
Still, I’d like to see the alternate version. I greatly preferred the director’s cut of Das Boot, so now I’m interested in such things.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind, hands down. Most other Sci-fi movies I can at least remember an alien or a spaceship or some other futuristic or otherworldly concept that might be interesting. From Close Encounters I remember the tune they play (why?), the pile of mashed potatoes(Why?) and lots of bright lights (WHY?) It’s a string of magical events all explained at the end with, “It’s aliens!” See almost any Spielberg movie for the same crap, over and over.
I want to say Avatar (Dances With Smurfs is spot on) but it did at least try. If they had only bothered to hire a writer it could have been good.
When 2001 first came out, my parents let my sister see it at the twin theater. She was 9 or 10. Afterward she told us it was about monkeys, so I didn’t actually bother seeing it until I hit college. What a surprise! Now I wonder what movie was in the other theater because clearly Sis pulled the theater switch on our parents.
An intelligently-designed one, of course. The Na’vi aren’t the dominant lifeform on Pandora; Eywa is. I thought the movie was clear enough about that, even though they don’t say it directly.
This also explains why the Na’vi are humanoid, rather than being hexapodal like all the other Pandoran vertebrates. Eywa’s been monitoring us for a while, and knew we’d eventually come for a visit, so she developed a species specifically for purposes of interacting with us when we came.
As I already pointed out, I did see it when it originally came out, and my reaction was “meh” then.
I don’t care much about special effect. I can suspend disbelief if they look a bit cheesy (as in Star Trek: TOS, for example), but I want a decent plot, engaging characters, and (in SF particularly) interesting ideas. Star Wars had none of these.
Wasn’t it a long time ago (and a galaxy far, far away) and not the future?
ETA: Oh, my pick is Bladerunner of the SF movies I’ve seen. Snooooozeville and Harrison Ford is one of the worst successful working actors around IMHO.
I like the old meme of "aliens as hostile to humans "-starting with HG Wells’ “War of the Worlds”. There’s something neat about aliens who come to evict us…and regard us as so much animal life. Too bad none of H.P. Lovecraft’s “Cthulu” stories never made it to the big screen-he had the “ultimate” aliens-beings so superior that they don’t even notice (or care anything) about us.
If by that you mean "The first movie about space travel where everything looked dirty and “lived in”, then I submit that the honor really goes to Dark Star.
Actually, the honor really goes to Washington Irving, who beat Wells to the punch by half a century with his “Invasion from the Moon”, whicgh also featured aliens treatuing earth people explicitly as Europeans treated “third world” colonies, and using magical ray weapons.
CalMeacham, nitpicker of First Claims
When I saw it for the first time, as a kid, I wasn’t smoking anything. It’s just that about half the audience was adding to the atmosphere, as was common in those days with certain movies. Tommy was another movie that had a haze of illegal smoke in the theater.
I also got the point, but that’s because I’d read Clarke’s “The Sentinel”, which he based the book and movie off of.
I don’t think anyone liked the first Star Trek movie so I’d dispute the idea that it’s overrated.
Personally, I found both Silent Running and Logan’s Run to be terrible.
I came in to mention Stalker as well. AI was in the running as well.
I really wanted to like Stalker. I liked the book for its take on an alien visitation and dangerous exploration. The movie gave us completely different.
Where to start?
Star Trek reboot was horrible, especially Kirk & Spock (Scotty & McCoy were pretty good).
Superman re-boot was equally bad- horrible terrible plot, and a incredibly bad Lois Lane.
Another re-boot that was Horrible was Planet of the Apes.
(Hmm are all SF re-boots bad? Can anyone think of a good one in the last decade or so?)
Alien wasn’t a SF film, it was a Horror film set in a spaceship.
Matrix was flashy and fun, but if you thought about it, dumb as a bag of hammers.
Avatar was beautiful and awe inspiring with fantastic effects, too bad they spent all the budget on CGI instead of a script.
Going by bibliophage’s link, I was surprised that Inception came in at #2, the plot sucked and had giant holes. Over-rated, but still worth watching, certainly.
Star Wars (ANH), Blade Runner and 2001 are all great films, IMHO.
Until today never even *heard of *“Stalker”.
I’m going with Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. To me it played out like a television episode. The cast was painfully older. The plot seems dated with the theme being parallel to the fall of the USSR. And worst of all Capt. Kirk actually surrenders in battle. The Capt. Kirk we all know would have never surrendered in the past.
I actually enjoy the much-hated fifth film more.
The guy was fixated on building the structure of the mesa the contact was to occur at - sort of like the aliens were forcing the image into his mind and he kept making it out of mashed potatoes, drawing it on everything he could doodle on, and eventually he was driven to drive to the mesa. Once he saw the mesa he stopped the compulsion to draw/sculpt/dream about it.