Just got done watching Moon (available on netflix streaming, if ya care), it’s good hard sci-fi.
Watched Pandorum a little bit ago and while kinda schmaltzy/horrory, I liked the world it created too.
Biggest Uberset selling move of all time?™ Avatar.
Sure seems like a good time to like Sci-fi.
ETA: Disctrict 9…ooh, that one too!
Still have not bothered to see avatar, if a movie spends as much time and money being hyped pre-release, it tends to make me not want to bother watching it. Just like I have refused to bother watching Moulin Rouge and Titanic. [I can categorically say that I have never seen more of the movie Titanic than a random trailer here and there, and enough to see that it is the Titanic before changing channels. Maybe a total of 15 minutes of footage from the movie tops.]
I really liked Moon, excellent premise, though a lot of people would find it very slow and boring [it is more like a 30s 40s paced movie.] Pandorum was interesting, though I figured out the plot twist fairly early. Good premise though. District 9 was interesting. The whole ghetto thing was oddly done though.
Liked Pandorum a lot, even tho it’s semi-flawed. (Can I say that?)
Loved District 9.
Haven’t seen Moon yet, but it’s in my Netflix queue.
Gotta give props to Serenity, 28 Days Later, Sleep Dealer and Ink as well. Thoroughly enjoyed all of them multiple times.
ooh, yeah, Serenety, and 28 days later are good answers, and the other two are added to my queue.
I’ll add Children of Men and 12 monkeys, although the latter is getting a little older than I’m interested in.
I liked Moon a lot–it is very derivative of classic sci-fi like 2001 and Solaris.
Inception was great!
The new *Star Trek *was brainless, but fun.
A couple of more: going back a few years, I thought Danny Boyle’s Sunshine was really good until the final act, and I loved Darren Aranofsky’s The Fountain.
Agree on Sunshine. It was scientifically accurate, for the most part, but the 3rd act really fucked up a good movie.
Agreed. What’s interesting is how anyone with a good vision can create a compelling sci-fi environment now. Any compelling in a way that, I dunno, eureka/stargate/Warehouse 13 are not.*
(* = don’t get me wrong, I like Vancouver Sci-fi, it all just doesn’t seem realistic.)
Alas, as a father with a busy schedule, Inception will have to wait til I can rent it at home.
In my opinion, the golden age of science-fiction movies was between 1968 and 1977. That was the era when science fiction was about ideas.
Then Star Wars came along and science fiction became about impressive special effects.
So all you kids get off my lawn.
It’s not all about that. Children of Men, for instance, had no obvious special effects at all. And even before Star Wars, there were still plenty of movies that boasted of their amazing effects; they just weren’t as good at it.
There were plenty of pre-Star Wars films that were crap, too. And many that boasted their special effects over coherent story-telling. It’s just that they haven’t endured beyond Saturday afternoon UHV filler.
District 9 was an excellent film not just due to the effects but because of the subtext. Moon had impressive performances and set design, but the story doesn’t actually make a lot of sense, and it has some technical issues (the fantail of dust on the rovers, the speed of the ping pong ball). The same is true for Sunshine.
Stranger
Obviously any broad categorization is going to have exceptions.
There have been good idea-driven science fiction movies made since 1977 (and before 1968). But they’ve been the rare exception to a genre dominated by special effects.
And there were effects-driven SF movies made between 1968 and 1977. But that was the brief period when idea-driven SF movies were common.
I guess I’m curious as to what this wealth of pre-Star Wars thoughtful science fiction films consists of. SciFi cinema, by its nature, has always been a venue for flashy effects (for their time) as opposed to a thoughtful exploration of themes and extrapolation of technology.
Frankly, I wouldn’t even classify Star Wars as being science fiction at all, insofar as there is very little “science”, and what is in the film is badly mangled (using parsecs as a unit of time, for instance). The Star Wars films are part space opera, but draw even more heavily from war films like The Dam Busters and The Guns of Navarone, and traditional Westerns or samurai films. The presence of science-y elements is nearly incidental. For all intents and purposes you could reset the movie in Nazi Germany or feudal Japan with only a very modest retooling of the screenplay.
Stranger
That’s kind of my point. The story of Star Wars is basically “a bunch of good guys fight the bad guys” - not really an idea-driven script.
But look at movies (to give a few examples) like Capricorn One (“What if they faked a space mission?”); A Clockwork Orange (“What if criminals were given aversion therapy?”); Demon Seed (“What if a computer became self-aware and took over?”); Logan’s Run (“What if no one was allowed to live past twenty-nine?”); Planet of the Apes (“What if humans were treated like animals?”); Rollerball (“What if sports became propaganda?”); Soylent Green (“What would happen if we run out of food?”); Westworld (“What if robots ran wild?”). Or The Andromeda Strain or A Boy and His Dog or Dark Star or Death Race 2000 or The Man Who Fell to Earth or The Omega Man or Silent Running or The Stepford Wives or THX1138 or Zardoz. These were not movies that could have been remade as a western or a samurai movie or a WWII movie. And while some of them were drive-in fodder, they were at least making an attempt to rise above being just lasers and explosions (even Death Race 2000).
I dug Moon, Sunshine and Pandorum. Look forward to seeing Inception and Splice. I didn’t particularly like Surrogates, Jumper, The Island, and I’ve yet to hear a good word about The Box.
Others to consider could be:
Time Travel
Fetching Cody
The Butterfly Effect
Primer
Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel
The I Inside
The Jacket
Memory Manipulation
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Paycheck
The Final Cut
Idea-Driven
Solaris (the remake)
Cube
Code 46
Zathura (warning: kid’s movie, which I normally hate, but I liked it)
Southland Tales (from the guy who made Donnie Darko)
Though I saw all of these, my memory needed some help so I culled a bunch from an IMDb search you (or others posting to the thread) may find helpful.
Putting in >70 minutes and >100 user votes helps weed out a bunch of chaff.
EDIT: I believe it’s spelled nouveau.
Great post! And it used to be spelled that way. 
Nu is the New Nou. (Or I’m a crappy speller, you pick.)
ETA: Holy Crap, how could I miss Wall-E?
Some of the ones I’ve seen and liked that haven’t been mentioned yet:
Xchange (2000) was enjoyable. Fast moving and interesting in how it dealt with the premise.
Paprika (2006) is a gorgeous looking total mind fuck.
Predators was better than I expected. More of an action film than real Sci-Fi, though - much like the original. Great atmosphere - good sound track.
Alien Raiders - typical horror/action alien monster flick. A bit predictable, but fun and well made on a very low budget.
What Planet Are You From? alien-on-earth comedy - funnier and raunchier than I expected.
It certainly seems there is a bit of a Sci-Fi revival of late, but that’s not unexpected. These things are always cyclical as studios jump on and then over-exploit the current bandwagons.
I really, really like Moon. As has been pointed out it has some minor issues but that is almost unavoidable in film due to running length and narrative constraints. It clearly takes a lot of inspiration from 2001 while running with it’s own ideas. The robot side-kick in particular was clearly designed to play on viewer’s pre-conceptions from 2001 IMO. The slow pacing is also well used to evoke to same feelings of isolation and claustrophobia as in 2001.
I have yet to see a film that has as many ideas in as Dark Star though. Script writers were still nicking ideas from that film 10 years later.
Hey Time traveler, check your watch. Dark Star was 36 years ago.
I know 
I meant that a lot of films between 1974 and 1984 stole ideas from it. I was amazed to discover that the opening and most famous shot in Star Wars, where the ships fly directly over the camera, first appeared 5 years earlier in Dark Star. Seriously, the shot is almost identical.
Not bad for a low-budget space comedy!