Jaws was before the other two; it was released in 1975.
Anybody else come in here expecting Escape from Alcatraz, Dirty Harry, and Bullit?
How about Phase IV? One of the great underrated SF movies of the period, in my opinion.
Also, any story dealing seriously with eugenics would, I think, be SF by definition, whether or not it’s “futuristic.” SF doesn’t have to deal with an alternate future; it deals merely with an alternate world based on some scientific or technological tweak. Flowers for Algernon (aka Charly) and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind are both technically SF despite the dearth of rayguns, rocketships and busty extraterrestrial nymphomaniacs.
A fictional parallel history of ancient Rome, including an aggressive and organized program of eugenic planning, would, in my opinion, qualify as SF, as long as the author is paying attention to the underlying genetics as part of the story.
For another example, focusing on a different area of human history, see Kim Stanley Robinson’s Years of Rice and Salt.
It appears I referenced Jaws 2 in IMDB. So I think it’s safe to say that as arguably the first special effects driven “blockbuster” type movie, it paved the way for the success of Star Wars, etc.
Probably the biggest factors in the content of sci-fi movies of any decade is the prevailing attitudes of the time, that societies vision of the future and the technology available.
The only movies from the 50s or 60s I recall are War of the Worlds, When Worlds Collide and The Day the Earth Stood Still, Invasion of the Body Snatchers and the assorted giant bug/monster movies. If any of those movies have anything in common, I would have to say it is society as a whole fighting against some external invador or threat.
Most of the 70s movies Little Nemo mentioned are dystopia fiction that address issues within society itself. This is not surprising as the Vietnam war left many people questioning the established institutions that up until then, people had taken for granted as working.
The threat of the Cold War and concerns about the economy continued the drive many of the dystopian movies in the 80s - Mad Max, Escape From New York, 12 Monkeys, Blade Runner, Terminator, The Day After as well as darker sci-fi like Aliens or The Thing. Even more lightharted movies like Robocop or Total Recal portrayed a world that was exceedingly violent and dysfunctional. You also had a plethora of Star Wars clones and knock offs like The Last Starfighter and the Star Trek films.
If I were to describe a theme of sci-fi movies from the last 10-15 years, it would be maintaining humanity in the face technology that has the potential of not just altering society, but what it means to be human - The Matrix, AI, Minority Report, Gattaca, etc. This would, of course, reflect the rapid advances and changes that have taken place in society during that time.
And of course you still have the summer blockbuster fireworks displays like Jurrasic Park, Armegeddon, Starship Troopers and Transformers.
I’m not very familiar with it, so I wouldn’t know how to arbitrarily dismiss it as ‘not pure SF, but just [something] in an SF setting’ - but I bet it could be done, because I think the distinction lies largely in the imagination and aesthetics of the observer.
It’s more of a slide show than a film, really. And it’s only 28 minutes long. It’s available on YouTube, for the curious.
The Star Trek films? “Clones and knock offs” of Star Wars? :eek: :mad: Pistols at dawn, madame.
I think the one two punch of Star Wars and Aliens at the box office did set back idea/concept S/F films for a bit. Flash Bang and using other genre plots and setting them in space (LOST PATROL IN SPACE… HIGH NOON IN SPACE etc etc) appealed to Hollywood producers and the average film goer.
There are still some good idea films being made (I liked Children of men quite a bit) but they generally don’t get the treatment or money that the latest Whiz bang special effdects extravaganza will get.
In all fairness The first Trek film’s special effects were heavily influenced by the success of Star Wars.
Swooping shots over the Klingons and what not.
I’m with you and not with you. Real, written sf has the same issues as post-77 movie sf. Star Wars is indeed pulp space opera - but what’s more science-fictiony than that? Are you accusing Leigh Brackett and C. L. Moore of not writing sf? It may not be at the intellectual level of 2001, but it is sure sf.
Outlands on the other hand is indeed a western, created no doubt by the need of the studio to make an sf film even if they had no ideas. But even that isn’t new. The very first issue of Galaxy, from 1950, had a back cover ad titled “You’ll Never See it in Galaxy” with a chunk of a western on the left side and a chunk of an sf story - with a blaster instead of a six-gun, on the right. Blish called this the “call a rabbit a smerp” story.
SF has always been good at social commentary, partly because you can disguise criticism (done during the McCarthy era) and partly because you can magnify and expand a trend to examine it, like The Space Merchants.
Having lived through the period, btw, I didn’t notice any great decrease in quality after Star Wars. SF movies were 90% crap before and 90% crap after. The heap after might have been a bit higher, that’s all.
Science fiction films say less about the future, and more about the times they are made & originally viewed in.
SF films from the late 60s/early 70s expressed (exploited) the countercultural fear that society was falling apart to the point that it was unrepairable, and needed to be replaced by something new:
2001: A Space Odyssey - the astronauts are assailed by their own computer that has grown smarter & more resourceful than they have. After the lone surviving astronaut deactivates the computer (i.e. destabilizes the impersonal machine ‘running society’), he evolves into a higher being…apparently by means of psychedelic hallucinations!
Planet of the Apes - the fear that our society is being overwhelmed and taken over by lower-class people with ‘baser’, more primal, less sophisticated instincts.
Soylent Green - rampant poverty & population expansion to the point that poverty stricken folks are considered cattle to be processed by large impersonal corporations.
Whereas in the late 70s / early 80s, you can neo-conservative Reaganism all over the Star Wars & Star Trek films: the clearly delineated good guys fighting & triumphing against clearly delineated evil menaces., just as they did in “the good ol’ days.” (“A long, long time ago…”) Logic & reason are tossed out the window in favor of a comforting fantasy.
“Science fiction is a branch of fantasy identifiable by the fact that it eases the “willing suspension of disbelief” on the part of its readers by utilizing an atmosphere of scientific credibility for its imaginative speculations in physical science, space, time, social science, and philosophy.” -Sam Moskowitz (Source)
Themes and plot points do not define science fiction. High technology does not define science fiction. It’s how much effort is put into appearing scientific. Jurassic Park has the animated video about the cloning process and scientists as characters. The Matrix at least has Morpheus explaining the history and purpose of the Matrix. Terminator, Total Recall, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, I, Robot, and others all explain the technology in a realistic way before dealing with the consequences of it later. Star Wars is NOT science fiction. Star Wars did next to nothing in explaining its technology, just a few sciency terms regarding hyperspeed. As Eric Foreman said, you either buy it or you don’t. In fact, it killed real science fiction cimema for years.
Wonderfully put and absolutely correct. This could be the thesis of an A-grade final paper in a science fiction cinema college course. I compared Mars Attacks! to H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds book. (Hey, that was the assignment; it was fun.)
Interesting. There is definately no gray in George Lucas flicks. Good or bad, nothing else.
Well, I’d say that the three eras defined in the OP are correct. The giant bug/Plan 9 era of the 50s, the sometimes whacky dystopias of the “seventies”, and the post Star Wars era.
It’s not that we don’t have real science fiction movies post Star Wars, it’s that a whole new genre of blockbuster movies became mainstream. And these blockbuster movies might have science fiction ideas (like the memory implants in Total Recall), but aren’t really about those science fiction ideas but rather about the spectacle. It’s easy to imagine a science fiction movie about the consequences of artificial memories with no gun battles or explosions, except such a movie wouldn’t be a summer blockbuster.
I watched Silent Running the other day, and was struck by how WEIRD that movie was. I mean, now that there are no forests or plants left on Earth, how in the world do people survive? They eat synthetic food (and think cantelopes stink), but honestly, where does the synthetic food come from? The government has the resources to build a fleet of forest ships…but wouldn’t it be a lot cheaper to, you know, build a bunch of domes on Earth? The weird thing is that Silent Running is decrying the destruction of the ecosystem, and yet it’s presented entirely as an aesthetic issue, totally ignoring the reality that if the ecosystem goes down the tubes human beings are going to be extinct along with everything else.
You know, you could say exactly the same thing about the new Battlestar Galactica series - which is, IMHO, the best science fiction ever shown on TV.
Well, of course they don’t get the money, because they don’t need the money. Special effects are expensive.
And I don’t agree that science fiction must necessarily explore the scientific aspects in depth. That might be a workable definition of hard science fiction, but you can still have good soft SF which is non-explanatory.
I also don’t agree that good SF movies are a dying breed. There’s just as many now as there ever were; it’s just harder to find them, hiding behind the big explosion movies. There is, perhaps, a problem with the studios not knowing how to promote good SF movies.
Anybody here see Primer, from a couple of years ago? Mind-bending time-travel SF, with nary a computer-generated critter or vehicle in sight. And its explanation of how the time machines work is limited to about thirty seconds of inspired Treknobabble, nothing more. 
The 1950s produced several SF films far superior to the 1970s films, IMHO.:
The Day the Earth Stood Still
Forbidden Planet
Destination Moon
It! The Terror from Beyond Space
The Lost Missile
Kronos (For sheer technical beauty – the film is dumbed than a bag of rocks)
The Quatermass Xperiment (AKA The Creeping Unknown)
Quatermass 2 (AKA Enemy From Space, an underappreciated classic)
Panic in Year Zero
50 Million Miles to Earth
Earth vs. The Flying Saucers
When World Collide
and the UR-Monster Movie
The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. It has all the cliche elements – except it was the very first one, so it wasn’t a cliche then. Very good writing and acting, and Harryhausen invented his “Dynamation” technique to make it because he couldn’t afford to do effects the way they had in “King Kong”
If you allow the 1950s to spill over into the 1960s (as you let the 1970s bleed that way), you have
Robinson Crusoe on Mars
Your 1968 movies ought to include the oft-overlooked
Quatermass and the Pit (AKA Five Million Years to Earth
Oh, yeah, also
**The Thing
The Fly
Four-Sided Triangle**
There was a book published in the 1970s called Science Fiction Gold about the great SF films of the 1950s, but I think they included too many clunkers.
Hmm.
Taking into account the comments of Sage Rat and the OP, I’m afraid I have to agree with Mangetout. The distinction is arbitrary.
Let me look at some of the OP’s 70s films that I’ve seen through Sage Rat’s lens:
The Andromeda Strain: What if a sample-return mission to space returned something dreadfully harmful that we did not know how to contain? A classic sci-fi theme. But then again, it’s about our explorations into the unknown giving us negative consequences in the form of an infectious agent that we are not immune to. You could make the exact same movie about the Columbian Exchange.
A Clockwork Orange: If we as a society could take free will away from terrible criminals so that they could no longer commit their crimes, should we?
Nothing really science related here except the means by which the removal takes place. The mechanism could just as easily be a wizard’s magic spell, so this is really a morality play with a psychological setting.
Dark Star: What if we put Cheech and Chong in space? Nuff said.
Logan’s Run: What if, to preserve what the powers that be have decided are limited resources for the most vital masses, we got rid of all members of the population over age 30?
Or, more generally, what if a segment of the population were deemed useless and dispensible? Only -the presumably post-nuclear war setting makes this anything but a WWII Holocaust film.
The Man Who Fell to Earth: What if there were an alien who-looked exactly like a heroin-addicted David Bowie? No, sorry. If a man appeared with great gifts for our society, but had ways and a nature so different from ours that we could not regard him as a true person despite outward appearances, would we ultimately accept or reject him? A racism parable with the outer space alien aspect thrown in.
etc. etc. Your mileage may vary. In fact your mileage will vary, which is my point. None of these classic “pure” sci fi films really need the science element to make their point, any more than Star Wars, from my point of view. Others may feel it’s essential.