I’m not saying there were no good SF films made before 1968 or after 1977 - there are too many counterexamples to offer for either period. But what originally started me thinking along these lines was when I was making a list of what I considered good SF movies and I noticed how many of them were made in a single decade.
To me, the central theme of science fiction is “what would it be like if things were different?” If you’re exploring an idea like “what would it be like if everybody was killed when they were thirty?” or “what would it be like if an intelligent human arrived in a world where apes were intelligent and humans were animals?” or “what would it be like if overpopulation got so bad we started running out of food?” These are science fiction ideas - they wouldn’t work in a western or a film noir or a horror movie.
Take Alien as a counterexample - it’s a great movie but it’s not really a science fiction movie. Sure it took place on a spaceship traveling to another planet but that was just the setting not the story. The story was “a group of people are trapped in an enclosed place with a monster that’s trying to kill them” - that’s a horror film plot. It could have just as easily have been set aboard an ocean liner or in a prison or an Antarctic base or snowbound hotel (and has been used in all these settings).
Or if they were found to be Jewish? Change that one aspect, and lose only the domed cities and the other techno-claptrap, and you’ve got a WWII Nazi Holocaust film.
Hmmm. A late 1960s film where the animals can communicate as well as we do and don’t necessarily hold human capacity for intelligence in high regard. You talkin’ Planet of the Apes or Dr. Doolittle?
You mean “what happens during widespread famine when resources are not available to support the populace through the crisis?” What’s inherently sci-fi about that theme? Why not set it in 1980s Ethiopia?
You may like those themes presented as sci-fi and not be able to imagine liking them if they were done without the sci-fi element, but that doesn’t mean that the science is any less dispensible than it is in Alien or Star Wars, ultimately. It seems more to be a matter of taste.
My counterexamples were to show that this was manifestly not true. For my money, Forbidden Planet, 2001, and The Day the Earth Stood Still were the top three SF movies of all time, and many of the others I list are in the top of my "all time best list. By comparison, I’m not all that impressed with a lot of the 1970s movies on your OP list.
I was disappointed with a lot of 1970s SF movies, but at least they were making more of them. I think Hollywood was too afraid people would be creeped out by real SF in the movies, and drew back or reigned in any SF. I think Star Trek showed it could be successful, and in the 1970s they started realizing there was a market for it. The magazine Cinefantastique pegged Logan’s Run as the start of the big-budget SF cycle. For what it’s worth, though, I thought Logan’s Run was awful, and I was disappointed in a lot of late 70’s flicks – Close Encounters, Alien (Give Me It! The Tereror etc. instead, any day), Outland,
it wasn’t until a bit later that the good SF started. 1982 was a bonanza –
The Thing
Star Trek II
Bladerunner
Tron
Firefox (depending upon how you define SF. Campbell, who called Fail-Safe SF, would’ve included it)
I’ll forgive them for E.T.
Wow, an amazing string of swings and misses. What I posted was my opinion. But after that you pretty much miscalled them all.
A society where everyone is killed when they turn thirty is not like a society where everyone who’s Jewish is killed. Because not everyone is Jewish. And those who are, are born Jewish; they don’t suddenly discover they’ve turned Jewish one day. Whereas in Logan’s Run, everyone was facing a death sentence for the same “crime” and knew the date of their execution. Describe a non-SF example of a society like that.
In Planet of the Apes, we had a society where an intelligent being was forced to deal with a world where his appearance marked him as a non-intelligent animal. It’s not an uncommon idea in SF, but again I can’t think of any non-SF examples.
Soylent Green was set in a world where hunger had become a universal condition and society had organized and institutionalized around it. Again, I cen’t think of a non-Sf example of such a society.
And finally, where did you get the idea that I only like SF movies and dislike anything else? I love horror movies and westerns and romantic comedies and action thrillers and gangster movies and historical epics and buddy films and chick flicks and biopics and screwball comedies and animated features and erotic noirs and teen comedies - and I’m able to recognize that there are differences between these genres. Science fiction movies are a genre - some science fiction movies are good and some are bad but they still share some common features which they don’t share with other genres.