Equilibrium is underrated.
Justus E. McQueen played L.Q. Jones who was one of the Marines in the movie “Battle Cry” from the novel by Leon Uris
A 1997 Canadian movie called “The Cube”. Alot of people didnt but I liked it.
Another childhood memory this brings back of watching “Silent Running”.
Bruce Dern was bothersome, but I remember getting all choked up at the very end, seeing the cute little robot Hewey(?) tending to the greenhouse, all by himself.
It is incorrect to call it a “remake,” but it was perceived to be related.
Though, in the end Ebert doesn’t seem to really get Brazil, and doesn’t like it.
I liked it, too.
The robots, which Trumball designed based on the ability of the legless man in Freaks, were an influence on Joel Hodgkin’s concept of the “robot pals” trapped on a space station in MST3K. He said another influence was the scene in The Omega Man of Charlton Heston watching Woodstock over and over in the empty theater and talking to the screen.
Combine Heston’s movie-watching and the robots from* Silent Running* with some snark and you get MST3K.
I watched that movie over andover as a kid on the Saturday morning SF/horror movie series, The World Beyond in Phoenix.
The setting and fossilized crash-landed alien crew of Mario Bava’s Planet of the Vampires is also often cited as an influence on Alien.
Never thought about it before, but you’re right about the Heinleinian feel - Ray Milland seems a lot like the father in “Farnham’s Freehold.” There were quite a few borderline novels at the time set after a nuclear strike, and encouraging people to toughen up and do what had to be done - Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank being one that comes to mind.
Heinlein got ripped off quite a bit by low-budget SF films and TV (even though he was willing to sue, and sometimes won). The Puppet Masters has to hold some kind of record for being plagiarized, everything from The Brain Eaters to Star Trek to Outer Limits to* Independence Day.* When it was finally adapted by Disney, it didn’t have the snap it would have had if made before all the copies. I still have a fondness for it, though. Donald Sutherland was good and I always liked Julie Warner.
The SF/Horror hybrid, X- The Man with X-Ray Eyes, also with Milland, had a very memorably creepy feel to it.
It was. In fact, Alien looks as it it was cobbled together from ideas from 1950s-1960s films. The plot and many details and the ending from It! The Terror from Beyond Space, the Foggy, windblown planet with crashed alien spaceship, and the Skeleton of the Dead Alien Pilot, from Planet of Vampires, and the Alien Creature deposited its alien babies inside the human, like an ichneumon wasp from Night of the Blood Beast*
*The idea of the “Alien Monster Loose on a Spaceship” appears to have first been used by A.E. vanVogt in his first published story, Black Destroyer. The meme of “Alien Creature Lays its Eggs in a Living Human” seems to have first been used by van Vogt in his second published story, Discord in Scarlet. Interestingly, both were combined into a single novel when van Vogt wrote bridging material to form these and others stories in a “fix-up” (his term) called The Voyage of the Space Beagle, first published in 1950 (well before Alien, or even it!)
http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?8401
So Dan O’Bannon and company could’ve gotten a couple of key ideas from one piece of literary SF. But I get the feeling that they were more cinematically influenced, and so argue that their influences wwere the above films. In any case, the films have more of Alien in them than van Vogt’s book.
Zardoz, granted it was weak in places…at times it was down-right fun.
I also liked Quiet Earth out of proportion to its general success, and I liked Until the End of the World a few years later also.
Last time I dropped acid (Dec, 23/93) I watched that, and seriously regretted it.
My synapses are still awry.
“THEM!”
The film had a cast oozing with talent, & the director really did some fun things with lighting & shadows.
Still trying to figure out the ending. I think I settled on …damn i don’t know how to make spoiler boxes.
I saw this as a midnight movie about 1980. I found it on a DVD a couple years ago and they had deleted the “Insert the navigation tape” beginning…maybe too few viewers would have understood…
Plus - I’ve ridden a Greyhound through Benson, Arizona and my '67 Mustang has the same gearshift as their spaceship! 
A relatively recent movie that didn’t get a lot of attention: Predestination, with Ethan Hawke. It’s a twisty tale–and a bit gimmicky for that–but well done.
I also enjoyed Under the Skin, starring Scarlett Johansson, but it’s not going to be everyone’s cup of tea. Moody and weird and trippy. Unsettling, in a good way.
I’m not sure if these count as science fiction, but I really liked:
Coherence - A meteor passing by the earth causes unexpected weirdness.
These Final Hours - It’s the end of the world as we know it, Australian version.
Related to the above, Mine Games is a horror movie very reminiscent of Coherence. So good.
I also enjoyed both of those.
How do we all feel about Outland? I’ve heard the “High Noon in Space” criticisms but I rather enjoy it.
I was somewhat disappointed to discover that the recent Outlander series did not in fact take place in a mining colony on Io.
Outland[ is kinda fun, but seriously dumb. Seriously. It starts with the bodies exploding when they get into vacuum (doesn’t happen – Arthur C, Clarke had been on a mission to disprove it, and this film came out well over a decade after 2001) and continues with the idiocy of Connery’s character disposing of evidence for no good reason, the space suits with lights inside the helmets, and the by-now standard idiocy of guys shooting at windows in a vacuum environment.
But if you really want to see a good takedown of this film, Harlan Ellison pretty much eviscerates the entire psychology and concept in a wonderful piece published in Omni: Screen Flights, Screen Fantasies in 1984. Sadly, it has not been reprinted ( Title: Outland: Out of its Mind But, Sadly, Not Out of Sight ) “Outland: Out of its Mind, but , Sadly, Not Out Of Sight” is cathartic.
Looking up Outland on IMDB I notice that the first guy to explode (due to “spiders”) was played by John Ratzenberger. It amuses me to imagine the character as Cliff Clavin, calmly explaining why opening your suit to let imaginary spiders out is perfectly rational.