A note from a concerned poster to no one in particular: this forum seems to attract the unlimited airing of opinion. I can understand nominating works that have not been mentioned, but the interest value of whether you just “liked” a work or not is usually limited. I for one read these boards not to receive simplistic yes/no opinions, but because I’m interested in what readers of these boards have to add to the discussion on particular works. Can we actually debate the merits of the works instead of simply polling or airing?
I liked it. I didn’t like it. It sucked. It blew. It was perfect. Beautiful. Trash. Boring. Snooze. Brilliant. Excellent. This is hardly salon discussion.
Of course people are interested in knowing whether you liked the film or not, but that’s when you incorporate your opinion into an intelligent discussion. Otherwise anyone can elicit perfectly valid “opinion lists” from anyone at all, in which case every single such list will be equally without merit. Well, now that that’s over with…
Chronos, I notice you’re speaking evil of Dark City again; do you have a reason this time for calling it “meaningless trash”? As far as Akira goes, I agree, I see nothing in this work to suggest it is one of the top 20 sci-fi films of all time. If they had to pick an important Japanese animation something like the earlier (and somewhat clunkier but more charming) Nausicaa springs to mind, although one is ultra-violent cyber-punk dorks and the other is post-apocalyptic insectia. Abandoning the “classics” they could easily have picked Ghost in the Shell or something equally interesting and stylish.
You later claim that Contact is deserving of inclusion among the greatest sci-fi films of all time. Care to expand on this? I found Contact of very little substance overall, with a presentation and development of themes that were practically pedestrian. Speaking of novels, you may be interested in the very interesting little book by Stanislaw Lem, His Master’s Voice, from which Sagan stole several main elements present in Contact (including much of the plot). Sagan is not a science fiction writer of any stature, but Lem, now there’s a writer…
(When Contact came out, I didn’t see a single reference to His Master’s Voice in any review of the film. That doesn’t seem right, considering that this is the writer who gave us Solaris).
Jurassic Park I notice has been adequately defended by RickJay and MattD. I don’t feel great enthusiasm for that film (and I’m ignoring the rather jocular sequels) but I have no difficulties recognizing the important good treatment of the dinosaur theme as far as films go).
Tuckerfan, I don’t understand why the decision to clone a selection of herbivorous AND carnivorous dinosaurs should make for a bad film. Is it a bad decision to raise large carnivores from the past? Possibly. But why does it make for a bad film? Don’t forget, the tragic flaw in Hammond is (predictably) hubris, in this case presuming he could play god with extinct animals of such power. Yes, he would have been better off cloning only the herbivores, but Hammond was driven by commercial interest to assume he could handle raising the T-Rex and velociraptors. Jurassic Park was meant to be the ultimate safari park, and a selection of dinosaurs was required for it. No doubt cloning only herbivores to begin with would have been smarter and safer, but that is a problem within the movie, not of the movie.
Star Wars fans, please calm down! Does the addition of a new section to the original Star Wars title really make a huge difference? Yes, the work is called Star Wars properly, or at least classically, but with the size of the Lucas franchise it is understandable that an extra few words have been tagged on to make reference simpler. After all, if you say “Star Wars” you could be talking about any of the 5 (so far) canonical films, a number of lesser films (Holiday Special, anyone?), a large number of books, video games, toys, etc. Star Wars has become the name of the franchise, and A New Hope makes it clear that you are talking about what has become Episode 4, and not about anything else or the entire franchise. Let’s face it, calling films by their episode numbers is not very appealing, nor does Star Wars: The Movie sound terribly slick, so there is a rationale of sorts behind tacking on A New Hope.
It’s fairly clear that Empire Strikes Back is a better film than Star Wars, but ESB is not the one that started it all…
Well ftg, Gattaca as a novel or short story would be nothing new, indeed it may even be boring since this material is not unusual in science fiction literature. The appeal of this film resides in its ideas, not in the action (otherwise you will find it quite boring). What we see in Gattaca is theoretically possible, and it raises important questions about the integration of social and hard sciences, and about society and the state(what is good for a society? Is a good society one filled with genetically perfect unswerving automata? How do the “advancement” concepts of technology and justice result in something as twisted as ‘Genoism’?- is it a problem with imperfect human nature or are there limitations to technological manipulation of human nature? Can we hope to maintain privacy of genetic information?). I think this “idea factor” alone is a significant achievement, because films normally do not communicate ideas quite as well as books do. I think Gattaca ultimately becomes too involved in melodrama though, so my opinion of it is tarnished in spite of its strong script and filming. By no means is this an embarrassment to the genre!
Close Encounters of the third Kind always struck me as a cop-out film, raising a big head of steam and then going nowhere with it. I have looked and looked again, and I can’t see why people rave about this film. I don’t see anything truly remarkable about it and even looking at the story there seems to be precious little there beyond journeying to a location and running into other confused people. I suppose the film has some interest when viewed allegorically, particularly the idea of chosen “disciples” converging on a bare mountain to partake in the pseudo-religious New Age ecstasy of contact with higher beings; but overall I’m afraid I just don’t get the appeal of this film. As a side note, I wonder if The Abyss deliberately imitated the ending?
By all the spirits, Miller, I hope you’re kidding! The setting of Tron alone is impressive, and how many gladiator films do you know that are as slick as this one? A purely artificial world with lightcycles and floating armoured tanks! There’s no question that the film descends into silliness every now and then, but many films do. Overall this film is certainly not without its merits, chief of which I consider the setting and the curiously effective and historically important special effects (especially in this day of careless CGI). But also consider–and you may have missed this when you were 12–that there is a story in Tron. A lot of people found that the jargon, the bewildering action, and the completely disorienting setting didn’t result in much of a story, but it’s there, and it’s more accessible today than it was 20 years ago. In 1982 people interested in computers and video games tended to be mostly kids, those who worked in computing, or hobbyists; today this film can speak to a much broader semi-computer-literate base without having to shift from the '80s. And it’s not at all Disney-like (but there is an emormous outline of a Mickey-Mouse head towards the end of the film when the camera pans across the dark and glittering computer landscape). Finally, Tron is the grand-daddy of the computer film and is considered seminal in this respect. Even if it weren’t it is a unique work and it would still be important simply for that reason. Like Harryhausen’s stop-motion work, Tron is not old and dated–it’s timeless.
(one thing I found the last time I viewed Tron is that the oppressive and claustrophobic graphics look infinitely better on the big screen than on a TV, and I have a fairly large-ish TV–it must be difficult to enjoy this film on very small screens).
Some people do find 2001 or sections of it boring, but the extra time just gives you time to think! It was made at a deliberate pace on purpose. Kubrick and Clarke really wanted to communicate what it must be like to take a months-long journey to another planet, or how it really feels to go on an EVA. You are made aware of enormous distances rolling by, whether it’s en route to Jupiter or speeding above the Lunar surface. The precision and gracefulness of celestial motion is also reflected in the pace and in the music (consider the sequence from the famous jump-cut to the completion of docking at the orbital station–I don’t think any other film I have seen brings together visuals, motion, and music is such harmony).
I’m not sure why you say the part with our ancestors lasted too long. Quite a lot of things happen in that sequence in spite of the poorly developed conversation skills involved, and I think compressing it would take away the neutral panoramic angle Kubrick was going for and replace it with a narrower expositional one. It would speed up the film, but this is not the kind of film you necessarily want to speed up, because you’ll almost certainly lose the hypnotic quality of the film and the “vastness” effect.
Somebody mentioned A.I. as missing from the list, but that is about as much of a science fiction film as Edward Scissorshands. In other words it’s not, it’s a fable despite its vague sci-fi trappings. And its ideas are rather basic, that I saw. A long and condescending film, I thought, and an opportunity lost–and I saw nothing in it that reminded me of Kubrick, whose project this was originally. I must however say that the performances of the kid, the gigolo-bot, and one or two others were fantastic.
