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When you look at lists of the best science fiction movies, what you see is a mix of recency bias and popular nonsense. Star Wars gets placed near the top because the lists are usually targeted to people who consume corporate slop. Back to the Future is another one on these lists that does not qualify as science fiction. It is a comedy where time travel is the MacGuffin. Of course, this raises the question as to what qualifies as science fiction and what makes for good sci-fi.
Science fiction is speculative fiction that relies on science to create scenarios where questions about the human condition are more easily explored. Artificial intelligence, for example, is useful in telling stories about what it means to be human. We instinctively know a computer program is not human, even if it is able to speak with us like a real human being. That gets to the issue of what separates flesh and blood humans from the artificial versions we are creating.
Heinlein said that science fiction takes what we know now, what we thought we knew before now and then speculates about the future based on a solid understanding of how science advances. Asimov famously said that science fiction is about how humans react to changes in science and technology. Together they make for a good definition of science fiction, which is as much about the science as the fiction. In other words, it is not just drama in space or in the future.
That is why Back to the Future is not science fiction. The time travel business is just a way for the main characters to be funny in unusual situations. The point of the film is to make people laugh, not challenge their views of humanity or technology. Time travel is a MacGuffin, which is a thing or event that moves the story along. The point of the time travel business is to put Christopher Lloyd and Michael J. Fox in wacky situations so they can be wacky and funny together.
Similarly, Star Wars is not science fiction. This has become a controversial statement because the adult children who consume the modern iterations of the franchise like to imagine themselves as science geeks. George Lucas has always described the franchise as a space opera, because it is space opera. Star Wars is consciously melodramatic and formulaic. It could just as easily be set in the Middle Ages or the Old West, but he chose to set the story in space.
In fairness, the Star Trek franchise can also be called space opera. The stories in the television series are the definition of melodramatic and formulaic. While the original series tried to think about the impact of interstellar travel on humanity, subsequent series were standard televisions dramas set in space. The main appeal of the original series was the relationship of the three main characters. That could just as easily have been done on a pirate ship in the 17th century.
That goes to what Heinlein said about science fiction. It has to try to project scientific progress into the future in a plausible way. We can assume we solved the problems of humans in space, for example, but it must do so in a way that is plausible. For example, we figured out how to shield spacemen from radiation and mitigate the effects of zero gravity on his muscles and bones. That means the humans still struggle with limitations, just different limitations than current humans.
This is why the girl boss phenomenon has killed modern sci-fi. The demand that the main character be a girl boss who never has to struggle to get what she wants and is never allowed to fail defeats the whole purpose of the genre. If science makes it so that girls can beat up men three times their size and they are able to solve every problem with minimum effort, there is no story worth telling. The girl boss turns the genre into a lecture on gender set in space.
That comes to the other part of the formula. It is not enough for the science to make some sense, leaving humans in a familiar conflict. The story has to be compelling. It is why Blade Runner can be called great sci-fi. The science is compelling as it suggests that material progress does not guarantee human happiness. It also delves into the question of what it means to be a human. The ambiguity of Deckard’s true nature and how his story plays out is gripping storytelling.
Of course, films have another aspect and that is the visuals. World building with the written word depends heavily on the reader. With movies, the maker has to do all of the work in order to get the viewer to suspend disbelief. This is another area where the girl boss ruins the project. By definition, girl boss lives outside the physical constraints of the world created for her. This makes that world absurd and pointless. The film becomes a study of girl boss rather than storytelling.
The visuals are why films like Blade Runner and 2001: A Space Odyssey are always at the top of these lists. The science is great, and the fiction is great, but they are also visual masterpieces that have come to define the genre. Many of the common things in space shows were invented by Kubrick. A film about a dystopian future will always mimic the visual sense of Blade Runner. It is why Star Wars works. The look and sound are great, despite being formulaic drama.
One final piece of the puzzle is what the stories are telling us about the current mood regarding science and culture. When Kubrick make 2001: A Space Odyssey, America was optimistic about space on the surface, but also anxious about the ramifications of technological advance. By the 1970’s, that anxiety had subsided only to return in the 1980’s when the microprocessor revolution hit normal Americans. Good science fiction holds a mirror up to the age in which it is produced.
In the end, what matters most is that Star Wars is not science fiction and anyone who argues otherwise should be sent to a camp. Further, there is a debate as to whether Blade Runner or 2001: A Space Odyssey is the best science fiction film, with some room to argue for Alien. The argument against Alien is that it is also a monster movie, so there is a category dispute. Otherwise, your choices for the greatest sci-fil film are down to two and there is no point in debating it.
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At this point, the purpose of every advertisement, television show, documentary and movie is fourfold: Reward non-White client groups with fiscal and psychological well being Tell Whites that they are conquered and that they no longer have a future Quell the disquiet Whites feel about what is happening to them, but who in their ignorance can’t figure out what it is. In virtual reality, the world is even better when you are being replaced, so replace the unease with a cope and a delusion that it is all going to be smiles and rainbows. Combine points 1-3 to further humiliate… Read more »
I have a “No Negro” policy when it comes to TV and movies. The Mrs starts scrolling through the offerings on the Roku and I keep barking “next, next, next…”
Same here. No negros and no damp eyed harlots in the ad picture.
You must do the helluva lot of barking.
The only film genre I’m watching these days is the Western, in no small measure because it is blissfully free of Hutus on horseback–Woody Strode being the odd counterexample. Of course, this rules out more contemporary examples, virtually everything since, say, 3:10 to Yuma (2007). This Memorial Day weekend I took in the trifecta of High Noon (1952), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) and Red River (1948). Mos’ satisfyin’. Call it the bearable whiteness of being.
Yes! 2007’s 3:10 to Yuma is the best remake of a Western ever IMO.
//Spoiler Alert//
I liked the more realistic downer ending vs the upbeat ending in the original, though it was great seeing Glenn Ford as a bad guy.
Ever watch the Spaghetti Western trifecta? Most folks like TGTBATU best but I always preferred For a Few Dollars More. A little less cheeky and much more violent. The character Indio from FAFDM is one of the most underrated bad guys in the Western genre IMO. What a nasty, evil SOB he is.
The actor who played Indio was an active communist. He did a great job
I think the vast majority of Euro actors at that time–second half of the sixties–were commies.
Heresy, I know, but I also prefer the newer version of 3:10.
For a Few Dollars More may be my favorite Western of ’em all. Gian Maria Volante’s Indio is a reptillian villain. And if you don’t love Lee van Cleef, you should be sent to a camp.
I looked for years before finding a yellow meershaum pipe like the one the colonel smoked. I just need a Klaus Kinksi hunchback to light a match on
Ha! Great scene.
Colonel: “I usually smoke after I eat. Come back in about 10 minutes.”
Hunchback: “In 10 minutes you’ll be smokin’ in Hell!”
The newer version of 3:10 to Yuma works so well because of a young Ben Foster’s awesome performance as Charlie Prince, the sadistic second in command of Ben Wade’s gang who easily slides into the top slot to try and prevent Wade from seeing a long stint in prison.
Foster sure gets plenty of praise, alright. Almost as much as Kilmer as Doc Holiday in Tombstone.
“I also commend to Your keeping the soul of Rome Clay – late Brigadier General, Confederate States Army – known to his comrades here, sir, as Trooper John Smith, United States Cavalry – a gallant soldier and a Christian gentleman..”
I do the same thing. Sadly, my wife likes those miniseries “set” in Bourbon France, Tudor England, Habsburg Spain, and such like, Of course blacks and homos everywhere. When she settles on one of these, I “put on my walkin’ shoes”. I used to tell her, hey, as long as you know that what you are watching is not history, have at it. But then it started pissing her off, so now I just make myself scarce, sans comment.
Yep. It’s not just girl bosses and it’s not just science fiction. Every single television show, drama, movie or advertisement features women and Negroes in positions of power and authority over stupid white men. It’s insufferable. I don’t deliberately watch any of it but I see it peripherally and in passing, and it’s such obviously unrealistic propaganda it practically makes me scream. I was sick of this shit decades ago. Back in the 1990s my wife dragged me to the theater to see some Tom Hanks film about a holy Negro on death row breathing magic green goo on everyone.… Read more »
What did you think of Gran Torino? It gets a beating in the wider bigot-osphere for being racially cucky but I quite liked it.
It was OK. I like most Clint flicks.
Josey Wales was muh favorite movie, until very recently, when I learned that Sandra Locke got pregnant just before the movie started filming, at which point she opted to have an abortion.
Now I can’t even enjoy Josey Wales anymore.
Hopefully we’ll always have “Patton”.
I got the gold right here pa!
I never thought much of her, she’s not beautiful and she’s not a great actress. I don’t know what Clint saw in her but pussy does strange things to otherwise intelligent men. I heard something about the abortion, but I don’t really follow these celebrities much. It’s very disappointing. Clint was a Hollywood Republican, and people tend to forget that rich, liberal Republicans were really the ones behind abortion in the 1960s and 1970s. Ronald Reagan and Nelson Rockefeller signed abortion into law in California and New York before Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973. Harry Blackmun, a Minnesota… Read more »
My understanding is that Clint is a libertarian. Also an atheist. But he doesn’t seem to be an anti-white racist, and he models white masculinity, so he’s worthy of respect in my book.
https://odysee.com/@WyattStagg:e/Gran-Torino-and-the-Subversion-of-Heroism-(2):8
I was a big fan of LOTR,Peter Jackson version, because I loved all the books. I went to The Hobbit (2012), got my usual popcorn and Diet Coke. The whole thing including ticket cost about $35, which I thought was a lot at the time. Only to sit and watch the movie feeling absolutely betrayed and horrified by what was done. I vowed while sitting there that I would never go to another movie at the theater. I’ve only broken that vow once. Went to Ford vs. Ferrari because I’m a big Christian Bale fan, and my brother wanted to… Read more »
Jackson turned the Hobbit and LOTR into Dungeons and Dragons.
He Celtified it.
He turned the first one into … a musical? I realize the books are loaded with poems and songs, but it’s understood that you skip over those.
The Hobbit was and is an abomination. Someday, perhaps already, someone will splice all three films into a 4-4.5 hr single edit. There is one reasonably solid movie in that 9 hrs of film. Making it into three movies was nothing less than a shameless cash grab.
The buttered popcorn is the only reason to go to the theater
Lettie: “ZMAN is right. The girl boss phenomena is anti-human.“
The Lady MacBeth Syndrome.
The Black Widow who is hellbent on wearing the pants in the fambly.
If left to its own devices, the Lady MacBeth Syndrome is fully capable of obliterating the entirety of Western Civilization.
Setting aside the V@xxpocalypse and the possiblity of Thermonukular War, nothing else worries me quite like the cold heartless unflinching march of Lady MacBeth through the various institutions of the land.
She’s very Jewish-looking.
Gul Dukat did nothing wrong.
Every single television show, drama, movie or advertisement features women and Negroes in positions of power and authority over white men. Blade Runner 2049 does something rather interesting with that. As a replicant, Ryan Gosling’s “Officer K” character is faster and stronger and tougher (and apparently smarter) than normal humans, so to keep him subservient to his girlboss superior in the LAPD, he has to undergo daily psychological conditioning, lest he become rebellious over the fact of his innate superiority to those who would exploit his abilities for their own ends. The plight of the modern white man in a… Read more »
Reality Rules: “At this point, the purpose of every advertisement, television show, documentary and movie is fourfold: Reward non-White client groups with fiscal and psychological well being Tell Whites that they are conquered and that they no longer have a future…” To this day, I am convinced that somebody ‘In The Know’ [perhaps in the Canadian Security Intelligence Service?] got together with the writers for Stargate SG-1, to write the episodes “2010” and “2001”, as a warning to nerds like us NOT to submit to the v@xxine. 2010 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_SG-1_season_4#ep82 2001 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_SG-1_season_5#ep98 Those two episodes of SG-1 pretty much laid out… Read more »
How in holy nebulas did you miss the most pertinant one for our time, Terminator.
Maybe I’ve been watching a little too much Boston Dynamics, Luckey Palmer, and X.AI vids, but this is starting scare the bejeezus out of yours truly.
Gaming streamer Asmongold has an update: video AI has jumped to the point where it is indistinguishable from film. He has a short clip titled, “It’s all over,” and declares that in two years, nothing we see onscreen will be real.
Any theories as to Asmon’s bloodlust for Palestinians?
Maybe his mom is a happy clapper evangelical or something.
The Terminators were great movies, even if they don’t qualify as sci fi.
The first Terminator was a fun movie but all time travel stories suffer from the paradox of time travel. They got around it in the first film by making the time travel essential to the future, but logically there was no real conflict. If future John Connor is the product of Kyle and his mother, then logically the Terminator must fail in his mission. He must always fail.
The paradox of time travel only exists if we accept the explanations of physics given us from the masters of the chalkboards, as Tesla called them.
The first Terminator is a bootstrap paradox. If Skynet didn’t try to kill Sarah Connor using time travel, John Connor would never exist and neither would Skynet. Terminator 2 adds further paradox since they have seemingly prevented Skynet’s development which makes John Connor’s existence non-causal.
All subsequent Terminator films went completely mindless on time travel consistency. Time travel is more of a logical conundrum than a science fiction.
“We’ll hide the keys later “*
”Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure” is my favorite time travel movie.
* quoted from memory
How is AI “onscreen” less real than Hollywood “onscreen” real? And I would argue that AI “onscreen” benefits innocents who are raped and abused to get their bodies “onscreen”. I am already at the point I do not believe ANYTHING the mass media puts “onscreen”. How many Joe Bidens? Was the Trump “onscreen” with Rogan somehow a foot shorter than the Trump we see elsewhere? Reality is what I can touch and feel.
re: the shrinking Trump, it’s hardly unusual for old men to shrink. He’s about that age.
too funny, too sad: so the next week on screen he is back to 6 ft plus? lolz.
Does that mean all of Hollywood will need to learn to Coal?
Az-
Asmongold and many others are reacting to the eerie new footage from Google’s Veo 3 tool, which seems to give voice and face to the ghosts in the machine.
As for Terminator, there is already real-world drone shootdown footage from Ukraine that looks exactly like the Hunter-Killer aerial drone shootdowns at the beginning of The Terminator and T2.
Time travel may be a “MacGuffin” but 1960’s “The Time Machine”(H.G. Wells)is one of my favorite Sci-fi films of all time. The portrayal of the “Eloi” and the “Morlocks” was truly inspired. Also must mention “Forbidden Planet”, a good film for its day.
The film wasn’t bad but I’d rate the original short story as one of the greatest of all time. We had to read it in high school and it’s haunted me ever since, especially as it takes place in the part of England where I grew up.
Heartily concur with “Forbidden Planet”! Sa it at the theatre when I was ten, never forgot it. The special effects were astonishing for 1956, the “monster from the id” was a fascinating concept for a ten year old, the “monster” itself was quite the sight to see when it “appeared” while attacking the electronic security fence… I rate it as equal to either of the two “big boys” and it was the first science fiction movie I recommended to my two grandsons. As soon as the granddaughter (now seven) is old enough, she will find herself watching it with Grandpa… Read more »
Forbidden Planet gets increasingly strange as its futuristic parts age. The music and visuals are more foreign now than they were then. And it’s quaintly wise. Nobody today has Shakespearean (or even Freudian) ideas about technology’s effects on people. We’re not that smart—the “tech bros” especially not.
A remake where the girl is a bitch and her father rapes her has been threatened for decades. Fortunately James Cameron will die before he can inflict it on us. And the title has no “resonance” with the market anymore, so it might never be defiled.
I think the Number One sci-fi novel of all time and its story about “technology’s effects on people” is “Frankenstein” .
The treatment of Frankenstein in the HBO series “Penny Dreadful” was superb. Goofy premise, but very well executed.
As I recall, the only POCs in the show were an African explorer’s man-servant and a stoic Injun. Not bad by modern PC standards.
Carl B… The portrayal of the “Eloi” and the “Morlocks”…
Jeremy Irons stole the show as the “Uber-Morlock”.
Ultra Darwinian; highly reminiscent of our current plight regarding the V@xxpocalypse.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rXrUrDZmVM
So Space Balls doesn’t make the cut?
I often wonder why Spaceballs worked but Robin Hood: Men in Tights did not. They are basically the same madcap Jewish-humor spoof film, but Spaceballs feels more fun and improvisational. Sometime after The Naked Gun, slapstick got really cringey. Now slapstick is only consumed by black people.
Within the slapstick genre…
In Little River, South Carolina, kneegrowz rent a boat for Memorial Day.
Hijinks ensue…
https://tinyurl.com/5ye69y25
VIDYA: https://tinyurl.com/ms5kktpf
Is there a dystopian version of Science Fiction, wherein the Tech is all degrading & falling apart & no one is smart enough to repair anything anymoar, and the hominids keep getting stoopider & stoopider & stoopider, until they start to resemble full blown “Hominidae“?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hominidae
“Crab mentality” might also be apropos…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_mentality
Okaaaay
Not sure about Spaceballs but I’ll fight to the death over Space Truckers.
“Star Wars” is consciously melodramatic and formulaic. It could just as easily be set in the Middle Ages or the Old West, but he chose to set the story in space. I’ve related before that nearly 25 years ago I went to an exhibit at the Field Museum in Chicago based on the first three Star Wars movies. I took a gal that I was dating at the time with me. While it was cool to see the costumes and the models they used in filming, what was also interesting was written and visual commentary from the museum curators. In that… Read more »
Yes, consciously patterned after the Hero’s Journey, JoJo Campbell et al. It’s not original storytelling but coheres and lasts as a (superior) definition of a superior time.
Lucas makes no secret of his regard for and conversations with Campbell.
I have always said Star Wars was a dumbed-down Dune, and then we got a dumbed-down Dune, complete with the girlboss.
The visuals almost redeemed both, though. Almost.
btw, if you want a really good, lesser known film, Sunshine.
Star Wars was a clean lift from The Hidden Fortress. I’m surprised Kurosawa didn’t sue the shit out of Lucasfilms for copyright violation.
Yes! R2D2 and C3PO are modeled after the fools who attend to the great Toshiro Mifune’s character in The Hidden Fortress. Kurosawa did indeed successfully sue Sergio Leone for ripping off Yojimbo and turning it into Fistfull of Dollars.
I thought the “The Expanse” was a really great sci-fi series.
One of the few where diversity actually made sense and worked quite well. There were three main groups of humans; those who have to deal with a failing earth, those who have colonized Mars and see “earthers” as a potential enemy and a third group who have adapted to their low gravity working environment in the outer ring.
No transporters, no warp drives, no blasters and no weird super-human aliens trying to kill everyone.
Just a decent script, some pretty good acting and an engaging story.
The protomolecule doesn’t count?
Technically, it was an ancient biological weapon, not an alien life form.
“The Protomolecule was sent by an alien civilization inside an interstellar asteroïd 2 billion years ago. This asteroïd was captured by Saturn’s gravity to become one of its many moons we called Phoebe. Yet its intended destination was Earth. It is initially seen as a weapon since infected humans die.”
https://expanse.fandom.com/wiki/Protomolecule
this show has the most realistic space flight and battle scenes. good story arc too.
I guess it comes down to whether you think sci-fi should be depressing, or not. 2001, Blade Runner, Gattaca, The Children of Men, are. All moody and plodding. Art house stuff. I have to prepare myself to see a film like Blade Runner. At the risk of sounding like a normie, though, Schwarzenegger IMO was the best sci-fi actor of all time, and perhaps was in the best sci-fi films of all time. Terminator II, Predator, The Running Man, Total Recall. All fantastic and re-watchable. Definitely not art house, but serious enough and not total brain-dead crap like you see… Read more »
I remembered Total Recall being a lot deeper and labyrinthine than I found it in my recent rewatch.
The novel was better. I’d say the best thing Stephen King ever wrote. Which isn’t saying much
Arnold sold his gonies to the Shriver family. Gutless punk.
I’d love to see more Heinlein novels adapted into screenplays, assuming they retained all the misogyny.
Starship Troopers, a classic WWII propaganda film!
All it was missing was Bing Crosby crooning a big showtune.
I know we’re supposed to roll our eyes at Starship Troopers, but “S.T.” was the last j00vie I ever saw with beautiful young White women wanting desperately to get “it” on with handsome young White men. [Caveat: I haven’t been in a j00vie theater in 15 years, so I have no idea what j00vies are like these days.] Starship Troopers was also the only j00vie I ever saw which gave me the feeling that, “Uh-oh, we might ackshually LOSE this war!!!!!” There’s something about the omnipresent threat of absolute extinction of the species which necessarily heightens the sense of a… Read more »
I don’t think we watched the same movie. I watched a campy satire of Heinlein’s novel.
But it was precisely the campy EROTICISM which made the movie work.
No EROTICISM means no P.I.V. means no descendants means extinction*** of the species.
http://urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=PIV
tl;dr == There has to be something we’re fighting for, else we might as well let the d@mned aliens eat us for dinner.
—————————————-
***Which is pretty close to where we are now, given all the new peer-reviewed papers regarding the V@xxpocalypse.
HINT: Multi-Generational Follicular Atresia…
This is precisely what we’re fighting for…
We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children, because the beauty of the White Aryan woman must not perish from the Earth.
Necessarily Eroticism [to be followed by natural vaginal childbirth] must be at the very heart of Sci Fi.
In the absence of Eroticism, Sci-Fi doesn’t even rise to the level of sheer purposeless nihilism.
Young Dina Meyer was quite the looker, even when they tried to dirty her up in Johnny Mnemonic. She was not quite an, “it girl,” of the mid to late-90s, much like Julianna Hatfield was in music.
The bizarre thing about Dina Meyer is that [apparently] she’s a full-bl00ded j00ess.
She’s gotta be amongst the very least j00ey-looking j00esses I’ve ever seen make a living as an actress.
She looks exactly like a ditzy SoCal surfboarding bish.
I wonder if she underwent massive plastic surgery so that she could pass as a shiksa?
And she certainly doesn’t have D-Cup khazarian milkers.
Very very weird.
I wonder is she’s ackshually a shiksa who faked her way through an Hollyweird career, pretending to be a j00ess?
That begs the question: if a “Jew” has so little Jewish DNA that he or she looks 100% White, and Jewish identity is primarily genetic…
It’s not really a satire in any meaningful sense. Verhoeven seemed to think that putting attractive blond men and women onscreen in vaguely Wehrmacht-esque uniforms made the film satirical, but it fails on that count because he never bothered to establish that there’s anything sinister or malignant about the Federation (unless one assumes that happy healthy white people are sinister and threatening, I guess).
Speaking of little girls beating up big men, in one of his novels, Robert Parker has his hero decking a Karate girl after she kicks him in the balls. She’s puzzled. She says that that should have ended it. He replied that it had happened to him before and knew that he would get over it. She gave him some feminist nonsense, but he replied that in the end, a good big person will always beat a good small person.
One of the reasons I have a main character, demi-human Faustina Hartmann, say “I’m a twenty-year-old girl. I can out think any of you, but a sixteen-year-old recruit can drop me in a second.” So, there’s the fiction of demi-humans, but also the science that the notion of a grrl boss is seriously stupid shit.
They THINK they can out-think us, but they can’t. Ever noticed how even today, all the inventors of the real cutting edge stuff (no, I don’t mean non-binary scissors) are still men?
The percentage of women who have the quantitative ability to do science at a high level is vanishingly small. Now in verbal ability, on the other hand, the dames may actually have a slight advantage over us, but mainly on average. Most people who have extraordinarily high verbal ability are men.
Women speak 18-20 k words per day
Men 7-8 k.
I speak 80 on a voluble day…
Took me three attempts to get through 2001 without falling asleep. Only film to do that so I guess that makes it great. Bladerunner is tops for scifi IMO. Agree on Star wars/trek. Aliens will be monsters so Alien qualifies. Asimov is over-rated and the genre would lose nothing had he never been born.
It was for the Asimov comment that I upvoted you
Well ya gotta remember that you guys are looking at him from 2025. I was buying his novels as he wrote them as a kid and the greats were all still alive and writing.
By today’s standards he must look really lame I suppose? Sometimes I read Vox Day and of his heroic battles with his fellow sci-fi and fantasy geeks…and it boggles the mind to think Asimov is not the worst of the lot… not by a long shot!
😂👍
I don’t think you could even sell real sci-fi in today’s market. It would go over everyone’s head…
There are plenty of other mid 20th century scifi writers besides Asimov whom I praise. It’s not about his times.
I stayed up to watch 2001 as a rerun, telling the missus this was the classic that started it all.
The wife hated it. She cursed me for keeping her awake.
Women enjoying a movie disqualifies it as science fiction. They don’t even like the romantic ones like Blade Runner and Solaris.
2001 is somewhat like space travel, which women don’t care about at all. Even female astronauts don’t.
HAL 9000 was the only thing 2001 had going for it. Take it out, the movie bombs, and it doesn’t make any of these lists either.
The sequel film 2010 was actually pretty well done and worth watching. Roy Scheider, John Lithgow, and Richard Dreyfus all give good performances. It also plays on a solid sense of Cold War paranoia from the early/mid-80s.
Can concur. I really enjoyed 2010, particularly the sub-plot dealing with HAL-9000’s seeming insanity and its ultimate cause.
The original Star Trek used some of the early great SF writers, including Harlan Ellison, Norman Spinrad, Theodore Sturgeon, Robert Bloch and Richard Matheson. It also obviously was influenced by Asimov’s “I, Robot.” It did have a tendency to resort to esoteric trickery, such as the Vulcan Mind Meld, to move the plot along.
Heinlein’s masterpiece “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” is a perfect example of sci-fi predicting the future…Written in the early ’60s, it predicts a sentient computer AI helping the Moon settlers defeat tyranny by the Earth’s government, and describes it quite plausibly… When the AI’s programmer asks it how they can possibly defeat Earth’s government, the AI replies “throw rocks” with a sort of slingshot from Moon’s low gravity…Which indeed works….
It’s never been made into a movie, though Heinlein’s satiric Starship Troopers has….
I think TPTB are afraid of the ideas people might get from an accurate retelling of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
Lol, they would have a field day in today’s Hollywood with the polyamory in “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress”. The women were in total control, IIRC….
Don’t you mean “Verhoeven’s (ostensibly-but-not-actually) satiric Starship Troopers“? Heinlein’s novel is not at all satirical to the best of my recollection.
Both Star Wars and Star Trek emerged as America was killing the Western as a genre. So they are adaptions of the Western into space. Star Trek is what’s called a “wagon train” story. Star Wars has all the set design of a Western.
I have always compared the original Star Trek to a pirate movie. The story is about the three men at the center of it and their adventures are how we learn about them and their relationship. Star Trek actually tried to be decent science fiction in the original, but they have limited resources and the studios wanted safe predictable content.
Subsequent iterations of the franchise are corporate office in space, remote branch office in space and human resources in space.
True, but I still get the hots over Lt Uhuru even if she was the first DEI hire in space.
Dude…
of all the hotties on the original ST
Lt Uhuru over Yeoman Rand?
Double Dude.
Oil Drillers gonna drill Oil…
Mudsharks gonna mudshark…
Agreed, Yeoman Rand by a mile.
Star Trek was the great 17th and 18th century explorers, scientists, and naval officers set in space. Think Captain Cook and Darwin, not Captain Kidd.
Can we send Human Resources to space immediately?
Thanking you in advance.
I think All HR depts should go back to their roots.
Call them Payroll and have them do nothing else.
The original Star Trek was the work of Lucille Ball, who, together with her husband, Desi Arnaz, created the Desilu production company.
Lucille Ball was one of the great unsung heroines of the 20th Century.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desilu
We in the 21st Century sure could use an whole helluva lot moar dames like Lucille Ball.
She was one seriously righteous broad.
…Horatio Hornblower says “Hi”…
Occasionally, Picard and Sisko — the CO characters in ST:TNG and ST:DS9 — envied the freedom of action and independence from Starfleet rules and regulations earlier commanders like Captain Kirk enjoyed.
‘The demand that the main character be a girl boss who never has to struggle to get what she wants and is never allowed to fail defeats the whole purpose of the genre’ However, the girlboss requirement is true to real life. What is portrayed in ‘Snow White’ and ‘Barbie’ is precisely what transpired in America and her satellite nations. Females took over, by vast preference and empowerment. Meaning they’re weaponized for destruction, because largely incompetent due to that lifelong entitlement. As for Heinlein, ‘Stranger in a Strange Land’ was, like ‘Lord of the Rings’, an underground legend in U.S.… Read more »
Little known fact: the word GROK first appears in Stranger in a strange land. It means to deeply understand and empathize on multiple levels.
Proving there is nothing new under the sun.
Nobody remembers nowadays but SISL was the counterculture’s bible during the initial parts of the movement.
Hugely influential book but hey Bob, what happened to Jesus? :O)
All true. But if we just adopted Heinlein’s basic idea of TANSTAAFL we would be better off.
I think science fiction is defined as a dramatic story whose narrative and philosophical underpinnings are based upon the following: human nature and how humans behave in relation to technology where they may behave differently in its absence how a technology forces human beings to confront challenges that amplify or distort existing human social dynamics By those standards I think RoboCop is an excellent sci-fi movie. What is interesting is in that film, the existing social dynamics of third-world/savage-populations level crime creates an impulse for applying mechanical technology as a solution. Of course, in that movie we see that the… Read more »
No one will ever convince me that Zardoz is not pure prophecy.
A philosophical tour of the finest kind.
That era of “camp” sci-fi, like Zardoz and Barbarella, had a wise premise (sometimes consciously): The standard Asimov-like sci-fi future is impossible because human nature is too low.
Well, here we are in the future. Nobody’s on the moon. The man who claims he’ll take humanity to Mars is a retarded drug addict who can’t even keep his baby mama drama off the network he owns. Etc.
Reality is what nerds can’t imagine.
Film is a terrible medium for sci-fi to begin with. It’s telling that one of the two top sci-fi movies mentioned by Zman was much better as a book, and it wasn’t even the best sci-fi books by that author.
It’s just a genre that doesn’t do well outside of its traditional home of the written word.
Science fiction also requires science, or else it’s fantasy. For my 20 books of Machine Civilization, I spent as much time doing research as I did writing them. Otherwise, it is a terrible disservice to the readers.
Does the movie Brazil qualify? No finer movie ever made.
No offense intended to Terry Gilliam, but “Brazil” is a rather obvious re-telling of Orwell’s “1984”.
I’m also of the thought that Kim Greist, as the love interest, was smoking hawt.
Thank Goodness Gilliam wasn’t able to deploy any of the j00esses he had been lusting after [such Ellen Barkin & Jamie Lee Curtis].
I don’t know why Gilliam had the h@rd-on for the j00esses.
[Maybe he knew from experience that the j00esses were more likely to “put out”?]
I learned a long time ago to not expect good science fiction films or television programs. Certainly nothing that will match the very best written science fiction. That said, I would pick the following three as the top three films- the already mentioned “Blade Runner” and “2001- A Space Odyssey” along with “The Andromeda Strain”.
Television shows seem even less fulfilling than film to me. “The Expanse” was probably the best science fiction television show I have seen and it got 5 seasons to tell its story. “Fringe” was pretty good, too, but in a different way.
Was waiting to see if anyone would mention The Andromeda Strain.
yes and no, maybe? If a man can beat up the technologically advanced Predator 3 times his own size…it takes a little work but maybe you can expect Girlboss to beat him up too? Why not? But I get what you’re saying, Z. I just finished binging on Caprica. I watched it ALL. I don’t think you guys woulda made it beyond the second episode. You can’t ruin a series like that so I’ll make the long story short: it’s the prequel to Battlestar Galactica. It’s about two dead teenage bubblegummer girl bosses that live in virtual reality on the… Read more »
But that is not what happens in the Predator film. The humans are no match physically. In both cases, they exploit the home planet advantage and get a little lucky. In the girl boss films, she is the only one who exists outside the physical constraints of the world created for her. Everyone else is limited by Newtonian physics.
I think that’s what Filthie meant by “it takes a little work.”
That”s right… the original was okay. I must have been watching one of the execrable spin-offs. It had a little black girl – flat as a board – beating up the predators AND the aliens.It was incredibly awful. I see two things going on that I think is driving the dearth of real sci-fi: the old school “chick flicks” the new age “message fiction” The girl boss has a place in chick flicks. (Or ‘chick-lit’). Those are stories for women, and we are not the intended audience. It’s largely harmless, IMO…just another genre of story telling. This message fiction is… Read more »
Critics loved it (or were told to), but canceled for low ratings. It would be worse if it was popular. There’s a reason Hollywood is dying.
And let its death be a particularly painful and humiliating one.
Where does a movie like The Omega Man (1971) fit? It’s a remake of a movie (The Last Man on Earth) which is clearly not science fiction. That movie was based on a novel I Am Legend, by Richard Matheson. In the 1971 version Robert Neville (Charlton Heston) is a scientist who’ simultaneously fighting and seeking a cure for the portion of humanity who have been turned into vampire-like creatures by mutations of biological warfare weapons. The early part of the film is pretty good, focusing on Neville’s psychological struggle to remain sane. The second part of the movie deteriorates… Read more »
Agreed, when they brought in the groovy 70s race-mixing love interest, it pretty much fell to squat, as if they had forgotten the plot.
But the mutations of biological warfare weapons? Oh yeah, that turned it into real science fiction. I’m still waiting for the vaccinated to go haywire when they activate the 5G signal network.
THAT was awesome sci-fi!!!
I couldn’t sleep for a week after watching it! What a great time it was to be a kid…
The Omega Man is one of my favorite movies. More social commentary than science fiction. The subtext in the New World Order is that Heston is the monster, so he goes out like one.
Better than dying in a camp.
Yeah, but the miscegenation scenes totally made me hate this movie. Many don’t realize that long before Heston became Pres of the NRA, he was a pretty hardcore lefty, even marching with MLK in the 60s. His other two sci-fi movies of that era (POTA and Soylent Green), were much better IMO.
It’s hard to think badly of the man who brought us “Get your paws off me you damn, dirty apes!”
funny enough, Lucas did make a great sci-fi film in THX-1138. it tends to get written off as a student film project, but it is really well made with some great performances by Robert Duvall and Donald Pleasance.
The AI God confession booth in THX-1138 looks eerily like something we will see soon in our own timeline. The routine mass drugging of the populace in the same film is already here.
The original Star Trek was modeled after Wagon Train. It was Wagon Train in space.
“When he launched Star Trek in 1966, its high concept (no one called it that) was “Wagon Train to the Stars”: a Western in space.”
Also see: https://www.newsweek.com/wagon-train-stars-410030
I was watching the night NBC aired the very first Star Trek episode shown. The one about the salt sucking shape shifter who Bones thought was his old girlfriend. I was hooked. I was so disappointed when they canceled it.
Salt-sucking shape-shifter–sounds like most of my old flames…
I feel the 1951 version of The Day the Earth Stood Still with Michael Rennie and Patricia Neal is a classic. The message at the end is really simple: stay the hell out of our backyard or we will blow you the hell away. Also hard to miss the Christ like rendering of Klattu.
Are flying saucer movies sci-fi or monster movies? Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, incidentally, is a terrific film, sci-fi or not.
I suppose most flying saucer movies are monster flicks. They are mostly wanting to destroy the Earth or dine on us. Then of course it becomes a feel good movie as we Earthlings unite and defeat them.
As an aside, a favorite spoof of the genre is Mars Attacks. I couldn’t stop laughing when it was revealed Slim Whitman was the solution!
That sounds like one I need to see alright.
The “advanced alien civilization lectures dirty, warlike humans” trope is rather naively optimistic, I think.
The Other is always superior, dontchaknow…
I may not be qualified to say which one is better, but I can say that I enjoyed Starship Troopers a lot more than either 2001 or Blade Runner. On Rotten Tomatoes list of top 150 scifi movies, Troopers is below Barbarella. A few weeks ago I finally got around to watching the original Mad Max. I’m kind of at a loss as to what about it inspired all the sequels. Maybe it was better in the context of its time than it is now.
I’ll duke it with anyone over any Mad Max, especially Mad Max: Thunderdome.
The girlboss “remakes”, however, should be burned at the stake, their writers with them.
An awesome Australian series we could consider a precursor to Mad Max:
Mr. Nobody.
What made Mad Max great was the slow decay of lawless anarchy, to where nothing really mattered. A film not about the whiz-bang, but about culture: surely relevant, prescient to today. We never knew if somebody pressed the button because they didn’t give a schmidt anymore, or if it all just fell apart.
Speaking of great Australian series’. What about Mr Inbetween. What a star!
It was! I was a kid when I saw it and was captivated by it. I tried to watch my other childhood favourite – Escape From New York… and…yeah. They don’t age well, do they?
EFNY ages just fine iyam
Dagnabit, I missed that. Did you say Barbarella?
OMG. OMFG. There has to be some kind of mistake, or we’re doomed.
Mad Max had a kind of 70s indie cred that was common among so-called auteurs. The same people who glaze kung fu, spaghetti westerns and zombie flicks. It was good enough, considering its low budget.
The Road Warrior is great. Beyond Thunderdome is half great, half garbage (everything actually beyond Thunderdome sucks).
Of the more recent sequels, I shall not speak.
The opening chase in Mad Max is still awesome. The, “last of the V8s,” intro scene is looking awfully prescient in this day and age.
Road Warrior ups the ante in terms of the chase scenes. The, “You wanna get outta here…you talk to me!” scene is up there with, “Come with me…if you want to live!” in terms of great one-liners.
Star wars is considered “science fantasy” and not true science fiction. I would suggest aliens, more than alien, was true science fiction in the sense that we see humans in space as prey rather than conqueror as our technological arrogance blinds us and we are reduced to primitive fears and irrationality.
When I read liberals defending this girlboss slop they’ll say something like “you’re talking about fiction where <dragons fly around>/<there is time travel>/<people fly through black holes>/etc. and you’re complaining about girlbosses being implausible” and the only answer is yes, the girlbosses are far MORE implausible than dragons flying around, because we know girls in our lives and we know how ridiculous the girlboss construct is. Anyone who has seen a woman throw a punch knows that Atomic Blonde is silly. It doesn’t mean Atomic Blonde isn’t entertaining in a vacuum, it is, but when literally every piece of fiction… Read more »
I prefer the more dystopian sci-fi flicks where instead of robots and time travel there is doom, gloom, and misery. Films like Gibson’s Road Warrior movies, 1984 (not as good as the book of course but still a great movie), and my all-time favorite, Soylent Green. Yes, some will say it’s campy, but it’s a good lesson that when people get hungry, all the woke luxury beliefs vanish. For example, in the SG world women are reduced to “furniture”. Girl bosses are ancient history. Speaking of Kubrick movies, how about A Clockwork Orange? Certainly a dystopian movie but is it… Read more »
I would draw a distinction between futuristic/dystopia stories and scifi. You can have the former without the latter. Such as Children of Men. But ACO, with its mind reconditioning program, you could maybe call scifi. Barely.
What about post-nuclear war scenarios? Like the ones portrayed in either version of On the Beach (1956 & 2000)? Or something more plausible like the book Trinity’s Child or its filmed version By Dawn’s Early Light, even though they have the requisite women’s lib pilot character?
2001, though Bladerunner is a worthy second.
2001 if Trump triumphs, Bladerunner if he doesn’t.
Total Recall – the original 1990 version – is campy, violent, and mindless, but underneath that veneer, it’s a story about a man looking to find himself and know who he is as he struggles with morality and what it means to be human. By that standard, it’s science fiction.
The Matrix.
The Martian.
Wall-e.
When it comes to girl bosses, let’s give credit where credit is due. Mary Shelley created Frankenstein in 1818.
Verne and Wells came a bit later, but all three really started the genre we know as Science Fiction today.
I’m surprised Planet of the Apes and its many sequels and iterations have yet to be mentioned. What do y’all think?
The first one is somewhat worth watching for Charlton Heston and the ape makeup. Everyone involved in making the CGI-ape reboot series should be sentenced to death for crimes against humanity.
I don’t understand why the modern POTA films have drawn so much interest and get so much praise. What am I missing?
They appeal to the predilections of genocidal misanthropes.
Off topic here I saw a movie out of Europe called “ the young messiah” that some of you might like. Given the ferocity of theological debate when it comes up, I have to think there are lots of believers here.
The tv show The Expanse hewed to Heinlein and Asimov’s definitions of science fiction and worked well.
Body snatchers?
Prime is excellent and a time travel movie. Very complicated.
Soylent Green. Interesting how much has already come to pass (normalizing euthanasia, “beyond food”, etc.).
Star Wars gets placed near the top because the lists are usually targeted to people who consume corporate slop. Star Wars may not technically be science fiction, but it’s neither corporate nor slop (unless you’re talking about the Disney company’s rubbish). Asimov famously said that science fiction is about how humans react to changes in science and technology. Bradbury (not quite so famously) said that the best science fiction film of all time (using Asimov’s definition) was Singing the Rain. The argument against Alien is that it is also a monster movie, so there is a category dispute. Alien is a well-shot but… Read more »
What about Silent Running? Planet of the Apes? Interstellar? Contact?
Without a doubt, 2001 is the best; When a movie spans the dawn of hominids to an imagined future, that is hard to top.
I never understood the attraction of Blade Runner. Maybe I should try to watch it again.
I sort of disagree. All science fiction is a “McMuffin” as Z says, as any sci-fi concept, when examined by a true expert in its field will be found absurd.(unless not, when it would become an actual scientific concept, lol). Back to the future, while obviously very light, is science fiction in that it is an examination of generational differences. The things that happened in Star Trek are magic with some scientific babble thrown in. The difference between sci-fi and say fantasy, is the origins of the magic. In fantasy, or horror I guess, the effects are based upon an… Read more »
I’d be hard-pressed to pick the best SF movies. Would need about a week to think about it. Obviously everything since about 2012 (2nd term of Black Jesus, when the race war truly kicked off and the Great Replacement took off its mask) has been crap. It’s not the composition of the cast, it’s the BS message. Furthermore, if we have a Diverse Writer he/she can produce anything and we’re expected to clap like trained seals.
I highly recommend “Attraction” and “Attraction 2” – both in the genre of science fiction about an alien spacecraft that crash lands in Moscow. The English dub versions are ok, except for the one voicing for Irina Starshenbaum. The visuals are absolutely stunning – worth seeing for this alone. The Russians make great movies that absolutely do not look like 90% of US TV commercials if you knowwhutI’msaying.
Find them on Amazon Prime.
I’d be a fan of this but I’d worry the government would f— things up even more: https://x.com/gelliottmorris/status/1927022405236441099