Science Fiction Films

[Jim A.]

WARNING: MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS (regarding the film CONTACT):

Invariably, when I write a list like "The Best Science Fiction Movies of All Time", I forget one or two. So I'd like to add one to that list, and a couple to the "Tempted to Add" list.

Quatermass and the Pit (aka in the U.S., Five Million Years to Earth, 1968) belongs on my "Best" list. It is the story of the discovery of an ancient alien spacecraft found buried underneath a London subway station. It's only draw-backs are a short anti-military sermon from the film's main character, Professor Quatermass, and the Kantian premise of innate ideas (a premise found in non-science fiction films as well, such as 1956's The Bad Seed). But it's an intriguing movie with good production values in spite of--and in consideration of--its low budget.

To the "Tempted" list, I would add:

Invaders from Mars (1953): A mysterious, atmospheric science-fantasy about the arrival of invading Martians, witnessed only by a young boy, whose elders don't believe him. I saw this movie when I was a child myself, and never forgot the image of the backyard fence with the light from the other side of it, and the eerie music. The Expressionistic sets emphasize the boy's inability to reach the grown-ups he's trying to convince--literally.

Contact (1997): I'd add this simply because of the tremendously thrilling scene where Jodie Foster is walking the cat-walk into the huge, alien-conceived transport. I was shaking when I first saw it in the theatre--not because I was scared, but because I wanted to be doing what she was doing! I would risk my life for that opportunity. Also, its a serious film; it deals with the issue of the discovery of alien intelligence somewhere out there in the Universe, and how our culture(s) would respond or react to it. However, the film forces the issue of the question of God's existence. Why would the discovery of alien life threaten someone's belief in God, who would have created the aliens, too? (I've never been able to figure that one out.) No explanation is given. I think that the authors of Contact felt they needed to have some "message" in order to have an excuse for a science fiction story. But most of all, I excluded it from the "Best" list because the film has an appaling message: that faith can co-exist with science! (I hope Carl Sagan didn't say or imply that in the novel Contact, upon which the movie is based.)

[D'kian]

I think that the authors of Contact felt they needed to have some "message" in order to have an excuse for a science fiction story. But most of all, I excluded it from the "Best" list because the film has an appaling message: that faith can co-exist with science! (I hope Carl Sagan didn't say or imply that in the novel Contact, upon which the movie is based.)

For once the film-makers are not entirely to blame. Sagan did put in much of the faith questions in the book to begin with. Although Ellie was more firmly atheist in the book.

BTW the whole faith vs science deal is like debating the nutritional merits of apples and rocks. religion is a system of beliefs and ideas. Science isn't. Science is a tool for uncovering the workings of the universe. Observations are open to debate, but facts are not.

[Gabo]

Blade Runner - What is a human? Of what value is life? These are questions asked and answered in part by this movie. I also love the future world presented. It is darker than I would imagine the real future to be, but it is gritty and reflects the push and pull of humans acting their lives in a dense urban setting. When I imagine the future, I imagine urban density as in this movie, albeit in a more positive way than this movie portrays. Harrison Ford in the lead role was superb, and Sean Young as Ford's love-interest was absolutely hot.

Agree about the movie, but avoid Philip Dick's novel at all costs... it's bad

[Galileo Blogs]

Can I interject my favorite sci-fi series?

It is Star Trek, the original one starring William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy. Captain Kirk (played by Shatner) is my personal hero. He is the efficacious man of reason, the integrated man who both understands his emotions and allows himself to experience them, and yet is guided by reason. His two companions, Spock (played by Leonard Nimoy) and the doctor, "Bones," are perfect foils to Kirk, even if their characters are somewhat obvious as a theatrical device. Spock is a Vulcan, the pure being of reason, whereas Bones, although obviously devoted to reason and science since he is a doctor, is overly guided by his emotions. Both Spock and Bones are shown to periodically make mistaken decisions because of Spock's suppression of his emotions and Bones' occasional emotional over-indulgence. Kirk, the efficacious man, makes the right decisions because he is complete and integrated. There is no mind-body dichotomy with Kirk.

The theme of mind-body integration plays frequently in Star Trek, as in one episode where Kirk is split into two people, but all of the strong emotions go with one Kirk and not the other. The Kirk who lacks strong passion is weak and vacillating, whereas the Kirk who has the strong passions but without the discipline of reason, makes rash, ultimately self-destructive decisions. There are at least several other episodes like this.

There are many other good characters in the series, including Scotty, the Scottish engineer who loves his ship more than any woman.

I also like the fact that Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek, eschews racial or sexual stereotypes, which was a somewhat bold position to take in the 1960s when Star Trek was made. As an example, apparently he originally wanted Kirk's No. 2 to be a woman, but television executives vetoed the idea. Of course, that may have been for the best because I cannot imagine the series without Spock, who happens to be male.

Apart from the virtue of Kirk's character, the other great thing about Star Trek is what I like best about science fiction: its depiction of a world where man and his technology has progressed. Not just progressed, but progressed magnificently. In that sense, Star Trek, just like all hopeful science fiction (as opposed to dystopian science fiction), affirms the reality of the efficacy and success of man's mind. The world of Star Trek is a world where reason has been victorious not just for years, but for centuries. As a result, humanity has achieved technologies that seem like magic to us today. However, some of that technology is not magic, but reality. As an example of that, Star Trek has served as inspiration for scientists, engineers, inventors and entrepreneurs who grew up watching the series. Inspired by Star Trek, they made cell phones (the modern flip phone may have been inspired by the flip-top communicators in the series) and floppy disks (the 3.5" computer disk, although no longer used any more today, is the same size as the computer disks depicted in the series).

The world of Star Trek is the world I want to live in. But then I look around me, at the Internet, at cell phones, at magnificent life-saving drugs, and everything else the mind of man creates, and I realize that we do live in that world. Even though the forces of un-reason have not yet been conquered, glorious reason still triumphs. The world man creates is a world worth living.

Edited February 3, 2008 by Galileo Blogs

[John McVey]

Quatermass and the Pit (aka in the U.S., Five Million Years to Earth, 1968) belongs on my "Best" list.

Now that you mention it I was going to say I forgot to cite The Quatermass Conclusion, but then I remembered that the 100-minute movie is actually just the cut-down version of a four-hour serial and so technically doesn't count for this thread. The movie is still entirely watchable because the writer deliberately crafted the series so that he could make a respectable movie out of it - and did so without filling the series with useless filler.

JJM

[John McVey]

Hey Mods, should this discussion and GB's interjection be put into a separate thread on sci-fi serials? Or are we happy to keep references to sci-fi serials in the same thread?

I've never had a chance to see Blake's 7.

Being from 70's UK it is dark and contains a malevolent universe premise, and isn't for children, but it is still highly enjoyable

although you wont like the end. Blake as the innocent man set up and then hounded by the agents of an increasingly oppressive government, Travis as the Javert-like military-policeman on the tail of Blake and his crew, and Servillan as the quintessential powerluster pulling strings and slitting throats to suit her agenda. Then there are the conflicts between Blake and Avon, how Avon changes over time both for good and for ill based on Blake's presence and absence, combined with questions over who influences whom in Avon's relationship with the computer ORAC. Villa is often annoying, but he has his moments.

I would dearly love to see that one redone intelligently as there is so much that could be done with it.

World-building is fun.

True, but that ain't art

And reading stories set in well-built worlds can be gratifying. But they are mere background for the action.

Da.

Did you ever see a short-lived show called "Earth 2"?

Nope. I looked up on Wikipedia and not a bit of it is familiar to me.

A lot of modern visual SF has become little more than special effects extravaganzas or action movies writ large.

And apropos of that, avoid Alien vs Predator 2. It is just a gorefest, and chock-full of plot holes and cliche character developments that lead nowhere.

In the original movies the embryos took several hours to develop, as eyebrow raising as that whole development thing was, but now they develop from eggs to 8-foot raptors in less than one hour just so it can have a scenario of the raptors breeding faster than bacteria.

Save for minor detail, the final scene is completely predictable.

Or take a novel and make it the starting point for a series.

Using the universes of the novels and some of their plot points would be more practical than actually putting the novels to screen, unless the novels in question are easily divided into five equally-sized chunks themselves divided into 20-26 mini-chunks with four of them as respectable cliffhangers.

JJM

[D'kian]

Being from 70's UK it is dark and contains a malevolent universe premise, and isn't for children, but it is still highly enjoyable

I suppose it's out on DVD or will be. If I can get my hands on it, I'll look it up.

True, but that ain't art

No, it's not. But writers who spend years developing a background won't toss it out after one story. Still, in SF there are some amazing stories which used a unique background just once or maybe twice. Asimov's "Nightfall," Kornbluth's "Shark Ship," (an actual religious death-cult). Of course, these were not elaborate backgrounds.

When a writer does an elaborate world he will often return to it. Sometimes the results are good, as in Niven's Known Space, and sometimes they are not, as in Niven's Ringworld, or, worse yet, Pohl's Gateway Universe.

And apropos of that, avoid Alien vs Predator 2.

I avoided the first one, too. I was done with "Alien" since the third movie. BTW fast-growing monsters are a massive contradiction. I mean, if they can gain a huge amount of mass in hours out of nothing, surely they don't need to eat people.

Using the universes of the novels and some of their plot points would be more practical than actually putting the novels to screen,

Sure. I can envision taking Asimov's Earth from "Caves of Steel," and building up a futuristic cop show that slowly mutates into a large political thriller. I wouldn't do the "Caves" plot until late in the first season, for instance. And the Baley/Daneel team would not break up after one case, either. We'd get to see more Spacer worlds, too.

[Adrian Hester]

I hadn't seen either of the films in years, so I reread the story and watched the movies again before replying.

Yes, the 1982 "The Thing." I have neither seen nor read the other works you mention. Thanks for mentioning them. I will have to check out the Campbell story. Was the 1951 movie good?

By 1950s "creature feature" standards, yes. It was produced by Howard Hawkes and it's suspected (from his being everywhere on the set every day) that he actually directed it but gave the credit to Christian Nyby (either to give him a good start in the industry or else not to be associated with a science fiction flick). As a result, the dialogue was quite easy on the ears. The Thing was a much less threatening creature in the 1951 film than in the story or the 1982 film; rather than a threat to the very foundations of individual identity, it was a blood-drinking marauder from space. (Played by James Arness in not his most difficult role--he had to bellow a lot and stand menacingly in doorways.) This drained a good deal of the tension from the story, so to make a good movie they added a conflict between the scientists and the military that was fairly routine--the impersonal demand for knowledge versus the protection of humanity, yadda yadda yadda. A mischievous comparison that occurred to me at the end is that it was just a souped-up Attack of the Crab Monsters. (Not really, but there were some similarities--but The Thing from Another World was a much better movie.) Also, it was the movie that ended with those famous words, "Watch the Skies!"

The Campbell story is available on a website devoted to the Carpenter movie.

As for "The Thing," I really enjoyed the lead character played by Kurt Russell. He is a common sense man who faces the reality of The Thing most squarely, and therefore has the best odds of survival. I like Kurt Russell movies generally. Physically, I like his looks and I generally like his movie roles. The other part of the "The Thing" I liked was the sheer outrageousness of The Thing. It is an audacious monster, if there can be such a thing as an audacious monster. One last note on "The Thing," the scene where Kurt Russell has everyone tied up and is testing their blood to see which one is The Thing is just damn funny. I don't think every reader of this forum will find it funny, but it appealed to my love of imaginative, even if bizarre, situations.

The 1982 movie stayed much closer to the original story and focused on one of its best and most memorable features, the reactions and relationships among the men as they realize some of the crew are no longer human but seem like it in every respect. In fact, the movie even used characters from the story (a dozen out of the just over three dozen men in the station in the original), names and jobs mostly the same, and I agree about Kurt Russell--he matched the character of McReady (a significant name!) and even what I remember of the description of his looks quite well. The exposition was quite different, but the main differences are exactly what you'd expect in changing a well-constructed story into a well-constructed movie:

In the story the men at the American station find the spaceship themselves and the story begins with the four men who found the creature recounting their adventures to the rest of the crew--this recounting allows the men's reactions to the creature, including disgust, presentiments and nightmares, to be center-stage from the very beginning. In the movie, on the other hand, the men at the American station have to figure out the weird goings-on at the Norwegian camp, and as they learn more the tension and worry build.

The major difference overall is that the story is a much more optimistic piece of work; it combines the tension in the movie with the solution of a well-worked-out SF puzzle. (I'll add that the movie keeping the same characters made me notice a plot hole the second time around I missed the first time:

In the movie, who drained out all the blood in the cooler? It was a close parallel to a similar situation in the story that made it clear either Garry or Copper had been assimilated, but the end result in the movie was that neither one had been turned--so which of the turned men had gotten into the cooler and how?

)

Edited February 12, 2008 by Adrian Hester

[fletch]

Adrian Hester,

I've got at least a partial answer to your "who got to the cooler" question and how. In the scene where Bennings and Windows were in the store room with the remains of the "thing," Bennings says to Windows "Go get the keys from Gary."

When Windows returns to the store room with the keys he sees Bennings being absorbed by the "thing." At that point, you here the sound of the keys dropping to the floor as Windows turnes to run. Now, as to who grabbed them and got to the blood, there is no way to know for sure. However, I believe that at that point in the movie only two people had been infected or absorbed by the "thing." Palmer and Norris. It had to be one of them.

I suppose it goes without saying that this movie is my favorite SF film. I am almost ashamed to say that at one point in my life I could recite almost every line from the film from memory.

[Galileo Blogs]

Adrian,

Thanks so much for the history behind "The Thing" and the comparison between it and the story it was based on. That significantly increases my enjoyment of it, especially because I nearly share "fletch"'s level of enthusiasm for this movie.

Fletch,

That blood-testing scene sure was funny, wasn't it?

I can't quote the exact line, but I especially laughed when the commander of the camp asked to be released from his chair after watching The Thing emerge next to him and get torched.

In addition to the humor of scenes like that, what I liked the best was the character of McReady. As you say, he is indeed "ready" at all times to face reality and take action. His focus on action, but always as the result of facing the facts in front of him in a rational manner, is very appealing.

The other characters die because they panic, are reckless (or even just have bad luck).

The fact that McReady and the other character (I forgot his name) survive to the end makes sense. The other character was the most reality-focused person besides McReady.

The moral message I got from "The Thing" is that one must always focus on reality no matter what circumstances you find yourself in. In an emergency, facing the reality of a situation squarely and without evasion is the best hope of survival.

[Galileo Blogs]

One of my other all-time favorite science fiction movies, Alien, has a similar theme as The Thing. One of my two favorite characters in that movie was the executive officer Kane, played by John Hurt.

He is the one who gets the alien attached to his face.

When he was part of the away team sent to survey the alien spaceship, the female member of his team expresses fear and wants to turn back. He says, "We've got to go on. We've got to go on." The particular way he said that conveyed so much to me. Both his words and his inflection conveyed the particular courage that comes from having a scientific mind. These were the banner words of a scientist's and explorer's quest to discover new knowledge. They had to go on, because something great was ready to be discovered, and no scientist/explorer could turn away from that.

Like The Thing, the theme of Alien was also that "one must always focus on reality no matter what circumstances you find yourself in. In an emergency, facing the reality of a situation squarely and without evasion is the best hope of survival."

Both movies achieved their thematic purpose in an imaginative, tense and interesting manner.

However, Alien explored this theme in more detail. The subtle differences between Ripley (played by Sigourney Weaver), Dallas (played by Tom Skerritt) and Parker (played by Yaphet Kotto) were telling

in who survived the encounter with the alien. All three were courageous, but Dallas focused too much on action, and was unwilling to study the facts fully before acting. As a result, he acted too recklessly in going after the alien and got killed. Like Dallas, Parker certainly did not suffer from a lack of courage. He understood just how serious the battle with the alien was. He failed because he displayed reckless chivalry in trying to prevent the alien from killing Lambert (played by Veronica Cartwright) when there was no hope he could be successful. Of course, Lambert's problem was that she allowed her fear to dictate her actions. Her fearfulness killed her and resulted in the death of Parker.

Ripley also has a flaw, but she overcomes it. She could be too cautious at times, as in when she states that the ship is not ready to leave the planet. Dallas over-ruled her, revealing his executive self-confidence, and also highlighting that much of Ripley's caution stems from her subordinate role. She is the third most senior officer on the ship, and does not habitually make important executive decisions. However, her character develops as she quickly learns to make those decisions. In the end, Ripley survives because, like McReady in The Thing, she faced the facts most squarely. For example, of all the crew members she was most active in seeking out all of the facts about the alien, as in when she repeatedly peppered Ash (played by Ian Holm) for more data. Of course, Ash could not provide the data he was endlessly "collating" because he was secretly plotting to preserve the alien.

Both movies are dark. Evil is potent, but

the human mind is shown to win in the end.

[fletch]

Galileo,

I think the line was: "If you gentlemen dont mind, I'd rather not spend the rest of this winter tied to this fucking couch."

Although it didnt bother me, I think the goriness of the film is what limited its exposure. Particularly the scene with the dogs. Too bad, too, because I think it is truly one of the all time great SF/Horror films ever made. A handfull of men in a desolate, isolated outpost facing down a devious and deadly alien with only their wits separating life from certain, horrible death. Great premise, great movie.

[Lemuel]

What are your favorite science-fiction films? And why?

Some of these aren't technically "science fiction", but they have sci-fi elements to them:

Gattaca ... I really like the look of the film and the production value, but I particularly like the theme of success though intelligence and perseverance.

The Astronaut Farmer ... Despite his friends' thinking he's crazy, a former colleague telling him to get real, and the pressure of a government afraid that he's building weapons of mass destruction, a man builds a rocket in his barn and launches it into space.

Batman Begins ... In my opinion, the best adaptation of a comic book character ever made, and a tribute to heroism and justice in a benevolent universe.

5ive Days to Midnight (cable miniseries) ... A physicist must solve his own murder given the contents of a police report sent to him from the future. Barring the impossibility of time travel, I enjoy watching a movie where a determined hero saves the day using his intelligence.

Serenity ... Because Firefly was such a good TV show.

Contact ... Although it does give faith some lip service, the story explores the various objections and barriers to scientific exploration, yet the scientist triumphs despite them.

The Incredibles ... A great morality play about being proud of one's abilities, and refusing to allow those who are envious to stop one from achieving greatness.

Minority Report ... Philosophically flawed, but great production value, and has a motivated hero.

Logan's Run ... I love dystopian films, stories about individuals who struggle against their society's irrationality, and this is one my favorite.

Galaxy Quest ... Technically a comedy spoof rather than a sci-fi film, but, unlike many other comedies, the heroes reason their way through a very extraordinary situation and triumph.

For no other reason than they're good sci-fi yarns, I like Star Wars (Episodes 4-6), 2001: A Space Odyssey, 2010: The Year We Make Contact, Blade Runner, I, Robot, the Terminator trilogy, the Alien series (1 & 2 more than 3 & 4), and a few of the Star Trek films (Wrath of Khan, The Undiscovered Country, First Contact, Nemesis)

[Galileo Blogs]

I think the line was: "If you gentlemen dont mind, I'd rather not spend the rest of this winter tied to this fucking couch."

Fletch, thanks for the line. It was funny.

[Adrian Hester]

Adrian Hester,

I've got at least a partial answer to your "who got to the cooler" question and how. In the scene where Bennings and Windows were in the store room with the remains of the "thing," Bennings says to Windows "Go get the keys from Gary."

When Windows returns to the store room with the keys he sees Bennings being absorbed by the "thing." At that point, you here the sound of the keys dropping to the floor as Windows turnes to run. Now, as to who grabbed them and got to the blood, there is no way to know for sure. However, I believe that at that point in the movie only two people had been infected or absorbed by the "thing." Palmer and Norris. It had to be one of them.

Ah, that makes a lot of sense. Thanks!