Interesting. Not a single comic-book related title. Heck, X-men is about a new race of humans arising among the Normals who fear them. That's about as SF as one can get.

Posted May 5, 2007 10:09 AM by Serge

At last, a geeky topic which isn't depressing to me, like those writing or political ones. Still, I don't have much to say. Old enough to think that 2001 and Star Wars (now subtitled "A New Hope") are the top genre movies. I'm sure that leaves out a lot. It's so much people's preference. Thought Blade Runner looked gorgeous, but wasn't that great. I think each person will have their own favourites, depending on what time frame they're from. How about "Forbidden Planet," for instance?

That spelling reference at the bottom of the comment window comes off as vaguely condescending, like you're expecting us to do some of those things.

Posted May 5, 2007 10:14 AM by Jack Ruttan

When I read that they had put The Matrix at #1, I didn't bother reading the whole list.

Posted May 5, 2007 10:26 AM by David Dvorkin

Jack Ruttan @ 2... I too would put Forbidden Planet wayyyyy at the top of the list, but the constraint is that this has to be something from the last 25 years.

Posted May 5, 2007 10:32 AM by Serge

I've been sitting on a copy of Brazil from Netflix for the last two weeks. (Well, not literally sitting on it. The cleaning situation in the living room hasn't become quite that bad yet.) Mostly put it in the queue because I had the vague notion it was a "classic" of some sort, but I haven't had any inspiration to actually watch the sucker. Maybe I'll give it a try today, if it actually is a good movie. So long as it's not like 2001, which I grant may well be a classic, but was so excruciatingly boring to watch that it wasn't even worth finally catching all those references to it from other sources.

Posted May 5, 2007 10:36 AM by Fade Manley

By what possible standard would Eternal Sunshine not be science fiction?

Posted May 5, 2007 10:36 AM by Gavin

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind not SF? It's a story about the effects of a hypothetical new technology -- voluntary selective memory erasure -- on personal relationships. How could it be possibly be more like SF?

Posted May 5, 2007 10:37 AM by Rich McAllister

What about Dark City?

Posted May 5, 2007 10:43 AM by Serge

In the virtual-category of SF movies, I'd have put The Thirteenth Floor, not The Matrix.

Posted May 5, 2007 10:48 AM by Serge

I very much liked Matrix. Parts 2 and 3, not so very much. I can still watch the original. The sequels almost destroyed my ability to enjoy it, though. But top-ranked? Uh, no.

And, yes, Firefly deserves to be ranked much higher.

Posted May 5, 2007 11:05 AM by John

EW has never had any taste in, or judgement of, science fiction. For years the critic they assigned all the SF reviews to was Ken Tucker, who hates science fiction (and gay people, but that's another story).

The fact that any of the recent Star Bores movies are on this list proves that they have no taste.

And hello? Farscape?

Posted May 5, 2007 11:07 AM by Xopher

I think Eternal Sunshine Spotless Whatever qualifies for Science Fiction. I also think it does NOT qualify in being in the top anything list, except, perhaps, top 25 most complicated movie titles or something.

Dark City => saw it. loved it. Seems like "The Matrix" was basically "Dark City" with a little bit of rearrangment. And "dark city" and "brazil" are twins separated at birth. or something.

There were some moments that really hooked me in "The Matrix". When she learned how to fly helicopters in a split second, after all the time I spent in training to learn the old fashioned way, that scene made me drool a little bit. Yeah, The Matrix wasn't the first one to come up with that concept, (I seem to remember it being in some RPG's a decade or so earlier), but hey, it was helicopters, so it got in there.

The "There is no spoon" line was pretty nice, too. The whole "what is real what is illusion" isn't exactly something The Matrix invented, but it isn't very often that a blockbuster action movie has most of its audience go through the actual experience of questioning their fundamental worldview assumptions. "Total Recall" did it too. I give them both a point for at least getting something in the mainstream culture that involves some sort of thinking.

Sometimes it isnt' about being first with an idea. Sometimes I'm just happy to see people reminding others of the idea. In a "Hey, remember that time when we used to respect human rights?" sort of way....

Posted May 5, 2007 11:09 AM by Greg London

Oh, I see, they meant the animated series of The Clone Wars, which I never heard of at all. Still stupid, but not as stupid as including the recent live-action-but-still-without-noticeable-acting crapfests.

Posted May 5, 2007 11:24 AM by Xopher

Eureka should have been on that list.

Posted May 5, 2007 11:28 AM by Serge

I loved Quantum Leap. Of course, I was 15 at the time...

Posted May 5, 2007 11:34 AM by kouredios

This list just shows that the lister doesn't really get SF. Or is this based on box-office or ratings?

Cause then maybe it starts making some sense. Maybe.

Posted May 5, 2007 11:35 AM by beth meacham

No Gattaca? And V and Starship Troopers are on the Best list? **shudder**

Posted May 5, 2007 11:37 AM by Madeleine Robins

What's with all the Dark City love? Srsly! As an armchair film scholar I'm disappointed that a film which clearly rips off several better silent films -- and throws in some truly horrendous acting and editing, to boot -- gets such love from people who should know better. (And the fact that people think the Wachowski Brothers ripped it off make me laugh and laugh.)

Posted May 5, 2007 11:46 AM by Chelsea

Serge@1 No comic-book related titles? Heroes doesn't qualify for you? :) Seriously, I hope the writers can keep up the quality of this show. It has enough quality SF for makinglight to approve of it, and yet it's also accessible enough that coworkers of mine who'd never watch Doctor Who or Firefly can't wait to chat with me about Hiro, Peter, Nathan, et al. every Tuesday morning.

Posted May 5, 2007 11:54 AM by casey

Is Brazil really science fiction?

I just rewatched it this week. Well, I watched a 142-minute movie that had some likeness to the movie I watched in 1985. Plus I watched parts of the 94-minute version and much of Gilliam's commentary.

God, what a dreadful film. Sure it has brilliant parts, but overall it's so relentlessly negative that it's painful to watch. Listening to the commentary doesn't improve matters. We learn why Gilliam wanted to get back at plastic surgeons, but his "satire" bears such little resemblance to its target that it only makes me dislike the film.

And why all the ducts? Gilliam hates the way "modern conveniences" (i.e. indoor plumbing) deface the beauty of Victorian architecture. Too bad the proles won't keep emptying chamber pots so that Gilliam can enjoy his unblemished view of the quaint native houses.

Posted May 5, 2007 11:56 AM by Ken Hirsch

But Battlefield Earth was left off the list? :-)

Posted May 5, 2007 12:01 PM by Joel Polowin

Starship Troopers?!

Posted May 5, 2007 12:07 PM by janine

Chelsea 18: An interesting comment to be your first ever on Making Light. Would you care to explain why you think the Wachowski brothers did not mine Dark City for ideas? Would you like to name the "better silent films" you speak of?

I'd actually be interested in hearing these things, which isn't as true of a simply-derisive first comment.

Posted May 5, 2007 12:07 PM by Xopher

If the list was meant to be tv/movies with the greatest impact, as opposed to being great on their own, I can see including the first V miniseries. Diana unhooking her jaw and swallowing a guinea pig was something EVERYONE at school talked about the next day. Similarly, while I think DS9 is a much, much better show than TNG, I can see including TNG since it relaunched the franchise that then stayed on my television for the next 18 years. However, if the list is supposed to be movie/tv shows that are the greatest in their own right, then I probably wouldn't have included about 75% of the list.

Agree with Xopher that Farscape ought to be on the list.

Posted May 5, 2007 12:07 PM by cathy

No Gattaca? If it was my personal list I'd have Mamoru Oshii's Avalon in there too, but I'll cut them a little slack due to its lack of a theatrical release. Even so, they bloody ought to have remembered Ghost in the Shell.

In fact, now I notice it, the only non-American products in there are Dr Who and (arguably) Brazil (unless I'm missing one of the ones I'm not familiar with). Huh. Parochial, or what?

Posted May 5, 2007 12:11 PM by Charlie Stross

Wait.

Neither Farscape nor Babylon 5?

The compiler is utterly wrong, obviously.

Posted May 5, 2007 12:16 PM by JESR

I think one reason it's a bad list is because it's based on things other than the quality of the show in question.

E.T. is on the list because they give it credit for Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan. Total Recall is on the list because... um. They wanted a Schwarzenegger vehicle, and couldn't afford to fill up a Hummer?

The Clone Wars animated series (as much as I liked it) is only on the list because they wanted to put something Star Wars on the list, and it's the non-video game that didn't suck.

Another reason the list is bad is it wasn't compiled by someone very familiar with SF. The Firefly blurb wasn't written by someone who watched the show, and TNG tackled homosexuality like Lost tackles closure.

I'd rather see the list of top SF movies from the future and other timelines: the definitive Casablanca (starring Peter Beardsley and Myra Binglebat), the Neil Gaiman/Terry Gilliam Episode III: Fall of the Republic (from the timeline where Lucas realized he can't write dialog or direct)...

Postscript to #21 - I'm sure Mitt Romney is writing them a stern email. "Worst top 25 list ever!"

Posted May 5, 2007 12:19 PM by FungiFromYuggoth

#7 seconded. And while I'm at it, I'll defend The Matrix too. It's hard to remember, in the wake of Reloaded and Revolutions, that it was actually quite amazing, and, er, revolutionary. You old timers will just have to take my word for it, but The Matrix was the kind of movie that made fans--it had the scope, the mix of eye-catching action and mind-blowing ideas that hooks you like heroin. And, most of all, it was popular. That's not the only mark of quality, but it's hardly irrelevant. Star Wars wouldn't be a classic of the genre and a pillar of fandom if no one had gone to see it. It was, more than a sf movie, a cultural moment.

That seems to be as much as anything what they are going for--not the sf titles that were the best, but the ones that made the heaviest impressions on the public zeitgeist. On that criterium, The Matrix is a pretty reasonable pick.

Posted May 5, 2007 12:27 PM by Heresiarch

Easily the most serious omission is "Babylon 5", possibly the best sf TV series ever (I only hedge because I'm not familiar with some of the more recent series here). E.T. perhaps works better as modern myth than as science fiction, which goes double for The Matrix. Yes, Eternal Sunshine... counts as sf. Agree with your enthusiasm for Brazil, but upon reflection I'm wondering why Gilliam's Twelve Monkeys isn't here as well. (I also wonder why only one Spielberg movie is on the list; Jurassic Park, Minority Report and critics' favorite A.I. might have all been listed.)

Finally, I'm glad to see two animated series on the list, but I also found myself thinking of good-to-great animation not listed, especially two great anime films (Akira and Nausicaä of the Valley of the Winds) and two very different twists of the E.T.-meets-kid concept (The Iron Giant and Lilo & Stitch); I also think "Dexter's Laboratory" wouldn't have disgraced the list, and admit to a weakness for "My Life as a Teenage Robot" as well.

Posted May 5, 2007 12:28 PM by Rob T.

That 25 year limit is tough for me, but they could have found places for "Babylon 5," "Gattaca," and "Akira."

Again, it's so much down to personal taste, and what you've run into in your viewing career (no Heroes for me, as of yet). Was "Robocop" out of the running? I'd put that in ahead of the other Voerhoven (sp?) movies. (something new for the spelling ref. queue).

Posted May 5, 2007 12:29 PM by Jack Ruttan

Well, clearly if "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" is SciFi, then so is "Being John Malkovich" which was a much, much better movie.

Posted May 5, 2007 12:30 PM by Lee

Rob T. #29 got some nice ones. The good thing about these kinds of topics is that it might let you discover something you've missed. I suppose I can vote for "The Incredibles," but none of these is a perfect production.

Posted May 5, 2007 12:33 PM by Jack Ruttan

I think we're in agreement with regard to this list: we diskard it uterly.

Posted May 5, 2007 12:34 PM by Xopher

Xopher: For some reason I thought I'd occasionally poked my head in here and there over the years, but apparently I'm mistaken.

As far as the silent films that are better than Dark City: it pretty openly plunders from almost everything Fritz Lang ever directed, most notably Metropolis (which, come to think of it, is noticeably absent from this list), as well as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

It's not so much that I don't think the Wachowskis didn't rip off DC for The Matrix as I find the irony of talking about how DC was ripped off kind of painful in light of the films Proyas obviously plagiarizes. (There's one particular scene in DC that's almost identical to Metropolis, save for the shoot-for-the-edit cutting style [in which no shot lasts more than five seconds] and even worse acting.)

Posted May 5, 2007 12:36 PM by Chelsea

I was about to whine about parochial Americans and where's Blake's 7, and then I remembered that Blake's 7 is now more than 25 years old.

I hate it when the universe reminds me that I'm middle-aged now.

Posted May 5, 2007 12:36 PM by Julia Jones

While far from the best of any given time period, "The Matrix" is a truly enjoyable movie. As long as you don't think about it too hard.

If you think about it too hard and start to notice how the Wachowskis (sp?) have ripped off characters, costume designs, themes and set-pieces from Grant Morrison's widely ignored comics series "The Invisibles," "The Matrix" becomes downright infuriating. (Morrison thought of suing but eventually let it go.)

During the release of the sequels, I couldn't understand why no one was pointing out the debt they owed to "The Invisibles." I should have done so myself.

Posted May 5, 2007 12:43 PM by Michael Berry

This is about what I'd expect from Entertainment Weekly.

I think we can all (or nearly all) agree that Babylon 5 damn well ought to be on that list somewhere and that they really didn't need to include Starship Troopers...but I'd be really interested in seeing what people here would have chosen for the #1 spot.

Posted May 5, 2007 12:51 PM by Naomi

Chelsea 34: I see your point about both Metropolis and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, but considered it more of an homage than a ripoff. (Both are more than 25 years old; they weren't doing the best SF films ever, after all.) Not that I think Dark City is a great movie, I'm just really fond of it for my own reasons. I try to get everyone to have a friend fast-forward over the stupid spoilery initial voiceover and watch it for the first time expecting a film noir—which technically it is, I guess, but I mean in mood and subject matter, not just lighting.

I agree with your last paragraph, too, but think the Wachowskis more likely to have seen Dark City then any silent movie, no matter how good—maybe even "especially a classic one." (I don't like them very much, even though The Matrix was the movie that finally pushed me over the edge into buying a DVD player.)

Posted May 5, 2007 12:54 PM by Xopher

Michael 36: The bad physics annoyed me too. I mean, bad physics is de rigeur in Hollowood, but The Matrix was the first movie where the physics was so bad it turned the bad guys into the good guys. At least in my limited film knowledge base.

Posted May 5, 2007 12:57 PM by Xopher

I'd go for either B5 or DS9 as number one, if only because they have cool acronyms.

(Oh, and also because I don't have cable, don't go out to movies, and very seldom rent anything.)

Posted May 5, 2007 12:59 PM by adamsj

Oh, and in that light, Early Edition belongs somewhere toward the bottom of that list.

Posted May 5, 2007 1:00 PM by adamsj

Any top-whatever list that has The Matrix anywhere in it, never mind at the top, automatically goes into the garbage bin as far as I'm concerned. Unless it's a list of the "most annoying movies of all time", in which case, bring it on.

Yes, where the hell is Farscape?!

Personally I would have ranked Brazil higher, since after 21 years it is still my favorite movie of all time. Though at this point I would hesitate to file it under SF ... I would create a new genre for it: "Prescient History". :P

Remember, folks, We're All In This Together.

Posted May 5, 2007 1:04 PM by meredith

The Matrix reminded me less of a good movie and more of Space Mountain, including the long wait in line (which I know has been dealt with, sort of, these days).

Posted May 5, 2007 1:06 PM by JESR

There are two Dark Cities--one that's good, and the director's cut which is utter crap. You can't get the good one anymore, I don't think. (mumble mumble kids mumble lawn)

Posted May 5, 2007 1:09 PM by TexAnne

I agree. No Farscape? What were they thinking?

Posted May 5, 2007 1:11 PM by Melissa Mead

What, no Max Headroom?

Posted May 5, 2007 1:17 PM by Jen Roth

Movies I would include that they didn't, strict SF division:

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across The Eighth Dimension
Android
Dark City (I thought it was pretty clear that viewers were supposed to think of Metropolis, not to mention "It's A Good Life," "Telek," and "You're All Alone." So I'm firmly in the homage camp.)
Pi
Princess Mononoke

Movies I would include that they didn't, fringe SF division:

Being John Malkovich
City of Lost Children
Groundhog Day
The Iron Giant
The Sacrifice
Waking Life

Posted May 5, 2007 1:25 PM by Tim Walters

Yes, no Farscape, and yes, no Max Headroom, but shiny shiny pic of Nathan Fillion.

Oh, whoops, was that out loud? Sorry!

Posted May 5, 2007 1:28 PM by Chryss

What Jen @ 46 said. Listing Quantum Leap but not Max Headroom is just... bizarre.

Posted May 5, 2007 1:29 PM by Chris Clarke

@27 they already had Terminators 1 & 2, so they didn't need Total Recall. So, no idea why it's there...

Reading the actual blurb on Firefly, it was a lot more positive overall than just "didn't work" implies. They were clearly referring to its cancellation...and recommended everyone go out and watch the whole season, the movie, and then lobby for more. So yeah...why wasn't it ranked higher?

Posted May 5, 2007 1:30 PM by kouredios

Julia @ 35: Me too. Sigh.

(On the other hand, it's fun the way that pop culture now is continually referencing stuff from my childhood, because it's made by people my age.)

Posted May 5, 2007 1:45 PM by sharon

Managing not to mention Babylon 5 damns this list irrevocably.

Posted May 5, 2007 1:46 PM by Fragano Ledgister

14. CHILDREN OF MEN (2006)

Just shows they aren’t familiar with the core literature.

What does this mean?

Posted May 5, 2007 2:14 PM by Martin

Eternal Sunshine: definitely science fiction, and excellent. Not as great as Being John Malkovich, sure, but that's one of the top five science fiction movies ever.

Another great sf movie missing from the list: Delicatessen.

I love Brazil so much that it's hard for me to understand dislking it, but I guess if something being relentlessly bleak automatically qualifies it for awfulness, that would do it. I don't understand why bleakness isn't as valid a thing to shoot for as anything else. Anyway, it's hilarious, too.

I'd have Gattaca high on my list, too.

And Repo Man.

I'm surprised to not see The Truman Show on their list, which is flawed but still would make my top 25, and has enough well-done standard movie stuff to please a non-sf audience.

Posted May 5, 2007 2:15 PM by Scraps

I can't believe I left off Repo Man!

Posted May 5, 2007 2:17 PM by Tim Walters

Ditto on Max Headroom - I loved that show - and most of # 47's two lists. (Well, I'd put Pi on the fringe list, and I never saw Android or even heard of The Sacrifice.)

I would not only include Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind on the SF list, I'd move it much nearer the top. That was a good movie, and even though I dislike Jim Carrey, he was a damn good actor in that movie. The Matrix (first movie only) indisputably belongs on the list, but maybe more like #10.

Posted May 5, 2007 2:19 PM by Clifton Royston

Indisputably? I'll dispute it: The Matrix was a shiny adventure movie dressed up in eye-rolling faux-profundity and flattened by an idiot plot. I thought its action-adventure elements were poorly done, but I hate that genre, so I'm an unreliable judge. But the science fiction elements were just gabble, and come to pieces at a touch.

Posted May 5, 2007 2:33 PM by Scraps

The Sacrifice is a mid-Eighties Tarkovsky film, and on second thought it's probably not even SFnal enough to be on the fringe list. I expect that what I really wanted was for Stalker to be a couple of years newer, and thus eligible.

Posted May 5, 2007 2:34 PM by Tim Walters

OK then, it's clearly not indisputable. I guess that was a silly adjective to use.

The reason it functions as SF, despite the silliness of the humans-as-batteries idea, is that there were a lot of potential different ways in which it could have been developed in the successors which would have been interesting, coherent, and deep. Even up through the end of #2, it could have been turned around, and I actually took some bits in #2 as hints that they were going to. (Why did the Oracle only in the Matrix? What was the reality status of that other place Neo exited the Matrix to with the Architect? And why is Neo eventually able to start exerting strange effects in the real world?)

They could have pulled the whole thing together in the third movie with a revelation that the "real world" they had exited into was itself simulated and no more real than the "Matrix". Until the huge disappointment of the last movie I had thought that was the plan all along. Unfortunately the clever pointers I thought I had seen in that direction turned out to be simply scriptwriting ineptness. I was robbed.

Nonetheless, I continue to see The Matrix as part of the trilogy I wanted to see, just as I would prefer to continue maintaining that Star Wars ep I-III never existed and that the original Star Wars remains untainted and pure.

Posted May 5, 2007 2:58 PM by Clifton Royston

Martin, I don't know what the original commentor meant, for sure, but I'd bet that it has something to do with Margaret Attwood's adamant rejection of the term SF to describe her writing.

Posted May 5, 2007 3:08 PM by JESR

casey @ 19... True, there is Heroes. The strange thing is that I could never get into it, maybe precisely because I love comic-books. If that makes any sense.

Posted May 5, 2007 3:08 PM by Serge

Sharon @51: I'm having a lot of fun with Life on Mars, because I'm in the right age group to enjoy the references.

(I did my bit to drive up the viewing figures on the Camberwick Green pastiche trailer uploaded to Youtube.:-)

Posted May 5, 2007 3:13 PM by Julia Jones

Tim@47: Buckaroo Banzai was a lot better movie before I actually saw it. I could see it trying So. Damn. Hard. to be awesome, but it's got a perfect combination of too much going on and too little of it onscreen. My gaze kept going from my watch to trying to look around the corner at the far more interesting movie that they didn't bother to shoot.

All of which saddens me, because I had spent, well, decades with this movie ticking in the back of my head, wanting to find a copy to see it.

Posted May 5, 2007 3:19 PM by Anticorium

Serge @ 9: I enjoyed The Thirteenth Floor, but I thought it relied a little too much on, "now here's our twist!" It suffers on rewatching (as does The Matrix, of course).

Posted May 5, 2007 3:20 PM by Adam Lipkin

This is what you get when the people making up the list have gotten all of their education and tastes from watching American prime-time TV: Badly understood SF and drivel.

Posted May 5, 2007 3:26 PM by Carl

Clifton: That was my thought, too. The only way it made sense for Neo and Agent Smith to be able to do what they did in the real world was for it all to be a simulation, too.

I thought The Matrix was a pretty fun film, for many of the same reasons as the first Star Wars. It's a pity they then ran it into the ground with their next two films.

Posted May 5, 2007 3:29 PM by albatross

Anticorium @ 83:

I can see what you mean about too much of it being offscreen, but that's part of what I liked about it: the sense that everything happening was imbedded in a complex backstory that's never made explicit.

I can certainly understand that it wouldn't live up to decades of anticipation, though; it's too slight and goofy for that. In my case, I saw its original theatrical release with no expectations at all, so it was a wonderful surprise.

Add to the I-can't-believe-I-forgot-to-mention-it list: Tremors.

Posted May 5, 2007 3:30 PM by Tim Walters

ESOTSM SF?

Yes. The snark answer is because it reminded me a great deal of a sweet sharp story read in Asimovs* about how divorce and old loves change given the existence of selective memory erasure. "Just get over her already- she's over you" has a new meaning when she doesn't remember you at all.

Children of Men?
I noticed when it first came out that there wasn't a single non-SF-based review of CoM that mentioned Aldiss. Not one. I started looking at Google-news: 2000+ hits turned to 200 (at best) when "science fiction" was added, and zeroed at Aldiss.

My main and righteous rant will, if I can't resist it (and already I've got my keyboard up against the whetstone) go into the PKDick thread. One point I'd make there is that reviewers are allowed to get away with a research laziness that wouldn't now be acceptible for a high school newspaper: they're not even reading Wikipedia, where the wiki article represents a floor, a minimum of topical knowledge that one must account for in a review.

-------
* the movie and the story were, as I recall, work timeline simultaneous: I mention it for sfnalishness, not causality. CoM, on the other hand...

Posted May 5, 2007 3:43 PM by Kathryn from Sunnyvale

I'd call The Truman Show SF, albeit very near-term, and it was much better than most of the stuff on that list. The first Matrix movie was pretty fun IMO, and Minority Report was a good movie that was unquestionably SF.

Being John Malkovich was a fantastic movie, but I'm not sure I'd quite call it SF.

DS9 seems like it ought to beat out all the other Star Trek series in terms of quality, but I think it was too dark to have as much of a draw as TNG.

I am not sure what a good list of this kind would look like, but this ain't it.

Posted May 5, 2007 3:59 PM by albatross

I'm going to throw this out there because I just saw it the other evening, but Demolition Man is a scifi movie from 15 years ago full of facepalming goodness.

Re: Children Of Men

While the schtick wasn't particularly innovative, I came into the film not knowing a darn thing about it. My friend was with me at the ticket booth and said, "Let's go see that!" So I shrugged, paid my dollar, and went in.

The thing is, Children of Men is a really good film, and plot is only one part of what makes it good. It's the first movie in a long time that left me shaken after seeing it, and glad I had -- and a lot of that was because of subtle things that only the film medium could have accomplished.

Re: the Matrix

So, I'm going to put out a tangential and probably wildly unpopular opinion and mention that I enjoyed the second movie an awful lot, more than the others -- though not because of anything the characters said. Visually, however, it featured a lot of pretty, consequence-less, stylistic violence in interesting locations (and I come at this with a background in dance, martial arts, and watching far too many kung fu movies).

Of course, the same could be said for 300, and that movie did more to offend me than anything else.

Posted May 5, 2007 4:01 PM by A. Nakama

IMO, 'ST: The Mild Annoyance of Khan' didn't beat out 'ST: A Whale of A Movie', but that's possibly because 'Khan' was a sequel to a single episode (which, also IMO, wasn't that great to begin with).

Posted May 5, 2007 4:11 PM by P J Evans

I'm somewhat surprised that commenters here don't mention Mirrormask among alternatives. Or did it not receive wide enough release?

For that matter, I think we'd be able to come up with a better list of good F/SF movies and television without even going back 25 years. How about 5 years?

Posted May 5, 2007 4:31 PM by Peter Hentges

I loved Mirrormask, but I'd consider it fantasy rather than SF.

Posted May 5, 2007 4:58 PM by Tim Walters

JESR (60): Children of Men was written by P. D. James, not Margaret Atwood. Or did you mean something else?

Posted May 5, 2007 5:26 PM by Mary Aileen

Tim Walters @ 67... Add to the I-can't-believe-I-forgot-to-mention-it list: Tremors.

"I vote for outer space. There's no way these boys are from around here."

Posted May 5, 2007 5:31 PM by Serge

Howard the Duck, maybe. If the list were to include 9999 movies.

Posted May 5, 2007 5:39 PM by Serge

I was rather turned off of Children of Men by the blurbs I saw. Any plot which begins with something happening "inexplicably" frustrates me -- it feels like the writers are displaying a failure of imagination for not at least /trying/ to explain it, even if the explanation is obvious bullshit. (Unless the film is about the discovery of the explanation, a la Serenity.) I also don't like movies which are too obvious in pushing a particular political message, even one I agree with, and all the comparisons that were being drawn between CoM and recent events made me wary. People here are saying not entirely dismissive things about the movie, though, so I'll put the question to you--- is Children of Men worth seeing, or should I just read the Aldiss book instead?

Posted May 5, 2007 5:41 PM by Kevin Riggle

re Children of Men - go see. Probably repeatedly. One of the best movies in the past few years. Amazing filmmaking - beautiful and definitely dystopian sf.

I'm disappointed that the list did not include one of my all time favorite films, "Until the End of the World" (though perhaps that should really be 2-3 films - as distributed it is really almost 2 films plus there is apparently a directors cut with another 2 hrs).

I also think that Doctor Who (plus the current spinoff Torchwood) deserve to be MUCH higher on the list. Of course I'm a Dr. Who fan and thus rather biased on this subject - but I've always found Doctor Who much more interesting than either Star Trek or Star Wars (and the current series of Doctor Who are among the best of the series 40+ years)

And the absence of Babylon 5 is extremely glaring. By far one of the best SF TV shows of the past 25 years (much better I'd say than V, clone wars, or Lost). And I think it is too early to say if Heroes will stand up - so far it is very promising and good, but we're only 20 shows in - see Lost for what can go wrong)

Shannon

Posted May 5, 2007 6:04 PM by Shannon Clark

Re: Dark City (which I enjoyed):

I saw a presentation of The Limey* at the Dryden Theater at the Eastman House, which was based on a screenplay by Lem Dobbs, who is credited as a co-writer on Dark City. He was on hand to make some comments on The Limey, and also talked about Dark City.

He commented that Roger Ebert turned out to be a big fan of Dark City, and had hosted a three day conference about the film at some college. Dobbs had a chance to stop in on one day of this event. After one of the presentations, someone in the audience brings up the hotel room number where some scene unfolds, and finds a matching Biblical reference which seems significant.

In his comments at the Eastman, Dobbs noted how people will often read more into a script than is there; he needed a room number for the scene, he was staying in a hotel at the time, he used his room number.

* Call out to Serge: The Limey starred Terence Stamp (also known for what role?). In the month it was shown, the Dryden also managed to show a couple of other films he started in, including Modesty Blaise.

Posted May 5, 2007 6:04 PM by Rob Rusick

Rob Rusick @ 79... Terence Stamp (also known for what role?)

I won't say it. I won't.

Posted May 5, 2007 6:06 PM by Serge

FungiFromYoggoth @ 27

TNG tackled homosexuality like Lost tackles closure.

Or worse; Lost will handle closure perforce when the network cancels it. You have read the preface David Gerrold wrote for "Blood and Fire"? I'm glad he wrote that down; I hate to get my gossip on streetcorners.

Posted May 5, 2007 6:08 PM by Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers)

#35
Aw, heck. I'm not 25 yet, and I love Blake's 7.

(Servalan makes me a happy girl!

Posted May 5, 2007 6:18 PM by Comesleep

Well I also thouht it a tad parochial: so, in a spirit of friendly rivalry, here's my shot at the top 10 best british tv sf of all time:
1 Dr Who
2 Blakes 7
3 Survivors
4 Sapphire and Steel
5 Doomwatch
6 The Tomorrow People
7 Year of the Sex Olympics
8 Thunderbirds
9 Quatermass
10 Threads

Anyone fancy doing a USian version?

Posted May 5, 2007 6:19 PM by Andy Brazil

Clone Wars was Samurai Jack with light sabers, which is to say, cool.

Posted May 5, 2007 6:24 PM by Earl Cooley III

First the obligatory comment about the futility of trying to choose and rank works of art according to any one criterion: it has only one good result, that it starts discussions like this where we can find out about works we didn't know of, and people with tastes similar to ours.

Next, violent agreement: Farscape, Gattaca, and Buckaroo Banzai should have been on the list.* Their absence proves, as if we didn't already know, that whoever made up the list didn't understand SF at all.

I also think 12 Monkeys should have been on the list. It's the only big budget** time travel movie I can think of where the writers didn't get a headache from the paradoxes and blow rational thought off completely, or just pull a deus ex machina from where the sun don't shine.

And while we're at it, why isn't there a list for fantasy? Not bludgeons and dragons, but movies like Mirrormask or Labryrinth.

* See, I do contain multitudes.

** There's one small budget (around $8000 IIRC) movie called Primer that not only gets that right, it also gets the high-tech startup atmosphere and character right.

Posted May 5, 2007 6:37 PM by Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers)

Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless mind, which some people have described as Carrey's best work, is not really science fiction at all, instead it is what we nowadays would call a counter-factual.

Posted May 5, 2007 6:38 PM by bryan

Mary Aileen, no, just swapping pairs again; it's a brain thing.

Sorry.

Posted May 5, 2007 6:50 PM by JESR

Comesleep @82: Unfortunately I'm old enough to have watched Blake's 7 on its original outing. Now I am using the DVDs to hook a another generation of new souls for the faith.

One of the creepier things about watching a late 70s dystopia is seeing how many of the things the writers used as markers of a totalitarian state have come to pass, or are in the offing.

Posted May 5, 2007 7:20 PM by Julia Jones

One of my favorite little-noticed movies is called Equilibrium. It's kind of "Brave New World" with some of the visual appeal of The Matrix.

Posted May 5, 2007 8:06 PM by Scott MacHaffie

Bruce @ 85:

Next, violent agreement: Farscape, Gattaca, and Buckaroo Banzai should have been on the list.* Their absence proves, as if we didn't already know, that whoever made up the list didn't understand SF at all.

I've never seen Farscape, and I thought Gattaca oozed mediocrity from every pore. Can I still be in the club?

Twelve Monkeys was OK in and of itself, but failed my test for remakes: would I rather have just watched the original again?

Bryan @ 86: funny!

Posted May 5, 2007 8:11 PM by Tim Walters

Bryan, #86:

[..]we nowadays would call a counter-factual.

Do we, indeed? I'm comfortable with 'science fiction', myself; 'counterfactual' sounds like a high-faluting term that high-faluters might apply to SF they like in order to avoid admitting that they like something in genre.

Posted May 5, 2007 8:20 PM by NelC

NelC: I think Bryan was engaging in a little cross-thread humor.

Posted May 5, 2007 8:26 PM by Tim Walters

"bryan," I mean. Sorry, bryan.

Posted May 5, 2007 8:27 PM by Tim Walters

The last network-aired episode of "Max Headroom" involved Max, Edison, & friends trying to protect a ring of video pirates supplying educational programming to disadvantaged kids.

The copyright cops eventually drag away the video equipment, but on orders from their lieutenant ignore a sheet-draped archaic mechanism off in the corner.

The episode ends with a kid reading, from a freshly printed book, the opening lines from A Tale of Two Cities.

Freaking brilliant.

Posted May 5, 2007 8:38 PM by Stefan Jones

Scott at 89 has got Equilibrium as the main one I would have loved to see. It's like the Matrix but with slightly less physics jiggery-pokery. Also Christian Bale is many millions of times hotter than Keanu Reeves.

I think if there were to be a fantasy list, Buffy would have to be in the top 5.

Posted May 5, 2007 8:54 PM by Nomie

Myself (and I understand this is a pet peeve) don't understand the Heroes worship*. I have two episodes on my iTunes, but I can't bring myself to finish even the first episode. I keep getting pulled up short by the eclipse scene in the middle, which between the pseudo-profundity, the geographic idiocy (it's daylight in Tokyo AND New York), scientific idiocy (the sun is high in the sky in Tokyo AND New York simultaneously), and the false notes (Japanese office workers doing their exercising in SUITS?** And not stopping to notice the eclipse?), it was enough to convince me that I couldn't trust the show. Call it nitpicking, but it becomes REALLY hard to suspend disbelief when so much nonsense gets thrown up.

I have an American-raised Japanese colleague who recognizes all this, but is still a fan of the show. So, what am I missing?

But to get back on topic, yeah, it's a pretty worthless list.

*I'm sorry, I couldn't resist.
**The whole Japanese office sequences looked phony to me, from the layout of the offices to the dress of the workers, given my experiences of Japanese offices.

Posted May 5, 2007 8:55 PM by Calton Bolick

Ah, Max Headroom. It long ago occurred to me that were I to become insanely rich like Michael Jackson, rather than buy the Elephant Man bones, I'd buy all the rights to "Max Headroom", and then set up a website that would play all Max, all the time. Yes, then I would know I had truly made it. ahhh.....

Buckaroo Bonzai, is past the 25 year mark, but it is, of course, the best movie of all time. I'd probably buy all the rights to that one and set up a 24-7 Bonzai site.

Posted May 5, 2007 9:01 PM by Greg London

Tim Walters @ 90

Thanks for the reference to La Jetee; I hadn't known about it. With luck there's tape or DVD I can get my hands on.

What did you think was mediocre about Gataca? Writing, acting, camera work? I don't think it's a great film by any means, but I saw some solid craft in there.

The thing about Farscape that I think grabs a lot of people is that it's different from most other SF in TV or movies. I particularly like it because of the creature design, but then I'm a fan of puppets and such.

Posted May 5, 2007 9:04 PM by Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers)

Hm, I'm surprised by all the votes for Gattacca. I just couldn't get into it. The pacing just seemed painfully slow. I had a similar experience watching "Eyes Wide Shut".

Posted May 5, 2007 9:08 PM by Greg London

Bryan, Tim, I just read the post this moment. Shame I can't remove my comment for redundancy....

Posted May 5, 2007 9:14 PM by NelC

Greg 99: See, I loved Eyes Wide Shut. I understand that I'm one of the few who did.

Bruce 98: Well, I have to admit that Ben Browder is a huge part of what I like about Farscape; but another part is that I really like the themes it covers; in fact that show had a thematic richness that few shows in any genre can match.

It's close to Buffy in that regard, IMHO.

Posted May 5, 2007 9:42 PM by Xopher

Not yet mentioned, I think: one of my all-time favorite SF movies, John Sayles's The Brother from Another Planet.

Sayles also wrote and directed one of my favorite fantasy movies, The Secret of Roan Inish, a movie that convinced me that you can do astonishing magic on about forty-nine cents worth of special effects if your script is good enough.

However. Heroes is brill, sententious narration and defective Japanese offices notwithstanding. And Life on Mars (which I just inhaled both seasons of, in the last week) is excellent, with moments of Transcendentally Great, most notably a scene in S1E7 which I intend to write a future Making Light post about.

Posted May 5, 2007 9:51 PM by Patrick Nielsen Hayden

Xopher @ 101

Makes two of us, anyway; I loved Eyes Wide Shut enough to buy a DVD and watch it occasionally. Referring back to the Opening / Closing Line thread, it has a great ending line.

And I can get behind slow-moving: one of my favorite movies of recent years is "The Long Engagement".

Posted May 5, 2007 9:51 PM by Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers)

Bruce @ 98:

What did you think was mediocre about Gataca? Writing, acting, camera work? I don't think it's a great film by any means, but I saw some solid craft in there.

I couldn't point to anything specific wrong with it; as you say, it was solidly crafted. It just seemed bland and uninspired. Definitely a very subjective thing.

Which reminds me, by some chain of assocation, of a couple of films that I don't think have been mentioned: eXistenZ, which I can't decide exactly how much I liked but which was certainly unique, and A.I., which was definitely quite bad but which kept me glued to the screen by its sheer wtfitude.

Posted May 5, 2007 9:59 PM by Tim Walters

Patrick 102: I forgot about TBFAP; I love that movie. Years later when I saw Joe Morton in a speaking role, I was like "wait, he can't...oh." It also has some wonderful monologues in it. My favorite is the one that starts "Do you eat pork?"

It also has a special place in my heart because bits of it were filmed in Hoboken (the video parlor scenes were filmed at Mr. Big's (now defunct) at 9th and Washington). Sayles lived here then; I used to see him on the bus from Port Atrocity.

I haven't seen Roan Inish, but I'll make sure I do.

Posted May 5, 2007 10:05 PM by Xopher

Squee! Someone else who remembers The Tomorrow People!

Here in the States it aired on Nickelodeon of all channels when I was, erm, still in single digits. And after it came something called The Third Eye which I never did sit still and watch but nevertheless whose title credits sequence fascinated me enough that I eventually made myself a brass wire necklace out of it. (This explanation is a very klutzy answer to "Ooo! You have a All-Seeing Eye necklace! What's up with that?")

Posted May 5, 2007 10:08 PM by Nicole J. LeBoeuf-Little

Roan Inish is wonderful.

Another movie that's not quite fantasy, but that strikes me as something a lot of MLers would like, is Anchoress, about (you guessed it) an anchoress in 14th-century England whose mother (played by Toyah Wilcox!) happens to be the town witch, filmed in gorgeous black and white.

Posted May 5, 2007 10:15 PM by Tim Walters

Greg 99: See, I loved Eyes Wide Shut. I understand that I'm one of the few who did.

i think a lot of it was improperly set expectations due to misleading advertising. All the ads I saw for "Eyes Wide Shut" had the song "baby done a bad, bad thing" playing in the background. It's a rather fast beat blues song. High energy. then some slow spots, then high again. Variation, but mostly high energy.

The movie's real soundtrack seems to be based on a guy sitting six feet from a piano keyboard, trying to play some really cool music with a cue stick from the pool hall. He's playing all the right notes, but he has to play real slow to make sure he hits the right keys.

Whether my expectations are met or not can have a big impact on my enjoyment of a movie. If I expect crap and get something slightly better, I might feel pleasently surprised. If I expect amazing things and get something that's "pretty good", I might feel disappointed.

I was severely disappointed by Eyes Wide Shut. And I know part of that was due to massive mismatch in expectation versus delivered goods.

The other reason for disappointment is some yet undefined quality of the movie that I've been unable to put my finger on, but I can tell you set off my "something about this movie isn't working" when I'm watching the orgy scene and all I could think was "This might be a good time to get a refill on my soda".

I was that fricken bored. I don't know what was the cause. A room full of beautiful naked people on screen, would, I would think, be sufficient ingredients to grab my interest at least long enough to not think about Mt Dew refills, but for some reason, I was bored out of my fricken gourd.

Gattacca was equally slow. It was worse in some ways than Eyes Wide Shut because there were obvious things that I predicted would happen an hour or so before they happened. Or maybe Eyes Wide Shut was worse because there really was no plot other than "Man overreacts to wife's under-the-influence fantasy, yet can't bring himself to do the deed." And then we spend hours watching how Tom Cruise can't bring himself to cheat, or is for some other reason thwarted from cheating, on his wife. I suppose I knew from the beginning that he wouldn't actually do it.

Then, Gattacca was a standard "Man tries to pass himself off as someone else" plot. And had just about every "trying to pass as someone else" plot turn that a few years of basic television will expose you to.

Plus, I had a problem sympathizing with the main Gattacca character for one very specific reason. I may be remembering the details incorrectly, but I had issue with a guy whose eyesight was so bad that his posing as a flight crewmember would put him in a position where losing his glasses would mean a bunch of people could die.

Posted May 5, 2007 10:23 PM by Greg London

I can't believe I forgot The Prestige.

Posted May 5, 2007 10:31 PM by Scraps

Greg 108: That's all there really was to the plot of EWS. That's just not all there was to the movie. The plot is simple; a lot of other stuff hangs on it. If I could tell you what, Kubrick wouldn't have had to make a movie about it.

Posted May 5, 2007 10:32 PM by Xopher

The Prestige

Meh. If you take the story of The Prestige and cut and snip it until it was in chronological order, you would have no movie. The only thing that made it interesting was how they chopped it up in random order to keep you from knowing completely what was going on. Take away that gimmick and most of the movie evaporates.

It reminded me of Memento in that regard. cut up the movie and reassemble it in chronological order and it's boring.

Also, I find it funny that there's a scene in the movie where they're talking one person's magic act and they say something like "He did it so fast, the audience didn't have time to figure out what happened. He needs to dress it up", and the movie itself ends by making the same mistake. All the false assumptions they encourage you to make during the whole movie are unraveled in a five second shot at the very end.

I spent fifteen minutes explaining the movie to the person I saw it with after it was over. And most of the conversation sounded like this: "No, see, they wanted you to think that, but what really happened was this, which they show you at the end."

Also, I loved Christian Bale in Batman Begins, but I could not stand his accent in The Prestige.

The only thing truly good about The Prestige was seeing David Bowie play the part of a genius far ahead of his time. Made me smile everytime he was on screen.

Posted May 5, 2007 10:45 PM by Greg London

I doubt that there is such a thing as a story that's interesting no matter how you tell it--but The Prestige would be a lot closer than most. I'm rather swoggled that anyone could consider it dull.

The book is in chronological order (twice!), and it's utterly fascinating. Admittedly, the story is different in many important ways.

Posted May 5, 2007 11:14 PM by Tim Walters

Greg London @ 108

A room full of beautiful naked people on screen, would, I would think, be sufficient ingredients to grab my interest at least long enough to not think about Mt Dew refills, but for some reason, I was bored out of my fricken gourd.

One of the points of that scene was that these people had no passion in them at all. Everything they had or were came from the games they played, not from what was in them. I think it takes a great deal of ability for a director to be able to make people forget about the sexual cues they've been conditioned to react to all their lives, and see this scene from the outside, as if they were anthropologists watching an unfamiliar ceremony from a strange culture.

I'd be interested to know how people with other orientations saw that scene, because I am fairly sure it was primarily aimed at straight males. Part of the reason for that I'm sure is that the culture that Kubrick was talking about is controlled mostly by straight males, and AFAIK he himself was straight.

Posted May 5, 2007 11:27 PM by Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers)

Right, I can't believe I forgot to mention eXistenZ (or however the CamelCaps go...) but come to think of it, how about Videodrome which squeaks in as it was 1983? It may be cheesy, but what cheese!

Or Naked Lunch - oh wait, that's based on real litteracheur, so it must be more of that darn counter-factual. Thanks for reminding us, bryan!

Posted May 5, 2007 11:55 PM by Clifton Royston

Julia, at 88

DVDs?
What, really?
I've been making do with the library's(and now my partner in crime's mother's)VHS tapes all this time, and there are DVDs?
Must have!

Posted May 6, 2007 12:22 AM by Comesleep

One of the points of that scene was that these people had no passion in them at all.

If that was the point, it succeeded vastly beyond any other scene in movie history.

Everything they had or were came from the games they played, not from what was in them. ... and see this scene from the outside, as if they were anthropologists watching an unfamiliar ceremony from a strange culture.

So, what you're saying is that EWS was a sort of sexual Gulliver's Travels? Cruise playing the gullible gulliver?

If so, I don't know what I was supposed to learn from the various Lilliputs. Maybe "different people get off from different things"? Or maybe something more simple like "There are some messed up people in the world". Problem is I knew all that already, and didn't need EWS to tell me. Maybe I'm missing something.

That, plus, the whole basis for the movie still goes back to Tom getting all bent out of shape from his wife telling him of her fantasy while stoned. And all I could think the whole time was, dude, chill out, she was high. Or maybe I missed the point of that interaction too.

Posted May 6, 2007 12:30 AM by Greg London

I'm mildly appalled that my first actual post on Making Light is in defense of something seemingly indefensible within fandom, but I'm sure I'll get over it. To wit: Starship Troopers is one of my very favorite movies, and deserves its place on the list. I have a friend who described the "Heinlein dynamo" that could be powered by the release of this movie, but I both suspected for a long time and then read Paul Verhoeven explicitly saying that was precisely the point. I've always thought of it as a particularly involved book report. Verhoeven may have missed the deeper point of the book (although, quick! what is it? I've read it five times and still can't say for sure), but given his firsthand experience with fascism, which has colored most of his work, I think it's a fair response. Plus it's got Michael Ironsides and Jake Busey, and I don't think we'll ever see a better version of 90210 in Space. This movie brings me real pleasure every time I see it.

I'm in agreement with Charlie: some subset of Avalon, Ghost in the Shell, Ghost in the Shell 2 or Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex belonged in there. All suffer from cod philosophizing and Avalon, in particular, can be reminiscent of a particularly overwrought story from mid-80s issues of Heavy Metal, but absolutely nothing else on film or TV has done a more brilliant job of extending cyberpunk conceits into the 21st century. Mamoru Oshii and Masamune Shirow are both pretty important auteurs of identity in the post-industrial era, and the intersection of their sensibilities makes for thought-provoking viewing. That weird part in the middle of Ghost in the Shell 2 still creeps me out, while remaining beautiful after multiple viewings.

I'd also like to spread some love for Neon Genesis Evangelion, which deserves all the ridicule it gets (cheesy Freudian psychology, helping birth the endless stream of Troubled Psychic Teen anime, multiple endings that make 2001 look like a model of cogent rationality) but which I found one of the most disturbingly intense visual experiences I've ever had. It can be accused of many things, but being dumb is not one of them.

And while I'm on the subject of Japan, I can't overlook Hayao Miyazake. Nausicaä is nowhere near as sophisticated as a movie as it was as a manga, but it's still one of the most lyrical sf films ever, from a purely visual standpoint, and for a post-apocalyptic environmentalist science fantasy it spends a surprising amount of time talking about science – among other things, the heroine is a biologist and zoologist. (All of Miyazake's films are great, but most of them are fantasies rather than sf.)

Just to blow any credibility I might have accumulated by the preceding, I have to stick up for V. While it has not held up, and the story is ludicrously implausible, hokey, and pretty much dead on arrival as far as originality is concerned, it was my favorite thing ever in 7th grade and I loveded it. I went to a Halloween party with my first-ever girlfriend and was dressed as one of the bad guys with his human mask taken off (even with the cheesy insignia, hand-made by me on felt!). I was very proud of my costume. I refuse to disown any of these memories.

As for the EW list, it's the product of many hands and I'm not sure the rankings are really meant to be taken all that seriously. I'd boot at least half the items on the list, personally, but as this comes from a non-genre publication, the results are about what I'd expect. I think if I were in charge, there'd be a lot more movies like Ice Pirates and Spaceballs in there, and I'm sad that it's too late to put Time Bandits on the list (which would rank waaaay above Brazil on my own list).

Finally, I think it's interesting that nobody's stuck up for Artificial Intelligence, which I think will eventually make its way into a list of overlooked classics. It was seriously flawed, but it tried to cram three long films into one very long film and got at least half of the material in there, and it fused the styles of two of the 20th century's most distinctive stylists without the joins showing too obviously. And it was based (however tenuously) on a Brian Aldiss story.

Posted May 6, 2007 1:24 AM by Forrest L Norvell

1. EW.com Has No Taste.

2. Thank you to the people who mentioned Max Headroom. It was a brilliant show, killed off by being not only put into a deathzone slot, but by being pre-empted without warning everyone other week.

3. I think I saw ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND as part of "here's what's been nominated for Hugo BDP. All I remember, if it is a true memory, is that the reaction was overwhelmingly negative, mine included. I don't remember if anyone said, "I want the [hour and a half or however long] of my life back please," or not. It made such a non-positive impact that I don't remember anything about it other than I think I saw it, regarded having seen it as a waste of my time, and that the audience I was part of mostly was unappreciative.

Since Saturday I went to a viewing of some of this years' BDP Hugos nominated works, I've been reinforced in my lack of appreciation for Dr Who (but at least that stupid muffler's gone!), suspect that The Prestige might give me a nightmare, and the episode of Stargate SG-1 is going below No Award (so do the Dr Who episodes I've seen so far). The Stargate episode's self-referentiality annoyed me/was coy beyond my tolerance for such things. It was less smooth than e.g. the scene in Blazing Saddles where the venue changes from Old West into the the acting talent crashing into the movie set and the set and stage being shown as set and stage, with all the acting talent swarming all over the facility.... I have almost no appreciation for broad humor and the types of humor most present in that particular Stargate episode and in much of Dr Who, just don't work for me.

I suspect that Torchwood would work better for me. (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was something that I totally lack appreciation of. The most devastating comment about that body of work I've heard, though, was the comment by a friend, who'd had -really- low standards for sex partners back in the 1970s (they had to bathe regularly and be able to have some minimal level of conversational ability...). The friend said, "That wasn't anyone in Hitchhiker's Guide that I would have slept with." Ouch! I liked Blake's 7 despite its sets (or lack thereof as regards credibility...), perhaps because it had to have acting ability and good writing and editing in it to make the viewer overlook the low budget characteristics otherwise.

Posted May 6, 2007 1:28 AM by Paula Lieberman

I'm clearly working on a different level from y'all. The two SF movies that are constantly on my Netflix queue (dropped back in again after I see them) are Galaxy Quest and Monster's Inc.

Posted May 6, 2007 1:29 AM by Marilee

Forrest L. Norville #117

Vorhoeven was not making a book that was in keeping with the novel, he was taking the book name and some character names, and applying a different, and stupid as regards operations, set of all sorts of things.

The judgment of the movie by people who've read the book tends to look at the movie in terms of the book, and in terms of sensibilities for military operations. Vorhoeven wanted to make a specific film, bottled it in a package with lettering on it that claimed to be "Starhip Troopers."

It's as if you went to a store to buy coffee beans, and the package turned out to be full of black cooking beans instead of coffee beans....

Posted May 6, 2007 1:34 AM by Paula Lieberman

"What did you think was mediocre about Gataca? Writing, acting, camera work? I don't think it's a great film by any means, but I saw some solid craft in there.
----------------
I couldn't point to anything specific wrong with it; as you say, it was solidly crafted. It just seemed bland and uninspired. Definitely a very subjective thing."

I agree with both: it had the craft, it lacked the art.

That said: as a Science Fiction movie, think if you had seen the movie in the context of Science Fiction movies 1980 - what would your opinion be then?

Posted May 6, 2007 1:46 AM by bryan

Children of Men is a science-fiction movie, no matter the original author's opinion, since science fiction is a term agreed upon to identify fictions with particular tropes agreed upon by a community.

That it is a movie means that it is different than a book. The concepts may not have been innovative but I think it was pretty high art as a movie. Perhaps the parts that I was impressed by were stolen from other movies, one seldom knows all the sources for what one likes. But it had probably the best cartoon (in the meaning of a sequential animation) I have ever seen in it, by which I mean specifically the part when they are going into the prison, and the midwife is taken off the bus.
In Narrative Art I think it is impressive if the artist can make a comment on the nature of the art, its physics (for want of a better word), at the same time as advancing the narrative without being especially obtrusive about it.

Since any film is basically a sequence of still images happening to fast for us to note the sequence, this seemed like the smart film equivalent of embedded stories.

That the scene was a cartoon could also be seen as a commentary on the mechanic nature of the totalitarian process.

Posted May 6, 2007 2:10 AM by bryan

#59 Clifton Royston: "The reason it functions as SF, despite the silliness of the humans-as-batteries idea, is that there were a lot of potential different ways in which it could have been developed in the successors which would have been interesting, coherent, and deep. Even up through the end of #2, it could have been turned around, and I actually took some bits in #2 as hints that they were going to."

I always thought that the humans-as-batteries was only a cover for the real truth--that the AIs were using human brains for their processors, a la Dan Simmons' Technocore. It's the only reason they'd bother to use humans instead of, say, cows. I also thought the second movie had set up a potentially brilliant ending, though in retrospect it's clear that they were simply blundering around the dark.

"They could have pulled the whole thing together in the third movie with a revelation that the "real world" they had exited into was itself simulated and no more real than the "Matrix"."

I was really hoping it was going to go in that direction too. It took me a couple of years to get back to a point where I could enjoy the first one for all the neat ideas it put in my head, instead remembering all the dumb shit they actually did.

Posted May 6, 2007 2:10 AM by Heresiarch

I found "A.I.: Artificial Intelligence" deeply creepy, chilling, and monstrous . . . as befits its topic.

If it weren't for the far-future wish-fulfillment ending, it would have both more appalling and more true to itself.

* * *

I don't think "Starship Troopers" was a great movie, but I enjoyed it as a satire and as a poke at con-suite militarism.

Posted May 6, 2007 2:11 AM by Stefan Jones

#123: That occurred to me to.

Also, that the Matrix started out as something like Second Life.

Posted May 6, 2007 2:15 AM by Stefan Jones

'The judgment of the movie by people who've read the book tends to look at the