Posted on 08/14/2005 8:45:49 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
There's an old topic by this name, and it seems like it would be of some interest in casual moments.
I have seen Dune I don't know how many times...it was interesting. I also like the version made for the Sci-Fi channel with William Hurt as Leto...It's actually a bit truer and less a surreal adaptation, but I don't think the actress playing Jessica is pretty enough.
Bab5 was pretty alright, at first. The first captain or whatever had that distracting cast eye thing going on, which was one of the reasons I liked it. The cast was pretty alright, and the digital special effects were pretty swell, groundbreaking for TV. It got pretty bogged down, perhaps because of the anti-Second Amendment wank who was the alleged creative force behind the series.
DS9 was mostly awful, but I think I've seen every single episode of it. :') Bab5 was pitched to Paramount, which turned it down, then allegedly stole the idea to make DS9. Killing off the Tril in season six was pretty heartless, and I never liked the replacement. Also didn't much care to have Worf around. Didn't like any of their political soapbox episodes. Liked the revisiting of the Tribbles (original series) episode.
The original series was pitched as Wagon Train in Outer Space.
Voyager was Gilligan's Island in Outer Space. And Gilligan's Island was a better show. And of course, they had to get back at the end of the seventh season, and that was a kind of "what an amazing escape" kind of moment. Completely expected of course. :')
Fascinating.
http://www.brmovie.com/FAQs/BR_FAQ_Blade_Runners.htm
http://www.cs.uu.nl/wais/html/na-dir/movies/blade-runner-faq.html
It's time to either cut out or seriously up the medication because clearly you are delusional.
"When Worlds Collide" -- I finally saw that movie early this year, when I saw it on DVD at the library. I really loved that scene during the landing when the untrained rookie rocket pilot said, "we've still got a quarter tank" of fuel. I almost rolled off the couch laughing. Still better than the original novel AFAIC. ;')
"Somewhere in Time" -- yeah, that's a good example. Premiere screening was in the Grand Hotel I believe, and when the sound track failed, Reeve stood up and filled in the dialogue for the audience until it was fixed.
"Too bad Elvis didn't make a sci-fi flick. I mean it! That white jumpsuit would have been a perfect costume."
[singing] "uh-huh!"
Heh... someone also said, "Alien... Not only one of the greatest sci fi movies of all times, but one of the greatest movies period."
Spielberg once referred to John Wayne's "The Searchers" as not only the best western ever made, but also the best movie.
Total Recall really used some nice sets / composites. Dialogue is really dreadful. Sharon was one tough broad, and the movie was made when she was still pretty luscious. Love that scene when Rachel Ticotin calls her the b word.
And let's not forget "X-Files: Fight the Future". Oh, okay, let's forget it. ;')
The first post not dragged down by juvenile nonsense.
Metropolis is clearly a breakthrough film and still stands up well today. The Thing (from another world) is influencial, but ironically the John Carpenter remake actually reflects the original story (Who Goes There?) better.
I'm only familiar in passing with The Man In The White Suit, but I would definitely substitute The Day The Earth Stood Still from this era. Frankly I'm surprised it's not on your list.
The Pal WOTW is one of my guilty pleasures from late night TV. It does not stand up on its own as an SF movie, except as an artifact of its era. And I dearly love it, bad acting (particularly by Gene Barry) and all. Even so I might substitute The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms from the same year.
Forbidden Planet. What can I say? Shakespeare. Anne Francis. Walter Pidgeon. Anne Francis. Leslie Nielsen. Anne Francis. Jack Kelly. Anne Francis. Richard (the 6 million dollar man) Anderson. Anne Francis. Earl Holliman. And finally Anne Francis and Robby The Robot. What's not to like?
2001: A Space Odyssey is clearly a classic, though, for me, it doesn't hold up as a movie in its own right. 2010 actually is a better movie to watch, some 25 or 30 years on.
Colossus, the Forbin Project is a perfect SF TV Movie. It wasn't, however, a TV movie. It stays very tightly within the book and does an excellent job of conveying the paranoid message of the the book. What most people don't realize is that The Forbin Project was the first book in a trilogy. Remember, if you will, that at the end of the movie Colossus the master computer was in charge and humans were enslaved. Well, in the second book, The Fall Of Colossus, those wiley humans managed to figure out a way to defeat the mighty computer brain. Unfortunately it was only as Colossus was failing that they found out that the great computer had only done what it did out of necesity, since it didn't have time to deal with petty human squabbles while it prepared to fight off the alien invaders it had deduced were about to arrive. That is the subject of Colossus And The Crab. Totally different object lesson to be drawn from the full trilogy than from the stand alone first story. I'd love to see SciFi do them as a mini-series.
Andromeda Strain is very well executed and absolutely pure speculative fiction (not SciFi). It stands out, for me, in this list. Unfortunately its not a real fun movie to watch. Oh well.
Tarkovsky's Solaris (as opposed to George Clooney's) has its attractions, but it's too obscure for me.
Now, I'm preparing my own, definitive, list (;^>) but I definitely give you credit as the best so far in this thread.
I really think I'd love sitting down in a good movie theater / bar (ala the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin) sometime. You have very good taste.
Dark Star (John Carpenter, 1974) was brilliant!
Especially for a movie where the main prop, the space ship, was carved from a piece of styrofoam with a pen knife.
Did you know that the script writer, Dan O'Bannon, re-worked this comedy script into a little movie called Alien? Yes, that Alien.
Oh, so close. Better luck next time.
Stargate (the original movie) was 1994 and didn't have any SG-1 attached to it.
But I will agree it was very good. Emerich and Devlin were pissed when the series, SG-1, was produced without them. What really pissed them off was that it was good, maybe even better than the original.
Sometimes that's the way it goes.
I got to spend several hours with Richard Jordan, who played Duncan Idaho in this movie, when he made the Michael J Fox movie The Secret Of My Success in my office bullding in NY. Very nice man.
He couldn't figure out why he was signed to three movies when his character got killed in the film. I explained what happened to Duncan Idaho in Dune Messiah and Children of Dune (as well as the rest of the novels to that time).
His comment was "Oh, I'm so glad that movie bombed."
The ultimate story of 2001, for me, is that Kubrick was one of the first to really use audience screenings to effect the final version of a film.
As I have read the tale Kubrick put behavioral psychiatrists into the audience (and in observation ports around the theater) and those observers would note whenever the audience got bored or exhibited any loss of interest.
Kubrick then cut that portion of the film, no matter what was going on or how important it was to understanding the plot.
True or not that always explained a lot about 2001 for me.
OK, with a handle like Jack Deth you have an unfair advantage on this thread.
You and I and any other SF characters should either disqualify ourselves or move into a "professionals" division ;^>
However, "Raquel Welch in fur bikini" makes almost any movie worth adding to almost any list.
Have you ever seen The Magic Christian? It might qualify as SF (barely) but it has Raquel Welch in a dominatrix costume with a whip and 30 topless slaves rowing a (modern cruise) ship at her command. Worth the cost of the movie for that 90 seconds ;^>
Have you read the original story, I Am Legend, by Richard Matheson? Great story and it would make a fabulous movie done straight. Both Last Man On Earth and Omega Man are clearly classics, in their own way (Neville in the thater reciting all of the lines from Woodstock is one of the great post apocalyptic scenes ever).
Ahnuld (the guvinator) was scheduled to do yet another version in the run up to his political career then Will Smith was tagged, but it's now in develpment hell.
Ah well.
By the way, Matheson is a great SF/horror writer. He wrote some of the best Twilight Zone episodes and his Trilogy of Terror (three stories as one TV movie with Karen Black) is still very scary.
Take a look at his credits in IMDB. You'll be amazed.
Not an original thought in anyone head involved with this movie, but it was fun.
No. If I can find it I will though.
his Trilogy of Terror (three stories as one TV movie with Karen Black) is still very scary
I remember this one, she's sitting in the corner with a knife. One of the better TV horror/thriller movies of the 70's
Take a look at his credits in IMDB. You'll be amazed.
Wow. You are right. Impressive body of work.
Thanks for the info.
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