I can rave for hours. It was that good.

Although it's not really sci-fi (I don't think...or maybe it is *shrug*), it brings to mind another sci-fi movie I thought was well done: The 5th Element. They were both exceptional, in my opinion.

"What's the point?" you ask? Did I bring you here to give you my opinion? No. Well...yeah, but not just for that. My point is that these are only two of the great sci-fi flicks out there. Which others would you list? Which ones are worth watching again and again? Which ones are not? Why? What makes a good/bad movie good/bad?

And please, let's not speak of Battlefield Earth. We have different opinions, and let's leave it at that.

still just wonderin',
CVG

5th Element was stylish. I wouldn't say it was a brilliant film, but it certainly had a lot of enjoyable characters, and was put together very well.

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Most of the raving I've heard has been from scientists, and it's the foaming at the mouth kind, not the enthusiastic sort.

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Yeah, every time I hear the words "The Atlantic current shut down!" in one of the previews I start laughing hysterically. (The bad kind of hysterically. The hysterically where other people give you funny looks and start edging away.) Then I say "Like there's only one current in the Atlantic?" And then I start raving about the North Atlantic Deep Water and climate regime change time frames, and man, it just goes downhill from there.

"The Core is a marvel. It has everything: common physics misconceptions, blatant misrepresentations of physical laws, a complete range of stereotypes, ridiculous feats of engineering, and pure fabrication of scientific "facts". "

Unfortunately it looks like they haven't done anything new on the site since I was there last: http://www.intuitor.com/moviephysics/

The best dystopian film is A Clockwork Orange.

The best science fantasy film is the original Star Wars trilogy.

Time Bandits -- which I haven't seen since I was a kid -- was great; I'd guess that would fall under the "time travel" category of science fiction.

What about a good alternative history? I can't think of any A. H. film, much less a good one.

As for soft SF -- again, I can't think of one.

For horror SF, you've got Alien and Aliens. (Yes, this is a legitimate category--see the old SF films of the 1950s.)

And for adventure SF, my favorite is probably either Terminator or T2. Would these fall under hard SF?

If you wanted to open this up to fantasy as well, I'd say Conan the Barbarian is the best sword and socercy film out there, and that The Lord of the Rings trilogy is the best epic fantasy ever made.

I think there was a TV film based on Robert Harris's Fatherland, although I haven't seen it.

Like Mary said, the best thing that I've heard anyone say about The Day After Tomorrow is that its heart is in the right place...and that is really open to interpretation. After all, Waterworld's heart was in the exact same place, remember?

Even people who agree that ludicrous scaremongering has a place in our national policy debate (and there are a surprising number of these sorts) feel that The Day After Tomorrow overdoes it. It's merely patently silly, only persuasive to the most gullible.

As for good SF, I think that Lilo and Stitch takes the prize for movies released in the past decade. Time Bandits isn't SF at all, it's religious fiction. I just mentioned it because I was watching it the other day.

2001 and 2010 probably have the honor of being the premire "hard" SF entrants, though they both postulate hyper advanced aliens (which should be the hardest of hard SF concepts--but is out of favor for some reason or other).

Deep Impact was also surprisingly hard SF (but the title was so mercilessly stupid it obviated any accuracy in the science). There were two main science flaws. First, our nuclear powered rockets are better than the Russian's nuclear powered rockets...the only reason to have a Russian reactor was to have a Russian on board so the plot wouldn't be waving the flag too much. Second, if you're catching the comet before it reaches perihelion, it is a heck of a lot easier to simply deflect it so it misses Earth entirely than to blow it to smithereens (a fair number of which will still end up hitting the Earth).

I did not want to see The Day After Tomorrow. I told my friend, on Saturday, that I had no wish to see that movie. Nevertheless, this was an awful weekend for movies and they dragged me to it.

I laughed....but only to save my sanity.

As we walked out of the theatre, me, my husband, and our two friends who wanted to see it, we tried to decide if we'd ever seen a worse movie before. We think Battlefield Earth might be in the running, but we actually started turning to B horror films to really find something worse.

There was nothing, and i do mean NOTHING, either politically, socially, or scientifically accurate about that movie.

Now, I was willing to give its faulty scientific premises a break, since I knew in advance that they were coming and I assumed, in advance, that I could just ignore them and still try to like the movie.

I couldn't. Mostly because not on ly was it not scientifically acurate, it was not even internally consistent.

Don't worry, for those who haven't seen the movie, I'll tell you if I change my mind and decide upon a spoiler. But really, you don't want to see this movie anyway.

The President who kept turning to the VP and asking what we should do was awful. Also, oh, I did decide to put in a teeny spoiler, not that it matter much, but avert your eyes and skip to the next paragraph if it will both you. Then the President is the last one to leave Washington! Puh-lease!

skip line

Ok, then let's talk about those buffoons in Arctic equipment that didn't ever have their coats and hoods buttoned up properly. And in the parts where it was supposed to be cold (another ice age is coming...the premise of the whole movei) I felt no cold. The actors failed us in that respect.

And the writers didn't know how to establish or maintain suspense. They basically just kept dishing it out to the main characters, twisting the knife in wish obviously contrived and cheesy new developments. But then, this might have fallen from a totally unbelievable situation at the core, which prevented me from liking but a single moment of the movie.

I did like one joke...with the nerd in the library....it made me laugh. That, IMO, but the one reedeming moment in the movie, and certainly not worth $16 and 2 hours of my life.

As I left the theatre one of my friends said, in an attempt to give them some credit for having picked upa a science text at some point in their lives, "Well, snow is white." But another said, "It's not THAT white."

I think I'm done now. I feel dirty having dredged that memory up again.

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I think they accomplished what they set out to do and that was give somebody 2 hours of entertainment.

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Some people expect too much from movies, and it just ruins the experience.

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Billions of dollars are pumped into these movies and asking for continuity and good acting is like asking that a novel have believable characters and a coherent plot.

Although I did read this book once that had amazing battle sequences and, man, I LOVED the font style.

I have not been to see this new one, cause I thought it looked like something I did not want to spend even $5 on--(our local in bad shape theater has movies for $5 all the time) (cheap date night)

Though, i did like Dante's Peak. LOL

And I do think people can overthink a movie--my hubby does this and often spoils a movie for me. Sometimes it is escapisim we go for--

As to me, I'd rather see Shrek II or Scooby Doo for pure escapisms--we know it's not real or meant to be like real life.

Neon Genesis: Evangelion--overall, the number one best SF anything that I've ever seen. Yes, it's that good.

Serial Experiments Lain--For psychologically disturbing anime, this is the best (except for Eva, the anime world's slang for Neon Genesis: Evangelion."

Cowboy Bebop--The best space opera I've seen. (Except Eva).

X--The best apocalypse SF story (except Eva. That show is pretty much everything genre in SF).

Escaflowne--The best Fantasy SF I've seen (Umm, I actually don't think Eva fits in here. Surprise!)

I'm a bit of a layman, at the theater. When I give up my six bucks (sixteen dollars! I can't imagine paying 16 bucks for a movie. I guess if I did, I'd be a little more critical, too ) my IQ drops ten or twenty points. The ticket taker holds onto them and I pick them back up when I leave.

I go to movies to be entertained, and when I encounter a movie like Day, I watch it, if it looks interesting. I don't sit in the theatre and laugh at the ridiculous flaws in their science.

I mean, the heroes in Independence Day won with a computer virus! I realize this is a bit of a modern send-up War of the Worlds (where, for the two of you who don't know, seemingly indestructible aliens from Mars were destroyed by microscopic viruses...the common cold, I think), but still. A virus?

I'm not looking for scientific plausibility. I'm just looking for a good story. For me, the movie was about this great weather change, yeah, but it was also about people trying to survive. The grsoup of kids, for example, didn't know the science of it. They just knew that it was getting really cold, really fast, and they didn't want to die.

CVG

PS--maybe I'm remembering wrong, but I only recall the president asking once for the VP's advice.

PPS--you are correct, however, when you comment on the acting. For all their trying to convince me that a new ice age was coming, I really didn't feel the cold, here. I didn't see it in the actors, sorry to say.

PPPS--You had respect for me? Wow.

PPPPS--I saw Shrek first, too, though, so I guess I kind of went in suspending belief. *shrug*

Also, one of the reasons I liked the movie so much was the ice-covered image of Earth at the end, and the creative questions it raised. Like, how is the planet going to live, now? How different will life be? How would I handle it?

And so on.

It's a movie about global warming and the planet ends up ice-covered?

My personal favorite for global warming arguments is the comparison to the Paleocene Thermal Maximum, when a methane release from methane hydrates bumped the temperatures up considerably. It's the best paleo-analogue for the present experiment (what many earth science people call the fact that we've, you know, like tripled our atmospheric carbon dioxide).

This one isn't a record breaker by any means, but it sure wasn't Gigli, either. I did see Shrek II, and it was good, but not as funny as the first.

I agree. I go to movies to be entertained. I liked Independence Day well enough to own the movie at home. I don't by the computer virus crap for a second, but it was a fun, fast-paced action movie that kept me on the edge of my seat. I felt for hte people when the all died and I cheered victory when the ships came down. I went ahead and saved the computer virus ridicule for outside the theatre when I left with a group of half a dozen fellow comp scis.

And I think I mentioned that when I entered the theatre, I as willing to set aside the scientific implausibility of the movie, because I already knew it was coming.

I was actually more bothered by the other implausible things, and the internal inconsistencies.

Yes, a movie's job is to entertain. Ovverthinking a movie (or a book or anything else) can rip the entertainment value right out. I have this problem sometimes when receiving feedback on my stories. Do you know the ones I mean? When it is obvious someone was reading it to LOOK for errors and this crippled their ability to enjoy the book at all?

I did not watch The Day After Tomorrow in this way. I was waiting for it to surprise me. The trouble was, the flaws in it jumped off the screen and punched me in the nose. Unlike in Independence Day, where a single plot hole developed near the climax, dozens of tiny plot holes and problems began at the outset of this movie.

Here's a problem...for a movie that shows the entire northern hemisphere being threatened by an ice age that comes awfully doggone quickly (was wliling to overlook that last part...), it was amazing how they summed up the entire northern hemisphere by showing the city of New York. This actually personally offended me. they ripped up L.A. a little bit, too, but I looked at that map of the US, and I saw the sattelite things they did with it. My hometown was well-buried as well, and I had no sense of the impending threat to any part of the U.S. EXCEPT New York. I had no sense ot the loss of life. This is a serious flaw in a movie that tries to build suspense around the idea that a lot of people are going to/have died.

Spoiler alert for the next paragraph...

And the evacuation....they evacuated the entirety of the southern states (actually, the line was well north of the mason-dixon line, so they evacuated more people than that) to Mexico in a week? And then the Mexican governmnet tried to close off the border, whidch was obviously thrown in as part of their political statement, but the truth is we wouldn't have made a deal with mexico, we'd have taken over their country. No niceness, no "thank you for helping us" at the end...guns and a bigger military and a serious taking over a Mexico. And since we would surely run out of room in Mexico, we'd go ahead and start taking over the rest of central america as well. This situation would have turned into a blood bath, and it was just terribly amusing that it did not.

end spoiler

Oh yeah, and the passage of time was shown very poorly. I have no idea how much time elapsed, only a guess.

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individual liberties (ironically something that Cruise is not well known for supporting--at least in the way the founding fathers intended

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Christine's spoiler ahead:

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but the truth is we wouldn't have made a deal with mexico, we'd have taken over their country. No niceness, no "thank you for helping us" at the end...guns and a bigger military and a serious taking over a Mexico. And since we would surely run out of room in Mexico, we'd go ahead and start taking over the rest of central america as well.

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And yes, Soylent Green is great, and my enjoyment of it has been enhanced ever since I saw Phil Hartman's timeless rendition of the final scene. His Heston was breathtaking...

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given hot-headed American blood and culture

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Nor do I believe we're imperialistic at heart. If any country could flex its muscles in that direction, it's the U.S., but she chooses to be a gentle giant.

In any case, it was a minor point and I didn't want it mucking up the board.

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Battlefeild Earth (sorry i had to, just pretend you didn't see it.)

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OK, I haven't seen Battlefield Earth. But I have read the book... so, what was wrong with it?

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BUt I think the Best from what I consider Sci-fi was Western World. It had all THat I love about Sci-fi.

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You mean Westworld... Early 80s Michael Crichton story with AI robots running around killing theme park guests? That was kind of fun, in a way

Actually, as a laugh riot nearing Rocky Horror Picture Show proportions, it isn't bad at all...invite the friends, pop in the DVD, and prepare to snark.

As a supposedly serious science fiction movie? It stinks on ice. Hammy acting, ridiculous plot holes, even the costumes and makeup are poor. It makes the much-maligned Waterworld look like high art.

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we weren't just centered in New York which, despite popular movie belief, is not the only city in this country

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The main problem, mild confusion of the story, was simply because of omission. It was a very long book (the film only covered half of it.) The only major science problem was that of the harrier jets not requiring maintainence (or even working at all) after sitting for 1000 years.

The characters and acting were exactly what I had expected from the book. The aliens were very much over-the-top and arrogant. They couldn’t possibly conceive of the humans being equal (intellectually or otherwise) because they weren’t people, just animals capable of labor. Look at how the British colonies were run and increase it by a level of magnitude, if you need help absorbing the concept.

I think that it’s obvious that this movie was panned because of real-world social issues and not the movie itself. John Travolta, a known Scientologist, dared to make a film based on L. Ron Hubbard’s, the founder of Scientology, novel. So, it must be a film about Scientology right? Well, no. But that didn’t stop any of the critics from saying it was.

If you honestly compare Battlefield Earth to successful movies like Jurassic Park, E.T., Independence Day, Deep Blue Sea, the remake of Planet of The Apes, and Signs, you’ll see it’s possibly the best of the bunch.

My God, Signs was awful!

Just so I don’t leave you wondering... The other two movies that I like, but everyone else hates, are Dune and Hudson Hawk.

1. Saw Lynch's adaptation. Found myself utterly confused by the whole concept, and wondering what on earth it was all about. Can't say I particularly enjoyed it. This probably put me off reading the book for several years.
2. Watched the Sci-Fi channel adaptation of a few years ago. More interesting; perhaps 6 hours is enough time to get most of the story across. It was certainly possible to understand at least half of it.
3. Read the book. Understood at last.
4. Watched the SciFi adaptation again, and understood that.

I think the entire problem with Lynch's adaptation, well... two problems really. You can't fit that story into 3 hours, or however long it was, and Lynch isn't a very good director, IMO, and screwed it up by concentrating on the most unusual aspects of the story and neglecting the parts that let you actually understand what's going on.

Maybe Battlefield Earth is the same... it's certainly a very long story (I think it runs to about 1,100 pages in the book), and if you miss the wrong bits, nobody who hasn't read the book will have the slightest clue what's happening.

Now can't forget the original Terminator ( Michael Biehn was excellent, even tho Arnie was in the running for the role of Reese )and the story behind it.....

that's about it for my rantings....
And of course one of my fav's " Cast Away "
Thanks for reading and lemme know what ya'll think....
Ok...Instead of posting again...here's a little reply....If you don't see the HUGE IMO WetWilly ( you need glasses ) I was expressing that it was in my opinion ( again not wanting to infuriate any one ( nice word, huh? ) But I watch stuff that I like and would be willing to watch other anime ( if I can get ahold of it )to give an honest opinion......

Another of my fav's is Bruce Campbell vs. The Army of Darkness ( and the other two Evil Dead movies ) Forgot to mention this.
[This message has been edited by Monolith (edited June 03, 2004).]