The State of Sci Fi... (1 Viewer)

[RobertR]

By the way, it occurs to me that there is one other great SF film that managed to acheive a "timeless" (ie undated) look with its spacecraft interior controls--The Day the Earth Stood Still.

 

[Mike Voigt]

I would also add The Andromeda Strain into a list of basically pure SF.

To me, that film encompasses the critical elements in what I would call hard-core SF: plausible, internally consistent science, and even to a degree predictable scientific development from the present reality. For its times, it was very much advanced and "futuristic"; in that sense, it shares the same difficulty 2001 has, and that is that parts of it have been overcome by unpredictable developments since then. Others... have not come to pass, at least not to my knowledge, though I would not dismiss them out of hand.

This is part of what makes films like 2001 so likable. They are an integral structure; everything internal to the film correlates, there is no wild jump off into LA-LA land to function as a deus ex machina.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy the popcorn 'Sci-Fi' stuff, too - for example, I love Star Wars very much, but I also very much consider it a fable for the modern world, one that is a lot more consistent in the archetypes of personality and fall-and-redemption than it will ever be in the area of science.

Mike

 

[Jack Briggs]

Good points about The Andromeda Strain. And I'm very glad Robert mentioned The Day the Earth Stood Still, which definitely is in the top five of my list of all-time-greatest SF films.

What gives the Robert Wise film such an advantage is that its story is set in the time of the film's making--1951. The flying saucer-like spacecraft has the same timeless appeal as does the cruiser in Forbidden Planet; it definitely echoes the 1950s, but it has a baroque futuristic look as well. There are technical errors in the film, of course ("I came 250 million of your miles"--erm, the Asteroid Belt?), but the strength of its story overcomes the limitations. Therefore, the film works as cinema as well as SF.

Also interesting are the comments on dystopian SF tales; agree with me or not, but John Boorman's Zardoz certainly seems the quintessential statement of this sub-genre. But remember early-1970s American cinema as a whole: Most of the great films from the era reflected the times themselves; the Watergate years were not the most optimistic. Hence, Coppola's The Conversation and its ilk.

 

[Brook K]

I would also add Abre Los Ojos, I'm approaching Vanilla Sky with a good deal of trepidation. Fearing another Hollywood screw job of an excellent foreign film.

 

[Jason Seaver]

Shhhhhh... I haven't seen Abre Los Ojos, and I nearly threw a fit on the bus yesterday when the review of the remake in the Boston Phoenix (seperate rant on that obnoxious hipper-than-thou alternarag coming later ) basically spilled the cryonics
portion of the storyline even though it's not mentioned in the advertising and presumably meant to be a surprise.
Grrr...