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The Best Science Fiction Movies (Part 3)



This is the third installment of my list of favorite Science fiction films. Again, these are in no particular order.

Alien. Is it horror, or is it science fiction. Of course it is both. The first time I saw Alien it scared the willies out of me. Just so you know, I am not generally a fan of scary movies. I usually don’t watch them unless they are of the campy low budget variety that are so bad they are good. Something attracted me to go and see that film even though I knew it would be scary. It must have been the trailer. Although the marketing made it absolutely clear that this was going to be scary. But something about it caught my interest. The trailer looked so good.  I went to the theater to watch it, and it was quite a ride. The cast was excellent from Tom Skerritt and Yaphet Kotto, and Ian Holm, to a new actress I had never heard of before with the unlikely name of Sigourney Weaver. I was quite taken with Weaver’s portrayal of Ellen Ripley, second in command of the Nostromo. She sold me on the film. Under the direction of Ridley Scott all the actors had a loose naturalistic acting style that made it seem more real. The film is moody and atmospheric. Everything about it looked different from any Sci-fi film I had ever seen. The future was not all gleaming white with glowing buttons that went ‘boing’. No. This future was as dirty and sweaty and as messy as real life. The creature that they find is terrifying and strange, and yet there are aspects of it that seem almost familiar. The larval stage looked like a sea creature that you might possibly find on earth. And in fact, the creature’s life cycle was patterned after some species of wasps who lay their eggs in host prey and the larvae eat their way out, killing the host.

All of these things helped make the film seem more real which lead to greater emotional investment in the story and characters. For those who say that the sequel Aliens is better than the original, I disagree and refer you to last week’s discussion about sequels.

The Day the Earth Stood Still. On the one hand it is yet another 1950’s flying saucer movie. Yet it is so far above all the others of that ilk that it hardly bears comparison. The production values are first rate. The story is intelligent and they obtained some fine actors: Michael Rennie, Patricia Neal, and Sam Jaffe. Alien spaceman Klaatu comes to Earth to tell us humans to stop being so stupid, petty, hate-filled, and war like. If we don’t, they (the space-faring species that he represents) will end us. The film was made during the cold war. Klaatu’s message seemed right on point. Unfortunately it seems that humanity hasn’t progressed much from the 1950’s. The cold war may be over, but the hate mongering paranoia is still with us. Let’s just hope someone like Klaatu isn’t out there watching us.

Blade Runner. Another Ridley Scott entry. It had a wonderful starting point. It was based on a novel by Philip K. Dick called Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. (Philip K. Dick has been a wonderful resource for Hollywood. At least ten movies and three television series have been based on his stories). I read the novel years after seeing the movie. The film and the novel are quite different. The bones of the story are there in the film but it diverges from the novel in tone and explores new ground. We follow a detective as he tries to track down five illegal replicants (artificial humans). The main theme of Philip K. Dick’s story is still there in the film:  at what point does artificial intelligence deserve human rights?  At what point is it no longer artificial? Once again there is a dark and gritty feel to the film. We can almost smell the Los Angeles of 2019. (Really? 2019? We are almost there. Where are the flying cars? For that matter, where are the replicants?) On the surface it is a noir detective story. But deeper questions keep coming to the top. And there is the wonderful work By Harrison Ford and Rutger Hauer.

The Matrix. What a game changer. The Wachowski’s wrote and directed this and stunned everyone with ground-breaking visuals. It asks questions about reality. Is our world real because we perceive it? Or is reality something that we cannot see, and we are just being manipulated. These are questions philosophers have argued about for thousands of years. The film ties into some good old-fashioned paranoia about who is controlling our lives. There is a character who betrays his colleges and chooses the manufactured existence over reality. We may not like him, we may disagree with his choice and hope that he loses, and yet we can understand his choice. He is choosing a pleasant fantasy life over a harsh and horrid real one.

We will finish this off next week and summarize all.

(My novel Star Liner, is now available as an ebook through Copypastapublishing.com, Amazon, or the other usual online sources. For those who like to turn physical pages, the paperback will be out soon).
The link to my novel Star Liner

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