In honor of the 25th anniversary this year of Blade Runner, Sciencedude is taking suggestions for a list of the greatest science fiction films ever made. I emailed him my suggestions, and then had several "oh, yeah, that one!" moments afterwards. Here is my (revised) list of my top 25 favorite science fiction movies:
25. Enemy Mine. Lou Gossett Jr. makes a great lizard.
24. Outland. Sean Connery rocks as a space marshal, the only law on a mining facility on Jupiter's moon Io.
23. Innerspace. A fun take on Isaac Asimov's Fantastic Voyage, starring Dennis Quaid and a seemingly-possessed Martin Short.
22. Silent Running. Bruce Dern saves the last of the trees in a space ship.
21. Dark Star. Teaching phenomenology to a bomb.
20. Tron. Hacker is scanned into a virtual existence inside a computer, forced to fight the eeeevil Master Control Program. Very cool special effects, and still entertaining.
19. Planet of the Apes. "Get your stinking paws off me, you damn dirty ape!" The novel by Pierre Boulle was awesome, too.
18. Escape from New York. Kurt Russell as Snake Plissken rescuing the President from the hellhole maximum security prison that is New York circa 1998.
17. ET the extraterrestrial. Steven Spielberg's most successful movie, from back when Drew Barrymore was a cute, precocious kid.
16. Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Richard Dreyfuss making mountains out of mashed potatoes. That Steven Spielberg sort of has a flair for the skiffy movies, doesn't he?
15. Altered States. William Hurt blowing his mind.
14. The Last Starfighter. How can you not love the story of a video-game geek who saves the galaxy?
13. The Terminator. Michael Biehn as the good guy, Linda Hamilton making the transition from wimp to tough guy, and some musclebound dude with a funny name: "I'll be back".
12. The Abyss. It has plot holes that you can drive a Mac Truck through, but this time Michael Biehn is the bad guy, and he's awesome as the bad guy. James Cameron went all-out in this movie, and Ed Harris literally (yes, I know that word is often mis-used, but I do mean literally) drowns in a highly-oxygenated fluid. Ya gotta admire that kind of dedication to the craft. Amazing special effects, particularly the water/alien thingy.
11. Alien. Sigourney Weaver as one of the strongest female characters, ever.
10. Blade Runner. Just what does it mean to be human?
9. The Fifth Element. Stop me if you've heard this plot before: Bruce Willis is an everyman with a violent past forced by circumstances to save the world and the woman he loves.
8. Gattaca. Have you ever wanted anything so bad that you were willing to do anything - even die - to get it?
7. The Matrix. Is any of this real? "You take the blue pill - the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill - you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes."
6. Forbidden Planet. Yes, it's 50 years old, but it's still awesome.
5. The Fly. The arm wrestling scene alone was worth the price of admission.
4. Serenity. I was lucky enough to go see this movie for free, in exchange for reviewing it on my blog. What a blast. "I aim to misbehave."
3. 2001: A Space Odyssey. After this film, the song Also Sprach Zarathustra will always be associated with space. If you're going to do a space movie, this is how to get it done right.
2. Star Wars. Yes, I know, it's an obscure art house film that nobody's ever heard of.
1. Destination Moon. The oldest film on the list, and still (in my not so humble opinion) the best science fiction film ever made. Made 19 years before the first actual manned lunar mission, it is amazing how much of the science and engineering that they got bang-on. Based on the Robert A. Heinlein novel Rocketship Galileo.
Other great sci-fi movies that didn't make my top 25, but which I nonetheless enjoyed: Bicentennial Man, Total Recall, the Blob, Logan's Run, Scanners, Rollerball, The Running Man, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and Barbarella.
What would be on your list?
Update: D'oh! How could I forget the three movies represented in my nifty new title graphic? I, Robot (loosely based on the Asimov novel of the same name), Fritz Lang's Metropolis, and Frankenstein starring Boris Karloff. Of those three, only Frankenstein would make my top 25, right around spot number 18 or so, bumping Enemy Mine off the top 25 list. Sorry, Lou. I've also heard many good things about Metropolis, but since I haven't seen the movie I can't place it among my favorites. And I, Robot was fun but not one of my top favorites.
Another movie that I totally forgot about as I was making my list has to be Star Trek II: the Wrath of Khan. Seeing Chekov getting "bugged", Kirk yelling "KHAAAAANNNNN!", Spock dying, oh the awesomeness. It would have to slide in there around number 20, which would bump Outland off the list, if not for my sleight of hand which allows me to bump Innerspace off the list instead. Not that I have anything against Dennis Quaid, bumping two of his movies off my list of 25, it's just that I probably should have put Outland higher on the list in the first place. Sorry, Dennis.
Some more sci-fi movies that I enjoyed, but which didn't make the top 25: Independence Day, Men in Black, Spiderman, Back to the Future, the Day the Earth Stood Still, Twelve Monkeys, and Spaceballs. Geez, I watch too many movies.
The Internet Movie Database also has a list of favorite sci-fi movies, as voted on by members of that site.
6 comments:
Great list .. I'm especially happy to see Serenity so high .. Though i had to pay to see it, i'm certainly glad I did, because they just don't make science fiction that smart or funny very often anymore
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Indeed I am linked to wanderingspace.net. It is on the Space Blogroll, which I maintain. I also included Wanderingspace.net as also one of the feeds into the Space Feeds website a couple of weeks ago.
Thanks for the list, Ed. But I can't see how you could like "The Fly" so much. And I-Robot is easliy the best Robot movie I can think of. Don't we need to represent the genre?
And what movie could be better than Serenity? Are you smoking crack over there?
I liked the fly mostly for the way it explores the idea that there are unforeseen consequences to scientific experiments, which may be more interesting than the original experiment itself.
I, Robot was probably spoiled for me because I read so much Asimov, and expected the story to be a little closer to the original I, Robot. It is still a fun movie though.
I really enjoyed Serenity, a lot. However, I was already a browncoat before seeing that movie. While it was excellent, Destination Moon was even better - particularly when one considers that DM was produced in 1950. It is a truly amazing movie, and I highly recommend it to all space geeks.
I read a whole lot of Asimov as a kid and I loved I, Robot because it was like just another chapter in the book. I thought the plot was totally something Asimov could have come up with, and I thought the CGI robots were perfect. And I loved how Susan Calvin was done - very recognizable, but less of a ridiculous caricature than she came across as in his stuff.
We used to watch science fiction movies at home on Friday nights, for the cultural enrichment and life lessons our daughter could glean from them. I wrote about that here.
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