The Sci-Fi List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

An ongoing project to survey the best films of individual decades, genres, and filmmakers.
Message
Author
User avatar
domino harvey
Dot Com Dom
Joined: Wed Jan 11, 2006 2:42 pm

Re: The Sci-Fi List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

#851 Post by domino harvey » Fri Mar 05, 2021 3:12 pm

Glad you could have the full tabulation experience DI, complete with post-posting edits and retabulations. I hope you learned your lesson about ever volunteering to help for anything ever

User avatar
therewillbeblus
Joined: Tue Dec 22, 2015 3:40 pm

Re: The Sci-Fi List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

#852 Post by therewillbeblus » Fri Mar 05, 2021 3:15 pm

swo17 wrote:
Fri Mar 05, 2021 1:42 pm
bottled spider wrote:
Fri Mar 05, 2021 1:35 pm
Tomorrow I'll Wake Up and Scald Myself with Tea by the way was an also ran.
I'm just noticing it actually appears in both the also ran and orphan lists
I also voted for it, didn't even notice it was on both before

User avatar
mizo
Joined: Mon Aug 06, 2012 10:22 pm
Location: Heard about Pittsburgh PA?

Re: The Sci-Fi List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

#853 Post by mizo » Fri Mar 05, 2021 3:16 pm

therewillbeblus wrote:
Fri Mar 05, 2021 8:43 am
I wish whoever voted for Godard's King Lear had posted a defense here, I'm very interested in reading that (and I'm quite malleable to persuasion with genres, so it could've possibly escaped its fated orphan status)
It was me, and Domino just explained my own reasoning. I had originally placed Alphaville in my top five, since I wanted some Godard futurism to rank highly, but it's a film I've always been just a little cool on, and when I suddenly remembered the setting of King Lear, I swapped them out and moved Alphaville a little lower down. Afraid I didn't think much more about it than that! But, interrogating my choice now, I would say that Godard's typical concerns with forms of communication and disseminating information intersect interestingly with the post-apocalyptic theme. Attempts to preserve lost knowledge, people's alienation via technology from those that should be closest (think how Godard stages the "divesting of the kingdom" scene with the telegrams). On top of that, you've got some roving bands of outlaws and lost souls combing the wasteland. So, basically, it's Godard's Mad Max film! I also love some of the lo-fi sci-fi trappings, especially Godard's "high tech" headgear.

And, for fun, here's the rest of my top ten + orphans
1. Stalker
2. Detention
3. King Lear (Godard) ORPHAN
4. Her
5. Solaris (Tarkovsky)
6. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
7. Alphaville
8. Quasi at the Quackadero ORPHAN
9. Twilight Zone: Time Enough at Last
10. The Territory (Ruiz) ORPHAN - A little surprised by this omission!

Orphans
13. Jauja - But not by this one, which I fretted for a while about including, and sort of let in on a technicality
16. Twilight Zone: Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up? - I have a lot of nostalgia for this one, with its cheesy twist and all.
25. Teenagers from Outer Space (Tom Graeff) - My wacky final choice, this is admittedly, in many respects, an awful movie, with a stunningly low-effort monster and some dreadful performances. It also has a more fun and better organized story than 99% of good films. Maybe it was just exceeding low expectations, but I was amazed at how effectively the film pulled me along from one entertaining (if lo-fi and silly) set piece to the next in the course of its one-day-long series of interstellar calamities happening in a small suburban town. There are well-known Hitchcock movies that I find less exciting than this. And yes, for any MST3k fans, it's the movie with this immortal line (but seriously, you don't need Joel and the bots to have a good time with this one)

User avatar
DarkImbecile
Ask me about my visible cat breasts
Joined: Mon Dec 09, 2013 6:24 pm
Location: Albuquerque, NM

Re: The Sci-Fi List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

#854 Post by DarkImbecile » Fri Mar 05, 2021 3:38 pm

domino harvey wrote:
Fri Mar 05, 2021 3:12 pm
Glad you could have the full tabulation experience DI, complete with post-posting edits and retabulations. I hope you learned your lesson about ever volunteering to help for anything ever
Image

User avatar
domino harvey
Dot Com Dom
Joined: Wed Jan 11, 2006 2:42 pm

Re: The Sci-Fi List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

#855 Post by domino harvey » Fri Mar 05, 2021 3:43 pm

With all of the predictions the Simpsons have been getting right lately, swo17 and I have decided to merge the results from this list with the Simpsons List in a newer, better list

User avatar
therewillbeblus
Joined: Tue Dec 22, 2015 3:40 pm

Re: The Sci-Fi List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

#856 Post by therewillbeblus » Fri Mar 05, 2021 4:25 pm

mizo wrote:
Fri Mar 05, 2021 3:16 pm
therewillbeblus wrote:
Fri Mar 05, 2021 8:43 am
I wish whoever voted for Godard's King Lear had posted a defense here, I'm very interested in reading that (and I'm quite malleable to persuasion with genres, so it could've possibly escaped its fated orphan status)
It was me, and Domino just explained my own reasoning. I had originally placed Alphaville in my top five, since I wanted some Godard futurism to rank highly, but it's a film I've always been just a little cool on, and when I suddenly remembered the setting of King Lear, I swapped them out and moved Alphaville a little lower down. Afraid I didn't think much more about it than that! But, interrogating my choice now, I would say that Godard's typical concerns with forms of communication and disseminating information intersect interestingly with the post-apocalyptic theme. Attempts to preserve lost knowledge, people's alienation via technology from those that should be closest (think how Godard stages the "divesting of the kingdom" scene with the telegrams). On top of that, you've got some roving bands of outlaws and lost souls combing the wasteland. So, basically, it's Godard's Mad Max film! I also love some of the lo-fi sci-fi trappings, especially Godard's "high tech" headgear.
I really like that explanation, though I still wish you'd posted as I'd probably have been converted and done something similar. It could have made the main list!

bamwc2
Joined: Mon Jun 02, 2008 11:54 am

Re: The Sci-Fi List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

#857 Post by bamwc2 » Sat Mar 06, 2021 3:29 pm

Oh no! I just realized that I forgot to include God Told Me To! It probably would have been a top ten for me.

User avatar
swo17
Bloodthirsty Butcher
Joined: Tue Apr 15, 2008 10:25 am
Location: SLC, UT

Re: The Sci-Fi List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

#858 Post by swo17 » Sat Mar 06, 2021 4:09 pm

Hmmm...I hadn't considered it before (probably just because IMDb doesn't include sci-fi as a genre tag) but same here. I was considering including The Stuff but wasn't sure it was sci-fi enough

User avatar
therewillbeblus
Joined: Tue Dec 22, 2015 3:40 pm

Re: The Sci-Fi List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

#859 Post by therewillbeblus » Sun Mar 07, 2021 12:18 am

You guys got me curious about God Told Me To, and my God, what a schizophrenic gem. Here is a film that appears to be a police procedural B-movie in almost every way until its eerie premise explodes in a series of chaotic experimental action scenes that are nothing short of riveting, propelling it into an exhausting transformation that's anything but what it appeared to be. The parade attack is filmed in a manner that violently assaults the senses in sound design, blocking, and angular invasiveness, so unpredictably violating of the codes of viewer-safe cinematic language, and out of step with the methodical subdued pacing that came before, that my heart was pounding for minutes afterwards and didn't let up from there. The rest of the narrative follows an equally destabilizing rhythm, mimicking the bipolar score from Taxi Driver only in the form of a visual symphony (released around the same time, and Herrmann was originally tapped to score.. mysterious). I don’t know if this is necessarily high art, but the film provokes the existential horror of contesting with the notion of unfamiliar phenomena- alien forces synonymous with God’s power in an atheist world of skeptics and false senses of control- to a degree that reflects a trauma response from unrationalizable enigmas. This is one of those few intelligent films that demonstrates how fragile our capabilities are when presented with stimuli that challenges our complacent routines and schematic laws of existence.

And yet this film goes further into subjectively embracing the psychological defense mechanisms of narcissism, self-reflexively modeling the process of viewership as well, where Nicholas must double down on his belief of grandiosity to cope with this mysterious figure poisoning his worldview. So we too must drown in stylistic suffocation as we root for his own mental self-preservation to achieve salvation for ourselves vicariously. These jarring confrontations are strategically disguised within a deceptively mediocre sci-fi horror procedural, successfully implementing provocative offerings of macabre phantasmagoria to infect the frames at random; the arbitrary tempo signifying the psyche of our protagonist slowly rattled away from secure affirmations of reality, transparently revealing them to be privileges. Yes, in this film sanity is a privilege, and perhaps not a natural one.

As the narrative reached its final act, I found myself developing a dual reading of the film as a strong allegory for the disintegration of a detective’s psyche as he invests more and more time into relating too strongly to the killers he chases, the necessity of identifying with them consequentially eroding his own identity. There are many paralleled symptoms to this disturbance, such as victims/survivors turning to blame Nicholas as their abuser, and of course his own magnetic draw towards this alien leader. The wife/ex-wife conversation about Nicholas’ subconscious superstitious beliefs in children not being born postures at an interpretation of his blending of personalities with killers as a self-fulfilling prophecy to make sense of his perceived inability to be a father, or be vulnerable to anyone safely when he cannot trust himself. He desperately wants to differentiate himself from those he chases yet fatalistically cannot outrun his own mental decline. His late statement to his partner, “You don’t know who I am,” and the subsequent surrender of the relationship, is stated as much to himself as to her, as if looking in a mirror of fear and connecting with an image impossible to avoid any longer. This is the kind of bone-chilling self-destructiveness that dances on the jagged knife of self-delusion and acute perceptiveness, and the final showdown is as metaphorical an exhibition of Nicholas’ fight for his own soul as it is a literalized sci-fi horror climax. The theme seem to be as much about the devastating loss of 'self' as anything else.

bamwc2
Joined: Mon Jun 02, 2008 11:54 am

Re: The Sci-Fi List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

#860 Post by bamwc2 » Sun Mar 07, 2021 12:42 am

I'm really glad you liked it! For my money, Larry Cohen's output in the 70s is as exciting as any other director working that decade.

User avatar
therewillbeblus
Joined: Tue Dec 22, 2015 3:40 pm

Re: The Sci-Fi List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

#861 Post by therewillbeblus » Sun Mar 07, 2021 4:28 am

bamwc2 wrote:
Sun Mar 07, 2021 12:42 am
For my money, Larry Cohen's output in the 70s is as exciting as any other director working that decade.
I'm definitely interested in recs of where to go after this. As far as I know, I've only seen The Stuff from him.

User avatar
swo17
Bloodthirsty Butcher
Joined: Tue Apr 15, 2008 10:25 am
Location: SLC, UT

Re: The Sci-Fi List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

#862 Post by swo17 » Sun Mar 07, 2021 4:34 am

I'd recommend Bone

User avatar
knives
Joined: Sat Sep 06, 2008 6:49 pm

Re: The Sci-Fi List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

#863 Post by knives » Sun Mar 07, 2021 8:39 am

And Black Caesar.

bamwc2
Joined: Mon Jun 02, 2008 11:54 am

Re: The Sci-Fi List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

#864 Post by bamwc2 » Sun Mar 07, 2021 1:38 pm

I'll second Bone. It has some very politically incorrect dynamics in it that would never fly today, but Yaphet Kotto gives an amazing performance in it. I'm also a big fan of The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover. The only films of his I didn't care for from the 70s were It's Alive and it's sequel, but even they have their charms.

User avatar
therewillbeblus
Joined: Tue Dec 22, 2015 3:40 pm

Re: The Sci-Fi List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

#865 Post by therewillbeblus » Sun Mar 07, 2021 4:26 pm

Cool, thanks guys

Rounding out the blind spots to reach 100/100 on the main list:

Phase IV: I wasn’t nearly as impressed by this as others here, but this was a fine way to spend 90 minutes. I particularly enjoyed the deliberately reflexive (yet all-too-brief) shade of Davenport's performance, posturing at the mad scientist caricature to provide a satirical commentary on the irrational dogmatic devotion to scientific progress. Unfortunately this was passed over too quickly in a blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment, which diluted any solid subversive reading as the film gave both scientists the opportunity of sympathy with different strategies, making this little more than a solid chamber thriller that escapes its fate as an unmemorable programmer through the technical effects that grant the ants power through the medium’s possibilities. The continual editing shifts from humans to ants from similar camera-induced vantage points convey their size in the frame as equal to the humans, creating the threat of formidable adversaries, an exceptional optical manipulation in an otherwise unexceptional film.

L'Inhumaine: Excellent visual feast, from the art design to the radical visuals- especially that wild ending that imbues extraordinarily surreal techniques to create an unparalleled euphoric dizziness. I wouldn’t have voted for this, as its pleasures completely resided in superficial places rather than sci-fi themes for me, but I can’t blame anyone for its inclusion.

The Hole: If the themes and tones of Seeking a Friend for the End of the World and Antonioni's peak period ever crossed paths, this might be the end result, a comforting and silly film about alienation and loneliness, infusing a third eye perspective of joy into banal conditions. I don’t love this like the masses (and was pretty cool on Goodbye, Dragon Inn so I’m not exactly in simpatico with Tsai to begin with) but I did appreciate its feel and unique mood, and thoroughly enjoyed my viewing even if I didn't emerge blown away. The musical bits worked to contrast the isolation as indirect forms of expressive bursts, characters crawling out of the corners sideways to the narrative to deliver them, which somehow felt fully in step with the necessity to sidestep barriers in physical walls and social norms blocking said expression between characters, with the hole providing the opening for both irritation and intimacy- an eccentric paradox again exemplified by these third-wheel intrusive numbers. And as we acclimate to this tempo, we amusingly realize that the radio talk is arguably just as bizarre as the invasion of music. Tsai provides this opportunity to perceive the mundane as peculiar and absurd by detaching us from its complacent familiarity through gradually unbinding formalism, and it works.

If people were keen to vote for this kind of ‘barely qualifying sci-fi used to elicit truths about human connection’ I hope the same folks voted for Mauvais Sang, which is (broadly) doing something similar but better. I’m always game for stretching genre parameters though, so its placement on the main list is a nice W for that philosophy.
Last edited by therewillbeblus on Mon Mar 08, 2021 3:51 pm, edited 1 time in total.

User avatar
zedz
Joined: Sun Nov 07, 2004 7:24 pm

Re: The Sci-Fi List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

#866 Post by zedz » Mon Mar 08, 2021 3:45 pm

Thanks for posting your thoughts on the extra films twbb. My Carax vote was for Holy Motors, but Mauvais Sang would definitely have made my list if I'd been able to stretch it to fifty. I count that film and The Hole (and several others on my list, like Under Electric Clouds) as "films that take place in a science-fiction world", which for me is still science-fiction. But then, I'm usually more interested in the worlds of science-fiction than the plots. For me, the original Bladerunner is a magnificent feat of art direction in search of a compelling reason to exist.

User avatar
colinr0380
Joined: Mon Nov 08, 2004 4:30 pm
Location: Chapel-en-le-Frith, Derbyshire, UK

Re: The Sci-Fi List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

#867 Post by colinr0380 » Mon Mar 08, 2021 5:13 pm

Thanks for doing this list! I'm afraid in my haste to cut my list down to fifty entries I completely forgot to include When Worlds Collide (the best of the 1950s disaster film cycle), and I also wanted to mention a couple of films that I did not feel able to vote for as I was unable to revisit them before the deadline with 2011's Love, which is probably best described as what would happen if Terrence Malick had made Moon (this was the first film by William Eubank, who went on to 2014's The Signal and the 2018 Kristen Stewart seamonster adventure Underwater). The other is Stephen Norrington's first feature film, the tongue-in-cheek homage to Terminator and Aliens with another characteristically scenery chewing crazy Brad Dourif role, Death Machine, itself part of that early 90s trend of rampaging robots that also includes Richard Stanley's Hardware.

While it is in rough quality (and it has always been like that even in its DVD version) I also really like that early 1985 proto-Hardware short that Stanley made in the 1980s, Incidents In An Expanding Universe. At the very least that is a wonderfully evocative title!

And I wanted to put in a word for the Michael Critchton adaptation Sphere, which has a few rather silly twists but plays everything so earnestly that it works. Or at least works about the same as similar material is handled in The Abyss, which is what it feels in the tradition of.

DLAidoo
Joined: Sun Sep 13, 2020 5:23 pm

Re: The Sci-Fi List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

#868 Post by DLAidoo » Mon Apr 19, 2021 5:08 pm

I wanted to participate in this list but couldn't/ chose not to because I felt I had too much catching up to do before I could compile a list I'm moderately happy with. Loved seeing Mike Cahill's Another Earth in the top 25 and Zal Batmangij's Sound of My Voice (2011) in the top 100, both favorites of mine from the last decade. I think Brit Marling is one of the most interesting Sci-Fi voices out there right now. According to my quick ctrl f research A.T. White's Starfish (2018) wasn't even an orphan. If you love introspective, minimalist indie Sci-Fi I'd recommend you to watch it.

User avatar
domino harvey
Dot Com Dom
Joined: Wed Jan 11, 2006 2:42 pm

Re: The Sci-Fi List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

#869 Post by domino harvey » Wed Dec 01, 2021 6:10 pm

Rayon Vert wrote:
Sun Jan 10, 2021 12:10 pm
One per decade this week.

Screamers (Duguay 1995). (1st viewing) This was on an underrated or neglected sci-fi internet film list or two. A planet used for mining (what else is new?) is now a barren post-apocalyptic habitat with small armies left after the war that occurred between the mining company and a strikers’ alliance. The screamers are these self-replicating A.I. machines that are supposed to kill members of the mining company. This is a Philip K. Dick adaptation (the short story Second Variety) and apparently one of the most faithful ones. It’s definitely a recognizable universe with the human-impersonating androids we eventually run into, machines getting the upper hand, and even a teddy bear that features. Unfortunately whatever was good in the story or script doesn’t translate onto the screen for the most part. This looked and felt extremely generic, and the actors, sets and direction were all pretty weak and nondescript. So there are reasons it’s overlooked.
I caught up with Screamers last night and agree that it's a big miss, which is too bad because I think the first fifteen minutes hint at a lot of interesting ideas that this film has zero interest in pursuing. Any claims trying to be made reclaiming this fall apart like so many body parts once the first act ends and we realize this movie has no clue how to build on the handful of ideas it throws at us in the outset. What surprised me afterwards was that, based on the Wikipedia summary of the source text, a lot of my problems are inherent in the Dick story and not, as I'd assumed, just stupid screenwriting cliches rewriting and dumbing down a superior text. Indeed, it seems like the most compelling ideas (the film changes the setup to essentially be about the remnants of a union fight wherein America just decides to abandon both sides, including their own, once a cheaper alternative arises elsewhere) were actually added in. The idea of self-replicating robot murderers is also interesting, I guess, but there's no way to believe within the logic of the story presented that there was ever the materials needed on this desolate island to make carbon-copies of the same human robots-- it would have made more sense for the dead bodies that we hear get dragged under were being used to form reanimated robot corpses, though perhaps this is too close to RoboCop and we already have Peter Weller in the lead here!

This movie also contains one of the stupidest plot contrivances I can remember, in that in the finale
SpoilerShow
The Evil Jennifer Rubin-bot is wearing the same spacesuit as the Good Jennifer Rubin-bot, even though we saw all the young kid robots dressed identically so shouldn't she be wearing the tank top she wore for most of the film? Where did she get the spacesuit if there was only one escape pod and one suit, while we're at it. Like, what? Did no one read this script before filming?

User avatar
therewillbeblus
Joined: Tue Dec 22, 2015 3:40 pm

Re: The Sci-Fi List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

#870 Post by therewillbeblus » Fri Feb 04, 2022 4:46 pm

Intacto (Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, 2001): This Spanish thriller is perhaps more 'magical realism' than Sci-Fi, but the function of psychokinesis applied to corporeal systems feels right at home in the genre. The film didn't work for me on the whole, but the premise and -specifically the implications of how these powers are weaponized as practical and psychological utilities- is fascinating. Essentially the film takes place in a world where the luck can be amassed through continual participation in games of 'chance', which in turn eliminates unlucky people, empowering the lucky further ahead. Not only is it an interesting thematic examination of capitalist systems, but the film's deepest note deconstructs the idea of divine intervention and how we cope with the mystery around seemingly-coincidental/lucky circumstances.

The "luckiest" man, who is found and exploited for the ulterior motives of others, is a thief who lived an immoral existence prior to being the sole survivor of a plane crash- so in order to cope with the inconceivable irrationality of said effect (why did he live when other, more spiritually-fit people, died?) the characters propose that his 'plan'/duty is to use his luck for superficial capitalization. The concept that a spiritual intervention's intended consequence is to live a self-serving nonspiritual existence is ironic but also sensible as a recognition of our atheistic discomfort in leaning into the unknown. So why not opt for a shallow explanation that endorses shallow behavior? There is also the proposal that if said character does not continue to push their luck, they will become less powerful/lucky and move closer to doom- rather than closer to success; which is both a profession of existential fatalism and a twist on the spiritually concept that one is always either moving closer or further away from God/morality.

There are too many possibly philosophical rabbit holes to spawn from this central conceit, including the notion that, through touch, the more powerful/lucky can usurp another's luck, which feeds into the ethos of manipulating/using people as commodities, just as much as their abilities; and the cheeky implications for how amounted 'skills' are synonymous with luck, the opposite of 'skill' in our world- though certainly a case could be made for this metaphor mirroring how systemic ladders help one access skills to the point where they can become interchangeably swapped! Unfortunately the movie itself was little better than a programmer, but I could probably write a long essay on the inferences present in the film's sci-fi/fantasy world.

User avatar
therewillbeblus
Joined: Tue Dec 22, 2015 3:40 pm

Re: The Sci-Fi List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

#871 Post by therewillbeblus » Wed Jun 22, 2022 7:02 pm

Never Cursed wrote:
Mon Aug 17, 2020 2:54 am
The Toxic Avenger is one of the most repellent films I've seen in some time, and unlike with Triangle, I don't mean an ounce of that negative description positively. Almost every second of this film is concerned with being as disquietingly gross as possible, and while variations on through-and-through trashiness in an exploitation context can be interesting (see: the earlier half of John Waters' oeuvre), none of the creativity or meaning or novel presentation needed to make something special of an exploitation film is present here. No characters behave in remotely recognizable human ways, everything is filmed in the cheapest and cheat-iest way possible (it is a, uh, bold choice to film 95% of the main character's post-transformation scenes as though he is Lugosi's chiropractor and to dub all his lines in A Night To Dismember-level quality) with ridiculous continuity errors abound, and the film's sexual politics are loathsome in the more rotely expected ways (was the world really lacking in a scene where criminals robbing a taco joint kill a blind blonde's dog, strip her, and almost rape her, after which she is frequently cut to shrieking in bra and underwear?). I've seen the defense proffered that the film is a satire of z-grade monster shlock, and there is the the hint of that in how the mutated killer main character becomes something of a local superhero, but practically all of the heroic deeds which we see him undertake involve the brutal killing of various clearly or nebulously bad guys. At no point does the film try to undercut or subvert any of the things one would expect of z-grade monster shlock; the film is not magically more self-aware just because it shows our hero helping an old lady across the street or because it includes a couple Elephant Man jokes. I know there are at least a couple fervent defenders (sorry for trashing your darling!) of this film here, and I'd like to hear their cases for the film, but I absolutely hated this, and I'll certainly never seek out a Troma film again unless I hear that others are radically different from this.
I was repelled by this for entirely different reasons, and I say that as someone who also ultimately kinda loved this as it targets a very immature funny bone I have that responds to heightened absurdism operating on shallow levels, including deliberate comedies like Freddy Got Fingered. I can't defend the film on these merits, as it's fruitless to do when it comes to subjective comedy, but the idea that an entire group of people abide by an internal logic of sociopathy - girls and boys alike taking pictures of a child they just brutally killed with glee - works for me on a plane of unhinged antisocial humor.

Having said all that, I'm much less disturbed by the surrealistic imagery and regurgitated-ids-at-the-wall setpieces than what the film is insinuating on a sociopolitical level, and how that's influenced by social darwinism. I'm not often offended by characterizations, especially in schlock like this that overtly discourages the audience from take anything in it too seriously, but the mean-spirited and pointlessly exaggerated depiction of the main character in the first section is appalling, particularly how he fits into the skewed milieu around him. The way they portray him as a strange mixture of all stereotypes of people with developmental delays, and as just socially aware enough *but antisocial where it counts*, is seemingly incongruously-pitched next to the oppressors who are presented as hyperbolically sociopathic. The filmmakers are showing us a survivalist space where his own “deficits” lead to serious consequences, as he is taken advantage of in a way that’s of his own doing and causes his own downfall. I feel like the movie exists unconsciously as a support for Reagan-era conservatism, from bootstraps ideals to a moral model philosophy, that says this kid is weak and not on the same page as society and so it’s his fault that he’s doomed to fail and deserves it so too bad, and, just to make fun of both sides to distract from this ingrained perspective, they also show the others as evil. But one side clearly is operating functionally within this society- that is, until a monster comes in.

There could also be a reading that the filmmakers are exploiting him further by making him into the central destroyer- Hey, let’s make him our puppet, ‘other’ him some more, and show that only through fantastical circumstances can a sensitive weakling like this contend with life on life’s terms. At one point a peripheral character happens to mention that 'only bad people' are getting hurt, which reinforces moral model credo and also serves a wondrous apartheid that is the reverse of reality in every respect; thereby recognizing as Truth that what it's satirizing is how silly it is that the strong, able-minded, "normal" citizens -regardless of their moral behavior- could or would be bested by a social outcast. In this way, I could see how this film might be critiquing bootstraps-thumping, but for me the problems of the film exist in the vacuum of the first act: If our protagonist, pre-transformation, was capable of pulling himself up by his resources and facing these bullies with intellect and skill, he would have, but he didn't so he's doubly weak. The dissonance between bootstraps and social darwinist philosophies represents just one of many sociopolitical paradoxes that went unacknowledged by Reagan-era politics, and I'm not saying that the film is conscious of its implicit political outlooks, but that they're problematically woven into the fabric of how the filmmakers see their social environment, no matter how sensationalized it is- it's based on something.

I realize I’m probably reading deeper into this than maybe anyone ever has, but I feel it’s as if closeted eugenicists made this movie and its setup is irking me so much, more than a movie has bothered me in as long as I can remember. And yet everything else is amazing, conversely striking a chord in me that turns off these analytical lights and just enjoys the ride based on the surface-level insanity of the film. I don't remember the last time I felt so conflicted on a film, and it's both hilarious and sad that it's this film that's provoking that response. Just like the movie I guess.

User avatar
Mr Sausage
Joined: Wed Nov 03, 2004 9:02 pm
Location: Canada

Re: The Sci-Fi List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

#872 Post by Mr Sausage » Wed Jun 22, 2022 8:21 pm

I suspect the film is utterly cynical, and expresses that cynicism by representing every group through the stereotyping lense of its own outgroup. So bullies are represented the way a victim would see them, as sociopathic brutes who love violence as an end in itself; but victims are represented as nerds and weaklings whose weakness is so provoking that they actively court their own punishment. Everyone is exactly what their own worst critics say they are.

User avatar
therewillbeblus
Joined: Tue Dec 22, 2015 3:40 pm

Re: The Sci-Fi List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

#873 Post by therewillbeblus » Wed Jun 22, 2022 8:54 pm

That's a good and charitable reading that I share, but only as far as it's one that works in conscious employment by the filmmakers. My own internal discord stems from detecting that the problematic underlying worldviews aren't consciously-perpetuated in the way that this reading is - and that's exactly why 90% of the movie works for me, because I can engage with that kind of equitable absurdist enhancement! What disturbs me is the fundamental perspective that I sense entrenched in these sociopolitical dynamics.

User avatar
Mr Sausage
Joined: Wed Nov 03, 2004 9:02 pm
Location: Canada

Re: The Sci-Fi List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

#874 Post by Mr Sausage » Wed Jun 22, 2022 9:43 pm

I don't know that I was trying to be charitable. The filmmakers were attempting to make a thumb in people's eye. Whether they knew where their attempts to do so were coming from is debatable, as you've pointed out.

User avatar
therewillbeblus
Joined: Tue Dec 22, 2015 3:40 pm

Re: The Sci-Fi List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

#875 Post by therewillbeblus » Wed Jun 22, 2022 9:52 pm

I think it's charitable in the sense that it assumes the filmmakers are engaging in actionable neutrality towards all groups and thus humanity itself, inflated to maximize amusement in its central conceit, whereas in practice it seems that the 'attack all sides' approach is a sublimated cover-up of something more sinister, or at the very least a deep-seated view of who belongs on top- or more accurately who does not

Post Reply