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

[knives]

Dom is a closeted Ready Player One fan?

[domino harvey]

Dom is a closeted Ready Player One fan?

Does that make this my beard?

[bamwc2]

It’s very possible that a Spielberg film may be my number one on this list— but it’s not a title you mentioned anywhere in your post!

Domino, do I need to remind you that The Color Purple isn't sci-fi by any definition of the genre?

[domino harvey]

It’s very possible that a Spielberg film may be my number one on this list— but it’s not a title you mentioned anywhere in your post!

Domino, do I need to remind you that The Color Purple isn't sci-fi by any definition of the genre?

Everyone knows Venusians are purple =;

[therewillbeblus]

Clever girl

[knives]

Dom is a closeted Ready Player One fan?

Does that make this my beard?

Still a better beard then el Speilbergo׳s

[bamwc2]

It’s very possible that a Spielberg film may be my number one on this list— but it’s not a title you mentioned anywhere in your post!

Domino, do I need to remind you that The Color Purple isn't sci-fi by any definition of the genre?

Everyone knows Venusians are purple =;

No. As I learned in 2069: A Sex Odyssey, Venusians are naked. Very, very naked.

[bamwc2]

I forgot about both Jurassic Park and Ready Player One when I wrote the review. I like both, but don't consider either serious contenders for my list.

[therewillbeblus]

Like domino (I'm assuming), I also thought about putting JP at number one in the early incarnations of my list. It'll all depend on where I want to point the needle in my assessment of what the Best Sci-Fi Movie means to me, but as of now I'm leaning towards a more philosophical space (not that there isn't clear existential content in the Spielberg!)

[knives]

It does fulfill the very important Goldblum quotient for the genre.

[bottled spider]

The Wild Blue Yonder (Herzog, 2005) And another oddity, with Brad Dourif as an alien (obviously!) narrating a tale of alien arrival and human spacegoing over re-purposed footage alongside freshly shot material with Dourif in a seemingly deserted small town. Footage of a shuttle mission is used for humanity's first interplanetary mission and undersea diving in Antarctica for scenes of exploration of an alien world. The result is an oddly disconcerting film - we know what we are seeing is not actually what we are being told we are seeing (true, I know, of most cinema but doubly so here) but it also makes us look at the footage in a different way: underwater Antarctica really does look alien. Not as impressive as Last and First Men perhaps, but definitely worth a look.

I don't know how I never heard of this before. It's Herzog. Looks like it has had mixed reviews, but it sounds right up my street. I'll definitely watch this.

I liked the sound of this, but I'm afraid it didn't work for me. Much of the re-purposed footage doesn't match the narrative well enough, or doesn't mismatch it productively enough. I didn't like any of the score, and the high-pitched squealing bits (cat being neutered?) were actually painful. Replace Dourif with William Burroughs (who could tinker with the script, too), and score it to my personal musical taste, and I'd like it better.

[movielocke]

It’s very possible that a Spielberg film may be my number one on this list— but it’s not a title you mentioned anywhere in your post!

interesting... I count 8 Spielberg films as science fiction, and 8 more films that have supernatural elements but I wouldn't consider sci-fi. Never realized supernatural was literally half his filmography (I'd have guessed a third)

[therewillbeblus]

I completely forgot about Kiyoshi Kurosawa's work when compiling an initial list, probably because they're generally so hard to pin down in definition by genre! I think(?) Charisma and maybe Cure could qualify, though he made several other more explicitly sci-fi movies (Bright Future and Before We Vanish come to mind)

[Michael Kerpan]

TWBB -- As to Kiyoshi Kurosawa -- Not sure how I would classify Doppelganger (other than as a love story possibly even weirder than Bunuel's Archibaldo Cruz), but Bright Future and Before We Vanish definitely feel quite science-fictiony. I would say Kairo / Pulse seems a bit more SF-ish than Cure and Charisma.

[therewillbeblus]

Yeah in the case of Charisma, taking literal any projected meaning onto the tree seems to defeat the point, and one could make a similar case for the psychic/psychological abilities in Cure. Instead of using sci-fi ideas to translate philosophical meditations, these films use enigmatic anomalies to drive them, which only venture into sci-fi territory if you take them at face value, in which case I don't know if I could argue either. I thought of Doppelganger but it hits other genres louder (I mostly see it as a comedy). I am curious now on if any of his other films are more in step with the genre- any suggestions would be welcome in prompting me to pick back up filling in my KK gaps.

[Michael Kerpan]

I think the most SF-like of his films have all been mentioned -- except for Foreboding (a companion piece to Before We Vanish) which I have not seen -- not sure it has had a subbed release. Also, Real -- another film I've seen no trace of in the wild (but which definitely sounds like SF from what I have read).

Yes enigmatic anomalies are key in Cure and Charisma -- also Sakeba (Scream / Retribution).

[bamwc2]

Viewing Log:

Frankenstein (J. Searle Dawley, 1910): This early short from Edison Studios warns us at the beginning that there were some liberties taken with Mary Shelley's text, something that seems inevitable from a 10 minute adaptation. The young scientist Frankenstein (Augustus Phillips) writes his fiancee Elizabeth (Mary Fuller) to tell her that before they are to be married, he will have conquered death. Believing himself to have created the perfect man, the doctor is shocked when it turns out to be a hideous Monster (Charles Ogle ). While we're all used to the visage of Boris Karloff as The Monster, here he looks closer to a combination of The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Mr Hyde. The monster flees, but returns on Frankenstein's wedding night to exact revenge. It's a fairly unique (if not faithful) taken on Shelley's story that showcases the attention to detail that Edison Studios put into their productions. It's available for free on YouTube. At that price it's definitely worth checking out.

On the Silver Globe (Andrzej Zulawski, 1988): As the movie opens, we get an introduction by director Andrzej Zulawski, detailing the film's production in the late 70s and its repression at the hands of its Polish censors. The story begins with a group of astronauts seeking freedom that crash into an Earth-like planet. They found a new city, and a generation later only one of the original pilgrims, Jerzy (Jerzy Trela), remains. The rest of the tribe is populated by primitive descendants of the astronauts who practice a religion based on their parent's trip. Before Jerzy dies, he sends a video transmission back to Earth, which attracts the attention of an explorer named Marek (Andrzej Seweryn). Marek journeys to the planet, where he is mistaken for the messiah there to liberate them from the threat posed by the planet's native population. Zulawski's films are more about poetry than they are about coherent storytelling, but I found this one harder to follow than any of his other works. I could tell that I was watching something special, but I rarely could tell exactly what I was watching.

The Platform (Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia, 2019): Goreng (Ivan Massagué) awakens in a prison with the older Trimagasi (Zorion Eguileor) without explanation for why he was there. The curt Trimagasi provides some answers, but not enough. It turns out that the prison is vertical with at least 132 floors, each housing two inmates. At the top is a kitchen where a platform full of food begins descending, spending a short amount of time at each floor. Prisoners at the top feast on the delicacies, leaving a diminishing amount on each floor below. Those at the bottom get no scraps and have to resort to cannibalism to survive. Each month the inmates are shifted to a seemingly random floor, with a unseen Kafkaesque force controlling them. Mysterious and frequently gory, this Netflix film is hard to endure. With echoes of Cube, I can't exactly call the film good, but it kept my attention during its duration.

Resident Evil: Afterlife (Paul W.S. Anderson, 2010): At the start of the film Alice (Milla Jovovich) leads her clone army from the last entry in the series in an assault on Umbrella's Tokyo location. They're immediately killed off, raising the question of why they were even included in the first place. Umbrella head Albert Wexler (Shawn Roberts) strips Alice of her superpowers, instead of her clothes like the previous three movies. Eventually, she ends up in Alaska where she meets amnesiac Claire Redfield (Ali Larter). The two fly down to LA, where they land on a rooftop filled with a handful of survivors surrounded by thousands of zombies. The ship Arcadia is just off the shoreline, and promises to be their salvation if they could only reach it. Of course the character that's deeply coded as Jewish betrays them, and for some reason there's an eight-foot-tall zombie that has quarters explode from his head when he's hit with a shotgun blast (it happens again with a zombie dog for some reason?). Paul W.S. Anderson took on directing duties again, and it's more of his typical trash. I suppose that I might have liked it marginally better than the previous three entries, but at this point, it's like me trying to give rankings of which bouts of kidney stones I've enjoyed the most in my life. The next entry is the one that won the most critical praise of the franchise. I'm preying that it's worth going through this dreck for it, but I'm not really holding out much hope.

Sea Fever (Neasa Hardiman, 2019): This Irish sci-fi/horror mashup stars Hermione Corfield as Siobhán, a graduate student in biology who takes a spot on a fishing trawler to continue her research. Ship captain Gerard (Dougray Scott) is on the verge of losing his boat to creditors, and needs a large haul to save it, so he takes them to an exclusion zone ripe with fish. Once there, their ship runs into something big and stops. They see a Russian boat in the distance, but find the crew dead after boarding. Soon they realize that they're in the grasp of an enormous unknown sea creature that spreads a parasitic infection through the crew. The film has the vibe of something like Alien, as they begin dying one by one. This time Siobhán occupies the Ripley role, using her knowledge of science in a desperate attempt to save the crew. While it's not perfect, I was deeply impressed by this film from writer/director Neasa Hardiman. Most of her work has been for television, but here's hoping that she gets more chances to tell tales like this.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture (Robert Wise, 1979): Taking place a few years after the mission on television series ended, the first in the long line of movie adaptations begins with Admiral James T. Kirk (William Shatner) taking control of a refurbished USS Enterprise from it's young captain Decker (Stephen Collins). A mysterious object of immense proportions has destroyed any ship that it comes in conflict with as it makes its way toward Earth. Kirk, along with Chief Science Officer Spock (Leonard Nimoy) and the rest of the crew race against time to try and understand the immensely powerful object before it destroys all life on the planet. I've seen most of the Star Trek films, but had somehow never caught this one. It's decidedly 70s decor and campy acting from its lead makes it somewhat comical, but it was nice seeing the original cast together again. I can't say that it was anything special, but I guess I'd give it a mild recommendation.

World of Tomorrow (Don Hertzfeldt, 2015): This ingenious animated short was created by recording the voice of Don Hertzfeldt's four-year-old niece, Winona Mae, as she played and building up the story of Emily Prime around the dialogue. The resulting hilarity begins with a clone (Julia Pott) of Emily Prime contacting her from hundreds of years in the future before using time travel technology to brink her into her time. The clone tells her about the world of tomorrow as its on the verge of being wiped out by a passing meteor. Lasting only 16 minutes, the short packs more ideas and joy in it than most feature length films. I can't overstate how much I loved this one. It's a lock for my list. If you haven't seen it yet, then it's available for rental on Vimeo. There's also a sequel that I can't wait to check out.

[bottled spider]

World of Tomorrow (Don Hertzfeldt, 2015): This ingenious animated short was created by recording the voice of Don Hertzfeldt's four-year-old niece, Winona Mae, as she played and building up the story of Emily Prime around the dialogue. The resulting hilarity begins with a clone (Julia Pott) of Emily Prime contacting her from hundreds of years in the future before using time travel technology to brink her into her time. The clone tells her about the world of tomorrow as its on the verge of being wiped out by a passing meteor. Lasting only 16 minutes, the short packs more ideas and joy in it than most feature length films. I can't overstate how much I loved this one. It's a lock for my list. If you haven't seen it yet, then it's available for rental on Vimeo. There's also a sequel that I can't wait to check out.

This being the second resounding recommendation, I'll definitely watch this. And thanks for pointing to Vimeo. I was scratching my head after not seeing anything of Hertzfeldt available on Amazon or at my local brick-and-mortar.

[swo17]

Actually I think I like World of Tomorrow 2 even more

[bottled spider]

Well fine, I'll watch that one too then.

[swo17]

And there's a third one coming!

[knives]

They’re largely ineligible for this list, but all the fans of World of Tomorrow need to run to the John Hubley films that Hertzfeldt is riffing on.

[therewillbeblus]

I doubt I’ll have room for Verhoeven, though if I do that slot would likely go to RoboCop’s richer satire. Revisiting Starship Troopers I’m still slightly torn on the tactics of engagement and disengagement. The film succeeds at its own satire of fascism, and especially self-depreciation (beyond skewering the western postwar political movement) reflexively setting up character and narrative tropes, and knocking them down with ironic transparency.

My problems stem from the inconclusive tones by which Verhoeven juggles competing acts of embracing the fun and turning on it. I think the wooden acting, thin characterization of our protagonists, and broad social gags are intentional, and it’s a bit unclear to me why he thinks the rush-job (non)sex scene between Rico and Flores is funny (I think it’s a solid joke in the general’s blessing encouraging their romance like plenty of movies do, but even better for Rico’s emasculating oblivious admittance to being able to finish quickly as if that’s so divorced from a male’s ego he can’t fathom sexual shame; however I’m not sure that last part is as thought-out).

It’s easy to read the entire film as a joke on our artificial involvement in cinema (the “I got to have you” final words of pathos merely minutes after consummation of that relationship shatters any shred of worth we could place on the romance by reminding us of the hollow details we’ve been afforded to empathize with), or as a reflection of fascism’s hold on us, though there is very real catharsis in the grenade maneuver and subsequent celebration and accolades from the commander. A scene like this shifts the more obvious satirical nudges that the film flaunts unapologetically, by aligning the audience with the characters (yes, the potentially unworthy ones) and having us feel the gratification of ‘winning’ and being validated by a nationalist supervisor, reinforcing the groupthink process and making us uncomfortably aware that we are not exempt from the dopamine rush of social affirmation. The flow of disengagement causes me to see this as a subtly genius trick amidst a more cartoonish display of sanctimony. That’s not to say one is more admirable than the other but the unevenness of service delivery always puzzles me into musing on whether I’m misreading one of these layers of strategy in driving home the themes, beyond the clear Nazi iconography and narrative arcs.

The best scene is still the ironic fight scene to Mazzy Star, which defines the film’s cheeky tone at its best.

[bamwc2]

Viewing Log:

Before We Vanish (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2017): Three alien scouts come to Earth to prepare for an invasion by taking over the bodies of a trio of Japanese citizens. Schoolgirl Akira (Yuri Tsunematsu) starts things off by murdering her host's family, while young husband Shinji (Ryuhei Matsuda) explores the world with his host's wife Narumi (Masami Nagasawa). Teenager Amano (Mahiro Takasugi), the last of the alien triad, journeys with journalist Sakurai (Hiroki Hasegawa), who has been tasked with keeping track of him by the government. Not knowing how to function as humans, the three of them go around stealing concepts from people's brains by touching their foreheads. The aliens plan to kill off humanity, but once they learn what it means to be human, can they carry through with their goal? The film works well as both a philosophical meditation on what it means to be human, as well as an (occasional) action thriller. I missed this one when it came out, but am quite glad to have caught up with it.

Bill & Ted Face the Music (Dean Parisot, 2020): The good natured, but empty headed Bill (Alex Winter) & Ted (Keanu Reeves) are back nearly thirty years after their last adventure. Told that they were destined to write a song that would bring all of humanity together, the inseparable duo has spent the intervening time futilely trying to fulfill this prophecy. Now, pushing fifty, their wives are unhappy, they're broke, but they have the love of their two teenage daughters Thea (Samara Weaving) and Billie (Brigette Lundy-Paine). When reality itself starts to come undone by their inability to come up with their song, the pair decide to travel to the future where it's already been written. Unfortunately, they find increasingly desperate counterparts, while their daughters scheme to put together a band of history's greatest musicians to help the boys compose their masterpiece. The new additions to the story like Thea and Billie are most excellent (as was suicidal robot Dennis Caleb McCoy (Anthony Carrigan)), and it was wonderful to see Death (William Sadler) make a return. It was a very timely movie too. Seeing familiar, sincere characters acting out love and joy was just what I needed in my life right now. Was it good? I'd say reasonably so. It was a loving tribute to the power of music that I liked a little better than the second film, but a little less than the first.

Flash Gordon (Mike Hodges, 1980): When intergalactic tyrant Ming the Merciless (Max von Sydow) turns his attention to Earth, he unleashes cataclysmic disasters that bring down a plane carrying football hero Flash Gordon (Sam J. Jones) and travel agent Dale Arden (Melody Anderson). By sheer coincidence it crashes into the laboratory of Dr. Hans Zarkov (Topol), a scientist who believes that an evil extraterrestrial power brings disaster to Earth. Dr. Zarkov forces the pair to accompany him in his homemade rocket ship to the planet Mongo. There the three of them become embroiled in the resistance to Ming's rule. Ming claims Dale for his bride, while Flash unites those opposed to Ming in battle. Intentionally cheesy, the film is far too self-aware of its own campiness to be much fun as bad cinema. That being said, it's nowhere near good either. I get that the filmmakers were going for the 1930s serial style, but its so unrelentingly over the top, that its just bad.

Resident Evil: Retribution (Paul W.S. Anderson, 2012): Well, I'm finally here. According to Slant, this Paul W.S. Anderson fiasco is the 87th best sci-fi movie ever made. This time it picks up right where the last one left off, with Alice (Milla Jovovich) leading a fight where the survivors aboard the Arcadia are wiped out by the Umbrella Corporation's evil shock troops. Alice is taken hostage by a mind controlled Jill Valentine (Sienna Guillory) who's back for the first time since the second film in the series. Put into a simulation at an underground Umbrella facility made to model Raccoon City, Alice must once again fight off hoards of zombies and a killer AI to save the life of Jill, a new ally named Ada Wong (Bingbing Li), and Becky (Aryana Engineer), a little girl from the simulation. All of Anderson's trademarks are here: impossible fight choreography from a depowered Alice, zombie slaying so repetitious as to be mind numbingly boring, and the worst dialogue this side of a George Lucas screenplay. I can understand why people would consider this to be the best entry in the franchise, but to make another analogy, its like figuring out the best way to get killed by a bear. You're fucked no matter which one you choose.

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (Nicholas Meyer, 1982): Captain Terrell (Paul Winfield) and Commander Chekov (Walter Koenig) make their way in a barren desert planet where they find the remnants of a group of genetically enhanced humans lead by Kahn (Ricardo Montalban). Using a mind altering ear worm, Kahn takes over Terell's ship and uses it to seek out the USS Enterprise, which is once again helmed by Admiral James T. Kirk (William Shatner). After an initial encounter ends in a stalemate, Kahn goes after a Federation project known as Genesis, which has the power to terraform lifeless planets within the span of a minute. I must have seen the ending to this film half a dozen times on HBO as a kid, but don't think that I've ever seen it all the way through until now. The cheese factor is high in this one as well, but overall, I'd say it's not a bad film. Montalban can be every bit as hammy as Shatner, but the two are dynamic when squaring off with one another.

A Trip to the Moon (Georges Méliès, 1902): One of my most shameful blindspots as a cineaste are the films of Georges Méliès. I'd caught a few of them here and there, but never his most famous work A Trip to the Moon. Thankfully, I've finally caught up with it, and it was worth the wait. At a meeting of an astronomy association, Professor Barbenfouillis (Georges Méliès) proposes a trip to the moon, which five members of the society except. The group are then essentially shot out of a gun and land on the lunar surface where they encounter a lush, hospitable environment. Unfortunately, the moon is inhabited by vicious Selenite natives. The crew battle them as they explode into puffs of smoke, before escaping to a sea on Earth. The care and attention to detail is truly remarkable as Méliès essentially invented these cinematic techniques ex nihilo or adapted them from the stage. Regardless of whether these are original to the auteur or not, they are enormously effective here.

World of Tomorrow Episode Two: The Burden of Other People's Thoughts (Don Hertzfeldt, 2017): Emily Prime (Winona Mae) is once again visited by a clone from the future, this time it's Emily 6 (Julia Pott), a backup clone that survived the explosion that killed off humanity by being warehoused in "the outer rings". Her memories are fragmentary without Emily 3 to upload them from, so she travels back to get them from her progenitor. Most of the short takes place in Emily 6's mind where the four-year-old Emily Prime has a wondrous time going through her host's memories. Eventually they move on to Emily Prime's mind where we're introduced to Triangleland. Like the original, this was an amazing experience. I suppose that some of the novelty has worn off, but the young Emily is still a joy to behold, and her futuristic interlocutor is often hilarious as well. If I had to pick just one to be on my list, it'd be the original, but there's certainly a case to be made for including both.

[bottled spider]

Possible Worlds (Lepage, 2000)
Based on a play by mathematician John Mighton. The protagonist keeps shifting involuntarily from one alternative reality to another. In each possible world he finds his love, or love interest, Joyce (Tilda Swinton), but she's a different possible Joyce in each case, and their relationship is different (or non-existent) in each reality. "A cubist love story," as the director puts it. The main character is necessarily in a constant state of disorientation (though he navigates his predicament with passive fortitude), but the film itself is surprisingly coherent. There is a "home" reality and underlying unity, and a plot trajectory. The coherence comes in part from skillful transitions between scenes, which are inventive, yet smooth. The film is beautiful -- the director has a nice sense of colour -- and well scored. Good performance from Swinton. The ending is tremendous.

Two other Canadian films I might vote for are Pontypool and Antiviral (Brandon Cronenberg). Pontypool is science fiction to the degree that it explores the idea of a language virus, it's just a question of whether its horror elements overwhelm the science fiction. It will either place high on my list or not at all. Antiviral is much more definitely sci-fi. I liked it, but hesitate to recommend it, as I might not be thanked for it -- the film has a pretty middling rating on IMDb.