The best sci-fi movie of all time is:

[deviantchild]

I'll second "The Day The Earth Stood Still", but I'd also like to nominate "Forbidden Planet" too.

edit: Ok, and one modern film too - "Alien"

 

[Solzhenitsyn]

I periodically get into the "what is sci-fi?" debate

I love Alien and Aliens but they arent really sci-fi movies.

IMO, the central tentpole of a sci-fi book or movie is how modernization and technology change the human experience.

Alien could have easily been set on a modern day oil supertanker and been essentially the same movie. big ship, crew finds something unpleasant on an uncharted island, gribbly creature thing gets aboard and starts running around on it picking off the crew, who have nowhere to escape. lone survivor bails in a lifeboat. Now alien had great effects and superb atmosphere, which is what makes it a great *horror* movie, that just happens to have a futuristic setting.

 

[London Geezer]

I periodically get into the "what is sci-fi?" debate

I love Alien and Aliens but they arent really sci-fi movies.

IMO, the central tentpole of a sci-fi book or movie is how modernization and technology change the human experience.

Alien could have easily been set on a modern day oil supertanker and been essentially the same movie. big ship, crew finds something unpleasant on an uncharted island, gribbly creature thing gets aboard and starts running around on it picking off the crew, who have nowhere to escape. lone survivor bails in a lifeboat. Now alien had great effects and superb atmosphere, which is what makes it a great *horror* movie, that just happens to have a futuristic setting.

I agree. Totally. Alien is first and foremost a Horror movie set in space.
Event Horizon is the same.
Star Wars, on the other end are Crap movies set in space.

 

[Diplo]

A poll without '2001', 'Dark City', 'Close Encounters Of 3rd Kind' or 'Twelve Monkeys' is just wrong!

 

[Mize]

Dune, Dark City and many others.... list is too flawed....

Dune was an absolute disaster of a movie and bore no similarity to the book other than some imagery and names. Yuck. The fade-out-then-fade-back-in narration by Paul's mother at the start set the tone - hokey. Someone needs to do with Dune what they did with LoTR.

 

[deviantchild]

A poll without '2001', 'Dark City', 'Close Encounters Of 3rd Kind' or 'Twelve Monkeys' is just wrong!

Stil trying to get to see "Dark City" !!!
I thought not having "Close Encounters..." was a bit strange too, but then there's obviously loads missing anyway and I wasn't actually expecting to see a poll in the thread in the first place.

 

[mcsven]

I'm not sure about the Dune film. It's a mess, but it's an interesting mess. The arrival of the third-stage guild navigator at the beginning is superb and the sense of scale is pretty good. I didn't like the ending, since it didn't make any sense whatsoever if you had read the book(s). But ultimately it's a film, not a book, and I'm a big fan of treating different media versions of the same story on their own merits.

I'm interested in the question: what makes a film a science fiction film? For that matter, what makes a book science fiction? A great deal of science fiction stories are actually philosophical treaties about something not related to science whatsoever and the science bit is just "high concept" setup. The Matrix is a good example of this, and much of Heinlein is the same.

On a slightly different topic - science fiction stories I would love to see made into good movies - a decent Foundation film and The Moon is Harsh Mistress are at the top of my list. I think they want to do some Rama stuff - which would be interesting - but it never seems to get off the ground.

 

[martrox]

After seeing Serenity this afternoon.....it's on my list. Made me cry!

 

[WhiningKhan]

I'm interested in the question: what makes a film a science fiction film? For that matter, what makes a book science fiction? A great deal of science fiction stories are actually philosophical treaties about something not related to science whatsoever and the science bit is just "high concept" setup. The Matrix is a good example of this, and much of Heinlein is the same.

Many people seem to equate 'science' to technology and physics, and expect these themes to appear in science fiction. I wonder if the US education system causes this (isn't one subject called 'science' in US schools? It contains just mostly physics and chemistry, right?)

By definition, psychology is science, isn't it? Philosophy may be a bit too far into arts, but I wouldn't count it totally out.

Anyway, since literature is an art, not a science, it's not very productive to set strict genre-limits in it.

On a slightly different topic - science fiction stories I would love to see made into good movies - a decent Foundation film and The Moon is Harsh Mistress are at the top of my list. I think they want to do some Rama stuff - which would be interesting - but it never seems to get off the ground.

Exactly what I thought of each of those books at the time I read them.

Nowadays, I'm a bit more wary of wishing film interpretations from the books I like - in many cases, they would most likely produce quite cheesy results. Then again, almost all sf films are somewhat cheesy...

Too bad the Foundation got so convoluted - Asimov got himself into too much trouble as he tried to 'perfect' the universe. I still pretty much liked all his work, but the Benford-Bear-Brin -trilogy went too far. Or rather the first Benford book was a total failure, and he left Bear & Brin too deep in his own crap for them to pull themselves out of it.

 

[RussSchultz]

I'm interested in the question: what makes a film a science fiction film? For that matter, what makes a book science fiction? A great deal of science fiction stories are actually philosophical treaties about something not related to science whatsoever and the science bit is just "high concept" setup. The Matrix is a good example of this, and much of Heinlein is the same.

I think its any story where science is a key plot enabler, usually in the form of 'what if...?".

You could not have 'The Matrix' without science, for example.

You could have Star Wars, as science/technology was actually very tangential to the story. It was more of a fantasy story set in space. Until, of course, Lucas started trying to explain the force scientifically. (bleh)

 

[eastgate2]

I definitely say Solaris(original one).

Stalker(by the same director) to me is also a very nice sf movie since it involves e.t intelligence.

 

[Deepak]

WTF? Where is MGS, my all time fav movie...

 

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

I'm not sure about the Dune film. It's a mess, but it's an interesting mess. The arrival of the third-stage guild navigator at the beginning is superb and the sense of scale is pretty good. I didn't like the ending, since it didn't make any sense whatsoever if you had read the book(s). But ultimately it's a film, not a book, and I'm a big fan of treating different media versions of the same story on their own merits.

I agree with you. In general, it's a pretty stylish film, and it does add a visual interpretation of the book. I don't understand why people rag on the way it jumps through time, because the book does the same: "For two years Muad'ib harried the Harkonen forces and brought spice production to a halt" is about all that covers two years of rebellion.

I've also recently watched the Sci-Fi Channel versions of "Dune" and "Children Of Dune", and I was surprised by how faithful they were to the storyline books. "Children" is particularly well done, though I suspect both are reasonably incomprehensible unless you have read the books too.

However, having recently re-read all the Brian Herbert Dune books, I don't see how they would ever translate more than the surface story into a movie. The books are full of deep layers - politics, economics, religion, future visions, devious plots, past live memories, resurrected characters, philosopy, sex, secret societies, etc. spread across tens of thousands of years. Dune's entirety is just not suitable to a good film translation. What makes Dune great is what means it will never work as a movie, and we have to make do with a superficial retelling of the story, without all the depth an nuance that the books give.

 

[silence]

I agree with you. In general, it's a pretty stylish film, and it does add a visual interpretation of the book. I don't understand why people rag on the way it jumps through time, because the book does the same: "For two years Muad'ib harried the Harkonen forces and brought spice production to a halt" is about all that covers two years of rebellion.

I've also recently watched the Sci-Fi Channel versions of "Dune" and "Children Of Dune", and I was surprised by how faithful they were to the storyline books. "Children" is particularly well done, though I suspect both are reasonably incomprehensible unless you have read the books too.

However, having recently re-read all the Brian Herbert Dune books, I don't see how they would ever translate more than the surface story into a movie. The books are full of deep layers - politics, economics, religion, future visions, devious plots, past live memories, resurrected characters, philosopy, sex, secret societies, etc. spread across tens of thousands of years. Dune's entirety is just not suitable to a good film translation. What makes it great it what means it will never work as a movie, and we have to make do with a superficial retelling of the story, without all the depth an nuance that the books give.

There is no way you can get everything that is in books into movie. As you said, there are so many layers beneath each move and each characther that it is simply impossible to make movie. I think thats the reason why they moved so much from original story (specially the ending) and made movie as it is. If you havent read the books you wouldnt know what was changed and if you look at movie from thet POV, then you have one pretty good movie.

Anyone who read Starship Troopers and watched the movie knows how much they changed there. Heinlein's book and movie have two things in common.... name and bugs.

I like to read Herbert's books, but i also like to watch Dune from time to time. It does have "something" in it.

 

[Nite_Hawk]

How about "The lawn-mower man" for the hot VR action when I was still too young to get anything better?

Nite_Hawk

 

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

I like to read Herbert's books, but i also like to watch Dune from time to time. It does have "something" in it.

It's got that David Lynch grotesqueness, but painted on a big canvas. There were rumours that he had a nervous breakdown while filming, and now he says that the problem was everyone involved had their own vision of what the film should be, and he allowed himself to be pushed around too much. It was his first, and last big budget movie, and he had actually been signed up to do two sequels if the first one had been financially sucessful. Frank Herbert liked the film, except for the ending, which he also thought made no sense with regard to the ecology of Dune.

I would love to have seen the unfinished four hour version that was shown to the crew initially, and it would be possible today to fill in the missing special effects. However, Lynch won't have anything to do with Dune any more, so there will never be a proper "directors cut".

It's a pity Herbert died before finishing the last book. He was devoted to his wife, and when she died, he followed soon afterward. He had the last book all planned out, but never wrote the book itself.

 

[silence]

i heard about that 4 hour version, i always hoped it will pop somewhere.... now i know it wont.

 

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

i heard about that 4 hour version, i always hoped it will pop somewhere.... now i know it wont.

This is from the little booklet inside my copy of the Dune Special Edition that came out recently. There's also a couple of stills from the two missing scenes:

Yet one other event had occurred just before Lynch quit Mexico City for Los Angeles, an occurrence that would soon become legend. For on January 29, 1984. Lynch screened an approximately four-to-five hour rough cut (accounts vary) of his picture to those DUNE cast and crew members still remaining in Mexico City. This was the sole time the only true, so-called "Extended Version" of DUNE - whose theatrical running time would clock out at 137 minutes - was publicly screened in something of the shape it's director had intended.

Although this late-January "Cast and Crew Screening DUNE" was dotted with incomplete special effects sequences and was, overall, an obvious work-in-progress, it did feature shots and sequences which would either never be seen again or only resurface at a much later date as part of MCA television's 1988, two-part, three-hour DUNE (which included great swaths of newly-recorded. badly done narration explaining the film's plot, poorly executed artwork also created expressively for this version. and roughly 45 additional minutes of previously excised footage and outtakes. Lynch. however, had no part in the MCA-TV DUNE. and angrily took his name off the project, substituting "Alan Smithee" for his directorial credit and the more vituperative "Judas Booth" for his screenplay card).

Some of the material seen in the "Cast and Crew Screening" DUNE included a longer version of Alia's birthing sequence: a knife fight between actors Kyle MacLachlan and Judd Omen (credited as "Jams" in the final credits of the theatrical release. but not actually seen in the film!): a moment after Jamis is killed when his wife (Molly Wryn, also credited but unseen in the theatrical cut) and children are "given" to Paul: the burning of Jamis' body to recover its water: and the death of Thufir Hawat by poison. in the Great Hall at film's end.