Hollywood can't do Science Fiction

[Connavar]

District 9 i feel gets too harsh criticism. People overplay the action parts and overlook how it tried to tell a good enough story of humans,aliens first contact story.

Pandorum was one of few SF i rented as DVD and was happy with. It was new good enough Alien type sf.

Really i dont expect Cowboys and Aliens names film to be the kind of SF i want to see. I expect it to be fun action,adventure and i look forward to it just because Harrison Ford even at his current age is the ideal action,adventure hero and Daniel Craig is hardcore often my kind of Bond.

[Magnus85]

Danny Boyle's Sunshine.

That is a movie every scifi fans should watch. Were it not for its horror elements, this would be one of the best scifi films in my opinion. The Mercury scene is one of those that stick to the back of your mind and lingers.

I think games have a much stronger presence when it comes to good scifi storytelling than movies have. Scifi movies are usually hard on the budget, so that is one reason Hollywood mainly sticks to the safe ones like Avatar and Star Wars clones.

[JunkMonkey]

Originally Posted by Magnus85

Danny Boyle's Sunshine.

That is a movie every scifi fans should watch.

And then ask themselves, what was all that "running out of air" b***s*** when the inside of the ship was size of an aircraft hanger factory?

"Oh crap! we're running out of air in the living quarters."
"Okay, I'll just turn off the heating in the ginormous space over there, sweep up the atmosphere when it freezes, and bring a couple of buckets in to defrost."

Not my idea. Fritz Leiber did it in 1951.

A Pail of Air - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[Yog-Sothoth]

Dark City? Great Scifi movie!

[clovis-man]

Originally Posted by Yog-Sothoth

Dark City? Great Scifi movie!

It was quite good, but Kiefer Sutherland's character was a little too quirky for me.

[CBellenis]

Am I alone in thinking Dark Star was one of the best films ever? I saw it as the 'B-movie' to 2001 A Space Odyssey (Another 'best film ever, surely?) in probably the best cinematic experience of my life.

[Starbeast]

Originally Posted by CBellenis

Am I alone in thinking Dark Star was one of the best films ever? I saw it as the 'B-movie' to 2001 A Space Odyssey (Another 'best film ever, surely?) in probably the best cinematic experience of my life.

I think it was very well done for a micro-budget film, but I thought by now a second installment would have been made by John Carpenter or Dan O'Bannon. Perhaps someone else might create Dark Star 2. Leslie Nielson would have been a great crew memeber if the film was made in the 1980's or 1990's along with Jim Carrey.

[clovis-man]

Originally Posted by Starbeast

I think it was very well done for a micro-budget film, but I thought by now a second installment would have been made by John Carpenter or Dan O'Bannon. Perhaps someone else might create Dark Star 2. Leslie Nielson would have been a great crew memeber if the film was made in the 1980's or 1990's along with Jim Carrey.

This didn't strike me as a "made for a sequel" film. Dan O'Bannon was the real creative force here and his Sgt. Pinback paranoia, tussle with the alien and the failed attempt to reason with the bomb resonate as stand-alone classics of dark humor.

[Interference]

Originally Posted by Anakha6

Was the plot of terminator really that much a piece of genius writing though to be fair? I remember it being quite simple and flawed in many respects.

No one has yet done a convincing Time-Travel-based film or TV series. Loop-holes are gaping and signal lazy (or dramatically acceptable) writing, I think.

I can't speak for novels or stories - I haven't read anywhere near enough - but the usual plot that Hollywood settles for is "how would X change history if they could and how does Y stop, or try to stop, them succeeding.

Yawn, in most cases.

But good Science Fiction in film (and I would tend to include things like CE3K, This Island Earth and, arguably, Forbidden Planet) are only as great as the thoughts and inspirations they provoke. I think that's what the genre, Science Fiction, is for: Showing you the box outside of which you may like to think.

Most other Science Fiction films available (even such classics as Alien, Star Wars and Blade Runner) could as easily have been westerns, had that particular genre/seam not been played out.

Originally Posted by Starbeast

....Leslie Nielson would have been a great crew memeber if the film was made in the 1980's or 1990's along with Jim Carrey.

Nothing with Jim Carrey in it could ever be "great".

[Starbeast]

Originally Posted by clovis-man

This didn't strike me as a "made for a sequel" film. Dan O'Bannon was the real creative force here and his Sgt. Pinback paranoia, tussle with the alien and the failed attempt to reason with the bomb resonate as stand-alone classics of dark humor.

I suppose you're right, but for me wanting more of the movie shows that the creators of the film did a great job.