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Underground > Film, TV & Theatre >

Help me broaden my DVD collection

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15:17 / 20.02.06

good scifi films are nearly an oxymoron, as this thread is proving. alternative thread title: b-movie toss please!!

the best grown uppy scifi movies i've seen in the past year or so would probably be

Save The Green Planet! and
Wild Blue Yonder

and to prove i'm not a complete bellend, good scifi is also star wars episodes 3-5 (or 6) and matrix episode 1.

your best visual scifi dinners are probably going to be made of anime though.

15:28 / 20.02.06

Primer.

16:08 / 20.02.06

Yes, yes, Primer. I really want to see that, but unfortunately the Guardian's prediction that it would be released on video this weekend turned out to be utterly wrong.

16:10 / 20.02.06

Perhaps more of a dystopian conspiracy thriller, but Demonlover is almost sci-fi in its presentation and highly underrated at that.

On the Ghost in the Shell tip, you should check out Avalon, a live action scifi in Polish by Mamoru Oshii, as culture clash wierdness it can't be beaten.

Oh yeah, and Sam Neil can do paranoiac horror like no-one else, Possession with Isabelle Adjani for example.

Sam is the man.

17:34 / 20.02.06

Cube? Are you talking about that awful film where the mentally disabled kid goes off into the light because mentally disabled people have a special understanding and see the world in a special way and know the way out of special existential puzzles because they are special? That film?

Did he get out? I very much doubt the people in charge of an installation like that would send a succesful test subject back home with a pat on the back and a "well done, son". For all we know, they're still busy dissecting him alive in some brightly-lit laboratory.

Now, I"ll second Solaris (the new one, with George Clooney; haven't seen the older version) and Farscape, add the new Battlestar Galactica, and I'd also like to put in a good word for RoboCop. Action, humour, and a tragical 21st-century-Frankenstein (anti?)hero... (but forget RoboCop 3. It's awful, and not in a good way.)

18:55 / 20.02.06

I really don't know where to begin because I think you're missing a hell of a lot of the movie's subtext in your response.

As I remember it Cube was chockablock with hamfistedly handled existential themes: the cube as life, the deathtraps as the ever present threat of death*, that kind of bollocks. These themes were heavily flagged when the characters started to question the nature of the cube, and later it's meaning... do you see where I'm going with this? I hope so.

That final scene was operating on a symbolic level. Traditionally "walking into the light" has been synonymous with a moment of profound change and/or transcendence (ascending to Heaven, a moment of fundamental psychological change, leaving prison, etc...).

Do I have to go on? I really can't be bothered.

*According to a number of existential philosophers - Heidegger for example - death is the defining feature of life

18:57 / 20.02.06

Unless of course you were being facetious...

22:40 / 20.02.06

No, I see where you're coming from. It can indeed be viewed on more than one level, and while it's been a couple of years since I saw it and I've probably forgotten a lot, I am aware of the underlying metaphores one can find in Cube — or project onto it, for that matter. Some would argue there's no difference, so anyway... (been reading too much Lao Tzu again lately, I guess. Can't be arsed to analyze everything to death, just let it grow on me.)

So yes, I was being facetious — up to a point. I didn't take it quite as literally as my initial response might have led you to believe, but regardless of what level one chooses to interpret it on, it's definitely not one of those stories that ends with a simple "and he lived happily ever after". I was left with a distinctly ambiguous feeling about him "walking into the light".
I think we can agree transcendence is not a happy end, or an end at all, so I suspect we're just approaching the same subject from a different angle anyway. I simply try to avoid the trap of thinking I know exactly what the author meant; "trust the story, not the storyteller" and all that.

06:52 / 21.02.06

I think we can agree transcendence is not a happy end, or an end at all

We-ell, I think we can agree that walking into the light is usually a good thing (except in poltergeist where it was clearly signposted as teh bad), and that to transcend is to pass beyond a given set of limits. The given set of limits, in this case, being fear, pain, incomprehension and the threat of death.

15:33 / 21.02.06

Anyone mentioned Scanners or how about Videodrome? David Croneberg always gives good sci-fi and these two are his best IMHO. 80's alienation and paranoia, and a tag line to die for "All hail the new Flesh".

Mad Max II - Post-apocalypse road movie to end all road movie, the final 30 minute chase sequence hasn't been bettered even by the Matrix II. And it has Bruce Spence in a gyro-copter.

Aliens - James Cameron does military sci-fi, an absolute classic of the genre.

Tremors - This is how you make a sci-fi B-Movie, great monsters and some very funny and tense scenes where a large number of the principals are eaten

.

15:58 / 21.02.06

I wholeheartedly agree with every one of your recommendations.

We must be secret frence.

16:22 / 21.02.06

I'm only the second one to suggest Contact?

Happy Dave Has Left

17:52 / 21.02.06

*sticks his head backs in and grins widely*

Awesome, I've been without web access for a couple of days, and I come back to a fully fledged SF smorgasbord. Schweet. I'll be getting my notepad out and making notes just as soon as I'm not getting absolutely drowned at work - keep 'em coming!

20:02 / 21.02.06

I second Repo Man and Gattacca for movies.

I just recently bought and watched the first three seasons of Farscape over the past few months and have to say it's worth getting. Now to save up for series 4 (man those sets aren't cheap).

22:12 / 21.02.06

I really wouldn't say Strange Days is really 'edgy'... it's pretty flawed... particularly the notion that memories could be encoded on what look like Sony minidisks...

I would expect to get the memories of at least several Sun readers onto a 1.44MB floppy disc... with a mini disc I could record the entire readerships memories.

I also liked strange days, it may not be a great film but I can watch it over and over.

Great Science fiction films that I like, would have to include Alien, The Thing(original and carpenters vesion),Predator,Westworld,Metropolis,Howard the Duck, Phantom Menace.

Did you spot the red herring???

Yes thats right the Phantom Menace is not a great sci-fi film.

23:40 / 21.02.06

The Time Machine (1960). Some may say (although, probably not on The Barb) it's silly old toss but those people are stupid. And the Morlocks are still scary.

Seconding Contact too and adding The Forgotten for the lengthy x-files episode feel of it and the *whoosh* abduction scenes.

08:00 / 22.02.06

The 1960s version of the Time Machine is brilliant not for its adaptation of HG Well's classic story per se (although this is great) but for its fantastic thought-provoking, 'desert island discs' ending where the hero returns to the library of his house and takes three books with him before leaving again in his time machine. The audience is then posed the question what three books would they take in a similar situation...

12:25 / 22.02.06

Could somebody who likes the movie explain, in two hundred words or less, exactly why Contact isn't sentimental Hollywood crap?

I am an open-minded fellow.

Happy Dave Has Left

17:46 / 22.02.06

Also, having had a quick scan, please do list the not-so-good films too, within reason - I like a bit of cheesy sci-fi, as long as it's not Lorca and the Outlaws (AKA Starship), a straight-to-video shocker which somehow surfaced in my local Ritz video shop when I was around ten. Bizarre, long, pointless and horrifyingly bad. I can still remember the virtual ants that ate your face. Ick. Nearly put me off SF for life. Thankfully, I discovered the wider world of SF and have been hooked ever since :-)

18:01 / 22.02.06

Contact isn't sentimental Hollywood crap

I liked it because it was exactly that. If ya'll can count horror movies with sci-fi elements as being interesting iterations of the scifi genre, then chickflicks that do the same can be counted. Contact broke down in simple terms in a completely accessible world, what sci-fi was all about, and added heart and philosophy to an otherwise head-focussed concept.

uncle retrospective

18:12 / 22.02.06

Even if you didn't like the film, Contact the book is a huge crunchy hard sci fi monster of a book. Great stuff.

18:15 / 22.02.06

So you like it because it's good at what it does? I can get my head around that, but you ain't changing my mind.
So, sir, Mr Chad.

18:21 / 22.02.06

I read the book in my hard sci-fi lovin' teens.

18:44 / 22.02.06

It's not all sci-fi, but the future parts in 2046 were amazing. If you too the robot section out of the main narrative, you'd have one of the best sci-fi short stories ever filmed, and intact, you get a wonderful mixing of past and future.

19:16 / 22.02.06

but you ain't changing my mind.

Was that my intention? I agreed and affirmed your view if anything. Perhaps someone else can lie to you that it's a subtle action film tween the GodFearing Luddite Contingents and the the Flatlanders of the Broken Sciences with tachyon speederballs and fifth dimensional gyroscopes. All while a forbidden love is lost and regained in the momentary 19 hour trip to the Vega starsystem.

19:56 / 22.02.06

Boboss just likes to FIGHT. He'll pick a fight over anything Chad, anything. I mean it.

Even Hunger Breaks.

And everyone agrees those are delicious.

Everyone.

20:20 / 22.02.06

I would NEVER fight the Chadster!

Hunger Breaks are scary. That is a fact.

Perhaps someone should make a supercool horror movie titled Attack of the Hunger Breaks.

08:37 / 23.02.06

I liked Contact, but then I'm a sucker for sentimentality, weirdly though it's the scene where they recieve the alien signal that I like most of all. I know they're manipulating me horribly but it's just such a perfect scene I think.

18:31 / 23.02.06

spielberg has made some good ones too. i watched war of the worlds yesterday and thought it was okay, nothing in comparison to the far superior close encounters of the third kind though. i know, it is too long and all, but it has this weird scary-but-also-fascinating feel to it, tricking you into wanting it to happen to you.

minority report has alread been mentioned, here i especially find the optics impressive, more than say the story..

and what about tron? it might look and sound very dated in places but i simply can't understand how anyone who grew up in the eighties and was to the slightest degree interested in computer games would not love this film.

18:39 / 23.02.06

To carry on with my narcissistic meta-commentary, Minority Report is one of the most tonally messy films I've ever seen. Is it a thriller? A car ad*? A comedy? An action movie? A family drama?

In a Radio 4 interview, Terry Gilliam recently accused Spielberg of having forgotten how to direct movies, stating that his latest films are little more than series of well constructed scenes. I tend to agree.

*I hate that scene in the factory. I challenge you to watch it again without my words ringing in your ears

18:52 / 23.02.06

"1999 was the year the Indian nuclear satellite went out of control. No one knew where it would land. It soared above the ozone layer like a lethal bird of prey. The whole world was alarmed. Claire couldn't care less."

So begins my favorite sci-fi film Until the End of the World by Wim Wenders. It's a great vision of the near future, full of great characters and a simple little bit of sci-fi technology that directly or indirectly sets all their stories into motion.

Sadly, it still hasn't come out on DVD in America. Bastards! Although I hear it's around in Europe....

19:06 / 23.02.06

reminds me of that one film the quiet earth. it's been awhile since i last watched it, but i always thought it was a pretty absorbing apocalyptic vision. some scientific experiment goes wrong and all people vanish from the planet, except for those who had just died the exact moment it happened.

19:17 / 23.02.06

Does When the Wind Blows count? Probably not, but it's fucking brilliant nonetheless.

15:36 / 24.02.06

Oooh thumbs up for 'This Quiet Earth' I caught it late one night when I couldn't sleep, not exactly the kind of film to lull yourself to sleep with. It's a great sci-fi/post Apocalypse film and has some great WTF?! moments.

18:39 / 24.02.06

I'd urge you to check out Tarkovsky's Solyaris and Stalker but neither film is for everyone. They would be my favourite sf films if it weren't for Chris Marker's La Jetee.

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