OK - I don't want this discussion to get bogged down in discussions about whether The Matrix is the highpoint of Western cinematic art or a load of pretentious quasi-philosophical bumf hidden behind some cool effects... So...

What's the best Sci-Fi movie pre-Matrix? I'm going to keep my pick under wraps for the time being, but a clue: it's not Tron.

Either 2001:A Space Odyssey, or Blade Runner, or maybe Alien. My favorite will always be They Live!

2001
Star Wars
Blade Runner

First off, S, maybe Carpenter will make "They Live 2" and the fight scene with the same people will be 20 minutes long, and after they put the glasses on, they'll be on the Enterprise! Think about that for a second before you say "always."

My votes are "Planet of the Apes" (68), 2001, A Clockwork Orange, Alien and Aliens.I probably should include some "Terminators", but I honestly don't think that any are as GREAT as those five!

Then again, I just thought of two WAY better. "Star Wars" (77) and "Close Encounters of the Third Kind. "

There's a lot of fence sitting here. Yup, I agree that most of the nominations are deserving, but what is the ONE movie that stands out for you above the others, and why?

By the way, pardon my ignorance, but can someone give me some details on "They Live" and why it is so awesome?

QUESTION: Was the Matrix THAT good?

Please, let's leave the Matrix out of this discussion. I'm not trying to imply it is the best or not...

The irony is that if you didnt bring it up, no one else probably would have.

Hows about the Great Rocky Horror Picture Show and it's outstanding sequel Shock Treatment?

I would also agree that They Live is incredibly good. "I am here to chew bubblegum and kicks ass.... And I'm all out of bubblegum."

But it's too hard to pick one. Everyone would just pick 2001 anyway.

But if I have to say one, I'm going to disregard all of the obvious choices and any that have already been mentioned, and say The Fifth Element. I really like that movie, it's fun ... but not totally stupid. And I have watched it several times and never seem to get tired of it.

And I would never have said the Matrix. I thought the Matrix was dumb.

Oh yeah, and Tron? .... is AWESOME.

There are a lot of great suggestions here. I'm also a big fan of They Live. It makes a great double bill with Repo Man.

The Fifth Element is overlooked in my opinion. I'm surprised it doesn't come up more often.

Three films that I think are crucial to genre are Fritz Lang's Metropolis, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Blade Runner. All three had an enourmous impact on the way we visualize the future and their influence is pervasive. The fact that Metropolis is a silent film seems to diminish its currency today, which is too bad. I think both 2001 and Blade Runner are flawed. I think the former is given credit for having far more substance than is really there. The latter, too, compromised much of what was best about Dick's novel, in my mind unnecessarily.

My beef against Steven Spielberg is his tendency toward the melodramatic from about ET on, which is why I think Close Encounters of the Third Kind is a classic of the genre. There is honestly nothing about the original film I do not love, though I can do without the director's cut.

The best? Hands down, The Day The Earth Stood Still. Some cold war films have aged better than others, but none nearly so well as Robert Wise's classic. Superb.

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This message has been edited. Last edited by: LinnTate,

I agree with your thoughts on 2001. I have always found it far more interesting in terms of style rather than substance.

The Fifth Element? I can't take it too seriously, it strikes me as a series of gags and caricatures of Sci-Fi, quite entertaining, but not really moving or thought provoking.

My vote for the best has to go to Blade Runner. It draws me in every time I watch it. Partly because of the mood and the way that the design depicts a darkly detailed future that still connects with the present day. But also because of the way the themes of creation and mortality are worked out so directly and simply. The scene where Roy (Rutger Hauer) finally loses his fight against the inevitable always leaves me with a genuine sense of what is tragic about death, the dying of the light of consciousness and spirit.

Yeah, and I did like Tron. When I was in junior high school.

"They Live" is a fine example of "alien amongst us" with some rather nifty political subtext, something Carpenter isn't always given credit for. We shouldn't forget or short change his "Prince of Darkness", a fine effective time travel or other dimensions apocralytic end of days w/liquid satan thrown in. Horror on the face of it, but can be read as SF in the 50's mode.

Why exclude "Matrix" if you want to be serious? Both it and "Bladrunner" are from the PK Dick canon, not to mention "Total Recall", "Minority Report" and lesser items like "Scanner" and "Paycheck". You can see influences of Dick in "Fifth Element" too, by way of French comics art like Moebius and Druillet.

LinnTate, it's interesting that you mentioned both Metropolis and Bladerunner. (Metropolis is one of my favorite movies, by the way, lack of sound notwithstanding)

We watched both films in a Postmodernism class and had a discussion about how Metropolis informed the direction and set design of Bladerunner. SO its funny to see them mentioned together again.

That sounds like a great class, KT. If memory serves, I think the production team on Blade Runner were pretty upfront about the influence of Metropolis on their work. One of the things I liked, though, was the degree to which the mixed old and new, the twenty-first century city built directly on top of the twentieth. There is a really splendid essay that delves further into it here.

Everybody probably already knows this bit of trivia, but the building that was the scene of Batty's final confrontation with Deckard, The Bradbury, was also the setting of the excellent 1964 episode of The Outer Limits penned by Harlan Ellison.

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Thanks so much for that link, LinnTate. I am very intrested in reading that!

Wong, I didn't know the Matrix had anything to do with PKD! I personally don't see any resemblance. The quasi-religious themes in the Matrix, and the mumbo-jumbo dialogue resemble a Dick novel in no way other than the psychological factor of living inside the Matrix. Both the Matrix and the Fifth Element seem to me to be imagined by someone who read Dick, but nothing like Dick's work himself. Now, I am biased in that Dick is one of my favorite authors, and I disliked both of the aforementioned movies, but personally I see no direct connections between them.
Oh yeah Mark-I too love Planet of the Apes as well as Beneath the Planet of Apes!

I really don't want to piss off Smenkharon or wong828, but I thought that "Prince of Darkness" was easily one of Carpenter's worst, especially disappointing after "They Live." Please don't explain to me how I don't get Lovecraft because my brother is THE GREATEST Lovecraft fan on the face of the Earth, even more than HP himself, so there!

EDIT--I'm becoming more fallible (pronounced full-of-it) as each day passes. "Prince of Darkness" was a year before "They Live."

This message has been edited. Last edited by: mark f,

Smenkharon:

I simply meant influences: the idea that perceptual reality is illusory, overlaid on another more "real" one, or that "reality" is simply a construct (althought strictly speaking, that didn't become a SF trope until William Gibson with Neuromancer and Count Zero. In Dick's Time Out of Joint, the protagonist was was unwittingly figuring out in-coming missile trajectories from the Soviet bloc when he did his daily crossword puzzle.

The Europeans (the French particularly) loved the idea that Dick populated his stuff with regular guys, not "heros". So a taxi driver gets to save the universe, altho I guess Bruce Willis may not be your just regular guy. Luc Besson started his career in the comics, so there's some degrees of seperation.

mark f:

They Live was taken from PK Dick and Ray Nelson's The Ganymede Takeover, and is a variation on the "we are property" trope that popped up in 40s, 50s SF and Horror - in no large part to the thinking (or nonsense) of Charle Forte and the writings of Lovecraft. Carpenter made it fairly straight SF with a few aliens and a bit of Reagan critique thrown in. Prince of Darkness and In the Mouth of Madness are more orthodox in the Lovecraft axis, where the horror element is more explicit. I like Prince simply because it fuses horror elements with SF element in a rather seamless way (liquid satan and time travel/dimensional displacement), altho I could've done without the zombies that seemed to have walked straight out of Night of the Living Dead. But hey, we all gotta be Hollywood bankable.

By the way I have no taste for either Forte or Lovecraft; I don't get it.
Bad science, crackpot ideas, tabloid yearnings, but then, what is Close Encounter and Taken? Superscience aliens comes across endless light years to put on a light show and rescue Richard Dryfuss from a boring marriage. People from all walk of life disappear, not for good real reasons or bad fate, but from bad reasons like superscience aliens wanting to train for medical licence or have sex with Earth women (men too, I guess). Or nitwit superscience alien enslaving whole human population in gorgeous looking locales to built monumental architecture that can be seen from space.

Oh, why would I be pissed off, mark f?

The Matrix was awesome but not THE best sci-fi film ever!!!
The acting, apart from Hugo Weaving's excellent Agent Smith, was really mediocre and the story is just a combination of ideas taken from Japanese cartoons!! (Ghost in the Shell etc..)

For me, the best sci-fi film ever has to be BLADE RUNNER, I saw it dozens of times and I still love it!