Dark futures, space battles and so on (Sci-fi)

Member Name: hogsflesh

Product:	Sci-fi
Date:	24/05/01 (79 review reads)
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Advantages: great films

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Science fiction's quite a difficult genre to pick from, mainly because it's so enormous. The comprehensive Aurum Encyclopaedia of Science Fiction includes all manner of films that I'd never really thought of as sci fi at all, like Frankenstein or the James Bond movies. And I suppose they are in a way, but they both seem to belong firmly in other genres more than they do in science fiction, so I'm not going to include them here.

Anyway, here are ten sci fi movies that I really like.

1) Flash Gordon - My favourite film. Mindless, gaudy fun. Brian Blessed. Queen. Klytus. And so on. I already wrote an opinion if this, so I'm not going to repeat myself here, but there's no way I could leave it off the list.

2) Star Wars - I grew up with this film (and the two that followed it). I can still watch it quite happily. I prefer it to Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi because it's a lot more simple and fun, and has no Ewoks or Yoda. The whole trilogy has some great Freudian stuff going on. Whenever I can't sleep I while away the time by thinking about the symbolic significance of severed arms in the films, or the subtle hints we get that Boba Fett is gay, or contemplating the number of father figures that Luke Skywalker gets through during the course of the trilogy. Of course, one of the reasons I resent The Phantom Menace is because it screws up all the neat symbolism of the previous trilogy. I also prefer the pre-Special Edition version, with the shoddy special effects intact. I dislike the rather glossy look to bits of the remastered versions. But anyway, Star Wars is still a favourite after all these years.

3) A Clockwork Orange - Kubrick's best film, in my view. A vision of the future as 1970s kitsch hell. Based on Anthony Burgess's dystopian novel, it follows the exploits of Alex, a young thug, who rampages around with his less intelligent friends beating, raping and robbing their way thr
ough their bleak city before being arrested and brainwashed by the government. Malcolm MacDowell gives a great performance, making Alex horribly likeable. Patrick Magee is also fantastic as the author who Alex cripples. This film should be very thought-provoking - is free will and the right to make your own decisions more important than law and order and so on. That kind of works, but my one real qualm about A Clockwork Orange is that the viewer may be too taken in by the stylishness of it, and miss the moral point. It's beautifully shot, has some really distinctive set and costume designs, excellent synthesiser versions of classical music on the soundtrack, and Malcolm MacDowell. When faced with all that, it's a bit difficult to remember that there's meant to be a point to it all - I wonder if Kubrick forgot too? But it's still a virtuoso piece of film-making, and something that everyone should see.

4) Metropolis - I really like silent films. I love the way all the men wear lipstick, and the over the top pantomime acting styles. I also really like the absurdly massive scale of some of them. This film is so enormous in practically every respect that it probably ranks as my favourite post-1910 silent film. It was made in 1926 in Germany by Fritz Lang, who later became a successful Hollywood director. The sets are absolutely overwhelming. It's a great vision of how people in the Twenties saw the future - a city in which the rich live lives of idle leisure while the workers toil ceaselessly in huge machines.

Apparently Metropolis was originally about 3 hours long (although that may have been because of title cards). The version I've got is about an hour and a half. Sadly, the story is terrible, which may be why it wasn't a financial success at the time. A messianic woman tries to be the workers' Gandhi. The rich make a robotic double of her to discredit her (as opposed to, say, just killing her or something), there'
;s a big riot and a twee ending. But you can ignore the plot and just watch the visuals. Metropolis was hugely influential: Frankenstein, Star Wars and Dr Strangelove are three of the more obvious films that took bits of Metropolis and re-used them. My video copy sadly has a dire eighties soundtrack, but I did once see this in a cinema with a live synthesiser soundtrack, which was excellent. Queen's video for Radio Ga Ga was largely based on this film.

5) Invasion of the Body Snatchers - I don't usually like American 50s sci fi films very much. They're all too obvious in their reds under the beds paranoia, or too damn preachy (especially The Day The Earth Stood Still). But this one is fantastic. An unspecified alien menace is creating "pod people", replicas of people who eventually take their place, gradually infiltrating society. A real sense of unsettling paranoia is developed as the hero tries to figure out who has been replaced and who hasn't. It works extremely well, not least because the pod people can be seen as both a metaphor for Communist infiltration and as a metaphor for McCarthyist conformity. Surprisingly subversive for the era or American arch-conservatism, only slightly let down by the silly ending that the studio insisted be stuck on. One of many films that The Matrix stole ideas from.

6) The Fifth Element - This is another great film. Unlike the pretentious Leon, this is a film where Luc Besson finally found a worthy showcase for his talents. I'm still not entirely sure what was going on - something about a load of aliens coming to destroy the Earth, but a taxi driver (Bruce Willis) finds the fifth element, reincarnated as a very sexy Milla Jovovich, and lots of things happen. Gary Oldman is the villain, acting in his trademark "turned up to eleven" style, and Ian Holm is superb as a monk who's waiting for... ah... oh, sod it, I really can't be bothered to try to make head nor tail o
f the plot. It really doesn't matter; the film is just a succession of great set pieces. To try to describe them in any detail would ruin them, but my favourite is the scene where Gary Oldman is choking on a cherry stone. I think The Matrix may have stolen an idea or two from this film.

7) Brazil - Terry Gilliam's superb dystopia movie. Combining Gilliam's typically incredible visual sense with an unusually literate script (Tom Stoppard had a hand in it), the film combines an Orwellian future society with Kafkaesque absurdity and Dickensian characters. Jonathan Pryce is a minor worker in an incomprehensible government department. His attempts to pursue the woman of his dreams land him in a whole world of hurt. The acting, from a wide array of classy actors, is superb, with Michael Palin as a torturer and Robert de Niro as an illegal plumber particularly standing out. There's an incredible wistfulness about the film - the future resembles the 1940s, Pryce has romantic dreams of being a winged warrior, and his colleagues watch romantic old movies while their boss isn't looking. The studio famously messed around with this film, and it wasn't financially successful, but that hardly matters now. This film is great, and the fact that The Matrix stole ideas from it should also be ignored.

8) At The Earth's Core - Why does no one make films like this any more? With today's special effects, I'd imagine the Victorian scientists being eaten by dinosaurs sub-genre could be revitalised. I've always loved these kinds of films. Whether the monsters are the jerky Harryhausen type, or just the normal lizard superimposed on the horizon type, there's loads of fun to be had when you get Victorian scientists encountering primitive lands. This one is my favourite. Doug McClure, the superstar of this type of film, is his usual reliable self, with Peter Cushing throwing in his doddery old man act (cf. Dr Who and the Daleks), and
the delightful Caroline Munro as a crumpet cavewoman. And the monsters (giant reptile bat things) are entertainingly bad even by the impressive standards of badness established by similar films (Warlords of Atlantis, The Land That Time Forgot etc.) We need more films like this. I'd imagine Michael Ironside or Edward Woodward would do pretty well in Victorian dress, being chased by a large two-headed iguana. Unusually for a sci fi film, The Matrix didn't steal any ideas from At The Earth's Core.

9) The Invisible Man (1933) - The first adaptation of my favourite HG Wells novel, and easily the best I've seen. Directed by James Whale just before he did Bride of Frankenstein, this is very much a part of the wave of Universal horror movies that were so popular at the time, with the usual horror ingredients (inn full of suspicious yokels, mad scientist, monster on the rampage), but unlike similar ideas (Jekyll & Hyde, Island of Lost Souls), it seems to be more sci fi than horror. It made Claude Rains a star, and he is absolutely brilliant as Griffin, the invisible man, all the more so since his face is swathed in bandages the whole time. The scene where he unwraps his bandages before a bunch of befuddled peasants, revealing a blank space where his head should be, is actually pretty convincing, as are most of the special effects. Rains' generally mischievous behaviour doesn't quite tally with his stated desire to take over the world, but I suppose he is mad, so we can forgive that. A very classy little film.

10) The Thing (1982) - This is a remake of an equally good movie from the fifties, but I'm choosing John Carpenter's version over that one because of the special effects. Whereas 50s Thing was just a guy in a monster suit, 80s Thing is a dazzling array of creatures as it shape-shifts into all manner of unlikely guises. The Thing can take on any shape it wants, and so, as with Invasion of the Body Snatchers, we never kno
w who will turn out to be human and who won't. The Thing uses one of the great sci fi/horror plots, that of a group of people in an isolated location (the Arctic, in this case) who have to contend with invasion of their insular world by a malevolent force. Dr Who used that idea at least 30 times, but the classic example is Alien. The Thing also very much a film of its time. Whereas the 50s characters had teamed up together and defeated the creature using good old American initiative, here the characters constantly argue, and understandably regard each other with deep suspicion. When you've seen the decapitated head of one of your colleagues grow spider legs and scuttle away, you're naturally going to be a little wary. Great film, even of The Matrix did shamelessly rip off bits of it.

These are just the ten films that occurred to me first. There are quite a few other films that I could easily have put in this list: Starship Troopers, Aliens, all 3 Quatermass films, Mars Attacks!, Strangelove, 2001. But that's the thing about top ten lists, isn't it? Never enough room for everything.

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