I just watched Contact, and it was a great freaking movie. Sure, it wasn't perfect. It certainly had it's problems, not the least of which was that it tries to pass itself off as more profound than it really was, and sometimes comes off as being just plain pretentious.. But it was a PROFOUND movie that hit a touch with every fiber of my being. And even if you don't like the movie for personal reasons, you've got to admit that it was just epic, extremely clever, and thoroughly engaging. I think it says something that the movie is two and a half hours long, but it feels like a 90 minute movie.
But it annoys me when I hear people saying "that movie sucked. I sat through that whole movie just to see the alien, and it was her damn dad."
Well if that's your biggest complaint about the movie, then you just owned yourself. Surprise, you're an idiot. Congratulations on missing the entire ****ing point of the movie. Maybe I should go see "Music and Lyrics" with my girlfriend and then start complaining that there weren't enough zombies in it.
:|
But I digress. My point is, why does science fiction movies suck so much?
I mean, most dramas and most comedies suck too. In fact, most MOVIES suck. But science fiction is probably my favourite genre. And I don't think I could count 50 science fiction movies that were watchable, and I don't think I could even count 10 science fiction movies I've seen that were actually great.
It's not that the potential isn't there. I mean, science is just about the most amazing and awe-inspiring discipline available to us.Hell, just pick up any issue of Scientific American, and I guarantee that each month there's going to be at least one thing that just blows your mind, dude. Just take a mindblowing and potentially controversial and/or life-changing scientific idea, and wrap a good plot around it. Shouldn'[t be that freaking hard.
But no. Whenever a new science fiction movie comes out, you know what it's going to be like. A monster appears, a bunch of people die, then the hero saves the day. Hell, I don't even have a problem with that. After all, Aliens and The Terminator are two of my favourite movies ever. But at least those movies were good DESPITE being typical monster movies. Most other science fiction movies don't even TRY to be good, they just make a crappy monster movie and then figure that people will watch it anyway just because there's so much of a shortage of good science fiction movies.
Seriously, I think that science fiction has to be just about the laziest movie genre ever. And that's just sad. The only other film genre I can think of that has LOWER expectations than science fiction is porn.
Well...science fiction and fantasy for a long time didn't really have much. Fantasy seems to be getting it's turn now. Perhaps in a few years science fiction movies will be coming out by the bucket load.
12 Monkeys is my favorite science fiction movie. The genre isn't very strong, you're definitely right. I think it's mostly because it's about fantasy and that means it can be inconsistent.
There are alot of great sci fi movies. The Matrix, Terminator, Donnie Darko, V for Vendetta,Children of Men, Twelve Monkeys, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Truman Show, and Minority Report. Thats only a couple.
12 Monkeys is my favorite science fiction movie. The genre isn't very strong, you're definitely right. I think it's mostly because it's about fantasy and that means it can be inconsistent.quiglythegreat
heh, my uncle had a thirty-second part in that. he even had a line.Â
But I do agree with the TP. There needs to be more book-to-film adaptations, like Ender's Game (which is still in pre-production) for there to be any really good sci-fi movies. Asimov, Heinlein and Clarke all wrote fantastic books, more rewarding than many of the movies I've ever seen. The Foundation series was the ultimate space opera. Stranger in a Strange Land was hands down one of the top 10 books I've ever read. In my opinion, there needs to be less monster sci-fi flicks, and more of the real sci-fi, the kind that raises all sorts of sociological questions.Â
And if they do do more book-to-film stuff, don't screw it up. There were rumors on the IMDB boards about the studio in charge of The Golden Compass taking out all of the religious content, which was a very important part of the book.
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