Your favorite Sci-Fi movies

[Jeff T]

Science Fiction is among my favorite genre in reading and movies, yet I find it a struggle to find really good science Fiction movies available to watch.

Therefore after thinking about this a bit, I though I'd create a thread where we can list and discuss some of our favorites; separate from among all of the really lousy ones out there. This was a bit of a challenge.

So... I'll start off with a few of mine.

Note: I am excluding Star Trek and Star Wars... because they've been discussed before but you can include them if you choose (but especially since Star Wars to me is merely fantasy in space)

Also, these are just personal opinions, not some fact-based list based on statistics, profits or anything.

Dramatic: (sort of chronological... as I reflect back on these))

Metropolis (original)
The Day the Earth Stood Still (original)
Forbidden Planet
Fantastic Voyage
Planet of the Apes
2001: A Space Odyssey & 2010
Soylent Green
Silent Running
The Andromeda Strain
Westworld
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
Blade Runner
Brazil
Terminator I & II
Alien(s)
Predator
The Fly (86)
Jurassic Park
AI
Gattaca
Matrix
Contact
Equilibrium
District 9
Minority Report
Moon
Oblivion
Edge of Tomorrow
Avatar (fantasy too)
Inception
Looper
Gravity
Intergalactic


Comedy:
Back to the Future
Independence Day
Wall-e
Galaxy Quest
The 5th Element

(I'm sure that I am forgetting some... please add yours too!

[Kheren]

I beg to differ on 3 points:

1- Star Wars is no sci fi at all; remove the space scenery and what you have are pure samurai movies, complete with swordplay style and zen philosophy. Heck, A New Hope is almost a copy-paste of Akira Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress! Moreover, you need science or at least scientific ideas explored to have science-fiction. Not only there is none in the entire saga, but most of science goes out the window for the sake of escapism and spectacle.

Oh don't misunderstand me, I like them fine; but as adventure movies, not as sci fi!


2- Avatar is no more fantasy than anything listed here. It is clearly about imagining an alien world and a typical first contact story with an alien culture... albeit heavily influenced by the historical events of Europeean contact with American natives; still, relevant, as speculation about first contact could be, given the same exploitative mentality of a technologically more advanced culture upon another one. This has been a staple of Sci Fi litterature for at least half a century, beginning with HG Wells War of the Worlds (with US as the primitive natives!).


3- Independence day a comedy? I agree it is a ridiculous movie on many points and that it has Will Smith and a few gags in it... but I don't think the idea was to make a humourous tale like the others listed there. 

Same argument with the 5th Element by the way. I haven't watched it in English but in the original French version, it does not feel at all like a comedy the same way Galaxy Quest and Back to the Future obviously are and are intended to be.

Fine list btw. I've seen them all except Intergalactic (no money for movies at the time). Mine would be waaaaaaay too long... but there is one movie not listed here that jumps to my mind; The Incredible Shrinking Man. 

Although atomic science today would easily tell you of it's impossibility, yet I still remember how impressive the finale had been to me when I first watched it as a kid. That religious-minded finale might sound a bit corny today, but it opened my mind then to the mysteries of our existence and to the possibility of things beyond our reality like few other things ever did.

To me that's what true sci fi is about... like Star Trek.

[Jeff T]

just to respond to your points:

1. That is why I made the comment in the opening statements before the list
(but especially since Star Wars to me is merely fantasy in space)
Because I don't see Star Wars as Science Fiction either.... just dressed up good vs evil in space... but it is often lumped in as Sci-Fi.

Also if I thought  of Star Wars as Sci-Fi, I would have included Spaceballs in the comedy group.

2. I loved Avatar... The best 3-D Imax movie I've seen. But some also classify this as fantasy; hence my italics.
For example, IMDb classifies it as -  Action | Adventure | Fantasy.
I see it as science fiction, which is why I included it in this list.

3.  Mostly because of Will Smith,  Independence day to me is more of a goofy comedy throughout than real Sci-Fi drama. Just as The Fifth Element is... especially with all of the goofy and annoying antics of Chris Tucker. But even Bruce Willis, Gary Oldman and Milla Jovovich had a lot of silly parts.


But as I stated before the list... these are merely MY OPINIONS.

Looking forward to seeing lists from other Fleet members too.

[BLZBUB]

Well, I've seen most of Jef T's list, excepting Silent Running, Oblivion, Inception & Intergalactic.

 Bu to add from my list to this, I recommend the following:

Planet of the Apes(1968)
Blade Runner
The Abyss
Children of Men
Logan's Run


 Don't get me started on my Sci-Fi reading list.

[Evshell]

It's kind of disingenuous to list many of those other movies and then say Star Wars isn't Sci-fi. Doesn't the fact that it contains technology that would've required science more advanced than our own current understandings count for something? They have ships, droids, and lightsabers that would've required science to develop. I'd love to live to see us come close to anything resembling that kind of technology. In my opinion technology is a branch of science, and even though it isn't being explained by any science jargon in Star Wars like they try to do with Star Trek, it had to have been developed by someone.

Oblivion has a lot of fancy technology, but it is not explained in the least and the core story is really just a drama. Predator has one alien coming down to Earth without any scientific background or explanation and is more of an action movie than anything. Looper, again mostly just action, contains one single element from sci-fi... time travel... which could be fantasy by all intents and purposes seeing as there's no plausible explanation for how it works any more than you could explain "hyperspace".

I could go on, but I think you get my drift. If you want to call Star Wars not sci-fi, fine, but I'm just saying you really have to leave out a lot of this other stuff. I don't understand when Star Wars is singled out as the one and only "impostor" to the sci-fi world.

Sorry if this got the thread off track, I just felt I had to say something, but that's all I'll say on the topic.

Oh and all my favorites have mostly been listed already anyway.

[Kheren]

Agreed on several of your points. Oblivion I haven't seen now that I recall, so can't comment on it.

That being said, yes, Alien, Predator and the likes are basically horror movies with sci fi trappings just as Star wars is samurai movie with the same veneer; however, they could be seen as an exploration of the concept of alien life and how we may interact with; ergo, a science concept fictionalized; hence why I still see them as sci fi.

That is the core of my definition of sci fi; if it has at least a scientific concept explored in it, however badly or thinly, it should qualify as sci fi. Just having advanced tech does not make it sci fi to me but at best science fantasy, especially if the story is not at all about scientific ideas as the plot or main drive of the plot (i.e. time travel) but just a setting for something else, like a medieval adventure and story plots where horses are spaceships, forts are space stations, space is merely a backdrop like the desert in westerns and planets are realms for heroes to clash with villains with archaic weapons and values.

In short; Remove all the tech from Star Wars and you still have exactly the same story. Remove time travel from looper and you have no story at all.

By that definition, 1984 and Quest For Fire are sci fi, despite having little if no high tech at all; one explore social ideas in an imagined future (well, in the days the original was written) and the other exposes the scientific extrapolations of anthropology and paleontology about our distant ancestors.

This brings me therefore to another genre to define: anticipation. This would be to sci fi what sci-fi is to science fantasy; instead of just using sci fi wrapping on a story with no scientific idea to explore or play with (i.e. Star Wars) or playing around more or less acurately with science concepts as the basis of a story (i.e. Star Trek), anticipation tries to make an entertaining  story with his main plot element as rigourously accurate as possible with current scientific knowledge and extrapolate as best as possible from it. In this category would fit movies like 2001 a Space Odyssey (space exploration), Quest for Fire (anthropology), Phase IV (insect intelligence), 1984 (social extrapolation) and probably Gravity and Interstellar (both I have yet to see).

Thus science fantasy is when the story stands on it's own without all the high tech and colorful stars; sci fi is when the story falls apart if the science is removed; anticipation is when the science IS the plot.

So I'm not saying Star Wars being bad or even less alone in his "non-sci-fi" status. On the contrary they are (most of them) technically very well made and highly entertaining movies. But they are not about science or scientific knowledge or possibilities or about what science can do and can extrapolate (even less about even plausible technology btw). To quote George Lucas; they are "ancient mythologies retold for the younger, modern audiences." By his own words, old tales with a new wrapping.

And this, Star Wars does pretty well.That saga aims not at making you think and ponder and wonder about life, the universe and everything, but solely at entertaining you; just like a magician uses the laws of physics, psychology, physiology and chemistry to entertain you and fill you with wonder... but all that does not make one a teacher of science, even if he puts on a lab coat in front of a blackboard to do his tricks.

Just my opinion of course.

[Storm Windfall]

            FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION: A WRITER'S VIEW
       
            Roger Zelazny
       
            I have often wondered whether I am a science fiction writer dreaming I am a fantasy writer, or the other way around. Most of my science fiction contains some element of fantasy, and vice versa. I suppose that this could be annoying to purists of both persuasions, who may feel that I am spoiling an otherwise acceptable science fiction story with the inclusion of the unexplained, or that I am violating the purity of a fantasy by causing its wonders to conform to too rational a set of strictures.
            There may be some truth in this, so the least I can do is try to tell you why I operate this way, what this seeming hybrid nature of much of my work means to me and how I see this meaning as applying to the area at large.
            My first independent reading as a schoolboy involved mythology-in large quantities. It was not until later that I discovered folk tales, fairy tales, fantastic voyages. And it was not until considerably later-at age eleven-that I read my first science fiction story.
            It actually did not occur to me until recently that this course of reading pretty much paralleled the development of the area. First came fantasy, with its roots in early religious systems-mythology-and epical literature. Watered-down versions of these materials survived the rise of Christianity in the form of legends, folklore, fairy tales, and some incorporated the Christian elements as well. Later came the fantastic voyages, the Utopias. Then, finally, with the industrial revolution, scientific justifications were substituted for the supernatural by Mary Shelley, Jules Verne, H. G. Wells. I had actually read things in the proper chronological order.
            I feel now that this colored my entire approach to the use of the fabulous in literature. The earliest writings of the fantasy sort involved considerable speculation from a small and shaky factual base. A lot of guesswork and supernatural justifications for events came into play. I accepted these things as a child would-uncritically-my only reading criterion being whether I enjoyed a story. About the time I discovered science fiction I was somewhere near the threshold of reflection. I began to appreciate the value of reason. I even began to enjoy reading about science. In a way, I guess, I was a case of ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny.
            I have never gotten away from a fondness for all of these forms-I suppose because my thinking has been touched by all of them. Emotionally, I find it difficult to draw distinctions between science fiction and fantasy because I feel them to be different areas of a continuum- the same ingredients but different proportions. Intellectually, however, I understand that if the fabulous elements involve the supernatural, or are simply unexplained in terms of an intelligent person's understanding of how natural laws operate, then that particular story should be considered a fantasy.
            If the fabulous should be explained, or indicated to be explainable in terms of the present state of human knowledge or theory-or some extension thereof-I can see how a story of this sort can be considered to be science fiction.
            When I write, though, I generally do not think in terms of such facile compartmentalizations. I feel that fiction should mirror life and that its modus is that classical act of mimesis, the imitation of an action. I concede that it is a distorting mirror we use in science fiction and fantasy; nevertheless, it should represent in some fashion everything which is placed before it. The peculiar virtue of a distorting mirror is its ability to lay special emphasis upon those features of consensus reality which the writer wishes to accent-a thing which in many ways places what we do close to satire, in the classical sense-making the science fiction and fantasy worlds special ways of talking about the present world. Another is the particularly wide range of characters this practice permits me to explore.
            Not only do I not like to think of my stories in terms of separate science fiction and fantasy categories, but I feel that for me it would actually be harmful in terms of the creative act to drive such a wedge into my view of the continuum. According to John Pfeiffer, author of The Human Brain, "There is an entire universe packed inside your skull, a compact model of your surroundings based on all the experiences you have accumulated during the course of a lifetime." Of necessity such a model is limited by the range of one's perceptions and the nature of one's experiences.
            Thus, the world about which I write, the world to which I hold up my distorting mirror, is not the real world in any ultimate sense. It is only my limited, personal image of the real world. Therefore, though I have tried hard to make my version of reality as complete a model as possible, there are gaps, dark areas which exist in testimony to my ignorance of various matters. We all possess these dark areas, somewhere, because we have not world enough nor time to take in everything. These are a part of the human condition-Jung's shadows, if you like; unfilled addresses in our personal databases, if you prefer.
            What has this to do with the fabulous-with fantasy and science fiction? My feelings are that science fiction, with its rational, quasi-documentable approach to existence, springs from the well-lighted, well-regulated areas of our private universes, whereas fantasy, in the tradition of its historical origins, has its roots in the dark areas. Somewhere, I already hear voices raised in objection to my implication that fantasy springs from ignorance and science fiction from enlightenment. In a way it is true, and in a way it is not. To quote Edith Hamilton, "There has probably not been a better educated generation than the one that ushered in the end of Athens." Yet it was these same highly rational Greeks who passed classical mythology along to us, in its most powerful, sophisticated forms, while providing material for early chapters in world history books.
            Fantasy may take its premises from the unknown, but what it does with them immediately thereafter is subject them to the same rational processes used by any storyteller in the working out of a tale. The story itself then unfolds in a perfectly clear-cut fashion.
            I am not saying that the dark areas represent things which are ultimately unknowable, but only that these are representations of the unknown within the minds of individual authors-from the nameless horrors of Lovecraft to the mental processes of Larry Niven's Puppeteers. I doubt that any two authors' world models coincide exactly. And I feel that the generalization and representation of these clouds of unknowing in literature are a basis for fantasy.
            I wish to take things one step further, however. I can hardly deny the effectiveness of a good story which is purely fantasy nor of another which is purely science fiction, in terms of the distinctions as I see them. As I said earlier, I tend not to think of such distinctions at all while I am working. When I am writing a story of some length, my personal sense of aesthetics usually causes me to strive for closure, to go for the full picture, to give at least a nod to everything I regard in that version of reality. As a consequence, my stories reflect the dark areas as well as the light ones; they contain a few ambiguous or unexplained matters along with a majority of things which follow the rules. In other words, I tend to mix my fantasy and my science fiction. Looked at one way, what I write is, I suppose, science fantasy-a bastard genre, according to some thinking on the matter. I am not sure what that makes me.
            I followed this pattern in my first book-This Immortal-by leaving certain things unexplained and open to multiple interpretations. I did it again in my second book-The Dream Master-only there the dark areas were in the human psyche itself rather than in events. It was present in the Peian religion and its effects on my narrator, Francis Sandow, in the otherwise science fiction novel Isle of the Dead. In Lord of Light, I wrote a book where events could be taken either as science fiction or as fantasy with but a slight shifting of accent. And so on, up through my recent novel, Eye of Cat, where the final quarter of the book may be taken either as fantasy or as hallucination, according to one's taste in such matters. I write that way because I must, because a small part of me that wishes to remain honest while telling the calculated lies of fiction feels obliged to indicate in this manner that I do not know everything, and that my ignorance, too, must somehow be manifested in the universes which I create.
            I was wondering recently where this placed me within the general context of American incarnations of the fabulous. I began reviewing their history with this in mind, and I was struck by a serendipitous insight into our relationship to the grand scheme of things.
            We did it backwards.
            American fantastic literature began the pulp magazines of the late 1920s. From that time on through the 1930s it was heavily indebted to other sorts of adventure tales. We can regard this as a kind of C/r-science fiction, whence rose the impetus which has carried all of the rest.
            What happened, then, in the 1940s? This was the time of the "hard" science fiction story, the time of the sort of story referred to by Kingsley Amis as having the "idea as hero." Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein in particular exemplify this period when the idea, derived from science, dominated the narrative. At initial regard, it should not seem strange that our science fiction entered its first recognizable period with what was the latest phase in the historical development of fantastic literature-that technologically oriented form of the fabulous narrative which had to await the appropriate development of the sciences. But what happened next?
            In the 1950s, with the collapse of many of the science fiction magazines and the migration of science fiction to the paperback and hardcover book markets, along with the freedom from magazine restrictions thus obtained, came a shifting of concerns to the sociological and political areas. The idea was still hero, but the ideas were no longer derived exclusively from the physical sciences. 1 think of Edward Bellamy and of Fred Pohl. I think of Thomas More and of Mack Reynolds. I think of Nietzsche and of some of Freud's character studies (which I can only classify as fantasies) and I think of Philip Jose Farmer. Looking back even further to the pastoral genre I also think of Ray Bradbury and of Clifford Simak.
            Moving-ahead, I suppose-to the experimental work of the 1960s, I recall the Carmina Burana, the troubadours, the minnesingers, the lyrical literature of self of an even earlier period.
            And the 1970s? We saw a resurgence of fantasy-fat-volumed trilogies detailing marvelous exploits of gods, warriors, and wizards-a thing which is with us still, and which in recent years, as with Tolkien, has taken on the overtones of ersatz scripture.
            American fabulous literature appears to have recapitalated phylogeny in reverse. We worked at it steadily and have finally made it back to the mythic beginning-which is where I came in. I have a strange sense of deja vu, of my lost past recaptured, on reading much of the current material in the area.
            Such are the joys, you might say, of being able to select my own examples. True. I can point to numerous exceptions to every generalization I've made. Yet I feel there is something to what I have said or I would not have sketched this tendency in even this wavery impressionistic outline.
            So where do we go from here? I see three possibilities and a whimsical vision: We can drop back into the Ur-and write adventure stories with just the fabulous trappings-which is the direction Hollywood seems to have taken. Or we can turn around now and work our way forward again, catching up with H. G. Wells sometime around the turn of the century. Or we can fall back upon our experience and strive for a synthesis-a form of science fiction which combines good storytelling with the technological sensitivity of the forties, the sociological concerns of the fifties, and the attention to better writing and improved characterization which came out of the sixties.
            Those, I say, are three possibilities. A less likely avenue might be to do the latter and also to incorporate the experience of the ancient 1970s, when fantasy reached what may have been its greatest peak in this century. That is, to use all of the above with a dash of darkness here and there, to add to the flavor without overpowering the principal ingredients, to manipulate our fancies through a range of rationality and bafflement-in that our imagination needs both to fuel it, and a fullness of expression requires the acknowledgment of chaos and darkness opposed by the sum of our knowledge and the more successful traditions of thought to which we are heir.
            I feel that it is this opposition which generates the tensions and conflicts of the human mind and heart implicit in all particularly good writing, secondary to the narrative line itself but essential if that nebulous quality known as tone is to sound with veracity in the search for mimetic verisimilitude. This quality, I feel, is present in the best writing in any genre-or in no genre at all, for labels are only a matter of convenience, and subject to revision by manufacturers or college catalog editors. One must, of course, feel strongly about such matters when attempting to recast the field in one's own image, for one would hate to dim the vision of those hard, gemlike authorial virtues of narcissism and arrogance.
            Will science fiction and fantasy go this way? Partly, it depends on who is writing it-and to the extent that I see many talented newcomers in the area, I am heartened. The most gifted writers seem to be the ones who care the least what you call one of these things we are talking about, other than a story. Their main concern is how effectively a tale has been told. The area itself, like life, will go through the usual cycles of fads, periodic overemphasis of a certain sort of theme or character-as well as fat books, thin books, and trilogies. The best stories will be remembered years later. What they may be like, I can't really say. I'm not in the prediction business.
            End