Your favorite Science Fiction shows, movies...Drama, comedy, sone w with some horror element...

[Jeebo]

43. The 1950s was a GREAT decade for s-f films.

Five of my favorite movies EVER (not just science fiction!) were made in the 1950s:

War of the Worlds
The Day the Earth Stood Still
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
The Fly
Forbidden Planet

Forbidden Planet, in particular, is, in my humble opinion, the BEST science fiction movie ever made. I'm not talking about the silliness of the robot making booze for the cook, or the guys on the space ship kissing Altaira, or any of the other silliness in the early parts of the movie. I'm talking about the artifacts on the planet of the ancient Krell civilization, the way the humans in the movie interact with those artifacts, the mystery of the destructive force running rampant on the planet, and the mystery of what destroyed the Krell civilization. That movie is SO deep and SO profound and SO intelligent. I have watched it so many times that I find myself mouthing the words along with the characters. My favorite line in the movie: "We're ALL monsters in our subconscious, so we have LAWS and RELIGION!" And yes, as others in this thread have observed, the special effects are breathtaking, too.

I could mention lots of other great science fiction films that were not made in the 1950s, but I'm going to talk about only two: 2001 A Space Odyssey, and The Wall.

2001 gets lots of criticism because of all the bewildering stuff that happens at the end, but I think that's a big part of the point of the film. After all, if we humans ever encounter an extraterrestrial civilization that is so far ahead of us, wouldn't we find them bewildering and incomprehensible? I think our dogs and cats understand us better than we would understand a civilization that advanced. In that scene near the end of the film when David Bowman is being given a whirlwind tour of the universe, you see several shots of his face looking like a resident of a mental institution. That's because the man's mind is being seriously blown.

The Wall is one of the best science fiction films I've ever seen, one of the most overlooked (how many of you have seen it?) and also one of the best foreign language films I've ever seen. It's an Austrian film made in 2013. I don't think it was marketed or promoted as a science fiction film, but it nevertheless fits in that genre because the title phenomenon could only have been produced by a non-human technology. The movie is also a psychological study of isolation and survival. The actress who plays the unnamed woman ought to have gotten a Best Actress Oscar for her performance in this film, and if they gave Oscars to animal actors, they should have given one to her dog Lynx. I want that dog. What a great dog. The relationship between the woman and the dog is lovely to behold, and one of the best cinematic portrayals I've ever seen of cross-species friendships. There are lots of other great science fiction films I could mention, but I want to mention this one because nobody else is, and it is richly deserving of mention.

-- Ron

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