Movie Make-out

Gordon: With Moon about to rise in theaters, some of us at Movie Make-out and The Triple Feature got to talking about our favorite science fiction movies, and it turned into this purely subjective monstrosity. This top ten list is a combination of individual top 10s from myself, Trisha Lynn, and my two Triple Feature co-hosts Tom Brazelton (Theater Hopper) and Joe Dunn (Joe Loves Crappy Movies).

The popularity-contest aspect of lists from multiple critics inevitably results in low ranks for movies only one person listed and higher ranks for movies more than one person chose — so, before anybody gets all riled up at the high rank of a movie they don’t like, or the omission of a movie they love: We know. We get it. But we did our own list anyway, because they’re fun.

Rather than just give you the winners — which is, to be frank, just a run-down of rather familiar, popular movies — we thought we’d sweeten the pot by letting each of us pick a movie we wanted to make the list but didn’t. Our “honorable mentions,” as it were.…

Trisha Lynn: Before we start this hootenanny, guys, lemme just say that I think I came at this list from a very different perspective than the rest of you are because when I was in college, I took a course in sci-fi novels, and the way my professor Atara Stein taught the course was to take one specific theme that runs through many science fiction novels; the theme was of what it means to be human and how it manifests in the terms of artificial intelligence. It’s such a broad enough theme that it covered novels from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? to He, She, and It and to The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. We even watched the director’s cuts of Terminator 2: Judgement Day and Blade Runner in class (after having read the book for the latter, of course) and it is from this basis that I approached creating my top ten list and am arguing against the placement of the others.

The Movie Make-Out/Triple Feature Top Ten
Science Fiction Movies

10. Akira and Twelve Monkeys (tie)

Joe Dunn on Twelve Monkeys: One of the Gilliam masterpieces and the first film that made me look at Brad Pitt as something more than the latest Hollywood pretty boy. In my sophomore year of college I must have watched this film at least 50 times, putting it on by default as soon as I walked in the door. There’s just something so therapeutic about carnival music and Bruce Willis pounding some guy’s head in with a telephone.

Trisha Lynn on Twelve Monkeys: I love this movie, too, except unlike Joe, I have only seen it once and can never watch it again. The reason it’s not higher on my list is because it paints such a bleak picture of a humanity that despite all of its struggles to resolve the problem will cause it’s own destruction over and over again, and I can’t believe that someone finds that to be multiple-viewing material.

Trisha Lynn on Akira: It makes sense in a way that out of all the anime films we could have chosen to be on this list, the one that made it to the top 10 was this one from 1988. The story is a little disjointed if you haven’t read the manga, but at the same time, it still carries you through a dystopian power struggle that at the heart is a story of how a lack of caring can cause hurts that exponentially radiate outwards. Plus, there are the great iconic visuals (the gigantic crumbling teddy bear always gives me the creeps) and a stunning soundtrack that is always worth a re-listen.

Gordon on Akira: Personally, I prefer Ghost in the Shell, but Akira is what started it all for me and anime and manga. Trisha Lynn is right that the story doesn’t make a whole lot of sense without being at least a little familiar with the comics (it’s a very good adaptation of the first 1 1/2 volumes or so), but the visuals and the soundtrack set an awfully high standard for everything that came after it.

9. Brazil

Trisha Lynn: Now, this is the Terry Gilliam film that I picked to be on this list because it is both more playful and just as deadly serious as Monkeys and it was my number 1 choice. The performances from every actor are just amazing (watch for Robert DeNiro in a surprising role) and a lot of what I found enjoyable about Catch 22 (the novel) I found to love all over again in Brazil the movie.

Gordon: Trisha Lynn placing Brazil in her top spot single-handedly secured it a place on the final top ten, because of the small number of contributors to our group list. I adore the film (although I’m partial to Gilliam’s Baron Munchausen), but honestly, I scratch my head as to whether or not it counts as science fiction.

8. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan

Trisha Lynn: Never saw it. Do I have to hand my geek cred back in?

Gordon: Yes, you do. Star Trek II is an absolute classic — heck, it’s #8 on the Movie Make-out/Triple Feature Top Ten Science Fiction Movies List, so of course it’s great. Wrath of Khan is the perfect sequel for a TV-to-movie franchise like Trek: a logical follow-up to a story set up in one of the most well-regarded episodes of the original series (yet self-contained enough that you don’t need to know that).

Operating at a fraction of the Star Trek: The Motion Picture budget, director Nicholas Meyer took the best special effect of all — a fantastic script — and turned out an intense (dare I say it?) epic with no shortage of gravitas from a not-yet-self-parodying William Shatner and Khan himself, Ricardo Montalban. I especially love how the space combat in Wrath of Khan underscores how Star Trek’s ship-to-ship battles parallel naval combat, as opposed to Star Wars, which more closely paralleled aerial combat.

7. Empire Strikes Back

Gordon: This was my number one. Don’t get me wrong: Star Wars is awesome. It’s technically ground-breaking, the music is spectacular, and it’s fun as all get-out, but… well, to the non-fifteen-year-old me, the characters all feel pretty much cardboard cut-outs. The old wizard, the loudmouth brat, the swaggering hired gun, etc. With Irvin Kershner at the helm, though, Empire Strikes Back brought depth of characterization and a real sense of drama to Star Wars trilogy.

Also: Boba Fett! BOBA FETT.

6. Wall·E

Joe: Somewhere George Lucas is kicking himself for not giving R2D2 a love interest.

Trisha Lynn: And yet, he still wouldn’t have been able to pull off the romance nearly half as well as Andrew Stanton did. I like that of the two characters, Eve is the brawn, while the part of me that loves the movie Hello Dolly! melts every time she hears a young Michael Crawford harmonize those last lines in “It Only Takes a Moment.” So many disparate elements, but they mixed together so well.

Tom Brazelton: From the moment it hit screens in 2008, I have maintained that Wall·E will be a vision of the future people will still be talking about 50 years from now.

Like Blade Runner, it paints an unflattering portrait of humanity and consumerism run amok. Having choked life from the planet Earth, they flee on giant star-cruisers, become over-reliant on technology and balloon into corpulent, dim-witted, socially siloed corporate commodities. Profound messages on environmental responsibilities, the importance of community and harsh criticism of the consumer culture follow. Wall·E’s message is the most subversive and effective of any film on this list.

5. Back to the Future

Joe: Back to the Future was my pick for number one. I won’t lie and say that a big part of that was the nostalgia of watching it endlessly in my Grandmother’s TV room and dreaming about what it would be like to travel through time in a car where the doors opened up instead of out. What’s great about BTTF though is that it holds up beyond the nostalgia as a great story with great characters for people new to the film as well as those of us that have been curling up with it for most of our lives. Introduce it to someone and they’ll love you for life. Just don’t tell them about part three.

Trisha Lynn: While I’ll agree that Back to the Future Part III is not a great science fiction movie (it’s more of a Western), I’d argue that the second movie’s a better pick than the first. Yes, the story was a little chaotic, but it really ratcheted up the negative aspects to messing with the time stream, and I still think it’s a shame they didn’t leave in the scene where AU!Biff started disintegrating.

Tom: Time travel is a sci-fi staple, but only the Back to the Future movies make it fun. Sure, they get a little sloppy with the timeline, but the series introduces a lot of interesting concepts. Now no one can think about altering the past without photographs from the future fading you out of existence!

Back to the Future II, for example, is amazing for what it predicted correctly – Watching multiple TV channels simultaneously, TV glasses, video conferencing… even a baseball team in Miami! (Source: 11Points.com)

Gordon: I think Tom is forgetting about Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventures, which would’ve made my Top 20, almost undoubtedly. For some reason, the only thing I can think of saying about Back to the Future is that when I was a little kid and my family all went to see the movie, I opted to see Santa Claus: The Movie instead. Worst. Decision. Ever.

4. Aliens

Trisha Lynn: I have a love/hate relationship with Aliens because my first boyfriend loved the whole concept of the drop ships so much that he convinced me to go with him on a ride called “Freefall” at Six Flags Magic Mountain in California, claiming that he loved that ride because to him, that’s what it would be like being in one of those ships. Taking that ride is where I learned—to my horror—that I have a fear of falling.

Joe: Just the idea of taking the deliciously terrifying beasts from Scott’s master piece and adding… wait for it… MORE of them has got to be one of the best ideas in sci-fi history.

Gordon: What I really love about Aliens as a sequel is that it explores a completely different idea that the original only hinted at — that all monsters come from somewhere. And if there’s one of them, there has to be a lot of them. I’ve always been curious just how Jim Cameron convinced the producers that one of the best horror movies of all time needed a flat-out action movie for a sequel. (I would guess the success of Terminator and his Rambo: First Blood Part 2 script probably had something to do with it.)

3. Star Wars

Joe: Between A New Hope and Empire my allegiance lies with Episode IV.  Reason being—it’s a complete adventure. Granted, the best parts of Empire are the things that make it an incomplete adventure but when I need to get my fix of light sabers and Wookies I always reach for New Hope.

Tom: I don’t know if I would call Star Wars a TRUE science fiction movie as much as I would call it an action/adventure film in a science fiction setting.
But Star Wars was a huge leap forward for the genre not only by proving that science fiction could be sequelized and profitable, but for ushering in the age of the blockbuster as well.

2. Blade Runner

Tom: To me, probably the clearest example of sci-fi on the list. Distopian future? Check. Technology evolving beyond our control? Check. The philosophical ramifications of said technology? Check.

Blade Runner was a revelation to me because it promoted the idea that the future wasn’t a bright and shiny place. The future could still be dirty, disorganized and dangerous. With each passing year, the future looks more and more like Blade Runner and less and less like The Jetsons.

Gordon: Harrison Ford was on a roll in the early ’80s: Empire Strikes Back, Raiders, Blade Runner, Jedi, Temple of Doom, Witness and Mosquito Coast were all terrific movies. (Yes, I like Temple of Doom.) While Blade Runner was not a box office success at first, unlike the majority of those others, its status as a sci-fi classic is nigh-undisputed.

When the (much-improved) director’s cut hit theaters briefly, I dragged a friend of mine with the promise that if he didn’t like it, I would do a Spider-Man drawing for him. I still maintain that there is no possible way he didn’t, because it is genius, and that he just wanted the drawing from me. Which I never actually gave him. I am a bad person.

1. The Matrix

Gordon: The Matrix wasn’t actually the top choice of any of our lists—but it placed highly on several of the lists and easily secured our top slot. And while I had it considerably lower on my list, because I like my sci-fi darker and moodier, it’s a terrific, highly entertaining movie, to be sure. As a standalone movie, it holds up really well, but I always wondered how Jesus Superman Neo would go about freeing the slaves world from their robot overlords. Still, it’s really a shame that they never made any sequels to it. (La la la la la la la…)

Joe: Is there anyone in the world that wasn’t blown away by The Matrix when it was first released in 1999? I mean if it wasn’t the concept our world as a virtual program masking a living battery farm then it was the state of the art special effects and action sequences completely changing the way you think and look at movies. And if it was none of that then it was at least the Lady in Red.

Trisha Lynn: Can I just say that this didn’t make my list at all? There are other movies that handled the “What is humanity?” question with more gravitas and less mindless action, like the number two pick on the list. Not that I don’t like mindless action (I did enjoy the recent Wolverine movie, after all) but I say that just like a MacGuffin, if you’re going to introduce a theme in the first film, you’d better not fuck it up its resolution in the third one—which they did.

And yes, that means that I am judging this movie by how badly the entire trilogy of films performed because there are some awesome and amazing concepts in this franchise that I consider to be “true sci-fi” and those got thankfully explored in the the two-part “The Second Renaissance” short anime film that is part of The Animatrix. Just re-reading the synopsis on Wikipedia sends shivers down my spine all over again, remembering how skillfully director Mahiro Maeda was able to take the Wachowski brothers’ thoughts, combine them with familiar images of humanity’s own struggles against itself, and make us think about how as long as humankind rejects differences, we will never be able to progress as a people.

…And Then Some

Joe’s Pick: Galaxy Quest, the little movie that satirizes science fiction so well that it actually becomes it. Hell, it even does it better than at least a third of the Star Wars franchise. Quest is so clever and so fun that it proved Tim Allen’s worth as a leading man in a movie where he wasn’t playing Santa Claus.

Trisha Lynn’s Pick: Oh, come on! How in the world can you do a top science-fiction movies list and not include a film adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the very first sci-fi novel? And though Young Frankenstein is really damn funny and DeNiro (again with the great roles!) was amazing in Kenneth Branagh’s version, I’m actually going to go with The Bride because (a) Sting was so freaking hot and (b) it made the book actually a little more understandable.

Gordon’s Pick: THX-1138 was George Lucas’s first feature film, and in a lot of ways — despite my love for Star Wars and American Graffiti — I think it’s the best movie he’s directed. It’s thought-provoking and an absolute treat for the eyes and ears. Some people find it boring, to be sure, but the shot framing, sound design and music make this movie practically hypnotic to me. Every time Lucas says he’s done with Star Wars — no really this time — and wants to get back to making small movies like THX, I want to scream, “GET ON WITH IT, MAN!”

(Tom didn’t get his pick to us in time for “press,” but we’ll add his in when we get it.)