Be Excellent To Each Other

To Liverpool, according to Grant Morrison and a good percentage of scholars.

Of course, Grant Morrison also had him renting a room with Morrissey in his cupboard, but anyway...

Wasn't this called Saturn 3? I went to the cinema to see this with a couple of mates when I was quite young. It's not a bad film at all. Just checked the IMDB page and it is 3, not 5. Was written by Martin Amis as well!

Outland is awesome. It's basically High Noon in space.

Dark Star is worth a look as well - it's a mega cheapie cult classic.

Serenity is good in it's own right, but improves tenfold if you've seen Firefly which you can pick for about 2/6 nowadays.

Forbidden Planet. Awesome movie.

Event Horizon is also a 95% fabulous movie - the end is a bit trite but it's still excellent as it's difficult to see what they could have done differently.
Sunshine is similar
Solaris is pretty decent, though the original version will induce somnambulism even if you do a dozen lines of peruvian marching powder while watching it.

Excellent classic scifis which are not set in space:

The Andromeda Strain
Westworld
Demon Seed

That one set in a desert, in a research station studying super-intelligent ants. What was that called?

Yeah, it is 3, I had thought it 13 first myself. I have the same kind of almost-luck with the lottery as well

I fear what a whippersnapper I must be before you sir, if you went to see it at the cinema with a couple of mates! I first saw it on its premiere some time in the 80s, really late at night, and was absolutely terrified. I can remember it was on my first telly, with my Speccy connected to it, so.. yeah. Can I have a Werther's Original, please?

I know the one you mean and I saw it some time within the last few years. I have a feeling that it might not be quite as good as you're remembering it to be though.

This is very likely I'm afraid. Strike it from the list, whatever it is.

What about Space Camp, does that count? It's in space!

Phase IV

Careful peeps, this is a thread about Space films, not Sci-Fi in general.

It came out in 1980, so I would have been just over 11, so I'm hardly at retirement age yet. I think it may have been a 15 or an AA as them was the classifications back then! I think they went U, PG, A, AA, X or something, so getting into movies like that was always an ambition.

The last Star Trek film was my favourite of the whole lot.
Am I allowed to recommend Starship Troopers 3 (so that you can watch it and tell me if it's worth watching)?
What about Anime?

ST3 is much better than ST2. Make of that what you will.

Hooray! Someone else who liked it! It's not my favourite, but I'd much, much rather that now than say, First Contact or The Voyage Home, which are the two most commercially popular ones. (My fave is The Undiscovered Country)

Voyage Home is worst of all apart from Final Frontier.

I'm told the double-disc edition of The Final Frontier is good though, just for having lots of background goss' on why it was erm, so shit

Cool, added to the list.

Starship Troopers three is well work the... erm, purchase. (check PMs).

If you love the first (as all right-thinking people do) then I can't recommend the second, a no-budget cash in travesty of no redeeming qualities. Three (Marauder) is much improved, a decent plot by B-Movie sequel standards, Casper Van Dien back where he belongs (RICO!), plenty minge, plenty violence, plenty bugs and plenty of arsehole senior officers. The thing they have at the ned is great, too. Scriptwise, there's some really on-the-money moments, and some cringeworthy hacking apparent, but on the whole it is not an hour and a half any lover of the first film will regret.

It's sitting comfortably on my hard drive now. Hurrah!

I didn't know there was a Starship Troopers 3, but I am a fan of the first one and would welcome the chance to "review" a copy...

Ratios are really good at the moment, only too me two hours or so. Incoming PM.

Starchaser: The Legend of Orin
Dark Star

If there's one thing I've learnt from this thread it's that there really hasn't ever been a sci-fi space film that I'm completely happy with. I want one with vast ships like that look like the ones that famous illustrator whose name I can't remember used to draw when we were kids. I want it to have a non-silly plot that makes sense but that is still suspenseful or exciting but that isn't just a cop show or war film shoved, cliche's and all, into another setting. Proper bleak sci-fi. I don't know, it's sort of there in my head but I've never seen it or anything like it.

Wing Commander!

Unfortunately, the film industry is first and foremost about entertainment and the bigger the budget, which an epic scale space movie would need, the more entertaining it would probably need to be to recoup it's costs. Obviously, this isn't hard and fast, but Sci-Fi effects laden movies are bloody expensive, but they will get cheaper.

However, there's are some pretty dystopian Sci-Fi films that might fit your bill.
2001 is an obvious contender, as is Silent Running. There used to be an encyclopedia of Sci-Fi you used to able to buy - it would be cool if there was some kind of online equivalent resource (and don't say IMDB, as large as it is I don't want to have to read thousands of entrants in a vague Sci-Fi genre in the hope I might find something that is worth watching).

2001 and Silent Running are indeed the sort of thing that I'm after, although watching 2001 now all the outfits and sets just put me in mind of Space 1999 and it kind of ruins things a bit. Silent Running I love, and is probably as near as I've seen.

2001 can fuck off as far as it's possible for something to fuck off without disobeying the laws of physics. No, fuck that - we can rewrite the laws of physics so that execrable pile of pseudo-intellectual wankery can fuck off even further.

30 minutes of men in MONKEY SUITS for fuck's sake. OoooooOOOOoooh - it's a metaphor. OOOOOOOOOH.

Silent running always makes me cry.

I'm convinced there are other "concept" scifis out there though that we're just not thinking of. Almost certainly from the 70s.

Did Douglas Trumbull make anything else? It's not an uninteresting fact that he was the DP on 2001 and I think Silent Running was his debut feature.

I don't read an enormous amount of Sci-Fi, so I wouldn't know of enough source material to make any comprehensive suggestions, but the general vibe is frontier stuff - almost space westerns. Outland is a good example of that, as it's essentially a remake of High Noon, but it still doesn't address the rush for new territory and general jeopardy and plight that the taming of the West evoked. Where's our 21st century space obsessed John Ford or Sam Peckinpah?

Joss Whedon *did* sort of do this with Firefly and Serenity, of course.

Oh god yes, my fiancee saw it for the first time a couple of years ago and we were both properly sobbing by the end.

Yeah there were, the ant one you mentioned was sort of like that but as with quite a few 70s films it did seem to be suffering from the fact that the people involved apparently dropped a few too many tabs of LSD in the preceding decade.

Don't want to start a war here but I found Firefly immensely tedious for exactly that reason. It just seems like lack of imagination. It's a science fiction series for christ sake. You could make literally anything happen, but you've got stereotypical cowie characters in stereotypical cowie scenarios with a few extra spaceships thrown in.

I do love westerns though. And if you've got to cross genres, Outland is the way to handle it.

Oh and Goatboy: get your ass to Mars. If you haven't already, like.

Hmm, yes, it was, but I liked the way it was done. I know that there are a number of Anti-Firefly sorts on here, and I respect differing opinions, obviously. Mr Wrong Head.



Eh? Outland was even *more* a stereotypical "sheriff has to fight the bad guys" western just tarted up with sci-fi special sauce. I loved it, to be sure, but that's all it was.

I agree that IV was quite bad but it was also quite scary in places.

Yeah, those whales were pretty terrifying, weren't there?

Sunshine has a really good sense of scale - the sun is huge, and feels huge.

1) Wow, I went to see Starchaser as a kid. There was a local education/police-organised thing over summer holidays, for kids. I mostly just used to go on the trips to see films, anyway, they sodding listed this as 'Star Wars - The Legend of Orin'. Don't remember a thing about it except that everyone was dissapointed it wasn't really Star Wars.

2) "You TWAT", I've just just shouted. At myself, because Dark Star is one of my absolute all-time favourite films, and one of the first films I remember my Dad letting me sneak a viewing of whilst my Mum wasn't in.

The scene in the elevator shaft, where (gah, I forget, Talbot, I think) is pressed against the side, as the fearsome lift rises and falls perilously close to him, is one of my fave bits of low-budget film-making. As a kid I was all 'OH NO!', but to watch back now as a cynical adult, it's brilliantly cheap, and still works. Go watch it and see what I mean, then

It's not at any point set in space, but just wanted to say that the HD-DVD version of The Thing (coincidentally on the night I buggered off from here recently!), and I heartily recommend it to anyone with the equpment. Excellent, sharp transfer, and I think the sound is a few degrees better than on my DVD copy. Properly unnerved me in places, even knowing what happens.

How about Titan AE?

A New Hope is my favourite Star Wars by a long margin, and part of the reason would be the opening shot of the Blockade Runner chased by the Star Destroyer. Same reason I love the Nostromo from Aliens. It's a space-ship that appears to be literally a space-worthy oil-rig. Massive clunky space stuff is the best thing ever.

You mean Star Wars.

Yeah, I really must watch that again sometime. I've seen it but only on a laptop, through the laptop's own speakers so I can see how it might have lost a bit of its impact

What's that film where Burt Reynolds is a cybernetic tank sent back in time to be a webcam for an online second hand games store but gets caught up in an argument over car colour?

Much as I like them both and I do think it was a shame firefly was cancelled, there was too much an element of lightness in the series with the neanderthal humour of the principal character's solution to hit someone if there was a problem. Which IMO makes it a slightly bad fit for the dystopian/grimness factor. But you're bang on the money with the space cowboy analogue.

I dunno, but it sounds like the best damn film ever.

FTFY

I do, but I was talking to Da Kidz who would know it as A New Hope. Hey, at least I'm not scared of The Voyage Home bucko.

It wasn't really meant to be dystopian and grim though. It was meant to be a brave new world with the haves and the have-nots, but the have-nots making the best of what they have(not) got. Wow that's a crap sentence.

It's the absolutely ideal setting for creating a group of people who drift between grunt work and lawbreaking. It would also be nothing without the humour. And the hitting of people.

I'd just like to say 'Battle Beyond the Stars' because I always do.

It's what Seven Samurai was based on.

Flash Gordon.

Cunting FUCK.