This is old, but I don't see it on here:

Our expert panel votes for the top 10 sci-fi films

No Forbidden Planet!?

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Not a horrible list, but I would probably drop Solaris - I could live with Forbidden Planet in it's place.

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There's a lot of relatively good Sci-Fi movies not on the list, and I agree that Solaris seemed oddly placed there.

I kind of liked the low-budget "Dark Star", which I think could easily bump "War of the Worlds". After that, I think "Close Encounters" is the weakest on the list.

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I disagree with the previous comments about Solaris - it would probably be the first film on my list. I'd replace Terminator with 12 Monkeys which I thought was a better treatment of the "travel back in time to save the world" theme. Then I'd substitute Forbidden Planet, Dark Star and Metropolis for War of the Worlds, The Matrix, and Star Wars.

My list (in no particular order, and I reserve the right to change my mind tomorrow once I've figured out how to make room for Quatermass and the Pit):

Blade Runner
2001
Forbidden Planet
Alien
Solaris
12 Monkeys
The Day the Earth Stood Still
Dark Star
Metropolis
Close Encounters

To me, film sci-fi is all about big explosions and all round entertainment. I prefer my TV series to try to be more thought provoking. Films like Brazil, Dark City, 12 Monkeys and Gattaca are all bubbling under in the top 20.

If Phantom Menace cut out everything except the light sabre battle at the end, it would have been number one on my list.

Aliens
The Thing
Empire Strike Back
Terminator
Serenity
Wrath of Khan
The Matrix
Alien
Star Wars
ID4 -cheesey, I realise. But everyone has a favourite film they are ashamed of, no? Critters IV looks slightly less impressive though

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The Thing. Got that DVD collector edition and loved it. That movie for some reason sits in my top 10 for sure.

If they're referring to the original Solaris, then, yeah it belongs there. Forget the Clooney(?) remake. I'd drop Close Encounters of the Third Kind to make room for Forbidden Planet

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I'd say the same about Cronenberg's The Fly.

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" The universe is running away
I heard it on the news just the other day
There's this new stuff called dark energy
We can't measure and we can't see..." - from Jimmy Buffett's What if the hokey pokey is all it really is about?

Are you my sock puppet, John? Those were my thoughts exactly! The Tarkovsky Solaris is utterly beautiful, best SF movie ever. CE3K is merely... a film that exists.

Thinking on it, I'd prefer to drop War of the Worlds too as it never struck me as more than a jumped-up B movie. Heck, The Time Machine was much better.

I'd also like to see 2010 up there - one of the best sequels (one which actually advances the original storyline instead of just repeating it), and much better than the book.

It's interesting that only first sequels get a mention - and rightly so. In recent years there have been quite a few sequels that have been as good as, if not better than, the original, but the second sequel never seems to manage this. Empire Strikes Back was, IMO, better than A New Hope, but Return of the Jedi was much weaker. Similar things could be said for Terminator and Alien. And Matrix - the second Matrix film had some merit, but as for the third... oh dear!

I agree that Forbidden Planet should get in there, for me at the expense of 'The Matrix'. I would also ditch WotW for 'Contact'.

Otherwise, a pretty good list. ('The Thing' and 'Dark Star' would both be in my top 20, but I don't think would dislodge any of these others from the Top 10).

Edited: Ooh, ooh! And WestWorld.

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Blade Runner
2001
Star Wars/ESB
Alien
Solaris
Terminator/T2
The Day the Earth Stood Still
War of the Worlds
The Matrix
Close Encounters


Agreement on Forbidden Planet AND The Time Machine, both really should be in the top 10, but I can't think of who to dump out though. Probably Terminator and Alien if I HAD to choose.

But might I also suggest a dark horse for the mix, Leprechaun 4, Leprechauns in Space. Mighty fine sci-fi there! :P

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My top ten would be:
1. 2001
2. Empire Strikes Back
3. Terminator 2
4. Alien 2
5. The Time Machine
6. Blade Runner
7. Close Encounters
8. Forbidden Planet
9. Star Wars
10. Contact

It would be better to have a top 25. Too many excellent movies left to list.

Nice to see hardly anybody has knocked Blade Runner completely out so far

Too right!

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I can't come up with a reasonable list of my 10 favorites, let alone the 10 best. Instead, I'm going to instead make a list of some IMO notables, with the occasional exclusion, and why.

1) Serenity: A nice escape from the typical captain and crew. Also your brilliant, but _atypical_ camera work. They broke _all_ the rules and had ridiculous amounts of backstory to somehow cram in the intro, and they somehow kept it all brilliant.

2) Empire Strikes Back: The good guys survive, barely, and call it a movie.

3) Terminator 2: The good guys survive, barely, and call it a movie.

4) Alien 2: The good... gals... survive, barely, and call it a movie.

5) Contact: I loved the movie right up until the moment they drop the capsule. They lost me when the movie's tone started arguing for blind faith over evidence-gathering.

6) The Black Hole: Nah, just kidding. Made ya look. Psyche.

6) The Matrix: But most emphatically not 2 or 3.

7) Yoda's Memorable Journey: aka, the Yoda action scenes of Prequels 2 and 3. The least woodenly written character of the bunch (although I grant Ewan McGregor and Ian McDiarmid did fine jobs as well.)

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Hmm, aren't there 12 films on that list?

My newly revised top ten list is:

1. 2001
2. Forbidden Planet
3. Blade Runner
4. Aliens
5. Dark City
6. The Thing (John Carpenter's version)
7. The Empire Strikes Back
8. Terminator 2
9. STII: The Wrath of Khan (guilty pleasure)
10.Serenity

Dave MItsky

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Sorry to the poster above somewhere, but for me there's a lot more to scifi films than explosions.

I guess as a product of reading the scifi literature of the 1950s I expect my grey matter (what's left of it) to be tweaked by a scifi film.

Therefore my list, by an ancient derelict, is:

1. 2001: A Space Odyssey
2. The Day the Earth Stood Still
3. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)
4. Metropolis (1927)
5. Forbidden Planet
6. Fahrenheit 451
7. The Time Machine (1960)
8. This Island Earth (a Mitsky-ish guilty pleasure)
9. Dark Star (my sense of the absurd comes into play)
10. Contact (despite its religious rewrites (Carl would have puked) it still has those "approximately eighteen hours" as the clincher)

Honorable mention to The Birds. It tells you something about the validity of the Academy Awards that Hitchcock never won one.

For the omissions,

Alien series: just more monsters in the dark: didn't have to be on a spaceship, would have worked in a factory or an old house.
Terminator series: shoot-em-up with an eschatological time travel twist.
Star Wars: space opera with lots of sounds in vacuums, fun, but you're hungry an hour later.
Star Trek: this was hard to leave out, but the movies are more like extended TV shows, I still love them, but as extensions of TOS. Ditto TNG.
CEOTTK: Wonderful during the 1970s, arthritic now.
Blade Runner, Fifth Element, Total Recall et al: I really don't enjoy dystopian epics, especially when the music (e.g., Fifth Element) seems to be not synchronised with the movie.
Any anime: anemia. Want me to reveal vital government secrets? Just show me anime for more than a minute.
Bruce Willis: One minute of looking at his one expression is more than enough.
Wars of the Worlds: Opus 1: too many wires. Opus 2: too much Tom Cruise and non-credible effects.

The new #1 will be the ultimate Hitchhiker movie, but that's already in my head: I read the books.

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Mak,

What is "CEOTTK?"

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Close Encounters of the Third Kind

Mak, just out of curiosity, why leave off Serenity? Same TV connection as Star Trek?

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SeanF

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The contents of this post are ©2008 by SeanF and may not be copied or retransmitted in any form without the express written consent of SeanF

Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

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Ah, thanks. I've seen that enough times, you would think I would have made the connection.

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