Tag Archives: Influential SF Films

The Two Most Influential SF Films of the 2000s

So here I have come to the end of my occasional series. I started with the silent era treating it as a single decade, most unfair, and the decade by decade I have laid out what I think are the two SF films that influence the genre and movies in general. With the years 2000-2009, there are no more complete decades to review. I honestly thought that this would be one of the hardest because it is the most recent. Sometimes,m it can be very tricky seeing the lasting influence amid the noise of fads, but surprisingly I found it easy to make my selections.

X-Men (2000) My first pick popped out right at the start of the decade, Byran Singer’s superhero film, X-Men. Awash in superhero movies it can be hard for a modern viewer to appreciate just what a groundbreaking movie this was. Before X-Men superhero movies always operated in a world of camp and with winks towards the camera letting the audience know not to take the subject too seriously. And while films like Superman: The Movie and Tim Burton’s Batman made big box office, they remained in that slightly campy quarantine. X-Men, from it’s gritty start amid the Holocaust through it’s epic finale grounded itself in realism, treating the subject and inviting the audience to treat the subject, seriously. These were real characters with real motivation talking about real human conditions, but using the fantastic as their vehicle. Without this movie both in its style and in its success, it is unlikely we would be in our current riches with both the Marvel and DC cinematic Universes.

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. (2004) Set in an alternate history where Zepplin travel remained popular and pulp heroes battled mad scientists Sky Captain was a wild ride that never quite found success at the box office, but like another of my picks, Blade Runner, its influence it outsized to its ticket sales. This film pioneered for feature films the wide scale use of virtual sets. Of course Lucas was doing this already with his Star Wars prequel movies, but I do not think Lucas, with his endless piles of cash and reputation for being a technophile, produced the impact that Sky Captain did. By making this film with a modest budget, Kerry Conran illustrated that these techniques were available to all sorts of production that did not have ILM behind them. It also did not hurt that Conran shot Sky Captain with flair and style, making a film that had a distinct look over the flat perfect seen in Lucas’ Star Wars prequels.

The Two Most Influential SF Films of the 1990s.

If you are new to my blog, and I recognize it’s traffic is primarily friends and family, I have had an occasional series on the two most influential SF movie by decade. Of course, this is no objective listing but purely by spitball take on the films that had a lasting impact on movies beyond any box office success.

I covered the silent era, quite unfairly I am sure, in a single post, and then proceeded by decade covering the 1930s, 1940, 1950s, 1960, 1970s, and the 1980s.

Now I will continue into the 1990s.

The Matrix – (1999)Personally this is a film that did not work for me. The tropes concerning what is or is not real are old hat and many of the aspects of the plot make little to no sense. (If there is no sunlight, then people are dead and the 100 or so watts you can get from them are hardly worth harvesting.) My biases aside this film, in addition to spawning a franchise with sequels heavily influence the look of film for the next decade and beyond. ‘Bullet time,’ the hyper slow-motion with a moving camera, stunned audiences in 1999 and many filmmakers quickly copied the stylistic look of the Wachowski Siblings.

Visual style for SF films ceased being the domain of art-house productions and moved into the mainstream. Love or loathe it, The Matrix influences films to this day.

Jurassic Park (1993) Arriving earlier in the decade than The Matrix Jurassic Park’s impact on filmmaking is difficult to understate. When production began on the adaptation of Michael Crichton’s novel the filmmakers had planned on using traditional stop-motion animation to bring their dinosaurs to life, a technique that goes back the 1933’s classic film King Kong. However during pre-production the computer graphics team at Industrial Light and Magic demonstrated photorealistic CGI dinosaurs and the world changed. Influencing every special effects film follow, Jurassic Park freed the images on the screen from physical photography to anything that could be envisioned. Every summer is now swamped with good, bad, great, and terrible CGI animation. Studios are learning that great CGI can not save a film and that CGI stunts quickly bore the audience. This year’s Mad Max: Fury Road and Star Wars: The Force Awakens in part are rebelling against the CGI revolution started by Steven Spielberg with Jurassic Park.

The Two Most Influential Science-Fiction Films of the 1980s

So here am back at my irregular series on the most influential SF films, by decade. The 1980s are a particularly target rich environment for discussing SF and genre movies. After the explosive popularity of Star Wars in the 70’s, a popularity that followed through into the 80s with The Empire Strikes Back and The Return Of The Jedi, studios turned to genre film as the path to the next mega-blockbuster. The decade so film that had big budgets with full studio backing, and small Indy movies that challenged the big boys at the box-office. So picking just two and the most influential is a daunting task.

Neither film that I selected were major hits at the box office, but their impacts far out reached the lack luster initial performances.

Blade Runner (1982): A dark, film noir SF movie from master filmmaker Ridley Scott, Blade is a rather loose adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s stranger and thought provoking novel, Do Androids Dream of electric Sheep? The film cratered at the box office, when audiences were in the mood for light escapist fare, and had already been conditioned to accept Harrison Ford as an ‘action hero’ this psychological detective story about the qualities of humanity, love, and compassion, found itself serious out of step with the times. However the filmmaking was revolutionary. The look, feel, and future presented in Blade Runner inspired filmmakers for decades. Christopher Nolan is said to have used it as a touch stone for the look at ‘Batman Begins.’ Later it gained a cult following, and eventually critics noticed the serious thought and themes running through the film, but almost from the start filmmakers fell in love with it and copied it. Now regarded as a classic, and one that prompt endless debates about preferred versions , endings, and character natures, Blade Runner is a film that has stood the test of time.

The Last Starfighter (1984): Star Wars produced a glut of young men leaving home and becoming heroes in the vastness of space stories, and while this one is quirky, fun, and has some tremendous performances, overall the story is not that ground breaking. What marks The Last Starfighter as the innovative and formative movie that it is comes from its production. This was the first film to attempt and utilize photorealistic computer generated imagery for nearly all of the special effects produced in the movie. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan broke ground with the CGI of the Genesis effect, impressive work that holds up to this day, but it was less than a minute of screen-time while the rest of the film used traditional model photography to achieve the shots of dueling starships. The Last Starfighter has no miniatures or models, all the starships exist solely as CGI imagery. While that CGI is painfully dated by todays standards, it is hugely important in the history of film. It proved that it could be done and that audiences would accept the effects. From there we lead into Babylon 5, Jurassic Park, and every genre film made today. They are all building up in the work done in this film.

The Two Most Influential Science-Fiction Films of the 1970’s:

There has been a rather lengthy hiatus in this series as I dove into edits of my novel and composing a new short story, but I have returned to the topic, coming around to perhaps the most important decade in SF cinema except for the 1950’s.

First up I’ll discuss the moon-sized shadow eclipsing all SF films of the 70’s and later;

Star Wars (1977)

I think it is difficult for people who came of age later to appreciate just how monumental Star Wars was in the history of cinema. It is part of the triumvirate that created the block-buster phenomena that Hollywood continues to chase to this very day. (The other two films being JAWS and THE GODFATHER.) Science-Fiction simply had never been as big as Star Wars before and that sort of success casts a might long shadow.

Looking at SF films of the 70’s everything before Star Wars gets lost in the uproar of that space fantasy and everything after it is compared to it. While Hollywood had been moving in fits and starts towards adult science-fiction in the 1970’s with film such as The Omega Man, The Andromeda Strain, and Logan’s Run, the arrival of Lucas’ baby shunted all that aside for a generation as the studios chased after the next massive box-officer adventure.

However the influence of this movie reaches far beyond the pale imitations hurried into production and the senseless pursuit of massive runs, how we watch , hear, and make films changes because of George Lucas.

Today’s theaters packed with digital projectors, multi-channel sounds systems, and comfortable seating owe a great deal of their evolution to Lucas’ and his foresight and insistence on exhibition as well as film production. Behind the scenes, Lucas’ advanced the technology of film making more in the twenty years post Star Wars that in all the years following the introduction of synch-sound, Digital effects, digital processing, non-linear editing, these are tools that make todays production look vastly different to films short and edited traditionally. When you shoot a home video on your camera phone and edit it on your home computer you are participating Lucas’ revolution, it’s that massive.

Selecting a second film for the 1970’s is a very tough thing. Any film produced and released before Star Wars pretty much had any lasting impact erased by the tidal wave that is Star Wars, any film made after Star Wars nearly always is following and in some case just bolding stealing, from Lucas’ massive hit. Personally I came down to two post Star Wars films for my second choice; Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Alien. Alien has been copied endlessly since it’s stellar release in 1979, but I think the broader impact it had was that in theatrical films it pretty much, singlehandedly, destroyed the professional explorer set-up. Before Alien interstellar travel was the domain of military and para-military experts, after Alien’s ‘truckers in space’ approach the professional explorer for all practical purposes vanished from feature films.

However I am going to go with

Star Trek: the Motion Picture (1979)

After the success of Star Wars Paramount decided that the pilot that they had been planning for a new Star trek television series needed to be a feature film. The script wasn’t in great shape, and Roddenberry wasn’t an experience hand at feature film production. The $20 million dollar budget quickly vanished as the studio spent $40 million, the script was re-written as they filmed, and the production was troubled from the set to the special effects, but still the film was a hit, spawning a franchise of feature films that continue to this day, but I would argue that is not the lasting effect of Star trek: The Motion Picture.

The lasting effect came from the firing of Gene Roddenberry. Now out of the loop in the feature film department, he returned to his true love, television but this time with a Radical concept, a television show that would be sold directly to the stations, instead of a network, Star Trek: The Next Generation.

The success of the show paved the way for a flood of directly syndicated programming, most of it genre, laying the ground work for the fertile and rich television landscape we have to day in SF and fantasy. I don’t think we would have any of this with Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

The Two Most Influential Science-Fiction Films of 1960’s

Even though the 60s, or at least the start of the 60’s, now lies fifty years in the past, we are rapidly approaching SF films that are well known, and quite familiar to a larger audience. This of course makes the selection of just two as ‘most influential’ even more fraught with controversy and argument. Good!

The 1960’s is a rich field to for SF movies, particularly if we keep in mind a wide definition of SF that may include many films not generally thought of as part of that genre.

For example Dr. No, released in 1962, not only launched the Bond film franchise that runs strong to this very day, but it also birthed the entire super-spy genre which morphed, with Tom Clancy’s help, into the techno-thriller genre, a genre that is SF wearing fancy dress. By any reasonable observation and definition Dr. No is both SF and influential. So read one and see how I have selected one films that I think will scarcely surprise anyone, and another that will be received quite the opposite.

2001: A Space Odyssey – 1968

Stanley Kubrick’s brilliant and baffling masterpiece, 2001 is truly not only one of the most influential SF films of the 1960s, it is one of the most influential films of any genre of all time. It is groundbreaking in its style, scope, depth of concepts, technical mastery, and sheer artistry. Coming at the end of the decade, this movie raised the bar on what could be expected of a science-fiction film. Where Forbidden Planet brought in literature, 2001 demonstrated that SF, the genre of ideas in print fore decades and decades, could also be the genre of ideas on the silvered screen. Eschewing a traditional plot driven narrative, this film took us from the dawn of humanity through its eventual evolution beyond the cradle of Earth. It did this will a level of technical competence that forever changed what would be expected of a major SF film and set the stage for the dazzling spectacle in the next decade of Star Wars.

Co-written by one of the grandmasters of hard SF (science-fiction that is devoted to scientific accuracy) Arthur C Clarke, 2001 took a solid believable ground in science, capturing the realities of projected space-travel with a near documentarian style, and made this all accessible to the general public. I have twice seen this film screen in theaters and both times the audience is held in its powerful and hypnotic grip. While I prefer my films to have a more traditional narrative, I can see and appreciate the art, power, and brilliance exhibited in the film.

My second film, released the same year, is about as far as you can get from 2001: a Space Odyssey. This movie is a film assembled by amateurs, shot on grainy poor stock, limited in scope, with a traditional narrative about survival, and yet it is a small independent film that shook the foundations of film making and spawned a new genre unto itself.

Night of the Living Dead – 1968

What, I hear you scream, that’s not a science-fiction movie, that’s a horror film, a zombie film! Yes it is both of those things, a horror film, just as Frankenstein was a horror film, and it is not just a zombie movie it is the progenitor of all modern zombie movies. It is also, quite clearly, a science-fiction film. First off, co-writer and Direct George A. Romero has mentioned in interviews that the inspiration for this film was Richard Matheson’s novel, I am Legend, a story about a world overrun by scientifically explained vampires. In the film Night of the Living Dead, quite unlike Romero’s other zombie films, there is a clear explanation given for the rise of the dead and their transformation into murderous cannibals – radiation from the Venus probe. This radiation is what ‘activates’ the ghouls’ brains (the term zombie is never used in the movie and was grafted onto these revenants later) and it is what destroyed the brain destroys the ghouls. The cause and explanation is grounded in a scientific reason, though it is terrible science. So, like Dr. No, this is a movie that one rarely thinks of as SF, but clearly falls within those borders.

It’s influence would be hard to overstate. It has been called the most successful independent film of all time. (Only a mistake in the editing room prevented Romero and company from being richly rewarded for their creation and instead plopped the film directly into the public domain.) Where Dr. No spawned a single franchise and a fad, that quickly died out, in super-spy movies, the zombie films not only continues to be popular, the tropes of the zombie movie can often be found in other films far afield. The scene in Burton’s version of Sweeney Todd where the ‘mental’ patients attack their doctor is straight out of any zombie movie. The very concept, one that didn’t exist in 1967, has fully permeated our society today. Quibble all you like, I do not see how you cannot rate this as one of the most influential SF movies of the 60’s or of all time.

The Two Most Influential Science-Fiction Films of the 1950’s

Ah, we have emerged from the SF desert of the 40’s into the rich garden of the 1950’s. For many people this is when SF movies really started. It is certainly when they came into their own as a genre.

My last post I suffered from few films to select from, and this post has quite the opposite trouble. The 1950’s were such a golden age of SF movie that entire books have been devoted to the movies and their history. (I would heartily recommend Bill Warren’s Keep Watching the Skies! as an invaluable resource.)

It was during the 60’s that we got Creature from the Black Lagoon, the first full body suit monster movie. We are also got Them! which spawned countless giant insect movies. The Day the Earth Stood Still is a prime example of SF film addressing the concerns of the day while Invasion of The Body Snatchers terrifically captured tis terrors. Of there are so many to chose from, but of course I have already made my picks. One I expect bears no surprise, but my first pick is rather unknown to most people today.

Destination Moon – 1950.

Those who know me might suspect I selected this film because of the close association with one of my favorite SF authors, Robert A. Heinlien, but they would be wrong. This film, as a movie, is in my opinion flawed, but I am not selecting for best SF movies in each decade but most influential and on that count there can be no arguing with Destination Moon. This film, released in 1950, was a box office hit, both domestically and over-seas. It launched George Pal into his love affair with SF film, and for that alone it is an important film but it also launched the SF film crazed of the 1950’s. Without this film we do not have the rich fertile treasury of SF films from this decade and without those movies we do not have modern SF cinema. Destination Moon, while dry and flawed, is one of the most important SF films of any decade.

Forbidden Planet – 1956.

This selection should be less surprising. It is a well know movie, beloved and rescreened often. I had the good fortune to catch it in a theater and the special effect and images still hold up quite nicely. The characters are quite a bit dated, very much the writing is a product of the repressed 50’s, with the Production Code still in full effect, but this is still a movie well worth watching. It is influential because until Forbidden Planet science-fiction films were not literature. Most SF films were heavily plot based, being either adventure stories, such as Destination Moon’s exploration of the adventure inherent in a trip to the moon, allegorical story, or arguments for a particular worldview, such as The Day the Earth Stood Still. Forbidden Planet, an SF adaptation of The Tempest took the SF movie, with credible science, beyond the solar system and into the soul of humanity. It asked, with typical MGM glitz, deep questions about revenge and power and to price might they extract. In addition to opening up SF film to deeply internal stories, though they might be about aliens and robots on the surface, Forbidden Planet also inspired Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek. The production design of the movie strongly influenced the look of the television series, and the very concept of a paramilitary exploration of new worlds and new life-forms start here. There is no doubt that you can draw a line from Forbidden Planet, through Star Trek, to many shows and films today.

The Two Most Influential Science-Fiction Films of the 1940s

So here’s the next and in many ways the toughest essay in this darned series. Why is this one so bloody tough? Because there really are no notable SF films, from around the freaking world, that was produced during the 1940s.

For most of these essays my task has been to chose, from a number of influential SF movies, just two and name these as the most influential of their decade. Certainly the next decade up, the 1950s, will prove a challenge. What a treasure of rich, interesting, and diverse films to selection from, but the 1940s? There isn’t anything here, sister.

I am not going to leave this entry empty handed. I am going to find at least one genre movie that had a lasting impact on films far beyond the scope of the picture or its box-office.

My selection is 1949’s Might Joe Young. It has been called, and rightly so in my opinion, a King Kong knock-off. It is the story of a young woman and her pet 12 foot tall gorilla. They are brought out of the wilds of Africa to the wilds of Hollywood as entertainment for a nightclub. The ape goes mad, there is destruction and terror in the streets of Los Angeles. All in all not a terribly original story line, it features one of the stars of the original King Kong, a truly influential film, and the special effects were headed up by Willis O’Brien, the technical wizard who did the effects for Kong.

None of this makes this film particularly important or memorable, the O’Brien supervised the effects work, which were primarily performed by Ray Harryhousen .

Harryhousen’s influence on special effects and film reverberates to this day. In the Final Episode of season 4 for Game of Thrones, when the skeletal wraiths attack from the ice, that scene is pure Harryhousen. Brendan Fraiser fighting the mummies in 1999’s The Mummy is a direct homage to Harryhousen work in the Sinbad movies. Clash of the Titans, 2010, is a remake of Harryhousen’s Clash of the Titans 1981. It is nearly impossible to over state the impact on film and special-effect that this one man had, and his first big break was on this fairly forgettable film, Mighty Joe Young.

The Two Most Influential Science-Fiction Films of the 1930’s

So here’s the next in my continuing essay series. Before I dig into the two films and my arguments for selecting theme, let me talk for a couple of moments about definitions.

Science-Fiction is the genre of literature in which a development, advance, or change in scientific knowledge is critical to the plot, and that the removal of that elements renders the plot impossible.

Influential I touched on lightly in the first essay, but I want to expand here by detailing who and what is influenced. I am not speaking about the general public at large, thought that will nearly always be true as well, but that these films I have selected had an outsize impact on future filmmakers, often for generations.

So let’s get into the next decade, the 1930s.

My first selection is a well-known film, a classic know by huge numbers of people around the world;
Frankenstein – 1931 – James Whale

Certainly this tale has been around a hell of a lot longer than this 1931 film from Universal Studios. The novel by Mary Shelley was published in 1818 and has been adapted to stage and screen many times. In fact the 1931 production was not the first. Thomas Edison made a short based upon the novel (And knowing the man I’m willing to bet no royalties were paid,) that featured a creation scene done with a paper-mache monster burned to ash and run in reverse.

However it was James Whale and Universal’s Frankenstein that set the tone and standard for so many films to follow. It is unquestionably a science-fiction film because Dr. Frankenstein explains about visible rays, X-rays, and his discovery of a ray that generates all life. It is harnessing this ray, not sheer electrical power that revitalizes the monster’s corpse-like construction. This film is the granddaddy of all mad scientist movies. The lone inventor/scientist, working in some ruined, desolate, and gothic locale, that’s this Frankenstein and through this film German Expressionism. This is a film that continues to be referenced years and decades later, inspiring filmmakers to this day.

Things to Come – 1936 – William Cameron Menzies

This is a film that is not very well known outside of genre fans, but it is a critical film in the history of science-fiction movies, Based up the works of and with screenplay by H.G. Wells, this movie was a serious attempt to peer ahead and not only see what may be possible but also explain how we move from the present day to that fictionalized future. These days that is old hat in Science-Fiction films, but with this movie it was fairly revolutionary. Metropolis never explains where the city is, how it came to be, but merely waves it into existence and sets the story in motion. H.G. Wells, always the historian, loved plotting about the connecting dots between his times and his imagined futures; in effect he created the concept of the future history. Movies ever since Things To Come, if they were set in the future, have felt a pressure to explain how that future arrived. Things to Come was also the first post-apocalyptic movie and many to the tropes and plot devices of that genre were first established here. Two final aspects that influenced film making for decades, Things to Come gave us the clean art-deco city of the future that lasted all the up to Logan’s Run, and it gave the idea that people in the future would wear terribly silly fashions.

The Two Most Influential Science-Fiction Films of the Silent Era

This will be the first in hopefully a lengthy series of essays as I yammer away about which two SF films of each period I consider to be the most influential. Naturally ‘influential’ is a quite subjective measurement and you are welcome to comment, argue and suggest films that you think had a greater impact than the ones I suggest.

I will start with the silent period, covering basic 1890-1930, but after that I intend to tackle the question decade by decade.

A trip to the Moon (Le voyage dans la lune) – 1902 – George Melies

I consider this one of the most important SF films from the silent era because this is really the movie that kicked off SF as spectacle. The science was ludicrous and no one making did so under the illusion that this was a reality based adventure. This was about the wondrous and magical effect that the motion picture camera afforded the filmmakers. This is a short film, just 13 minutes long, but it cast a long shadow across the landscape of cinema. This film is the birth of special effect and special effect from this moment onward would remain at the heart and soul of SF cinema.

Metropolis – 1927 – Fritz Lang

Director Fritz Lang is a towering figure in film. The visionary man behind such classics as ‘M’, the film that made Peter Lore an international star, Lang always had a deep and sincere love for Science-Fiction. (In fact it was Lang who convinced Robert A. Heinlein to start writing Young adult novels.) I would argue that Lang’s better SF movie was 1929’s Woman in the Moon (Frau in Mond.) Woman in the Moon is less didactic and pays a closer attention to scientific details while delivering a better story and adventure. (This film was also a favorite of Werner Von Braun who saw it as a teenager and right up through Apollo copied the paint schemes for rockets from this movie.) However, Woman in the Moon simply has not impacted to trajectory of SF films in the manner that Metropolis did.

Metropolis, a sprawling massive production set in a future city divided between the exploited poor and the extravagantly wealthy, set design and social models that were to be copied for decades, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner look and feel can be trace directly back to Metropolis. The sprawling, towering city of the future was born here in this film.

The original print was lost for decades until 2010 gave us a restored version that is close to the original running time, but not quite. 1984 gave us a version where musical Giorgio Moroder revived the film with a soundtrack that included Queen’s Freddie Mercury, Adam Ant, Pat Benatar and many others.

Your thoughts?

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Robert Mitchell Evans

Literary Saboteur