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Have you heard of "La Planete Sauvage"? From 1973?
I haven't seen it but that one was also recommended to me as a strange sci-fi movie.
I know about Silent Running because it's one of Ray Manzarek's favorite movies but also, I haven't seen that one either.
But I have seen Logan's Run, which I loved, but it is a little cheesy. I heard that some major studio was going to make a remake.
There's animation in Forbidden Planet?
Are we talking about the same movie?
And we can't forget Space:1999, with Martin Landau.
I've seen a few episodes and I liked it a lot.
And Enemy Mine is great. Thanks for bringing it up.
Saw that in a theatre when I was a kid. Good times.
And "THE ICE PIRATES" with Robert Urich.
So cheesy but so good...
And my favorite "space" movie is 1980's FLASH GORDON with Max von Sydow as Ming the Merciless. Blew my mind as a kid.
Don't forget THE BLACK HOLE!
Another great movie from my childhood.
Holy shit!
I just looked up Logan's Run on the imdb and there is news of Bryan Singer directing. He wants to do that project instead of the Superman sequel, which has been offered to James McTiegue and the Wachowski's, who are "looking at their options".
Here's a plug from me, Warner Brothers: Let those three do whatever the hell they want with Superman. Just give them the OK to go absolutely nuts on it.
They could bring some insano glory to the Superman mythos.
Bullet time?
CGI from heaven?
The Man of Steel?
Great God Almighty Make it So!
I saw SILENT RUNNING when it first came out and the ending has a definite emotional kick to it! The question is why I haven't put the movie on my most favorite movie list. And I don't really have an answer to it so it's good that this movie has come up again. FORBIDDEN PLANET is a 50's classic sci fi movie, dated, but the last part of the movie is truly amazing and the special effects still hold up quite well. LA PLANETE SAUVAGE uses its animation is a fantastic vehicule to capture the very essence of strange and eerie sci fi in its purist form - one of the best examples of hard core sci fi - bringing the audience into a world beyond imagination. As for THE BLACK HOLE (1979) version, it wasn't my favorite, in fact, it was one of disappointment, being stereotypical and under-performed characterization, yet even as I attempt to recall it, the ending did have a special resonance to it.
SILENT RUNNING is a good one and worth mentioning on this thread. It also relates to SUNSHINE'S theme of life support. You all really know much more about obscure sci-fi movies than I do, but I've seen a few. Geof Murphy's THE QUIET EARTH for instance, which impressed me. Murphy's UTU (1983) was a little known but admirable Maori drama.
Enemy Mine and Silent Running certainly more to my liking than Sunshine and Robinson Crusoe on Mars. But the last two have some gorgeous visuals.
I made a little faux pas. I was thinking of "Fantastic Planet." I always get those confused. "Forbidden Planet" is the silly thing with Robbie the robot and Walter Pidgeon - very dated and very uncomfortable for me to watch (being a writer of science fiction).
I actually met Earl Holliman in 1977 through a friend of mine who worked on the Hollywood Reporter, a local trade paper in Los Angeles. Holliman came to my house with my friend in attendance. I fixed dinner for us. We spoke for nearly two hours. He was gracious but seemed distracted, as if he had better things to do than discuss his film career with me (a non-person). I asked him about working with John Wayne when he did the "Sons of Katie Elder." Holliman is still alive though he has not worked in nearly a decade. He turned eighty last year. At the time we met, he had just started a co-starring role with Angie Dickinson on "Police Woman."
Funny, I was a fan of "Forbidden Planet" at the time. (I have since recanted those feelings.) I didn't think to ask him about his whiskey scene with the robot. He always played a kind of whiner. I thought of him as shallow as most actors I met in Hollywood. If you are not talking about them, they just as soon move on. He did have a few funny stories to tell about various actors he knew through the years. He was in a good mood after a few glasses of beer and dished the dirt on several people. My friend, being a reporter, looked the other way. When I asked him later why he didn't want to print any of the rumors or at least investigate them, he told me, "If you want to survive in this town, you have to learn when to keep your mouth shut."
My friend survived a lot longer in LA than I did. I moved away two years later and never looked back.
What is wrong with "Forbidden Planet?" I could state my case in several ways... the stiff acting style, the predictable plot, the silly dialogue ("Hey, get a load of the dame...") or the corny sometimes cheese special effects, such as the rocket sled in miniature pulled through the set by a visible wire... or the flying saucer also held up by visible wires, etc.
Instead, I would like to mention one more overlooked science fiction film, "The man who fell to Earth." While the plot is convoluted and difficult to follow at times, it has a wonderful soul to it. Also check out, "Solaris" (1972 Russia) and a very obscure film called, "Journey to the seventh planet" (1962).
If you go to my website, I have an entire list of science fiction novels that I highly recommend for reading starting with Ursula LeGuinn's "The left hand of darkness." I consider this novel to be the greatest work in science fiction. She is the only author to receive both the Nebula and Hugo awards for two novels back to back, the other being her incredible work, "The Dispossessed."
I mentioned THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH in an earlier post just after the reviews when we started talking about sci-fi movies in general:THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH works both through the very personal style of Nicolas Roeg and because of the other-worldly quality and cool presence of David Bowie, who in his Ziggy Stardust phase seemed very much like an alien to begin with. This is a very interesting film because it dramatizes the exponential longing and loneliness a being from another planet would feel when separated at length from his (or its) whole species and galaxy.Quote:
Don't think one can really say one is "not a fan" of sci-fi, because it is too important and central an approach to "reality." How could one dismiss Alphaville, La Jetee, The Man Who Fell to Earth, Brazil, The Quiet Earth (Geoff Murphy), 28 Days Later, the even better and more pointedly political 28 Weeks Later; Soylant Green, Glade Runner, Gattaca, 1984; the list goes on and on. The quality varies but the significance is so often there. Significace is rarely reached through special effects of the explosion kind we find a lot of the new Star Trek, but production values like Kubrick's can greatly enhance the sense of another reality, which somebody really clever like Roeg can accomplish that with very simple means.
Could we have a link to your website and the list, please?
I agree with cinemabon's comments about FORBIDDEN PLANET but even with these problems, I continue to feel that it remains a 1950s sci fi classic because of its core sci fi storyline and its imaginative eerie horror genre and psychobabble climax along with a fantastic special effects drenched last third of the movie that rivals for me anything I've seen since.
I also believe that THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH was a much more serious and emotionally ripping sci fi classic. I recently watched SOLARIS (1972) again earlier this year and continue to feel that it doesn't hold up as well as a sci fi classic for me personally. I still enjoyed the narrowly crafted and relational focus of the remake starring George Clooney (2002) more than the original. Jeremy Davis had a great performance in the movie. I could never get over the long, long, long car ride towards the beginning of the original movie and Donatas Banionis as Kris Kelvin never seemed to be a compelling character...there was so much of the distant, overly layered foreign density to this movie that oozed and dripped of supposed artistic depth and superiority and heavy characterization and sophisticated dialogue but it just came across as pretentious to me.
Ursula LeGuinn is a heavy weight among science fiction writers.
I thought the Soderbergh remake suffered from boring stretches but maybe I didn't give it enough attention.
I haven't see THE JOURNEY TO THE SEVENTH PLANET (1972), but the writer Ray Bradbury wrote THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES (1950) which contained a great scene regarding a eerie mental creation of reality that was later scripted into a movie version (1980).
It would be a mistake to attempt to compare both Solaris movies to each other because they focus on different issues and Soderbergh's version is really more of a love story with a fantasy twist than a science fiction movie and to compare the remake to the novel would be really stretching it.
I can completely understand how there could be long boring stretches in Soderbergh's movie for many people especially if one is used to more action and activity in the wonderful world of science fiction movie. But I didn't go into this remake expecting such an exciting experience and I became even more entranced by the whole love story angle as such type of movies touch me personally because of my life experiences (oh now I'm beginning to sound like a recently nominated U.S. Supreme Court appointee). I don't think that paying more attention to this movie would provide an answer to whether or not this movie was truly good or not, this movie would be boring for those who expects the excitement of the alien mysterious storyline plot, this isn't it. For some, this is just a sci fi movie with a number of boring scenes. It would be like me having to watch golf on television until later in life when I came to appreciate not the relatively slow action but what went into the action.
Correction to my post about Bryan Singer and Logan's Run.
Apparently that is really old news.
He turned down Logan's Run in order to make Valkyrie.
The Superman sequel is in limbo right now.
The Wachowski's have nothing on their imdb listing indicating anything about Superman.
Singer wanted Jude Law to play General Zod (which I think is an awesome idea- Law could really show us a side of himself that would prove he can act like a badass) but apparently that too went nowhere.
Warner Brothers could make Superman into a more sucessful franchise than Nolan's Batman. Genius and greatness is just waiting to be unleashed. I've said it before: Superman is a character tailor-made for the movies. TAILOR MADE.
It has the potential to be the greatest series of action/adventure films ever made. Why they aren't marshalling supreme talent to lift this mythology into the cinematic pantheon I have no idea.
Every single element is there. It's just a matter of assembling all the creative forces to bring it to life. Superman Returns was fantastic. But I know the potential is there to really go majestically nova with it. Superman is a GOD. He is an amazing super-hero. An amazing concept. That icon deserves a movie that just blows people's heads off with it's coolness. Warners did it for Batman, there's no reason and no excuse why they can't deliver something absolutely insane with the Superman character.
I'm following how they produce the next movie like a HAWK.