The Ten Top Science Fiction Movies that Never Existed

Revenge of the Jedi

This is a funny and pointed article about the sad state of science fiction movies today. It talks to a great extent about how cynical and ignorant concerns took over the artistic concerns of movies that were never made but should have been, or were made much weaker than their conception would have indicated.

0 thoughts on “The Ten Top Science Fiction Movies that Never Existed”

  1. Hm… I’m down with complaining about science fiction films, but if one is going to make a top 10 list of never existed, should a better “Doom” film and a “Starcraft” film really be on there? Seriously, to me, the article itself reads as the problem to me more than anything it complains about.

    My top 10 list would include a cool Shards of Honor film, or a Left Hand of Darkness film, or something like that — certainly not an attempt to fix the Doom film or make Starcraft.

  2. Guy, it seems to be working now.

    John, I think you’re basically right; it’s not a brilliant article, and Starcraft is hardly the argument the dude should be making. Nonetheless, I feel his disappointment about Alien3 (which wasn’t terrible, but certainly wasn’t as good as the previous two, for precisely the reasons he gives) and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (which, again, he’s right on about).

    And the Star Wars prequels and Matrix sequels, well, that’s shooting fish in a barrel, but I have this glimmer of hope every time I read an article like that, that the future filmmakers of our culture will have read them, and realize that the content of science fiction matters a lot.

  3. Fair enough.

    Still, Alien3 was written to be a film about Ripley accepting her own death, which I don’t think is a bad idea in principle — though it wasn’t the action-filled blockbuster that David Wong wanted. I liked her having the queen inside her and thus the alien not wanting to hurt her, and that there was nothing to do about it. It just was executed poorly, probably in part due to the production problems mentioned (though I don’t know anything in particular about them).

  4. You know, John, that’s a good point: I really like the theme of Alien3; I just didn’t think the implementation was that great.

    I love the “you become what you hate” thing about the Queen inside Ripley. I love that she dies, never having gotten home. I even liked that the alien was built out of a little, harmless dog. I just didn’t care as much about the characters as I did in Alien; they weren’t as human to me.

    Nonetheless, the idea of the lid being off, and Earth being infested with these things could have been a statement about the Military-Industrial complex; it could have been about ecology and tribalism and other human features. It could have been a much bigger movie.

    In the end, the Aliens came to Earth in Aliens vs. Predator. And man, that was nongood.

  5. The reality is that if you are going to spend millions and millions of dollars making a movie with high-end special efects, that movie needs to appeal to teenage boys and it needs to be made for distribution on the worldwide market. So, yeah, these movies are going to be dumbed down. One, because teenage boys are not only willing to forego thematic sophistication in their movies they sometimes shun it outright. And, two, the screenplays need to be on a basic enough level so they don’t suffer from translation.

    If filmmakers are really interested in doing real sci-fi, they have to work on a much smaller (and cheaper) scale. Whether or not you like them as movies, “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” and “Code 46” are both examples of the kind of smart science fiction films I think we can reasonably expect. They’re both (relatively) low budget movies and they’re not at all reliant on special effects.

  6. Jon, I agree. A Scanner Darkly was a really enjoyable movie that, according to mt hasty Internet research, cost a tenth of what Minority Report cost.

    On the other hand, this site says that A Scanner Darkly lost money. There are no international figures for the film there, though, and other sites report that the film cost $8 mil, not 20.

    I think we’re gonna see a lot of change as time goes on. As production gets cheaper, the small, thoughtful, and weird motion picture will come into its own, like the fiction game is now.

  7. “I think we’re gonna see a lot of change as time goes on. As production gets cheaper, the small, thoughtful, and weird motion picture will come into its own, like the fiction game is now.”

    I completely agree!

    (I’m struck, now, by the question of how people can use stuff like YouTube to distribute little, quirky, sci-fi movies. I’m sure it’s being done already – I’ll have to check it out.)

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