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October 19, 2005
The Science Fiction Canon
John Scalzi announces his release of The Rough Guide to Sci-Fi Movies. He comes up with a list of the science fiction film canon. The ones I've seen are in bold:
The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension!
Akira
Alien
Aliens
Alphaville
Back to the Future
Blade Runner
Brazil
Bride of Frankenstein
Brother From Another Planet
A Clockwork Orange
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Contact
The Damned
Destination Moon
The Day The Earth Stood Still
Delicatessen
Escape From New York
ET: The Extraterrestrial
Flash Gordon: Space Soldiers (serial)
The Fly (1985 version) (Oh, But I've seen The Fly 2 -- the shame!)
Forbidden Planet
Ghost in the Shell
Gojira/Godzilla
The Incredibles
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956 version)
Jurassic Park
Mad Max 2/The Road Warrior
The Matrix
Metropolis
On the Beach
Planet of the Apes (1968 version)
Robocop
Sleeper
Solaris (1972 version)
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope
Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back
The Stepford Wives
Superman
Terminator 2: Judgement Day (But not the original Terminator? WTF?)
The Thing From Another World
Things to Come
Tron
12 Monkeys
28 Days Later
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
2001: A Space Odyssey
La Voyage Dans la Lune
War of the Worlds (1953 version)
Movies I wish I had seen: Sleeper, The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Fly, Delicatessen, Mad Max 2, Alphaville.
Movies that should be on this list: Them!, The Blob (1958 version), Terminator
Movie that isn't on the list because it just isn't canonical, but should be: Dark City
Elaboration on this after the jump...
I'll get to Terminator in a moment, but by ignoring films like Them! and The Blob, Scalzi is giving short thrift to the tradition of American pulp sci-fi. These were the cheesy science fiction films born of paranoia of nuclear weapons and teenage culture.
Dark City doesn't deserve to be on the list, but it should. It was a well written, well-developed sci-fi movie that never embedded itself deeply enough into popular culture. It is the sci-fi movie that deserves more love.
Finally, why did Scalzi leave out Terminator? I wasn't the only one to take issue with this choice. Scalzi argues that T2 "matters more," and in the sense of special effects, I think he's right. However, the original was simply a better film, and in terms of story line, I'm going to say more influential (and, for that matter, better and less beholden to commercial forms).
Posted by Dean at October 19, 2005 6:00 PM