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Space.com's Top 10 Space Movies of All Time
Comatose51 writes "Space.com has posted a Top 10 Space Movies of All Time list based on reader ratings on each movie. Apollo 13 is currently the #1 movie, followed by Star Trek: First Contact at #2, and Wrath of Khan at #3. I was surprised by Apollo 13 at #1, since I initially equated space movies with sci-fi. However, I don't disagree with it. What do other Slashdotters think, or suggest as good space movies?"
I think Serenity hasn't been around long enough to sink in to the culture properly, but god, such a good movie. Firefly was a good series too.
First Contact before Empire Strikes Back? I liked them both, but c'mon now. Overall I think the top ten are solid choices, but the order leaves a little to be desired.
That's the shit that feds me up
khan is #1 for me, just because it resonates so deeply with me. i, too, was left stranded on ceti alpha five.
. . . and Heavy Metal . . .
and I'm sorry but Episode IV practically invented the "summer blockbuster" for better or worse. It should be listed first.
I'm laughing at clouds.
The original Solaris could well be the best movie of all time.
Bar none. Period. Certainly no other space movie stands close.
Uhm, IMHO, of course.
They don't really define what constitures a "space movie," though. Does it take place in outer space? What if it's set entirely on another planet? Blade Runner is one of their candidates, but it hardly involved outer space at all. Are they using the term just to avoid the annoying flamewars about what defines "science fiction?"
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Dude, it's SPACE movies, not SCI FI movies. How the heck is Back to the Future, albeit a very good movie, considered a SPACE movie?
How could this movie not at least make the top three?! Shocking lack of taste, I say. Shocking.
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Then I nominate "The Right Stuff". Also I think this list is a little too Star Trek heavy (but I'm probably in the minority on that).
You are so boring that when I see you my feet go to sleep.
2001 is one of the best scifi movies.
Also don't forget StarTrek the motion picture. The original was long in spots but none of the others were as deep. The ending was great.
I never watched the series, and just happened to catch the movie two days before it disappeared from my local theatre. It was the matinee, and there were three other people in there with me. I have to say, I've been avoiding going out to see movies in recent years, because there always seems to be some asshat sitting behind me who feels that it's perfectly ok to discuss plot points in a normal voice, or be in a constant state of candy rustling, or other noise that just ruins the whole thing.
... empty ... walking out of those movies. All special effect, no humanity, no heart. Is anyone else yawning these days at the latest, greatest special effects? I mean, it's been a while since I was really wowed by this stuff - I think Terminator II was the last movie that really made me go "hey, neat!". The Matrix was ok (the first one only, please, not the travesty that the other two became), but it was mostly the style (and bullet time) that make that movie.
Anyway, back to the real point: Serenity has restored my faith in movies. Star Wars (the recent run of prequals) almost killed off my hope totally. I just felt so
Serenity was a return to something that George Lucas almost had in his grasp with his very first Star Wars movie: A sense of real people, experiencing real life, only in a very, very different environment to ours. This is true escapism - not Grand Councils and "sheratons in space" (thanks Joss), but real, gritty, imperfect, cowardly, funny, wisecracking people. The sort of characters you would probably like if you met them in real life. Who can imagine interacting with any of the recent Star Wars characters in real life? Sheesh.
Joss Whedon is one of those people who has a talent for mixing the real with the fantastic in a funny, witty way. I think Serenity is right up there at the top of my list of all-time favorite movies. It rocks because it has heart, which so many movies these days lack. The big mistake action movies make is that if you don't care about the characters, then who cares what happens to them? In Serenity, I cared. I took my wife to see it for a second time (had to travel a bit, since it was gone from most places by then). She is not a Sci-Fi fan, but I had a hunch, and I was right - she loved it. That says something.
I also went right out and bought the Firefly DVD set, and we both watched it all the way through over the next few nights. I have to say I am totally amazed that this show was canceled. They canned this in favor of what? More reality sludge? Yikes.
Any Top 10 Space Movie list that includes ST The Undiscovered Country yet leaves out Heavy Metal obviously cannot be taken seriously. And as much as I like Trek, I really don't think ST First Contact belongs on this list either. I do, however, agree with ST Wrath of Kahn. I also take offense at the absence of Silent Running.
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I've got two words for you: 'Dark Star'.
David Furst, Melbourne, Australia.
They missed Airplane II. Easily the best space movie EVER!
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But I think the top ten is a little biased in favor of movies that are part of a series. I guess that's because the characters are better known ( having spent more time with them ) and because it's easy to carry over karma from other films in a series. ( For better or worse. )
My top five would be, in order:
1) 2001: A Space Oddessy
2) The Right Stuff
3) Apollo 13
4) Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
5) Star Wars: Episode IV
Too bad the list is just space related movies, rather than space related stories in any medium. I'd love to throw Babylon 5 in the mix.
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but what about Dark Star? Come on people, it was co-written by Dan O'Bannon, who later reused the "alien mascot" section of the film as the basis of his script for Alien FFS!!
Directed by (the) John Carpenter as well.
And then there's Silent Running, although wabbits being nuked is probably not a big vote winner among the majority of popcorn-crunchers.
Spaceballs forever!
I thought the list was too heavy on the "air/sea battles transplanted into space" genre (nee space opera), and light on movies with deep emotional content. It looked like one generation's list. To go back a little bit, I'd nominate Silent Running as one of the better movies (especially for the sense of isolation in space, the challenges of living in such an environment, etc.) Besides, with a gorgeous soundtrack by Peter Schickeley (of PDQ Bach fame, amusingly enough), could it be all bad?
I've been watching that movie for over a decade and I still don't get that joke...
I've got to wonder what standard they used? Apollo 13, 2001 and Contact were solid and obvious choices but a lot of the rest were largely fantasy films. If hard science was a factor most of the rest of the films barely gave science a nod. If it was a science fiction list, several were definately fantasy and Apollo 13 was factual. Seemed to more reflect box office than anything. Another pointless ten best list.
When you consider that this film was made in 1968 it wasn't until 1977 when Star Wars appeared that you could get something to actually compare with in quality. And even though that film is almost forty years old it is still a film that you can watch. The only thing that it actually missed was the political situation in the world of today, but wh coul tell that at a time when the Soviet Union was at it's height and al-Qaeda wasn't known. The worst terrorists at the time was PLO and Lebanon was a holiday paradise.
Personally I don't give much for the Alien films, but it's a matter of taste.
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- Star Wars 4
- Star wars 5
- Alien
- Aliens (the sequel to Aliens)
- 2001: A Space Oddysey
- Blade Runner (well if Contact is on the list, why not this?)
- Star Wars 6
- Star Wars 3
- Planet of the Apes (1968 version)
Yes, i've gone against convention and used digits not roman numerals for the Star Wars films. I'd be interested to see are larger list - Star Wars/Trek domaination makes it seem more like a top 5.The ONE time those GNAA asshole could post this link and be on-topic, they are conspicuously absent from the discussion.
I don't quite know what to say.
LK
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Apollo 13 is a great first choice, along with 2001, Contact and the Wrath of Khan, while First Contact and The Undiscovered Country being the two most overrated of the Star Trek films. Star Wars is more mythology than "space movie" so I don't think they belong on the list. I'm a bit disappointed that plenty of good (and not so good) 50's and 60's space movies were ignored for this list. It's like the guys making the list were all born after 1975.
I find it very sad, that the list contains little less than a bunch of star wars/star treck movies. Who was the voting audience? Space Odyssey only #5? No Aliens? (OK, at least Alien is on the list). Where is "Blade Runner"? "Total Recall"? "Dark Star"? Hell, even "Stargate" or "Starship Troopers" deserved to get on that list more than some other entries ("Contact", for example, is a very good book, but a mediocre movie - to say the least).
Some obvious missing classics:
Forbidden Planet
Silent Running
Powers of Ten (ok, it's a short feature, but still a classic)
And some good ones that are better than ones that made the list:
Aliens
Galaxy Quest
(And if the new Battlestar Galactica series counted it would be near the top of my list.)
"Office Space"!
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I know I'm the minority on this but I hated First Contact. They ruined the Borg in the movie. What made the Borg unique was their total alien like qualities. Total logic, no emotion, total devotion to a single goal, etc. It made them a different kind of enemy, something special.
In first contact the introduce the Queen Borg who asks just like you average generic power hungry villian. No longer are the borg this unstopable, uncarring machine, now the Borg are just a the standard typical enemy you can try to seduce, reason with, etc.
How sad to take such an interesting race and completely ruin it's interesting qualities.
It was a wonderful movie - and it was about /going/ on a space mission. Not too much of science fiction in there.
It should have been there on the list. 'Contact' sucks, really, except for '22 hours of static on the tape'. It's more about Jodie Foster as this astronomer(!), and her fixations. The part where she uses the 'man can fly' analogy is the worst, and very obvious.
But hey, don't flame me, I'm clueless.
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I thought Serenenity was a very good movie, which leaves me more annoyed that like effectively all hollywood SF movies, it had no real concept of astronomy, how really far it is between planets in a solar system. (Or how vastly far it is in a galaxy, which Firefly sometimes declared to be its setting.)
A solar system is not like a western frontier where you meet other ships along the trail. And a solar system with hundreds of moons around many planets will have, depending on the place in the orbit, immense vast distances between planets on opposite sides of the star, and relatively short ones between moons, but still a vast void on all trips. You are not going to happen to run into Reaver ships.
Now as I said, most shows get this really wrong. To some extent the shows with FTL get it "better" even though FTL is itself fantasy, at least you get a reason to not treat the differences as so vast. Hyperspace jumps, another fantasy, are even better.
2001 got space right. Apollo 13 did (duh.) Few other films and very few TV shows ever did.
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I find it hard to believe that Space.Com, of all people, left out the first movie really worthy of the term "Space Movie"! Sure, it's old and dated, but Destination Moon was the first movie to even TRY to take the idea of space travel seriously. It stands with Forbidden Planet and The Day the Earth Stood Still as the only even half-way decent science fiction movies of its day, but those other two really aren't space movies. They may have space ships, but they're not about space travel, per se.
Someone said that a good war movie isn't about what people do in war. It's about what war does to people.
I agree with that sentiment and I think one could perhaps adopt that here: A good space movie isn't about people doing things in space. It's about what space does to people.
And in that category, there really isn't any movie like "2001". I don't know any movie which has tackled the issues of space travel like that. Man and machine. Man and space. The mysteries of the universe. Alien intelligence. It's all in there, almost like a guide to the philosophical issues of the space age.
Not that it has any answers. You've got to find those on your own. But it poses questions nobody had dared do before in Sci-Fi films. And it manages to do it without being noisy about it, unlike, say, The Matrix, which is quite overt with its philosophical pretentions. (Or worse, the contemporary 1968 "Planet of the Apes")
Add to that the stunning special effects for its age which were truely groundbreaking, the great directing by Kubrick, including some now-legendary segues like the bone-to-spaceship cut. And his usual incredible attention to detail. (missing though, that Pan-Am and the Soviet Union would be gone by 2001)
A lot of people are talking about Star Wars. Really, I'm a huge Star Wars fan, but you just can't compare them. Star Wars was just a revival of the old Flash Gordon matine. It's a great movie in it's own right, but it doesn't really aim higher than to be entertaining, and it's not really a space movie. I mean, the fact it's in space isn't terribly relevant to the plot, is it?
Well, that's what I think anyway.
I cant believe i neglected it!
I did read the book. When it first came out. In 1985. And I like the movie.
I learned a long time ago that translating a book to a movie inevitably involves a lot of compromises -- at least with any book over a hundred pages. In the case of Contact, I think they made them admirably.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
I understand that this list is most likely biased to the teen to early 50's crowd, as most kids under 12 would fall asleep watching a movie like Contact and most senior citizens would not be interested in a movie like star trek 2. Many of my favorite movies are those that I saw before I was a teenager; Star Wars 4-6, Star Treks 1-3, Alien(s), and even Flash Gordon.
Having said that, I have a little kid and when his little friends come over to play, we sometimes try to get them to settle down and watch a movie when it starts getting late. We have tried so many movies, mostly kids movies, but nothing ever works. They keep running around playing.
When the Star Wars 4-6 dvd set came out, I tried getting them to watch the original Star Wars for the first time. It only held their attention for about 15 minutes. I tried episode I and II at different times but both had the same effect. When the episode III dvd came out, one of the other kids parents told me she and her kid, age 5, hadn't seen it yet. My kid also hadn't seen it yet so I decided to give it a try. Then the unspeakable happened, the kids sat quietly and watched in amazement. I had never seen anything like it. I will admit that I fast forwarded through any parts of the movie where both anikan and padme where on the screen at the same time.
The thing that I realized was that my kid was experiencing the same thing I experienced when I was about his age and I saw Episode IV. Sure most of us in our generation would never place a movie like Episode III in our top ten space movie list but it's quite possible that 20 years from now this movie could be in the top 5. How many of our parents, who are now seniors, have nostalgic memories of shows like the Lone Ranger the same way we have nostalgic memories of sitting in a theater watching Star Trek 2 for the very first time?
I'm sure there of hundreds of stories like mine.
Before everyone here starts oozing with happiness about Serenity, it should be noted that IT FLOPPED. Despite a lot of attention, lots of dedicated fans, and great reviews, it was not even able to recap production costs at the box office. Look at this years yearly box office to get an idea of just how badly it did (for those tired of scrolling, it is in place 77).
Now, with DVD sales I am sure the studio won't end up in the red when all is said and done, but $25 million for a high budget high profile movie is terrible. Serenity will probably be pointed to in the future as a good reason not to use cult DVD followings as a reason to greenlight films. Sorry to tell ya all.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
Core dumped
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
Well... The list is biased and severely americanized. There is not a single movie on it shot outside the US. Hello yanks? Ever heard of Solaris? Stalker? It is also missing what is for me possibly the best sci-fi movie of the 90-es. Gattaca.
We can continue, but frankly, this poll is best ignored.
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Right, how could they forget the ultimate in space movies?
It has all the elements the other movies have and more.
Lets start or own list.
#1 Spaceballs
#2
if your pants fit well, it's not only because of the pants
I'm disappointed. That movie is so bad the badness overflows and it becomes good again. Also, has 2001 got an operating system named after it?
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Planets aren't static points, they are in a constant state of motion. Spacecraft don't travel in straight lines, that would require insane amounts of energy. The trick is to get from point A to point B in a reasonable amount of time without an excessive expenditure of energy. See Hohmann transfer orbit.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
He travels through time and space?
*ducks*
What's so bad about being lazy? What if there was a war and nobody showed up?
I agree about Gattaca, but do note this list is about space movies rather than sci-fi ones, and includes a number of non sci-fi films, including both docudramas (like Apollo 13 and The Right Stuff) and documentaries. Gattaca does have space-related elements, but the sci-fi focus is on earthbound genetics. Whether it's sufficiently space-related to be on the list I couldn't say; I didn't see it there, but the way the list is set up it's hard to know for sure if a movie is on it unless one sees it there.
Well, you can do something about that, if you like. It's still accepting votes, and many of the rankings have already changed a fair bit since the Slashdot summary was written.
Prior to that revelation, however, she, the scientist, finds herself in a situation not unlike that of her religious friend - she's just had a life-changing experience, she knows she's had it - yet all she has left to go by at that point is, it seems, faith. No evidence, no anything. Had everything been explained, had there been certainty, or had it been yet another little space adventure, the movie would have missed its own point. I'm not sure I agree with that point, nor is it a particularly brilliant point, but I did enjoy that movie more than any of the others in that list.
(I also find Khaaan painfully dull, for reasons I could not adequately explain, so shoot me already.)
That wasn't her dead father, btw., it was an alien lifeform masquerading as her father to "make it easier for her" (whether that makes sense or not) and, perhaps, to make it more mysterious for us. Frankly, I liked how there were but a few scant hints at an interstellar transport network, no more than a short glimpse or two of an illuminated alien city... in a way this was more impressive and felt a lot larger than the over-crowded scenery of several Star Wars films combined.
That is the most frustrating thing. If they would say the movie is one million years in the future then many of the things they portray would gain believility since it would be impossible to relate to such a different time in history.
We know that almost for certain we will recognize many things of human society in 500 years althought certainly many will look like magic to us, but certainly one would be able to digest how things progressed if given a chance.
The point is that in 500 years we know we will not be in the technological situation portrayed in the movie, and this, amongst many other things, makes it completely absurd.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
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