It’s the end of the first decade of this new Millenium. The singularity is at hand. The oceans are swelling and even I, your resident prescient sage can only imagine what lies ahead for us. For the first time I really feel like we made it. We’re really living in the future. Science is no longer something we have to go to. It’s not once removed from our daily existance, it’s now in us and all around us and the super science future of nano, quantum, robotic and bio is just right there , inches away.
Science Fiction movies now have to fight pretty hard to even keep up with now, much less tomorrow. Here’s my list of the best Science Fiction movies of the past decade. Since I’ve yet to see “Avatar” except maybe in tiny chunks due to all the many previews I’ve seen, this list may need to be amended. I’m hoping “Avatar” is good enough to do some bumping.
1. Pitch Black
Vin Diesel plays Riddick in this old school creature feature about a cool, almost Zen-like, shiny eyed criminal being transported from one hell to another on a prison ship when it crash lands on the worst planet ever. Unchained, Riddick finds an old human colony, now empty and full of spooky. Along with our almost slo-mo and calculating, thinking mans action hero, is an even more disturbed group of passengers that serve as far more complex alien snack food then in your usual less interesting Sci-Fi fare. This movie should have been the big momma that hatched a slew of increasingly awesome Riddick themed extravaganzas. Instead, we took a back step with the sequel, “The Chronicles Of Riddick”. More Riddick movies are on the way and we’re told and assured that they will be a return to form.
2. Minority Report
In this shiny Spielberg directed vision of a sparkily perfect Sci-Fi utopia, based on yet another work of Phillip K. Dick, something is rotten at the core. In this future, there is no murder. Slightly vegetative bald precogs see the upcoming drama where you are about to brain your brother in law with the 4 iron after he refuses to return your weed whacker. The precogs see and dream your every dark, but dedicated, bloody scheme.
Tom Cruise stars as the dude tasked to protect the three seers and also to hunt down the soon to be naughty. In “Minority Report”, the third precog is the trouble maker. Where all three see a murder, the future is set in stone. If a third disagrees, it was probably just some evil passing thought from a driver getting cut off. What happens though if the third report, the Minority Report, is purposely ignored? “Minority Report” is chock full and fully packed with awesome Sci-Fi tech and is probably a foreshadowing of our future where the police and government can follow your every move for the greater good of the never ending war on terrorism.
3. 28 Days Later
“28 Days Later” is not only wicked Sci-Fi but it also is one of the scariest movies ever made. “28 Days Later” is finally a Zombie movie we can believe in. Industrious science types, blindly creating every little widget they can imagine, regardless of the consequences, bio-cook a transmissible goo that reduces a person to a raging, mindless, red eyed killing machine by turning on or turning off inner brain bits that either elevate us to empathy or descend us into really fast, human chewing, engines of frothy murder.
Cillian Murphy wakes up from a coma only to find he is alone in the hospital and eventually also alone in the streets of London. Cillian quickly finds out that in truth he wishes he was alone as packs of virus or neurotransmitter oozing sprint Zombies tear screaming out of every nook and cranny, desperate to add him to their team or to rip him a new one. Cillian soon finds a few other survivors who aid him in the quest to stay alive until the Zombies starve. This is Sci-Fi Zombie-land, with the emphasis on the Science.
4. Wall-E
Pixars “Wall-E” is my emotional favorite here among the other group members. The little bastard really struck a nerve with me. It’s his attitude. Wall-E is sentient, sentimental and knows just how bad he’s got it. Alone long enough to store up enough experiences to be self aware, he wakes up to the realization every day that he has no life. But still, with endless good humour and painful innocence he keeps plucking away, doing his job when there’s no longer any reason to do it. The Earth has been vacated of humans and there’s nobody left to care. Wall-E spends his day, with his only friend the indestructible cockroach (who isn’t considered life apparently), moving trash from one pile to another.Imagine starting life up as an inanimate object, when suddenly Poof, you’re aware and understand love but love is impossible.
That’s gotta sting. Of course, Wall-E keeps the faith long enough to meet a girl, fall hopelessly in love and infect her with his vulnerability. Being in love makes you wonder sometimes if it’s worth the risk. But of course by the time you understand the danger of the potential loss, you’re already caught. Wall-E goes on to help save human kind from an endless cruise into low G corpulence but that’s really not the message I got. “Wall-E” is all about the importance of being earnest.
5. Moon
Does technology take away something from our humanity? Does it isolate us? In “Moon”, the feature directorial debut of the very talented Duncan Jones, the character played by Sam Rockwell is isolated in every way. He’s stuck alone, on the Moon, mining energy packed Helium 3 for an under-energized Earth and the most valuable, but disposable, tool he must use to do his job turns out to be himself. “Moon” was made on a tiny budget but proves that we in the Sci-Fi community instinctively recognize and appreciate that old world, old school method of telling a good story.
6. Cloverfield
New York gets wrecked, again. This time it’s different though as we see the action not from the eyes of military or science types fighting and scheming to protect the Big Apple, but from the shaky hand cam visions of ordinary bystanders, trapped in Manhattan as a giant, virtually indestructible monster power stomps it’s way through midtown. We never have any clue at all about what’s going on in the big picture. We just know what the people we are following would know as they run screaming down the streets or creeping through the dark subway tunnels. “Cloverfield” is wonderfully paranoid and claustrophobic and makes you feel completely helpless. In other words it’s a perfect simulation of a real life disaster.
7. Iron Man
Alone out of some of the recent great super hero movies of the past decade, “Iron Man” was pure Sci-Fi. I go back and re-watch parts of “Iron Man” just to see his gadgets, computers (transparent glass monitors!) and completely geektastic helmet heads up display, soon to be featured in a future augmented reality sunglass version. Don’t laugh, it’s happening. The visionaries behind “Iron Man” somehow managed to make the whole suit thing believable and so therefore I tried to imagine wearing the thing. I’m a little height deprived so I tried to figure out how could I get my feet into the thing and still have full sized armour. There would have to be some height enhancing robo feet. A dude in a five foot five inch suit of armour just isn’t as intimidating as he needs to be. When you’re scary and big, threat is often all you need to solve your problems. We little guys have to demonstrate and this approach can be problematic.
8. Serenity
Since as you might have noticed, there is a complete lack of the words Star and Wars smushed together in any of my top eight best Sci-Fi movies of the decade. I imagine you’re also betting that the final two will probably not contain any references to light sabers, droids or Natalie Portman (although I wish I could mention her) we will, as a team, just have to make do with the spirit of the original three movies and just forget that the next three happened. This is a tragedy but I’m hoping that the final tale in the live action “Star Wars” movie saga has not yet graced our big screens but is gestating even now in the belly of the world building genius of Mr. Lucas and is resting comfortably in the script writing hands of someone, please god, other than him.
So if it’s only the spirit of “Star Wars” that we have have left to us then the movie “Serenity” has done it’s very best to keep that happy feeling alive for us. “Serenity” goes about world building with the love a wookiee gives his crossbow. There’s a fantastic earnestness in the acting and production that, along with a great adventure story, makes “Serenity” one of the greats. Did you know that before “Serenity” was “Serenity” it was a television show called Firefly? It’s getting late to hope that Firefly or “Serenity” will ever return to us but if you buy yourself the box set of Firefly and the blue ray for “Serenity” and then also a copy for every single soul you know, perhaps the networks or studios will get the hint and bring back at least the spirit of what “Star Wars” used to be.
9. Children Of Men
You don’t need pretty lights, droids or jet booted suits of armour to be great Science Fiction. “Children Of Men” is hard boiled, dystopian story telling. In the near future, the human race is in some simple but final trouble. Women have stopped being able to give birth. Why this is happening is unknown. Did we mess too much with Mother Nature? Did we put too many chemicals in the shreddies? Nature is always looking to try and balance the system. Humans, being brighter than your average primate, can unbalance the system on purpose for it’s greedy purposes. Is there a genetic evolutionary trigger hiding in the helix, ready to dispose of us?
In “Children Of Men”, humankind is totally bummed out about the absence of the little ones. You would think it would be quieter, but no way. People, seeing the end, are going out with an eye on urban destruction. Clive Owens plays a guy named Theo, drifting along in the end times when an old flame returns with a mission. An African fugee (refugee) has been found and she’s preggers. Theo, apparently, is the only one left or handy with the moral and ethical nuts to see this miracle offshore to the place science guys are busy trying to fix procreation and once again allow humanity to go about it’s business. I’m sure we’ll have learned our lesson.
10. The Road
Like “Children Of Men”, “The Road” deals with the truth. If women stopped making babies, how would we react? If suddenly, after some great cataclysm, the Earth stopped making food, what would we do? How would we survive? The answer in “The Road”, based on the pulitzer prize winning novel by Cormac McCarthy is, we wouldn’t. Since we humans like to store stuff for a rainy day and also pump a metric crap load of preserving chemicals in our foodstuffs, we would likely linger on, far past the time when plants and animals, dependant on a healthy Earth and still a required component of it’s ecosystem (unlike us) died. In “The Road”, the father leads the son south, day by day, as the Earth dies. All that matters is each other. The movie honestly expresses the rules that there is no way out. This is all you get. “The Road” tests us to see if we can deal with a story that treats us like adults.
Well that’s the list. It’s my opinion of course. Yours may differ. I support your right to vigourously call me out and suggest your own movies. Already I’ve been asked why Star Trek didn’t make the cut. Well, I watched it again recently and while it had a lot of fun moments, mostly due to the super cast, the story was weak brother. There was some mighty big and lazy holes the writers didn’t think to fill. Kirk finds Spock on the same planet he gets marooned on? Pardon? Why was he dumped off the Enterprise in the first place? Isn’t there a brig? Please. That whole young Kirk meets Spock Prime thing was completely lame. Oh and Scotty just happens to be there too. You have to admit there’s some stupid there. In the beginning, the original Star Trek was about the writing first. I’m hoping the sequel does it better.