Your top 5 sci-fi movies (and why)

[Paul Farquhar]

Nothing says an SF movie can't also have supernatural elements, even big ones. After all, we have the end of Brainstorm.

How do you determine when something is supernatural?

 

[Paul Farquhar]

While not wrong, if you start getting picky about the horror/SF divide, a number of movies become a problem including Alien.

Something can belong to more than one genre at the same time. Problem solved.

 

[Ryujin]

Sounds like helping to me.

But is it, really, if the motivation is to help protect literally everyone else in the universe and any benefit to us is just incidental to that? "Straighten up or we'll disable all of your tech and roll you back to the Stone Age."

 

[Cadence]

How do you determine when something is supernatural?

Is the tech "sufficiently advanced," or merely "advanced"?

 

[Paul Farquhar]

But is it, really, if the motivation is to help protect literally everyone else in the universe and any benefit to us is just incidental to that? "Straighten up or we'll disable all of your tech and roll you back to the Stone Age."

Doesn’t matter what the motivation was, the aliens sorted out all of Earth’s problems with a big stick. It’s really up there in “we need a really strong leader to sort people out” territory.

 

[Epic Meepo]

Doesn’t matter what the motivation was, the aliens sorted out all of Earth’s problems with a big stick. It’s really up there in “we need a really strong leader to sort people out” territory.

The idea that "we need a really strong leader to sort people out" is, itself, a problem a really strong leader can't fix. So I'm going to say the aliens just replaced a bunch of problems with another big problem.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

The idea that "we need a really strong leader to sort people out" is, itself, a problem a really strong leader can't fix. So I'm going to say the aliens just replaced a bunch of problems with another big problem.

Quite. But not definitely not the "win" that the movie presents the outcome as.

 

[dbolack]

While not wrong, if you start getting picky about the horror/SF divide, a number of movies become a problem including Alien.

I've always thought of Alien as a Haunted House movie in space. But I wouldn't exclude it from the list.

 

[Thomas Shey]

The idea that "we need a really strong leader to sort people out" is, itself, a problem a really strong leader can't fix. So I'm going to say the aliens just replaced a bunch of problems with another big problem.

You do have to accept premise in that movie, or you're reading it as a different movie (i.e. that the robot police really are incorruptable and won't extend their perview beyond what's presented). There's a movie that can be questioning that premise, but TDTESS isn't it.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Quite. But not definitely not the "win" that the movie presents the outcome as.

You have to remember the temporal context it took place in.