I'm not sure how long this list has been knocking around (this is the 2005 edition), but since it's just come to my attention, I thought I'd take a look.
Top scoring sf film is Russian post-apocalypse tale Stalker, directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, who had previously directed Solaris, also on the list.
Sneaking in towards the bottom of the list is 2001: A Space Odyssey, but that's about it for sf. Compare that to the 2004 list, which featured most of the obvious omissions: Blade Runner, The Matrix, the Star Wars trilogy; plus one I had forgotten was about a minister, Signs. Plus this surprise entry, which I seem to remember also had aliens in it. All of which are in my video collection, and will probably get revisited on the blog when I get time to watch them...
The compilers of the list admit to favouring lesser-known movies - which presumably puts Star Wars and The Matrix at an instant disadvantage - but that still seems a poor showing for movie sf, doesn't it? (Having said that, I don't know what I'd knock off the list, other than some of the obscure foreign movies I've never heard of, which is no doubt very unfair.)
I'm almost afraid to do this, but the obvious way to end a post like this is to ask what spiritually significant sf movies have been missed, and open those up for discussion...
3 comments:
I admit it was only a TV movie, but The People movie that came out in the seventies was actually not half-bad. Pretty spiritual, too. (You know, Zenna Henderson's The People stories?)
I don't remember that the Disney movie of Escape from Witch Mountain had the spiritual stuff in it that Alexander Key's novel did, but something about it haunted me as a kid. (Key was always writing novels where a child was lost in a strange world less moral than his native one, and somewhere out there, the kid's relatives were looking for him or her. Escape from Witch Mountain was along these lines, IIRC, though not as touching as The Forgotten Door.)
You know, I was just thinking about this topic recently - sf movies with spiritual elements. Signs is one, though it's more of a sf comedy than anything.
One of my favorites, which I watched with my sf small group, is Donnie Darko. I believe a case can be made that it's a Catholic movie, and in fact I've read at least one review by an agnostic which did exactly that.
I must have missed that in Donnie Darko. Great movie though, I love that kind of wierd stuff.
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