2001: A Space Odyssey - 1968The most celebrated, mystical
and transcendent of all space films up to that time was one that visualized
space travel with incredible magnificence and seriousness. Kubrick's
respectable, influential film 2001: A
Space Odyssey (1968) (with less than 40 minutes of dialogue), based on Arthur
C. Clarke's novel, restored legitimacy to the science-fiction genre. The
impressive film featured an incredible opening enhanced by Richard Strauss'
Also Sprach Zarathustra, a 'Dawn of Man' sequence, majestic views of outer
space and drifting space stations, enigmatic monoliths, the breakdown of a
malevolent HAL super-computer (with Douglas Rains' voice), an astronaut's
journey to Jupiter (paralleling man's own growth of intelligence), a hallucinatory
light show trip through space, and a cryptic ending featuring a super-being
space fetus. Kubrick's film won the Oscar for Best Special Effects in 1968. A
sequel was produced sixteen years later, director Peter Hyams' 2010: The Year
We Make Contact (1984).
Planet of the Apes - 1968After 2001's success, Hollywood
produced many more space adventure films, including John Carpenter's
directorial debut film and parody - the unusual sci-fi satire Dark Star (1974),
about the crew of spaceship Dark Star on a ten-year mission to destroy planets
in deep space. More serious science-fiction films, Robert Wise's Star Trek: The
Motion Picture (1979) and Robert Zemeckis' Contact (1997) with Jodie Foster
examined further space journeys, contacts with alien life, and metaphysical
questions about man's place in the universe.
The Planet of the Apes Series (1968-1973) and After:
A popular, clever, mostly successful and serious five-film
series of classic simian films about apes that have evolved into an intelligent
society, derived from Pierre Boule's novel Monkey Planet, originated with
Planet of the Apes (1968). The first film in the series depicted a
post-apocalyptic, post-nuclear futuristic planet (Earth) - revealed in the
film's startling conclusion by a half-submerged Statue of Liberty. Its advanced
make-up techniques reversed the social positions of intelligent humans and
brutal apes to slyly criticize racial stereotypes. It also examined the effects
of technology upon humankind. Four sequels appeared over the years, plus a
live-action and animated TV series, and a recent feature film remake:
1. Planet of the Apes (1968) d.
Franklin J. Shaffner Astronauts
launched in 1972; they experience a time-warp and emerge in post-nuclear
holocaust 3978 A.D., near the "Forbidden Zone" (NYC)
2. Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970) d. Ted Post Second mission sent; also emerges in post-apocalypse 3955
A.D.; underground New York City discovered; ended with Earth's total
annihilation
3. Escape From the Planet of the Apes (1971) d. Don Taylor Earth, Los Angeles, 1973; a sequel and prequel to the first two
films
4. Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972) d. J. Lee Thompson 1991, Los Angeles
5. Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973) d. J. Lee Thompson North America, in the year 2670 A.D.
(in the film's prologue and epilogue), with a cut or flashback to 2003 A.D.
(about 12 years after the finale of # 4) in the aftermath of a thermo-nuclear
war (since the last film), with irradiated mutant humans (ancestors of the
mutants in the # 2 film) living in the ruins of the Forbidden City, and apes
living at rural Ape City (3-day's journey nearby)
Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011) d. Rupert Wyatt An
origin story (a prequel) intended to be occurring 2,000 years before the events
of the first Planet of the Apes (1968) film, from approximately the year 2010
to 2016. Its premise was similar to the one found in the fourth film, Conquest
of the Planet of the Apes (1972).
Planet of the Apes (2001) d.
Tim Burton Outer space in the year
2029 A.D., and in the future approximately 600-1,000 years later on an unknown
Earth-like 'planet of the apes,' and then on Earth? (in the twist ending)
Other 70s-80s Science Fiction Films:
Silent Running - 1971Other futuristic films were produced in
the 1970s and 1980s, many with the effects of technology run amok - whether it
was faults in human-tinkering technology or social engineering, or robot theme
parks with aberrant androids. The dystopic films included Silent Running
(1972), from Douglas Trumbull (special effects creator for 2001: A Space
Odyssey (1968)) in his directorial debut, a sci-fi environmental story about
the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust. A monk-robed, hippie ecologist named
Freeman Lowell (Bruce Dern) decided to refoliate a destroyed Earth with the
last surviving vegetation on an orbiting space station/greenhouse called the
Valley Forge. [The film's anthropomorphic drones or robots named Huey and Dewey
inspired the R2D2 robot of Star Wars (1977).
Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky's science-fiction
masterpiece Solaris (1972), a rebuttal to Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey
(1968), portrayed a water-dominated planet (with a huge, fluid-like brain for
an ocean) that was disrupting the minds of cosmonauts on an orbiting space
station. [The film was remade twice: Paul W. S. Anderson's Event Horizon (1997)
starring Laurence Fishburne and Sam Neill - a standard horror film about a
spaceship that opened a gateway to Hell, and Steven Soderbergh's
similarly-titled slow-moving Solaris (2002) with George Clooney as the
investigating psychologist.] Soylent Green (1973) provided a view of
deprivation in 21st century life in the year 2022 where dying people on the
over-populated, ecologically-unbalanced planet were made into human food
("Soylent Green is people").
Director Mike Hodges' Terminal Man (1974), a Michael
Crichton-based thriller with George Segal, featured a violence-prone scientist
implanted with a malfunctioning computer chip. L. Q. Jones' cult film A Boy and
His Dog (1975) was advertised as "an R rated, rather kinky tale of
survival." It was set in the post-apocalyptic year of 2024 in the
wasteland of the SW US and told of the survival of an 18 year old scavenger
named Vic (Don Johnson) and his telepathic talking dog named Blood. The story
involved a subterranean "Downunder" society intent on using VIc as a
"sperm bank" to impregnate 35 women before being terminated. And
Bryan Forbes' creepy cult classic The Stepford Wives (1975), adapted from Ira
Levin's 1972 novel, provided a savagely-chilling view of perfect, 'ideal'
suburban wives (docile android/robotic replicas) created by anti-women's lib
husbands in the upscale town of Stepford, Connecticut. [The feminist satire was
remade almost 30 years later by director Frank Oz, The Stepford Wives (2004) as
a dark comedy, with Nicole Kidman as the Katharine Ross character - an
automaton housewife and TV executive, and stars Matthew Broderick (as Nicole's
husband), Bette Midler, Christopher Walken, and Glenn Close.]
Westworld - 1973In writer/director Michael Crichton's
technophobic Westworld (1973), a black-hatted, programmed android-cowboy robot
(Yul Brynner) at a computer-controlled vacation resort of the future - a
high-tech Disneyland for rich vacationers (on the island of Delos) with three
worlds: Medieval World, Roman World and Westworld - rebelled, went beserk, and
murdered customers. Robots could be identified by raised ring formations
circling the finger joints of their hands. This influential film presaged many
future films with its creative themes and story elements: a resort park
(Jurassic Park (1993)), artificially-intelligent cyborgs (Blade Runner (1982)
and The Terminator (1984)), and pre-packaged virtual experiences (Total Recall
(1990)). Its lesser sequel Futureworld (1976) portrayed another scheme of
Westworld's scientists to create more clones - android world leaders. Death
Race 2000 (1975) told the story about a 21st century cross-country car race
with points scored for killing pedestrians.
Michael Anderson's hip sci-fi classic Logan's Run (1976)
presented life as hedonistic in the 23rd century inside a sealed domed city
following some kind of catastrophic disaster. Michael York played the role of a
black-clad 'Sandman' with orders to kill anyone who 'ran' toward 'Sanctuary'
after they turned 30 years of age, rather than facing a ceremonial 'carousel'
rebirth. And the imaginative and claustrophobic Demon Seed (1977), taken from
SF author Dean Koontz' novel, expanded the menace of 2001's HAL computer by
presenting a super-computer Proteus IV that sexually terrorized its creator's
wife.
WarGames - 1983Disney's sci-fi adventure Tron (1982) was set
inside a computerized videogame, where the designer/creator battled his own
computer games. It was one of the first films to use extensive
computer-generated graphics. In director John Badham's sci-fi fantasy WarGames
(1983), young computer-game player/hacker Matthew Broderick accidentally broke
into one of NORAD's military computers (WOPR - War Operations Plan Response)
and played a 'simulated' Global Thermonuclear War. And in the sci-fi cult film
and cautionary romantic fantasy Electric Dreams (1984) with a music video
style, a nerdy architect's empowered home computer named Edgar (voiced by Bud
Cort) fell in love with the guy's own upstairs neighbor and cello-playing
girlfriend Madeline (Virginia Madsen) - and became threatening. The film
featured songs from Giorgio Moroder ("Together in Electric Dreams"),
Boy George and Culture Club, and ELO's Jeff Lynne. The comedy/sci-fi film The
Last Starfighter (1984), the first film to feature realistic CGI effects,
depicted an expert video game player (Lance Guest) recruited by an alien-mentor
named Centauri (Robert Preston in his final film appearance) to participate in
an inter-galactic battle. Peter Hyams' socio-political Capricorn One (1977)
hypothesized the problems of faking a flight to Mars on a soundstage in a
television studio. And Hyams' outer-space film Outland (1981) consciously
patterned itself after the plot of the classic western High Noon.
Blade Runner - 1982John Carpenter's sci-fi action film
Escape from New York (1981), produced in the days before CGI special effects,
told of a ravaged 1997 Manhattan Island with the US President held hostage and
Kurt Russell (as one-eyed, anti-hero mercenary Snake Plissken) to the rescue -
it was followed by the inferior sequel Escape from L.A. (1996). Cops and
cyborgs (robots with human bodies) battled in the cult, film noirish,
thought-provoking SF classic from Philip K. Dick's classic novel Do Androids
Dream of Electric Sheep; Ridley Scott's
Blade Runner (1982) starred Harrison Ford as Rick Deckard, an ex-LA
detective (a futuristic Philip Marlowe) tracking down and retiring rebel
android 'replicants' (semi-human) in the Los Angeles of 2019, over-populated by
Asians. The film's superior production design depicted a perverse, bleak,
post-apocalyptic future. In Sergio Martino's grim post-nuclear tale 2019: After
the Fall of New York (1983), a leather-clad survivalist named Parsifal (Michael
Sopkiw) was given a mission to rescue the last fertile woman on Earth - in
Manhattan.
Similar films featured cyborgs as crime-fighting cops of the
future in industrial wastelands, such as in Paul Verhoeven's first film RoboCop
(1987) (a variation of the classic Frankenstein (1931)) and its lesser,
imitative sequels in 1990 and 1991. A year earlier, an endearing, adorable,
sophisticated robot named 'Number Five' (Johnny Five) appeared in director John
Badham's Short Circuit (1986). Paul Michael Glaser's The Running Man (1987),
set in the year 2017 in a world run by an evil government, found Arnold
Schwarzenegger as a framed cop (Ben "Butcher of Bakersfield"
Richards) condemned to participate in a violent TV game show (hosted by actual
game show host Richard Dawson) that mocked pro-wrestling, celebrity
competitions, game shows, and other forms of reality programming.
Star Trek - The Motion Picture - 1979Late in the 1970s, Star
Trek - The Motion Picture (1979) (and its many film sequels about the starship
USS Enterprise and its crew) rode the popular wave of the cult television
series of the 60s. Another slick, epic-sized adventure film with many sequels
was Superman (1978), starring a handsome and romantic Christopher Reeve as the
film counterpart of TV super-human George Reeves. Futuristic cartoon,
comic-book superhero characters became swashbuckling sci-fi films, including
Flash Gordon (1980) and the dark Batman (1989). The Right Stuff (1983) and
Apollo 13 (1995) turned the fictional devices and processes of early science
fiction into fact-based reality.
'Sci-Fi' Films with Revolutionary Visual Effects and Set
Design: in 1982
Seven films revolutionized film set design and visual
effects, and have become some of the most influential science-fiction/supernatural
films in recent film history:
TRON (1982) - a pioneering film in computer graphics Blade
Runner (1982) - the model for all futuristic tech-noir dystopias with bleak,
night-time LA cityscapes (influencing films such as Batman (1989), Strange Days
(1995), and Dark City (1998)) The Dark Crystal (1982) - an influential fantasy
adventure masterpiece featuring Jim Henson's Muppets E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) -
Spielberg's classic alien visitation film
Pink Floyd the Wall (1982) - an expressionistic musical, the first
feature-length music video (or "MTV" film before MTV's popularity
surged)
The Road Warrior (1982, US release) - the prototypical
post-apocalyptic action film and sci-fi western
Poltergeist (1982) - a seminal supernatural thriller with a
possessed young child
Various British/Foreign/Non-American Sci-Fi Films:
A Clockwork Orange - 1971One of the best British sci-fi
contributions was the most controversial, Joseph Losey's These Are the Damned
(or The Damned) (1963), a complex and grim, allegorical film about radioactive
children raised at a secret government installation in an experiment gone awry.
Francois Truffaut's first color and English-language film, Fahrenheit 451
(1967), with a score by Bernard Herrmann, adapted Ray Bradbury's classic
science fiction book to the screen, and foretold a futuristic world where books
and reading materials were banned and destroyed by groups of Firemen with
flamethrowers, including Montag (Oskar Werner).
Stanley Kubrick's followup to his 1968 space opera was A
Clockwork Orange (1971) - a violent, political allegory about mind control and
freedom of choice adapted from the Anthony Burgess novel. It told the story of
chief droog Alex - a rampaging anti-hero character (Malcolm McDowell) who was
rehabilitated by institutional, aversive shock-treatment torture ('Ludovico
therapy') in his perverted, altruistic futuristic society. Nicolas Roeg's The
Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), starred rock star David Bowie as an alien who
became trapped on Earth while on a mission. German director Wolfgang Petersen's
Enemy Mine (1985) featured two mortal enemies marooned on an alien planet - as
symbols for political combatants (USSR and the US): a reptilian-like Draconian
(Louis Gossett, Jr.) and an earthling pilot (Dennis Quaid), who are forced to
overcome their prejudices in order to survive.
The Road Warrior - 1981A post-apocalyptic, nihilistic
trilogy from Australia's George Miller contained both film noir and western
genre elements in its sci-fi tale, reminiscent of Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai
(1954), Sturges' The Magnificent Seven (1960), and the Sergio Leone "Man
with No Name" spaghetti westerns. The films were dark, desolate and grim
in nature and set in a scorched-earth Australia with scarce supplies of water
and gasoline:
the low-budget, independent original film Mad Max (1979)
introduced Max (Mel Gibson) as a vigilante after the killing of his wife and
child by a gang of marauding motorcycle punks
its action-packed, thrilling sequel The Road Warrior (1981)
(aka Mad Max 2), a survival story, again with star Mel Gibson as a vengeful
vigilante defending himself and a colony of pioneers beset by roving gangs of
Mohawked outlaws
Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985), a third Mad Max film that
ended the series; set 15 years after the previous installment, in a
post-nuclear apocalyptic wasteland with Tina Turner as the villainous queen
overlord of Bartertown
Nineteen Eighty-Four - 1984 Director Michael Radford's
Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984), a remake of the original 1956 version by Michael
Anderson (with American stars Edmond O'Brien as Winston Smith and Jan
Sterling), was the second (and definitive) adaptation of George Orwell's
nightmarish novel about a dystopian, totalitarian society named Oceania, with
John Hurt and Richard Burton (in his final role). [1984 also existed in a 1954
BBC version with Peter Cushing - adapted by Quatermass' Nigel Kneale. Its
influence was also demonstrated in Apple Computer's famed TV advertisement
aired in 1984, and filmed by Ridley Scott.] The words "Big Brother",
"thought-crime", "thought-police", and
"Orwellian" have since become commonplace terms.
Terry Gilliam's visually imaginative black, sci-fi comedy
Brazil (1985) also envisioned a nightmarish oppressive bureaucratic world of
the future, as did George Lucas' THX-1138 (1971) and Woody Allen's comedy spoof
Sleeper (1973).
Source : filmsite.org
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