One of my favorites ever though is The Blood of Heroes, I like that movie so much I wrote like 2000 words about it a couple of years ago. But basically if you like storytelling in the Mad Max movies you’ll love it. Of all the many Australian Mad Max inspired films this is the best one to me, mostly because instead of going into gratuitous exploitation like all of those it’s…an underdog sports movie! And it’s got a simple story but everyone performs the hell out of it. I mean this is a post apocalyptic sports movie starring Rutger Hauer, Joan Chen, Vincent D’Onofrio, Delroy Lindo, Hugh Keyes-Barne, it’s crazy. Joan Chen bites someone’s ear off. A guy with a metal head makes a short speech about smashing people’s brains out for honor and how he would never hurt someone for personal reasons while dramatic synthesizer music plays. EVERYONE in the movie looks like they’ve been through some shit and are not to be fucked with, awesome makeup. It’s directed by the guy who wrote most of Blade Runner.
It’s only flaw is it came out in 1990, long past when folks were tired of “What if a Mad Max were about…” movies even though it’s nothing like most of them.
That reminds me of the only 60s SF show on German TV: Raumpatrouille - Die phantastischen Abenteuer des Raumschiffes Orion. They had an iron as their central energy source! And yogurt cups on the ceiling, and lots of drinking and being sexist.
Stargate, SG1 and Atlantis have a special place in my heart, I even liked some of Universe, but after the kid was taken over by the ship AI it got to be a little too much.
Space 1999 has one of the greatest theme tunes of any TV show ever. It’s grand to reflect space but also funky as fuck… because the moon has been knocked out of orbit and is hurtling further out into deep space and everybody is probably going to die or something. I don’t know.
haha I always lumped that show in with Hercules and Xena in my mind (same network? same production company? I dunno) but despite the fact that it looked interesting I could never get into it, beyond a, uh…pubescent teen boy level.
As a kid, I got up at 4:30 am on Saturdays to watch that stuff! Remember very little about it, but it was just so cool looking! Also: UFO has a similar style, I think?
For movies, I really like Lockout (2012, directed by Luc Besson). It’s basically Escape From New York but on a space station and also kind of cyberpunk.Been a while since I watched it but definitely remember it being enjoyable.
Also Dredd (2012) I love for having a clearly defined and fairly modest scope to the story, in a way telling a smaller story is a really good way of making the world feel bigger.
The way the animism that you often see in Japanese sci-fi and fantasy movies shows up in the brief burst messed up cyberpunk flicks that came out of Japan in the mid 80s to mid 90s (Tetsuo: The Iron Man is probably the most famous) is something we don’t get often from sci-fi released outside of the country. But that super messy and more intimate merger of human and machine makes for striking imagery even on the lowest budgets. And ALL of these are about as budget as you can get.
Several of these movies, when they began production, their creators went with filming in black and white less for stylistic reasons and more to hide cheap effects and sets, but that doesn’t make them unpleasant to look at, it only helps as we see ones like Rubber’s Lover or Death Powder look stunning.
Rubber’s Lover can be grueling to watch due to its content honestly, but it’s one of my favorite looking films ever, and I honestly can’t imagine it being in color even though when filming first began that’s what they planned on.
Also along these lines, Person of Interest is 75% extremely mediocre vigilante crime procedural and 25% genuinely excellent cyberpunk show about artificial intelligence and surveillance.
What worked well about it was that the AI was basically the only sci-fi element, so it is awkwardly trying to use current level tech to exert itself. So it can watch any surveillance camera and call any phone, but still has to exist on a server and hire a bunch of guys with trucks to move that server around. At one point you find it was designed to delete its memory in order to limit its sentience, but hired a bunch of office workers to print out and re-input that data so it could remember.
By the point I stopped watching the main plot was about a shadow war fought by two omniscient AIs through human devotees, but sadly it couldn’t seem to commit to that plot fully, and kept doing small stakes organised crime episodes which drove me away. I suspect it was sold to the network as a crime show when what they really wanted to do was the sci-fi, hence the constant struggle.
Your mention of the Adjustment Bureau is a good way in to what I was going to say, which is that I will watch any adaptation of Philip K. Dick, whether it turns out good or bad. (The Adjustment Bureau is adapted from a PKD short story).
I had to read the whole thread to make sure nobody else mentioned it, but ALIEN muhfuggin NATION:
This show was based on a movie that came out in '88, it followed about a year later and only lasted one season. I guess Fox was a really new network at the time and they weren’t confident enough to keep it going, but the season ended on a cliffhanger and people liked it enough that they made a series of TV movies continuing the story over the next several years.
To me this show was cool because it is a super pragmatic take on the whole “what if aliens” thing, it’s basically a pretty standard police procedural with a twist. The idea that there is suddenly a totally unknown race integrating into our society is an opportunity for a lot of social commentary.
I don’t know about y’all, but will consume anything, anything, post-apocalyptic. Doesn’t matter if it is good, there’s just something about post-apocalyptic worlds that get my goat. Not necessarily sci-fi, but I wanted to chime in.
