The 1990s science fiction movie poll

fifth element and johnny mnemonic tie. I called it. waterworld a distant third

Some good ones on here but a pretty grim list overall. Starship Troopers probably.

but uh... Naked Lunch? what is sci-fi about that?

I thought starship troopers was the sequel to naked lunch

12 Monkeys
Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country
Johnny Mnemonic

^^^these are my favorites, although i've watched and enjoyed a ton of stuff on that list.

stargate = huge guilty pleasure.

what kind of fucking crack are you guys smoking

see you at the party richter

alien: resurrection is a fun alien movie.

what's the most '90s on here? pi?

It is! Also winona ryder. and the room full of disfigured mutant ripleys!!

ron perlman & dominique pinon!

lawnmower man is most 90s surely

xp yeah maybe ryder content is key here

I think JM is the most 90s of the bunch honestly! Smack in the middle of the decade, all up in Japan and shit, and would you look at this soundtrack: http://www.amazon.com/Johnny-Mnemonic-Various-Artists/dp/B000002AZF

ha, quien es mas '90s, stabbing westward or:

1. Pi (Symbol)r2 - Clint Mansell
2. P.E.T.R.O.L. - Orbital
3. Kalpol Intro - Autechre
4. Bucephalus Bouncing Ball - Aphex Twin
5. Watching Windows - Roni Size
6. Angel - Massive Attack
7. We Got The Gun - Clint Mansell
8. No Man's Land - David Holmes
9. Anthem - Gus Gus
10. Drippy - Banco De Gaia
11. Third from the Sun - Psilonaut
12. A Low Frequency Inversion Field - Spacetime Continuum
13. 2Pi (Symbol)r - Clint Mansell

(not a rhetorical question)

ha i misunderstood what tom was responding to, there.

alan rickman in 'galaxy quest' is grebt... a mobius-strip of a performance, even.

for the love of mike, Jordan, I cringed thru Johnny Mnemonic once, and I'd give that version of Keanu a tongue bath.

shortlist:

City Of Lost Children
eXistenZ
Mars Attacks!
The Iron Giant

i haven't seen johnny mnemonic since '96 probably, except for a little bit on tv. i have no objective sense of whether it's at all decent, just fond nostalgia.

Not quite the Hackers soundtrack.

Pi is the only one that has a character die from trying to do maths that is too hard.

i mean it has dolph lundgren AND henry rollins AND ice-t.

SPEAKING OF ICE-T WHERE IS TANK GIRL?

people all enjoy eXistenZ as OTT camp right? EXISTENZ IS PAUSED!!! *plop*

oh dude where IS tank girl? oh man did I fuck up

anybody who wants to say that a movie with mutant kangaroo ice-t in it doesn't qualify as science fiction can suck it, btw

just getting that out of the way ahead of time

eXistenZ is so fucking terrible, but i love the other three morbius choices

xp: I don't do camp. Tank Girl (saw for free) man be even worse than Mnemonic. Ice-T did plenty o' shit except for that Walter Hill movie.

The Iron Giant is one of the few great US films of the '90s, but is it SF, hmmmmmmmmmm.

JJ, "New ports are kinda tight," it may be a gay thing

did anyone see New Rose Hotel? it is approx. 10000000x worse than Johnny Mnemonic. it has christopher walken, willem defoe, and naked asia argento yet manages to be completely unwatchable.

it's kinda funny to watch walken basically improvise the script and pull out his stock lines from other movies, though.

So tempted to vote for one of these:
Demolition Man
Freejack
Judge Dredd

but I was predictable and went for Starship Troopers. Is The Postman as bad as they say?

Morbz' list is actually pretty OTM

(altho should I be surprised Morbz is no fan of Starship Troopers?)

should I be surprised both of you look down your nose at fun

nyah nyah

in what world is Starship Troopers not fun

or Mars Attacks! Best death by yodeling scene ever!

The only one of these that I saw and enjoyed is Dark City.

Galaxy Quest!

http://www.geocities.com/missipyle/pics/gq9.jpg

Easiest choice ever. So funny from beginning to end.

man galaxy quest has such an amazing cast

oh shit daryl mitchell is a paraplegic now?!? jeez

i voted TOTAL RECALL on a whim

Galaxy Quest is great but I dunno if anyone would love it who isn't overly familiar with Star Trek

but i also like galaxy quest, 12 monkeys, the fifth element and city of lost children

i've seen cube more times than i'd like to admit.

people all enjoy eXistenZ as OTT camp right?

I'm not sure I'd say it was camp, but definitely an OTT romp. Unless that's your only requirement for camp, in which case THAT'S COOL, BRO. It was on my shortlist, but I voted for City of Lost Children, as I figured it might not get much top vote love.

eXistenZ is not camp.

at least not in the way that, say, Mommie Dearest or Showgirls is camp

i voted TOTAL RECALL because it's awesome.

That's a sad selection of films.

it isn't really! I'm more impressed by it than I expected to be when I started compiling

I am too... but its still bad, especially compared to the 80s

ya, there is nothing remotely sci-fi about a movie that tells the story of an intergalactic war with space bugs

how did it even get on this list... must have been some filing mistake with the 90s action parody poll

lol

leaving it in here and leaving out terminator 2 is wilful inconsistency but I guess that's threadstarter's prerogative

now that must actually be some kind of mistake

tombot despises terminator 2 iirc

In movies sci-fi isn't a form the way horror or comedy or drama are. Content is what makes sci-fi sci-fi.

For example Alien is a sci-fi movie in content but a horror movie in form, Blade Runner is sort of a neo-noir,
Wall-E is sci-fi played as an animated family adventure movie. Most successful sci-fi movies are action adventure in form.

I guess.

anyway, poor Contact, eh?

I guess.

nice work lb *high fives as i skate past u*

lol

IF I MAY, to my understanding science-fiction speculates hard abt possible scientific advances/discoveries and the implications of these. Starship Troopers speculates hard abt militarism and propaganda, which are very much part of the world as we know it. This probably makes someone like Philip K Dick as much a writer of contemporary dramas as of science-fiction. Haven't gotten this all worked out obviously and you're just as valid claiming that space-bugs = sci-fi

science-fiction speculates hard abt possible scientific advances/discoveries and the implications of these.

no this is just what 'hard scifi' is

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_science_fiction

tbf tbf I think it's arrogant to say what's 'scientifically possible' given we don't know shit about our universe & possibly never will

except caek obvs

well... all of a life is a 'fiction' if u think abt it.

they shd just be called science movies rly

also all sci-fi is about 'now' if u think about it

2001 a space odyssey is a period piece!

http://cdn.uproxx.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/pta-disband.gif

The Island of Doctor Moreau: Somehow, weirdly, better than I expected? Brando in IDGAF mode is basically hilarious (and at times seems to be channeling Ian McDiarmid's Emperor!), Kilmer trying to act like a guy going crazy comes off as appealingly goofy, and it's always kind of a pleasant surprise to watch one of these 90s sci-fi movies where, whatever else might be going wrong, at least the sets and costumes and props are made of stuff. Thing doesn't look cheap anyhow.

The biggest problems have to do with the underworked plot and Thewlis's character, who for half the movie has no one to talk to and no clear immediate goals he's working towards. Probably also needed a more fundamental reconsideration at the level of, who really cares about human-animal hybrids (GWB aside)? Just not a really fundamental fear in 1996. They should have pushed the body-horror angle, maybe had one throwaway character who we get to know, who then wakes up and looks down and finds that Brando has replaced their hands with lobster claws, or something. It could be more like Saw. Once it gets to the rebelling-monsters stuff, we're in Planet of the Apes territory and it's just hard to get that worked up about it.

But, come on:

http://media.sfx.co.uk/files/2012/02/Fashion-moreau.png

Is he wearing a Flava Flav clock y/n?

no, but movie would be improved measurably by reworking brando as the hype-man for his little person buddy

http://www.standbyformindcontrol.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/moreau.jpg?9d7bd4

Also just rewatched Waterworld, which I can't say has gotten any better or any worse. Now that the budget is no longer some unprecedented absurdity it plays a little better, though you still just see money washing around in every shot - so many sets, so many explosions, so much stuff. I liked that about it really. Costner's character is still a hateful, alien bastard to whom it's impossible to relate - I think I admire that more now, since it's so clearly not driven by any kind of commercial instinct or Screenwriting 101 rules. Lavish career suicide. Everyone else is just kind of ...there. Dennis Hopper chews his lines up but he's just the tip of the goofiness iceberg in a movie that never really explains how this flooded world works. Sorta seems like Hopper's gang of Mad Max jet-ski bandits would have pretty much killed everybody off by now. So I guess as a "science fiction movie" it's basically a failure, but it's pretty good-looking I'd say.

omg y'all strange days is so horrible, just watched, kind of stunned at how long and stupid and self-congratulatory and gratuitous it was. just ugly and unpleasant and gesturing at all kinds of areas where it could Say Something, but not saying it.

oh wait there's a whole thread for that, nevermind

this week's dud: The Lawnmower Man. yikes, the CGI... but really the problem is the hodgepodge plot, a mangle of Dreamscape, Flowers For Algernon, a Tron type deal I guess, needlessly cluttered up by the religious angle and the evil military guys. Was this awesome if you saw it when it came out and you were 12?

no

Freejack 0

Had to actually see these results just now to remember that I actually saw this movie. In the theatre.

saw /johnny mnemonic/ and /virtuosity/ as a double feature the other night, part of anthology film archives's "1995: the year the internet broke" series. the context, and the crowd, massively improved johnny m, which is still a mess but a pretty lovable one. at least it's trying to cram in as many crazy ideas and characters as possible, even if it's at the expense of having a satisfying studio-movie narrative. Virtuosity is terrible, mostly enjoyably so but there's some half-baked prison violence and police brutality stuff near the beginning that kinda takes it away from being just a sloshy good-time bad movie. crowe and washington are giving it 100% at least.

i was pretty harsh on /strange days/ upthread. i've been convinced it's a way more interesting film than i gave it credit for and really should give it a rewatch.

Demolition Man 1

I think this might have been me

i was pretty harsh on /strange days/ upthread. i've been convinced it's a way more interesting film than i gave it credit for and really should give it a rewatch.

― Doctor Casino, Sunday, 8 March 2020 19:59 (four weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

you werent, you shouldn't be, it isnt, you shouldnt

this week's dud: The Lawnmower Man. yikes, the CGI... but really the problem is the hodgepodge plot, a mangle of Dreamscape, Flowers For Algernon, a Tron type deal I guess, needlessly cluttered up by the religious angle and the evil military guys. Was this awesome if you saw it when it came out and you were 12?

LOL, I was actually 12 when this came out and, no, it definitely wasn't awesome.

wow, i've forgotten most of the stuff about that movie that i mentioned in that post.

good decision

omg y'all strange days is so horrible, just watched, kind of stunned at how long and stupid and self-congratulatory and gratuitous it was. just ugly and unpleasant and gesturing at all kinds of areas where it could Say Something, but not saying it.

― Doctor Casino, Wednesday, February 18, 2015 11:23 PM (five years ago) bookmarkflaglink

i like strange days a lot but hard for me to say any aspect of this post is wrong

I don’t think I’d vote for it on a best sci-fi poll, but Galaxy Quest is easily the best film on this list in terms of quality.

not sure there's an "easily the best" option under any heading meself tbh, several movies here i love and think are really strong efforts

Considered watching 12 Monkeys the other day (don't think I've seen it since its theatrical release), remembered the plot, revised my consideration.

I do not care about 90% of these but Galaxy Quest is grebt.

A TS: Postman vs. Waterworld might be interesting. But for me it would come down to Olivia Williams vs. Jeanne Tripplehorn, and that would be sad because they are both dear to me. Terrible movies, of course.

so many bad opinions itt

mh, are you saying that you liked Waterworld?

sorry for the monday morning negativity

there are also so many good opinions itt

Galaxy Quest is indeed great

Strange Days is terrible, just like p much every other Kat Bigelow movie

I saw Lawnmower Man *in the theater*. It is also awful.

I think at the time i was still mildly curious about the potential of this newfangled CGI stuff

If you've seen the (yes, completely awful) film The Lawnmower Man but have yet to read the Stephen King short story 'The Lawnmower Man', I would suggest that you do so ASAP. Never has Hollywood more faithfully adapted an existing work. It's almost eerie.

I saw most of these when they came out, and for the most part, not since then. I have to go with my memory of how psyched I was upon exiting the theater I'd vote for Jurassic Park, though I'm baffled as to why T2 is not on the list.