calimac

So some time thirty years ago this month,

sturgeonslawyer and I and our friend Jo piled into her car, because she had one, and drove from our college down to the biig theatre (the one that features in Michaela Roessner's Vanishing Point, then unwritten) to see the new skiffy film.

And we watched it, and we came back out, and someone asked me, "So what did you think?" and I replied, "Not bad." That has remained my settled opinion. That it changed the cultural environment of SF film is beyond question. But the film itself? Not bad. A rousing cliched adventure story which at least was not boring, which is more than I can say for some of its successors, both in the series (Phantom Menace) and out (Raiders of the Lost Ark).

The series jumped the shark for me at the end of the second film, when Vader tells Luke "I am your father." I didn't believe it then, and I believe it even less now. It's a fudged-in retcon, I'm sure of it. Ghosti-Wan's abashed explanation in the third film, as to why he "lied" in the first one about Vader having killed Luke's father, is strained beyond credibility.

Also beyond credibility in the third film is the equally obviously retconned scene where Luke and Leia turn out to be siblings. We were watching that on first run - none of us knew what was going to happen - when Luke made the announcement to Leia. At that moment,

liveavatar, sitting next to me, turned to me and said, "Somehow, I always knew." Followed immediately by Leia saying to Luke, "Somehow, I always knew."

Incidentally, that turns one scene in the second film, where Leia kisses Luke on the mouth to spite Han, into inc-st. LJ in its quest for purity should delete all Star Wars fans.

About the prequels, the less said the better. I once read a story in which the Beatles got back together for a reunion tour, and they were awful. Who'd have imagined, if something equivalent to that actually happened, how awful it really would be?

So if Star Wars isn't the greatest SF film of all time - and it has aged rather badly - what is?

grrm says Forbidden Planet. I wouldn't. It's got a solid plot - not surprising since it's by William Shakespeare - but the actual writing is poor. And the acting! Except for Walter Pidgeon, who's fairly good as always, everybody in it is lifeless at best.

My list of the three greatest SF films has:

2001: A Space Odyssey - a perfectly paced, awesome epic, beautiful to watch, and the special effects still hold up. Deep and complex enough to set the viewer thinking, but not too much so to understand.
The Man in the White Suit - a 1950 Ealing comedy about a meek scientist, played by Alec Guinness, who invents an indestructible fabric. The story is mostly about the social effects of the invention, which makes this one of the few SF films that could have been a leading story in the top-ranked SF magazines of its own day, instead of reflecting the SF of 30 or 40 years earlier.
Dark Star - one of the Gemini astronauts described the spacecraft as "an orbiting men's room." This is perhaps the only SF film to honestly depict that side of space travel. And funny, funny, and rather wistful too.

I made this list some years ago, and there have been good SF films since then, notably A Scanner Darkly last year, but I'll stand by this.