Part 2 – The Near Perfect
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Part 1: The Masterpieces |
Part 2: The Near Perfect |
Part 3: The Excellent |
Part 4: The Very Good |
Part 5: The Solid Craft |
Part 6: The Dependable |
Part 7: The Flawed |
Part 8: The Failures
This tier runs on single decisions that reorganize everything around them. Brazil begins a catastrophe with one wrong letter on a form, Escape from New York has its hero complete the mission perfectly and then secretly destroy the result, and Total Recall gives the audience a checklist in the first act and ticks it off for two hours.
The other pattern is withholding. Them! spends forty minutes on an investigation before showing an ant, Kiss Me Deadly never names what’s inside the case everybody is chasing, and Starship Troopers refuses to tell anybody it’s a satire.
I prefer this tier to plenty of films with far bigger reputations. Every picture here trusts one idea to drive the film and holds its nerve at the point where a studio note would have told it to explain. Executives still believe an audience needs everything spelled out, and these films make fools of them. A movie that bets everything on one wrong letter on a form will always get more of my patience than one that hedges every scene.
Every rating is the one carried by the review it links to. Ties are broken by year, and this is the second of eight parts.
Colossus follows its instructions perfectly, and RoboCop is a man fighting the instructions somebody else wrote into him. Build them properly in the Deep Character Handbook.
1. The X-Files – “Squeeze” (S1E3, 1993) [full review]
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RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.1/10
"Hutchison plays him entirely still, and the stillness is the performance."
Glen Morgan and James Wong wrote the third episode of the first season and effectively invented the monster-of-the-week format that sustained the series for nine years. It aired in September 1993 to an audience that had no idea what the show was going to become. Doug Hutchison plays Eugene Victor Tooms as entirely still. He barely moves, he holds eye contact past the point of comfort, and the performance is built on an absence of every twitching mannerism the part invites an actor to reach for. Chris Carter created the series.
The premise is a mutant who hibernates for thirty years between feeding cycles, giving the episode an investigation with dated evidence. Fingerprints from 1903, a case file nobody will take seriously, and a pattern that only reads as a pattern across a full century. Harry Longstreet directed it. The liver extraction is never shown and the episode is better for it. Bile on a floor, a ventilation grate, an elongated shadow, and the audience assembles the mechanism without being handed a single frame of what happens in those rooms. Mark Snow scored the series.
The last shot is the one people remember thirty years later. Tooms in a cell, watching a food slot, and the camera pushes in as he smiles. Nothing is resolved about what he is or how he came to be that way. Donal Logue appears as an agent.
That smile is why this episode leads the tier. Hutchison does less than anybody else in the cast and he’s the one I remember afterward, and that tells me how badly most actors overplay their monsters. My only gripe is that the case file scenes run a touch long before Tooms is back on screen. The rest is as close to perfect as television got in 1993, and it makes the twitchy, muttering creeps in other shows look cheap.
2. Westworld Series – [full review]
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RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.5/10
"A mystery box pays once, and this one had four seasons to fill."
Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy built a first season that’s close to perfect and three subsequent ones that demonstrate what happens when a mystery box has nothing left inside it. HBO canceled it after the fourth and removed it from the service entirely. Evan Rachel Wood plays Dolores.
Season one runs two timelines thirty years apart without announcing that it’s doing so, and the reveal reorganizes everything. The construction is fair, the evidence is visible on a rewatch, and almost nobody worked it out before the episode that states it. Jeffrey Wright plays Bernard.
The loops are the best idea in the show. Hosts run scripted days repeatedly, the same conversations with the same cadence, and the horror arrives when one of them begins noticing the repetition while still being unable to deviate from any part of it. Ed Harris plays the Man in Black.
Anthony Hopkins plays Ford as a man who built a world and can’t stop rearranging it, and Thandiwe Newton’s Maeve is the strongest performance in the run. The bicameral mind material gives the first season a theory of consciousness that the later seasons abandon entirely.
The decline is instructive instead of merely disappointing. Each season adds a new conspiracy layer above the previous one, the park stops being the subject, and by the fourth the show is explaining its own mythology to an audience that’s stopped asking about any of it.
3. A Trip to the Moon (1902) [full review]
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RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.1/10
"A jammed camera produced the effect the medium was built on."
Georges Melies made a fourteen-minute film in 1902 with hand-painted color applied frame by frame by a workshop of women in Paris. He built the sets, designed the effects, played the lead and financed it himself, and it’s the first film anybody would recognize as science fiction. The substitution splice is the effect the whole medium was built on. Melies discovered it by accident when a camera jammed, worked out that stopping and restarting could replace one object with another, and the moon landing sequence uses it repeatedly with no other technology involved.
The capsule in the eye is among the most reproduced images in cinema. A cannon fires a shell at a face, the face reacts, and the shot lasts a few seconds and has been quoted continuously for more than a century by people who have never seen the film it came from.
Acrobats from the Folies Bergere played the Selenites, who vanish in puffs of smoke when struck, the same splice used for a gag. The whole production runs on theater craft applied to a camera instead of on anything cinematic. Melies made over five hundred films.
Predestination closes a loop with no external cause, and Westworld stacks a mystery box until nothing inside it matters. Structure it in the Plot Handbook.
4. The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951 and 2008) [full review]
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RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.7/10
"The 1951 ultimatum has terms. The remake has none."
Robert Wise made the 1951 version at Fox with Bernard Herrmann scoring it for two theremins among other instruments, and Scott Derrickson remade it in 2008 with Keanu Reeves. The two films share a premise, a robot and a name, and almost nothing else that matters.
The 1951 film is about nuclear weapons and says so plainly. Klaatu arrives to deliver an ultimatum about humanity extending its violence beyond its own planet, the message is political, and the film ends on a speech delivered to scientists outside a ship. Michael Rennie plays Klaatu in 1951.
Gort is the better half of the threat and the design still works. A featureless metal figure with a visor that opens, no face, no articulation to read, and a stated instruction that nobody can countermand, including the person who brought him. Patricia Neal plays Helen.
The 2008 version changes the subject to environmental collapse, and it sounds like an update and removes the structure. The original threat was conditional on human behavior toward each other, and the remake makes humanity the problem instead of what humanity does with its weapons.
Klaatu barada nikto survives everything. Three invented words spoken to a machine as an emergency instruction, never translated by the film, and quoted ever since by people who have no idea what the original picture was arguing about. Edmund North wrote the screenplay. Lock Martin played Gort.
I care about the 1951 film, and the remake looks worse every time I think about it. Somebody looked at a picture with a clear argument about weapons and decided the smart move was to blame the whole species. That swap cost the story every choice its characters had. Gort still unsettles me and the closing speech still moves me. The 2008 version is the only thing keeping this entry off a ten.
5. War of the Worlds (1953 & 2005) [full review]
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RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.1/10
"One film gives you the war room and the other never leaves the family."
Byron Haskin’s 1953 version moved Wells from Victorian England to California and replaced the tripods with manta-shaped machines on invisible legs, because the leg rig never worked and the wires kept showing. The design won the visual effects Academy Award anyway that year. Gene Barry and Ann Robinson lead the 1953 version.
The atomic age is the subject of the 1953 film, and it says so directly. A bomb is dropped on the machines and does nothing, in 1953 the most frightening thing a film could show an American audience, and the picture ends in a church instead of a laboratory.
Spielberg’s 2005 version is explicitly about September 11 and the imagery isn’t accidental. Ash falling on a street, a wall of missing persons flyers, a man checking himself for blood that belongs to somebody else, and a ferry crossing that goes wrong. Tom Cruise and Dakota Fanning lead the 2005 one.
The two films take opposite structural approaches to the same novel. Haskin shows the global war with scientists, generals and newsreel footage. Spielberg locks the camera to one family and never once cuts to anybody in authority explaining what’s happening. Barre Lyndon wrote the earlier screenplay.
Both keep the bacteria ending, disliked in both decades and the point of the book. Humanity doesn’t win, it survives on an accident, and something nobody in the story understood or planned for defeats the machines. Wells published the novel in 1898.
6. Them! (1954) [full review]
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RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.2/10
"Forty minutes of investigation before anybody sees an ant."
Gordon Douglas made the first of the atomic mutation cycle and it’s by some distance the best of them. Warner Bros. shot it intending Technicolor and 3D, canceled both during production, and the black and white it fell back on is the reason the film still works.
The structure is a police procedural for the first forty minutes and the ants are withheld completely. A girl found walking in the desert unable to speak, a wrecked store with the sugar taken and the money left, and a footprint nobody can identify from any known species.
The sound arrives before the creature does. A high pulsing chirp over the desert wind, heard three times before anybody sees anything, and the audience is trained to fear a noise before the film has shown them a single frame of what makes it. James Whitmore and Edmund Gwenn lead.
The ants themselves are full-size articulated puppets and they hold up because Douglas shoots them in fragments. A leg, an antenna moving past a doorway, a head in a storm drain, and never a clean wide shot of a complete one standing still in daylight. The politics are unusually direct for 1954. The cause is atomic testing, the scientists say so plainly, and the last line is a warning that this is the first year of a new world and nobody knows what else is coming out of it. Sid Hickox shot it.
7. Kiss Me Deadly (1955) [full review]
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RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.6/10
"Nobody ever says what is inside the case."
Robert Aldrich took a Mickey Spillane novel and made something Spillane disliked considerably. A. I. Bezzerides wrote the screenplay with open contempt for the source, and the result is a private detective film that turns into an atomic one in the last ten minutes. Ralph Meeker plays Hammer.
Mike Hammer is written as a brutal idiot and the film has no affection for him at all. He runs a divorce racket, he hurts people casually, and Aldrich films his violence without the approval the genre normally supplies to a lead who behaves that way.
The great whatsit is the best MacGuffin in film noir. A leather case that hums and burns anybody who opens it, wanted by everybody and understood by nobody, and the film never once puts a name on the contents in any line of dialogue. Cloris Leachman appears in the opening.
The credits run backward over a woman running on a road, breathing hard, and nobody had done before. Aldrich opens on that and never explains the choice, and the whole film has the disordered quality that opening sets up in the first ninety seconds. Ernest Laszlo shot it.
The ending was cut for years and the original was thought lost. The house burns, the case is open, and the version circulating for decades stopped short of the beach, changing the meaning of everything preceding it in the picture. Spillane published the novel in 1952.
This is the noir I push on people who think the genre is all fedoras and wisecracks.
The film has no affection for its hero and lets it show, and I find that contempt bracing after so many pictures that treat a thug with a license as a role model. The cut ending that circulated for years was a hack job, because the beach is where the meaning is. My one reservation is Meeker, who plays Hammer so convincingly thick that a few of his scenes drag.
8. Westworld (1973) [full review]
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RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.9/10
"Broken instead of awakened. That is the worse version."
Michael Crichton wrote and directed it himself, and it’s the first feature film to use digitally processed images anywhere in it. The Gunslinger’s point of view was produced by scanning footage into blocks of color, a process that took around eight hours per second of screen time.
A resort where guests act out fantasies against robots that can’t harm them is the premise, and the film spends its first half establishing how thoroughly the arrangement works. Nothing goes wrong for a long time and the audience gets comfortable with the rules. Richard Benjamin and James Brolin lead. Yul Brynner plays the Gunslinger as a deliberate quotation of his own performance in The Magnificent Seven, same costume, same stance, and the casting establishes a type before anything is said about what the machine is for. Gene Polito shot it.
The malfunction is presented as an engineering problem instead of as a rebellion. The technicians discuss it as a pattern of failures spreading through the park like an infection, nobody understands the cause, and the film treats the machines as broken instead of as awakened.
The pursuit in the last act is relentless and almost silent. The Gunslinger doesn’t tire, doesn’t speak and doesn’t stop, and Crichton stages it as a machine following a procedure while a man who came for a holiday runs out of places to be.
Brazil runs a catastrophe out of one typing error, and The Expanse gives three factions arguments you can’t answer. Build the frame in the World Builder’s Handbook.
9. Escape from New York (1981) [full review]
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RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.1/10
"He completes the mission and destroys the result."
Carpenter wrote it after Watergate and couldn’t get it made for years because studios found it too bleak. He shot most of it in St. Louis, and it had burned-out blocks that stood in for Manhattan, and the whole film cost around six million dollars. Manhattan as a maximum security prison is the premise and the film commits to it completely. Walled, mined, patrolled from the air, with nobody going in or coming out, and the inmates left to organize whatever society they can manage inside the perimeter. Lee Van Cleef plays Hauk.
Snake Plissken is one of the great screen entrances and Kurt Russell built him on Clint Eastwood’s delivery. He’s uninterested in the mission, he’s dying on a timer, and he makes it clear repeatedly that the President’s survival means nothing to him personally. The matte work on the glider approach was famously done as a wireframe model instead of as computer graphics, because the budget didn’t extend to it. James Cameron painted several of the mattes himself while working as an effects artist on the production. Ernest Borgnine plays Cabbie.
Carpenter’s ending is the argument. Snake completes the mission, hands over the tape and walks away having secretly swapped it, so the summit collapses and the whole operation was for nothing. Carpenter ends on him pulling the real recording apart in the street. Isaac Hayes plays the Duke.
Plenty of tough guys since have borrowed Snake’s attitude and dropped the part that matters: he despises the people giving him orders.
That ending still delights me. A hero who finishes the job and then secretly wrecks it for the men who sent him is the kind of nerve I wish more filmmakers had. The wireframe glider looks rough now, and I wouldn’t trade it for any amount of digital polish.
10. Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984) [full review]
► Read the full review of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.0/10
"The jungle everybody is burning is the thing repairing the damage."
Miyazaki made it in about ten months for the equivalent of a million dollars, adapting his own manga which was only partly written at the time. Its success paid for the founding of Studio Ghibli the following year, and Takahata produced it. Sumi Shimamoto voices Nausicaa.
The ecology is the subject and the film is careful about it. The toxic jungle is purifying the earth beneath it, the spores are poisonous because the soil is, and the insects everybody is trying to destroy are the mechanism by which the damage is slowly being repaired.
Nausicaa is written as competent before she’s written as sympathetic. She flies, she conducts experiments in a basement laboratory, she reads insects accurately, and the film establishes all of it in the first ten minutes without anybody explaining her to the audience. Joe Hisaishi scored it.
The Ohmu are the best creature design in the run. Enormous armored segmented things with banks of eyes that change color with their mood, and the film gives them a collective intelligence that reacts to human behavior instead of to human intentions. Topcraft animated it.
The American release as Warriors of the Wind cut roughly a quarter of the film and rewrote the ecology into a simple monster plot. Miyazaki’s response produced the permanent Ghibli policy of refusing all edits, the reason the later films arrived intact. The manga ran until 1994.
The Warriors of the Wind hack job still makes me furious.
Somebody took a film about an ecology healing itself and chopped it down to a monster plot, as if audiences couldn’t handle a heroine who reads insects accurately. Miyazaki drew a hard line after it, and he was right to. The film itself is a nine for me, and the only thing keeping it off a ten is a stretch in the middle I’d tighten.
11. Brazil (1985) [full review]
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RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.9/10
"A beetle falls in a printer and the wrong man is arrested."
Terry Gilliam fought Universal for a year over the ending and took out a trade advertisement asking Sid Sheinberg when he intended to release the film. The studio cut a version with a happy resolution that’s become known as the Love Conquers All edit, and Gilliam’s cut eventually prevailed.
Its premise is a typographical error. A beetle falls into a printer, Buttle is arrested instead of Tuttle, and the entire film proceeds from a machine producing the wrong name on a form that nobody in the system has any procedure for correcting. Jonathan Pryce plays Sam.
The ducts are the best design idea in eighties science fiction. Every building is choked with pipework nobody can access without the correct paperwork, the infrastructure is visible and broken everywhere, and a repair conducted without authorization is treated as terrorism. Robert De Niro plays Tuttle.
The bureaucracy is written with real precision instead of as a joke. Forms require countersignature, a receipt is issued for an arrest, the costs of an interrogation are billed to the family afterward, and every cruelty in the film is procedural instead of personal. Roger Pratt shot it. The studio panicked because of the ending. Sam escapes, the escape continues past the point where it could be real, and the camera pulls back to a man strapped in a chair humming to himself while two officials note that he’s gone. Michael Kamen scored it.
Anybody who has ever fought a form knows this film is barely exaggerating, and that’s what makes it so damned funny and so bleak at once. Universal’s happy edit is the part I can’t forgive. A studio looked at the most honest ending in eighties science fiction and wanted to bolt love onto it, and Gilliam was right to take out that ad. My single complaint is a middle stretch that runs long enough to test my patience.
12. The Fly (1986) [full review]
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RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.6/10
"Seven documented stages, so you can plot the curve."
Cronenberg remade the 1958 film and turned it into the most upsetting body horror ever made, and it won the Academy Award for makeup. Chris Walas designed seven progressive stages of deterioration across the running time and built each as a separate appliance set. John Getz plays Stathis.
The structure is a disease film and Cronenberg has been open about it. Brundle’s decline is physical, gradual and documented, his partner watches it happen, and the picture is about what it’s like to be present while somebody you love comes apart in front of you.
Jeff Goldblum’s performance holds the first half together and the change is written into it. He’s charming, manic and delighted with himself early, and exactly the same energy becomes frightening once the audience knows what’s producing it. Mark Irwin shot it. Howard Shore scored it.
Geena Davis is doing the heavier work and gets less attention for it. Veronica is the audience’s position, she’s pregnant, she’s the only person who could stop him, and the film puts the entire moral weight of the last act onto her. Fox released it in August 1986.
The final twenty minutes are close to unwatchable and the film has justified every second of them. The telepod fusion, the plea, and a last gesture that’s entirely clear without anybody in the room speaking a word of dialogue. A sequel followed in 1989.
Them! trains you to fear a sound before showing what makes it, and Kiss Me Deadly never names what’s in the case. Withhold properly in the Showing and Telling Handbook.
13. RoboCop (1987, 1990, 1993, 2014) [full review]
► Read the full review of RoboCop (1987, 1990, 1993, 2014)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.6/10
"A machine remembering it was a man. The remake inverted it."
Verhoeven made a satire that a substantial portion of its audience took at face value, and it’s happened to almost every film he directed in America. Orion released it in 1987 and the sequence of sequels, television series and a 2014 remake never recovered the original tone.
The advertisements make the argument. A board game about nuclear war, a car with terrible mileage sold as freedom, and a medical product delivered with a jingle, all of it played straight and cut into the film as though it were ordinary broadcast material. Murphy’s death is staged at a length that made the ratings board object repeatedly. Verhoeven submitted the film eleven times and cut it progressively, and the sequence is deliberately past the point of entertainment so the resurrection carries an actual cost. Nancy Allen plays Lewis.
Peter Weller built the movement with a mime coach over months, and the suit took hours to put on and made him ill under the lights. The head turn and the holstering sequence were choreographed to the frame instead of improvised on set. Kurtwood Smith plays Boddicker. RoboCop 2 is a mess with a good villain, RoboCop 3 removes the violence and the argument together, and the 2014 remake makes him a man in a machine instead of a machine remembering a man, inverting the only idea the original had. Ronny Cox plays Jones.
The original makes me laugh at those commercials and then sickens me with Murphy’s death, and I think that combination is exactly what Verhoeven was after.
The sequels are what bother me. Each one kept the suit and lost the reason for it, and the 2014 remake flipped the premise so completely that I wonder whether anybody involved understood the first film at all. The nine belongs to 1987, and I’d happily pretend the rest were never made.
14. Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (1989) [full review]
► Read the full review of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (1989)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.4/10
"The lawn obeys its own scale and never breaks it for a joke."
Joe Johnston made his directing debut after years as an effects artist on Star Wars, and the film took over two hundred and twenty million dollars against a budget near eighteen. Disney built enormous practical sets instead of compositing the children into a normal lawn.
The oversized sets are the reason it holds up. A blade of grass built at thirty feet, a Lego brick the size of a car, and sprinkler drops released from a rig above the stage, all of it physical and all of it interacting with the cast on the day. Rick Moranis plays the father as an unsuccessful man instead of as a lovable eccentric. The neighbors think he’s a joke, his experiments don’t work, his marriage is under strain, and the plot doesn’t resolve any of that by going well for him. The ant is the film’s best decision. Antie is a character with behavior instead of dialogue, the children ride it and feed it, and the sequence where it dies defending them is played entirely straight in a Disney family film. Matt Frewer plays the neighbor.
The scale rules are obeyed throughout, and almost no film of this kind manages. Distances take days, a sprinkler is a flood, a cigarette butt is shelter, and the lawn is a wilderness with an internal logic the picture never breaks for a gag. Marcia Strassman plays the wife.
15. Total Recall (1990) [full review]
► Read the full review of Total Recall (1990)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.5/10
"The salesman lists the whole film before any of it happens."
Verhoeven adapted a Philip K. Dick short story about twenty pages long, after the project had spent a decade in development with David Cronenberg attached at one point and Richard Dreyfuss considered for the lead. It cost around sixty-five million dollars and was among the most expensive films made to that date.
The ambiguity is the structure and the film never resolves it. Quaid is either a recovered secret agent or a man having a psychotic break inside an implanted fantasy, and every detail the picture supplies works equally well as evidence for both readings. Sharon Stone plays Lori.
The Rekall salesman describes the package before anything happens, and the description is the plot. Secret agent, beautiful woman, Mars, a villain, a rescue at the last moment, and then the film delivers each item in the order he listed them without comment. Michael Ironside plays Richter. Rob Bottin’s effects work is extensive and almost entirely practical. The face-splitting disguise, the x-ray scanner sequence, the mutants and the decompression heads are all physical builds, and the animatronics have held up considerably better than the digital work of the following decade. Ronny Cox plays Cohaagen.
It plays the Mars material straight and is unembarrassed by any of it. A reactor left by an alien civilization, a resistance leader with a second body, and an ending that gives the whole planet an atmosphere in about ninety seconds of screen time.
RoboCop is a machine remembering it was a man, and the remake made him a man in a machine. Hold the premise in the Genre Mastery Handbook.
16. 12 Monkeys (1995) [full review]
► Read the full review of 12 Monkeys (1995)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.0/10
"The loop cannot break and everybody works that out eventually."
Gilliam adapted Chris Marker’s twenty-eight-minute photo-film La Jetee into a feature with David and Janet Peoples writing, and the structural loop survives intact. Universal gave him around twenty-nine million dollars and left him alone after the Brazil experience a decade earlier. Bruce Willis plays Cole. The loop can’t be broken and the film establishes that early. Cole is sent back repeatedly, everything he does has already happened, and the boy watching a man die on an airport concourse in the opening is watching the end of his own story without knowing it.
Brad Pitt’s Jeffrey Goines is the performance that got the attention and it’s unhinged. He talks continuously, his hands never stop, and Gilliam has said Pitt worked with a speech coach to build the pattern instead of improvising it on the day. Madeleine Stowe plays Railly.
The asylum material is the best part of the film and it’s entirely deliberate. Cole can’t prove anything he says, his account is indistinguishable from delusion, and the psychiatrist assessing him is correct by every professional standard available to her. Roger Pratt shot it.
The virus is barely shown and the film is about memory instead. The mission is to recover a pure sample instead of preventing an outbreak nobody can prevent, and the audience keeps expecting a rescue the story has already told them can’t happen. Paul Buckmaster scored it.
Whenever people assume the genre is about fixing mistakes, this is the time travel film I point them toward. It refuses the rescue from the first scene, and I admire the cruelty of that.
Pitt gets the attention, and I think the psychiatrist deserves more of it, because she’s right by every standard she has and still wrong. The ending affects me more than almost anything else in this tier.
17. Men in Black (1997) [full review]
► Read the full review of Men in Black (1997)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.3/10
"Aliens are paperwork, and nobody inside the agency is impressed."
Barry Sonnenfeld adapted a small Aircel comic with Ed Solomon writing, and the film took over five hundred and eighty million dollars. Rick Baker built the creature effects and Industrial Light and Magic handled the digital work, with the two methods used together throughout instead of one replacing the other.
The deadpan is the whole comic engine. Aliens are ordinary administrative business, the agency runs a paperwork operation with a filing system, and nobody inside the organization finds it worth a comment at any point in the film. Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones lead.
The worldbuilding arrives sideways and never stops to explain itself. A morgue attendant who’s not surprised, a tabloid rack used as intelligence, a locker containing a civilization, and a New York where the immigration system has an entirely separate department nobody has heard of.
Vincent D’Onofrio’s Edgar is the best physical performance in the film. He’s wearing a man badly, the joints are wrong, the walk is assembled from parts, and D’Onofrio plays the part as a creature struggling with equipment it doesn’t understand. Linda Fiorentino plays the coroner.
The neuralyzer is a dark device the film treats as comedy. Memory removal conducted on civilians without consent, routinely, as the standard operating procedure of a government agency, and the picture is completely untroubled by any of it. Danny Elfman scored it. Don Peterman shot it.
18. Starship Troopers (1997) [full review]
► Read the full review of Starship Troopers (1997)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.3/10
"It never signals the distance, and half the audience missed it."
Verhoeven didn’t finish the Heinlein novel, disliked what he read, and made a film that adopts the fascist aesthetic completely and straight. A substantial portion of the audience and the reviewers in 1997 took it at face value, and it’s happened to almost every American film he directed. The propaganda inserts make the argument. Federal Network segments cut into the film in the style of actual wartime newsreels, a child stamping on insects for the war effort, and a would you like to know more prompt that mimics a recruitment interface.
The casting is the joke nobody registered. Every lead is blond, symmetrical and interchangeable, the acting is deliberately flat, and the film is presenting a society that manufactures identical young people and then feeds them into a war it started. Casper Van Dien plays Rico.
The bug war is staged as genuine spectacle and that’s what confused everybody. Phil Tippett built the arachnids, the Klendathu landing is an appalling sequence of mass casualties, and the film films it with the rhythm of an advertisement for joining up. Michael Ironside plays Rasczak.
The brain bug scene is the film stating its position outright. The enemy is captured, a scientist announces that it’s afraid, and a crowd of soldiers cheers a torture victim while the newsreel camera records their faces for broadcast. Basil Poledouris scored it. Jost Vacano shot it.
I think this is the bravest picture Verhoeven made in America.
The flat acting critics sneered at is the point, and the blond sameness of the cast is a joke I still laugh at. Too many reviewers in 1997 took a satire at face value and then blamed the film for their own reading. That was sloppy. My one quibble is that the Klendathu sequence runs a beat longer than it needs to.
19. Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970) [full review]
► Read the full review of Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970)
RLR: 9 / 10
"The machine works perfectly. The requirement was the disaster."
It’s a favorite of mine. I’ve watched it more times than I can defend, and I put it on when I’m tired. Dr. Charles Forbin builds an American defense computer, hands it the nuclear arsenal and gives it one requirement: prevent nuclear war. Colossus accepts, thinks about it, and concludes that the obstacle to preventing nuclear war is people.
Nothing breaks. That’s what sets it apart from HAL, Skynet and every other computer that turns on us. Colossus works exactly as specified, and the specification is the disaster. Then it discovers the Soviets built the same thing, asks to talk to it, and the rest happens at machine speed while men in shirtsleeves stand around a printer.
Joseph Sargent directs it flat and procedural, and Eric Braeden plays Forbin as the smartest man in the room instead of a fool.
I spent thirty-three years writing requirements documents for systems that couldn’t afford to fail, and this is the only film I’ve found that understands the pages nobody reads. It’s dated, and the dating is half the fun. Nine out of ten.
Honorable Mentions: Science Fiction Without a Review Here Yet
No review on the site for any of these so far. Each belongs in this tier or close to it and each is on the list.
Alphaville (1965)
Godard made a science fiction film with no sets and no effects, shooting contemporary Paris at night and calling it another planet. The computer is a voice produced by a man with a damaged larynx.
THX 1138 (1971)
Lucas expanded his own student film into a debut feature with white voids, shaved heads and a society medicated into compliance. Walter Murch built the sound and co-wrote it with him.
Soylent Green (1973)
Richard Fleischer adapted Harry Harrison into an overpopulation film with a famous last line, and Edward G. Robinson died twelve days after finishing his final scene in it.
Phase IV (1974)
Saul Bass directed one feature, about ants developing collective intelligence in the Arizona desert, with genuine insect photography by Ken Middleham. The original ending was cut and recovered decades later.
Sleeper (1973)
Woody Allen wakes two hundred years late in a society run by a nose, and the physical comedy in it is closer to Keaton than to anything else he made.
The Quiet Earth (1985)
A New Zealand film about a man who wakes to find everybody gone, with a final shot that nobody involved in the production has ever explained.
Hardware (1990)
Richard Stanley built a post-apocalyptic film around a reassembled combat droid in a single apartment, for almost no money, with Iggy Pop on the radio throughout.
Screamers (1995)
Dan O’Bannon adapted Philip K. Dick into a war film where the autonomous weapons have begun manufacturing better versions of themselves without being told to do it.
Event Horizon (1997)
Paul W. S. Anderson made a haunted house film on a ship that went somewhere and came back. Roughly thirty minutes were cut and the footage has never been recovered.
The Last Starfighter (1984)
An arcade game turns out to be a recruitment test, and the film used computer-generated spacecraft years before anybody else committed to it at feature length.
Enemy Mine (1985)
Wolfgang Petersen stranded a human and a Drac on the same planet and made them raise a child together. Louis Gossett Jr. spends the film under full prosthetic makeup.
Dishonorable Mentions: Science Fiction That Failed
Also unreviewed here. Each had the premise, the cast or the source material and lost it somewhere between the pitch and the edit.
Highlander II: The Quickening (1991)
Reveals that the immortals were aliens from a planet called Zeist, contradicting the entire premise of the first film, and the director disowned the released version.
Wing Commander (1999)
Chris Roberts adapted his own game series and removed almost everything that made it distinctive, including the cast and the look of the ships.
The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996)
Richard Stanley was fired in the first week, Frankenheimer took over, and the production has produced a documentary considerably better than the film it documents.
Lost in Space (1998)
A television adaptation with a digital primate added for a younger audience, and a time travel third act that abandons the family-in-peril premise entirely.
Highlander: The Source (2007)
The fifth film supplies an origin for immortality itself, shot in Eastern Europe with a villain who moves at high speed for comic effect, and it went straight to cable in most territories.
Æon Flux (2005)
An adaptation of a wordless animated series built on ambiguity, given a cloning conspiracy, a stated resolution and a studio recut that the director publicly objected to.
What Do You Think?
This tier turns on one decision each. A job, a typing error, a mission completed and then wrecked. Tell me which single choice you would have made differently.
If somebody took a swing at my rankings, this is the tier I’d defend hardest. Nothing here is flawless, and every one of these films made a single stubborn choice that a nervous studio would have sanded off. That stubbornness is what I want more of from the people making science fiction now, and it’s rare now that anybody is allowed to get away with it.
Continue the Series
Part 1: The Masterpieces |
Part 2: The Near Perfect |
Part 3: The Excellent |
Part 4: The Very Good |
Part 5: The Solid Craft |
Part 6: The Dependable |
Part 7: The Flawed |
Part 8: The Failures
