Part 3 – The Excellent
Series Navigation
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 rules the audience can hold. The Matrix gives away its entire mechanism in the first act and spends the rest on consequences, The One builds its escalation curve into the killing itself, and John Carter spends a sequence on a man failing to jump before the ability becomes useful.
The other pattern is refusing to explain. Fury Road never accounts for the Citadel or the water economy, A New Hope gives the Force about three lines, and The Blob takes away every tool a protagonist would normally reach for.
Every rating is the one carried by the review it links to. Ties are broken by year, and this is the third of eight parts.
Total Recall hands you a checklist in the first act and 12 Monkeys states its limit early and holds it. Structure it properly in the Plot Handbook.
1. The Matrix (1999) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Matrix (1999)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.7/10
"The whole mechanism is handed over in six minutes."
The Wachowskis pitched a philosophy film disguised as an action picture and Warner Bros. funded it after Bound. The cast trained in wire work for four months before shooting, unheard of on an American production, and Yuen Woo-ping choreographed every fight in the film. Keanu Reeves plays Neo.
Bullet time is the technique everybody copied and it was built from still cameras. A ring of them fired in sequence around a subject, the frames assembled into a move through a frozen moment, and the effect had been impossible at that scale before the film attempted it.
The premise arrives through Morpheus explaining it directly, and it should not work. The construct sequence hands the audience the entire mechanism in about six minutes, and the rest of the film is spent on consequences instead of on further revelation. Laurence Fishburne plays Morpheus.
The rules are stated and obeyed. Agents can occupy anybody still connected, a death inside kills the body outside, the jump is a test of belief, and every action sequence depends on limits the audience learned before it mattered. Carrie-Anne Moss plays Trinity. Bill Pope shot it.
Hugo Weaving plays Smith with a cadence nobody else has managed to imitate. The pauses in the middle of words, the disgust about the smell, and a program expressing something no program should have, and the sequels then spent two films explaining away. Don Davis scored it.
2. The One (2001) [full review]
► Read the full review of The One (2001)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 5.9/10
"Each kill makes both of them stronger, from opposite directions."
James Wong made a multiverse action film with Jet Li playing both leads, five years before the concept became standard studio material. It cost around forty-nine million dollars and was originally developed with Dwayne Johnson attached to the role. Carla Gugino plays the wife. Delroy Lindo plays the agent.
The mechanism is stated plainly and obeyed throughout. There are one hundred and twenty-four parallel universes, killing your own counterpart redistributes their strength among the survivors, and the last remaining version would become something the film calls the One. Trevor Rabin scored it. Robert McLachlan shot it.
The escalation is built into the rule and the film uses it properly. Yulaw gets faster and stronger with each kill, and Gabe gets the same increase without understanding why, so the two versions of the same man converge on identical capability from opposite directions.
The fighting styles distinguish the two leads, the smartest decision in the picture. Yulaw uses hard external forms and Gabe uses soft internal ones, so the final fight reads as a genuine argument between two approaches instead of a man hitting himself. Jason Statham plays Funsch.
3. Serenity (2005) [full review]
► Read the full review of Serenity (2005)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.8/10
"The Reavers were an administrative decision that went wrong."
Whedon made a feature to finish a television series Fox had cancelled after eleven aired episodes, and almost never happens. Universal gave him around thirty-nine million dollars on the strength of DVD sales, and the film did not recoup theatrically. Nathan Fillion plays Mal. Summer Glau plays River.
The opening is a structural problem solved elegantly. A flashback inside a classroom becomes a recording being watched by an operative, and the sequence delivers the setting, the war, the antagonist and River’s history inside a single continuous move. Jack Green shot it. David Newman scored it.
Chiwetel Ejiofor’s Operative is the best antagonist Whedon wrote. He is polite, he apologizes before killing, he believes in a better world and knows he has no place in it, and every position he states is coherent from inside his own argument. It ran one hundred and nineteen minutes.
The Reavers are explained and the explanation is the film’s actual subject. They were made by a government chemical intended to suppress aggression, the failure killed a planet, and the horror is an administrative decision instead of anything from outside. Adam Baldwin plays Jayne. Gina Torres plays Zoe.
The deaths are the reason the film has the reputation it does. Whedon kills two crew members without ceremony, one in the middle of a line, and the picture refuses the protection a television audience had come to expect from him. Alan Tudyk plays Wash.
4. District 9 (2009) [full review]
► Read the full review of District 9 (2009)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.9/10
"Wikus never quite becomes a hero, and it works anyway."
Neill Blomkamp expanded his own six-minute short into a feature for around thirty million dollars, shot in an actual Soweto township with residents appearing in it, after a cancelled Halo adaptation left him and Peter Jackson with a production window and no project. Peter Jackson produced it.
The documentary framing is used and then abandoned deliberately. The first act is interviews, security footage and news segments, and as Wikus loses his position in the world the film quietly drops the device and becomes conventional coverage. Trent Opaloch shot it. Clinton Shorter scored it.
The apartheid material is direct instead of allegorical. Forced relocation with signed consent forms, segregated services, a private military contractor administering a township, and language from actual South African policy used in the dialogue without alteration. Terri Tatchell co-wrote it. Sony released it in August 2009.
Sharlto Copley improvised most of his dialogue and had never acted before. Wikus is a bureaucrat who is cheerful about evictions, cowardly under pressure and selfish for almost the entire film, and he never quite becomes a hero at any point in it. Jason Cope plays Christopher.
The prawns are computer generated and they work because the film treats them as poor instead of as alien. They scavenge, they are addicted to cat food, they are exploited by a Nigerian gang, and the design gives them faces the audience can read. It was nominated for four Academy Awards.
Fury Road explains an entire world without a briefing and Snowpiercer arranges its class system as architecture. Build the frame in the World Builder’s Handbook.
5. Cowboys and Aliens (2011) [full review]
► Read the full review of Cowboys and Aliens (2011)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.0/10
"The aliens are prospectors. Same story, bigger scale."
Jon Favreau made a genuine western with a science fiction intrusion, from a graphic novel concept that existed before the comic did. Five writers share the credit, it cost around one hundred and sixty-three million dollars, and it lost money against a summer that punished anything unfamiliar.
The western is played entirely straight, the decision the title works against. The town, the cattle operation, the preacher and the dispossessed Apache are all constructed as a real frontier film before anything descends out of the sky at all. Olivia Wilde plays Ella. Sam Rockwell plays Doc.
Daniel Craig plays Lonergan as a man with no memory and a device on his wrist, and the amnesia structure does genuine work. He does not know what he has done, the audience does not either, and the film withholds it until the information costs him something.
Harrison Ford’s Dolarhyde is the best thing in the picture. A cattleman who is cruel to everybody including his own son, who has bought the town, and whom the film declines to soften until he has actually earned the change. Matthew Libatique shot it. Harry Gregson-Williams scored it.
The aliens are treated as prospectors instead of as conquerors, the smartest idea in it. They are extracting gold, the abductions are labour and experimentation, and the film maps the invasion directly onto the frontier economy it has spent an hour establishing. Steven Spielberg produced.
6. The Adjustment Bureau (2011) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Adjustment Bureau (2011)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.0/10
"The antagonists have a case you would struggle to answer."
George Nolfi adapted another short Philip K. Dick story and made a romance with a bureaucratic conspiracy attached. Matt Damon and Emily Blunt carry it, and the film cost around fifty million dollars against a premise that most studios would have turned into a chase.
The bureau are caseworkers instead of villains and the film holds that position. They wear hats, they carry notebooks, they discuss workload and jurisdiction, and they are genuinely apologetic about the interventions they are required to perform on people’s lives. John Slattery plays Richardson. Anthony Mackie plays Harry.
The doors are the best device in it and the rules are stated once. Certain doors connect to other places when opened by somebody wearing a hat, the geography of Manhattan becomes a network, and every chase in the film runs on a rule the audience can follow.
The argument underneath is about whether a plan is worth more than a choice, and the film gives both sides a real case. The bureau have evidence that free will produced two world wars, and the film does not pretend that position is stupid. John Toll shot it.
Terence Stamp arrives late as the enforcement escalation and the film needed him. He explains what the couple will cost each other in specific professional terms, and the scene is the only genuinely frightening thing in an otherwise gentle picture. Thomas Newman scored it. Universal released it in March 2011.
7. John Carter (2012) [full review]
► Read the full review of John Carter (2012)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.6/10
"He fails at the jumping first, so it lands later."
Andrew Stanton moved from Pixar to live action with a budget around two hundred and fifty million dollars, and Disney’s marketing removed both Mars and Princess from the title. It became one of the largest write-downs in studio history and the film is considerably better than that record suggests.
The Burroughs material is a century old and everything has already borrowed from it. A Princess of Mars was published in 1912, and the dying planet, the airships, the four-armed warriors and the human who gains strength in lower gravity have been taken by everybody since.
The Tharks are the best work in the film. Motion captured, four-armed, with a tusked design that reads as expressive, and a culture built on cruelty as a civic virtue that the film establishes through behaviour instead of through explanation. Taylor Kitsch plays Carter. Lynn Collins plays Dejah Thoris.
The frame story is the element that confused audiences and it is faithful to the book. Burroughs appears as a character inheriting his uncle’s journal, and the device is doing real structural work that the marketing never attempted to explain to anybody. Willem Dafoe voices Tars Tarkas.
The Barsoom gravity is used properly instead of as a gag. Carter jumps enormous distances because the planet is smaller, the film establishes it with a sequence of failures first, and every action scene afterward depends on a rule the audience watched him learn. Michael Giacchino scored it.
8. Snowpiercer (2013) [full review]
► Read the full review of Snowpiercer (2013)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.1/10
"The rebellion was part of the system all along."
Bong Joon-ho adapted a French graphic novel into his first English-language film, and the Weinstein Company demanded twenty minutes of cuts and an explanatory voiceover. Bong refused, the film was released in limited form intact, and the version everybody has seen is his. Chris Evans plays Curtis.
The train is the argument stated as architecture. A class system arranged linearly with the poor at the back and the engine at the front, and the entire plot is people moving forward through carriages that get more comfortable as they advance. Song Kang-ho plays Namgoong.
The protein bar sequence is the film’s method in miniature. The tail section is fed black blocks nobody can identify, the revelation about the contents arrives without ceremony, and the horror is followed immediately by everybody continuing to eat them. Hong Kyung-pyo shot it. Marco Beltrami scored it.
Tilda Swinton’s Mason is an administrator with a regional accent and false teeth, delivering a speech about shoes and their proper place. The performance is comic and the content is a functioning defense of a caste system. Ed Harris appears at the front. Jamie Bell and Octavia Spencer appear.
The ending refuses the revolution the structure promises. Reaching the engine reveals that the rebellion was planned by the people running it as a population control measure, and the only real escape is destroying the train entirely. Jacques Lob wrote the original comic. John Hurt plays Gilliam.
9. The World’s End (2013) [full review]
► Read the full review of The World’s End (2013)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.0/10
"A comedy built on a man nobody in the story wants to see."
Wright closed the Cornetto trilogy with the least liked and most serious of the three. A man in his forties assembles four friends who have moved on without him to finish a pub crawl they failed at as teenagers, and the film is about somebody nobody wants to see.
Gary King is an alcoholic and the film is direct about it. He is lying continuously, he is wearing the same coat he wore at eighteen, he has come from a treatment facility, and the comedy is built on a man everybody in the story is trying to get away from.
The science fiction turn arrives at the midpoint and is the least interesting thing in the picture. Blanks, blue blood, a network and a Network, and the invasion material is largely a mechanism for keeping five men in a town together after they would otherwise have left.
Simon Pegg is doing the best work of his career and it was not what the audience wanted. The bathroom scene where he pushes up a sleeve is played without any joke at all and reframes the entire first hour retroactively. Martin Freeman and Paddy Considine complete the five.
The fights are choreographed by Brad Allan and are genuinely good. Nick Frost’s shift from reluctance into fury is staged physically instead of written, and the bar sequence with the stools is the best action Wright has directed anywhere. Rosamund Pike plays the sister. Steven Price scored it.
Starship Troopers executes the logic it is attacking without signalling, and Cowboys and Aliens finds where two genres already overlap. Work the form in the Genre Mastery Handbook.
10. Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) [full review]
► Read the full review of Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.1/10
"No briefing, no exposition, and you understand the whole world."
George Miller spent close to two decades getting it made and shot most of it in Namibia after the Australian desert flooded. The vehicles were built and destroyed for real, the editing ran to around twenty-seven hundred cuts, and the film won six Academy Awards.
The worldbuilding arrives entirely through behaviour. Nobody explains the Citadel, the water economy, the War Boys or the half-life mythology, and the audience assembles all of it from what people do, wear and shout across a two-hour chase. Charlize Theron plays Furiosa. Tom Hardy plays Max.
Furiosa is the protagonist and Max is the passenger, and the marketing never mentioned. She has the goal, the history and the decision to make, and the film gives him the supporting role in somebody else’s story without commenting on it. John Seale shot it.
The chase structure is out and back, the simplest possible shape. They drive away from the Citadel, they turn around, and they drive back to it, and the entire second half is the first half reversed with everything the characters have learned applied to it.
Immortan Joe is built as an economic argument instead of as a tyrant. He controls water, he rations it deliberately, he owns the people who produce milk and the people who fight, and every part of the society follows from a resource held by one man.
11. The Martian (2015) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Martian (2015)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.0/10
"He narrates because he is logging it, so nothing reads as a device."
Ridley Scott adapted Andy Weir’s self-published novel with Drew Goddard writing, and the film treats its science as the actual content instead of as a backdrop. It took over six hundred and thirty million dollars and was nominated for seven Academy Awards. Jessica Chastain plays Lewis.
The structure is a sequence of problems with stated solutions. Calories, water, communication, transit, and each one is worked through on screen with the arithmetic visible, and almost no mainstream film has the confidence to attempt for two hours. Chiwetel Ejiofor plays Kapoor. Dariusz Wolski shot it.
Matt Damon narrates to a camera and that device solves the isolation problem. Watney explains what he is doing because he is logging it, the exposition has an in-world reason to exist, and the humour comes from a man performing competence for a future audience.
The potato sequence is the film in miniature. A stated problem, available materials, a method involving human waste and hydrazine, an explosion caused by a mistake he explains afterward, and a result that buys a specific number of additional days. Harry Gregson-Williams scored it. Fox released it in October 2015.
The ending is the part that departs from the novel and the film needed it. Weir’s book ends on the rescue and the film adds a coda about teaching, giving the picture a thesis about problem solving that the source leaves implicit. Weir self-published it in 2011.
12. Upgrade (2018) [full review]
► Read the full review of Upgrade (2018)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.5/10
"He grants permission one action at a time, right up until he cannot."
Leigh Whannell made it for around five million dollars in Melbourne and it looks considerably more expensive than that. The camera is rigged to move with the actor during fight sequences, so the frame stays locked to his body while he is thrown around inside it.
The premise is a paralysed man given an implant that can operate his body for him, with his consent, one action at a time. He asks permission, the chip answers, and the film keeps the arrangement conversational throughout. Betty Gabriel plays the detective. Harrison Gilbertson plays Eron.
Logan Marshall-Green plays two things at once and the physical work is the film. When STEM is driving, his face registers horror while his body performs precise violence, and the disconnect between the two is the best effect in the picture. Stefan Duscio shot it.
The violence is brief and genuinely shocking because the film rations it. STEM does not fight, it solves, and every confrontation ends in two or three movements with an outcome the audience was not braced for. Jed Palmer scored it. Blumhouse released it. Whannell had co-created Saw.
The ending is bleaker than anything the budget suggested. STEM was never assisting, the entire situation was engineered to acquire a host, and the last scene leaves a man locked inside a body somebody else is now operating full time. Simon Maiden voices STEM. Melanie Vallejo plays the wife.
13. Star Wars: A New Hope (1977) [full review]
► Read the full review of Star Wars: A New Hope (1977)
RLR: 8.5 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.6/10
"The Force gets three lines and carries six films."
Lucas made a film almost nobody at Fox expected to work, on around eleven million dollars, with an editing rescue by Marcia Lucas, Paul Hirsch and Richard Chew that restructured the whole picture. The first assembly was close to unwatchable. Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher lead.
The used universe is the design decision everybody copied. Ships are dented, droids are filthy, equipment fails, and nothing in the world looks manufactured for the film. No science fiction production had committed to that at scale before. Gilbert Taylor shot it. John Williams scored it.
The exposition is handled almost entirely by ignorance. Luke does not know anything, the droids are new to the situation, and every explanation the audience needs arrives because somebody in the scene genuinely requires it instead of because the plot does. Alec Guinness plays Obi-Wan.
The Force is left deliberately vague in this film. It is described in about three lines total, no midichlorians, no rules, no measurement, and the withholding is what let it carry the weight the later films kept trying to specify. It won six Academy Awards.
The trench run works because the geography was established twice before it happens. A briefing with a schematic, a rehearsal in dialogue, and then the sequence itself, so the audience knows exactly what a success or a failure would look like. Ben Burtt built the sound.
Wikus never quite becomes a hero and Gary King is somebody nobody wants to see. Two difficult protagonists, in the Deep Character Handbook.
14. Predator (1987) [full review]
► Read the full review of Predator (1987)
RLR: 8.5 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.8/10
"Several hundred rounds into a treeline, and nothing is hit."
John McTiernan made a film that spends forty minutes as a Central American action picture before revealing what it is. The original creature design by Boss Films was scrapped entirely after shooting began and Stan Winston rebuilt it from nothing during a production shutdown. Carl Weathers and Bill Duke fill out the squad.
The structure is a monster film where the monster is hunting the most dangerous men available, the reason the reversal works. The squad are established as genuinely capable, they win their first engagement decisively, and then the film takes them apart one at a time.
The thermal vision is the best point of view device in the genre. The audience sees what the creature sees, understands its limits, and the mud sequence pays off a rule established forty minutes earlier without anybody in the film explaining it aloud. Jim and John Thomas wrote it.
The minigun sequence is the moment the film states its own premise. Several hundred rounds into a treeline, everything destroyed, nothing hit, and a squad of professionals standing in silence realizing that their entire method does not apply here. Alan Silvestri scored it. Shane Black appears as Hawkins.
Kevin Peter Hall was seven feet two and performed the creature effectively blind for most of the shoot, since the helmet had no usable sightlines. Jean-Claude Van Damme was originally cast and left during the first design. Fox released it in June 1987. Joel Silver produced it.
15. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (BBC TV Series, 1981) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (BBC TV Series, 1981)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.9/10
"Everybody plays it straight. That is why it is funny."
The BBC adapted Douglas Adams after the radio series and before the novels had finished arriving, with Adams himself supervising. Six episodes were made on a budget that shows in every frame, and the production is considerably better for having no money to waste on anything except the writing.
Peter Jones voices the Book and the casting is the whole production. The delivery is unhurried, faintly weary and completely certain, and the entries themselves are the funniest material in any version of the property including the novels Adams wrote afterward. Alan J. W. Bell directed it.
The Guide graphics were animated by hand at Pearce Studios, frame by frame, because computer graphics of that quality did not exist in 1981. They look like a computer display and none of it is one, and the effect has aged considerably better than anything real would have.
The cast are played completely straight against material that invites mugging. Simon Jones is genuinely distressed about his house, Martin Benson delivers planning permission as bureaucratic fact, and nobody in the production ever signals that any of it is meant to be funny. David Dixon plays Ford Prefect.
The Vogons are the best design in it and they are men in suits. Latex, bad posture and a poetry reading conducted as an administrative punishment, and the whole sequence works because the performers treat the situation as tedious instead of as absurd. Sandra Dickinson plays Trillian.
16. When Worlds Collide (1951) [full review]
► Read the full review of When Worlds Collide (1951)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.6/10
"The people who lose the lottery keep working on the ark."
George Pal produced the early Cold War apocalypse film that set the template everything since has used. A rogue star is on approach, the world has months, and an ark gets built privately because no government in the film can organize a response in time.
The selection lottery is the part that still works. Places on the ark are limited and the names are drawn publicly, and the film spends real time on the people who lose and have to keep working on the project they will not be leaving on.
The financing is handled with unusual honesty for 1951. A dying industrialist pays for the ark and expects a seat in return, the scientists accept the arrangement because nobody else will fund it, and the film never pretends the compromise is anything else. Rudolph Mate directed it.
The effects won the Academy Award and the matte work by Chesley Bonestell is the reason. The approach of Bellus, the flooding of New York and the launch ramp are painted instead of built, and the paintings have a stillness models never achieved. Richard Derr and Barbara Rush lead.
The ending is the weakest part and the budget is why. The new world is a single painted backdrop revealed in the final shot, completed in a hurry, and the film stops on it abruptly with no sense of what the survivors are walking into.
Predator proves its squad is capable before taking them apart, and The Adjustment Bureau gives its opposition a case you cannot answer. Build it in the Conflict and Tension Handbook.
17. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956, 1978, 1993, 2007) [full review]
► Read the full review of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956, 1978, 1993, 2007)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.4/10
"Both readings hold, and neither is contradicted anywhere."
Four major versions exist across five decades and the premise has survived all of them. Don Siegel made the 1956 original in nineteen days, Philip Kaufman remade it in 1978, Abel Ferrara moved it to a military base in 1993, and the 2007 version is the failure.
The 1956 film has been claimed by both political readings for seventy years. It is either about communist infiltration or about McCarthyite conformity, and Siegel and Mainwaring both declined to settle it, the reason it still works on an audience today. Jack Finney published the novel in 1955.
Kaufman’s 1978 version moves it to San Francisco and that relocation is the smartest decision in the sequence. Paranoia functions in a city because anonymity was already normal, and nobody notices a person behaving strangely among several hundred thousand others. Kevin McCarthy leads the 1956 version.
The 1993 Abel Ferrara version sets it on a military base, the best premise of the four. Conformity is already mandatory, the uniforms are identical, and the invasion has almost nothing left to change about how anybody behaves. Donald Sutherland leads the 1978 one. Meg Tilly leads the 1993 version.
The Invasion in 2007 is the instructive failure. The Wachowskis rewrote it, the studio reshot substantially, and the pods became a virus with a cure, turning a film about identity into a medical thriller with a solution. Nicole Kidman leads the 2007 one. Daniel Mainwaring wrote the 1956 screenplay.
18. The Blob (1958 and 1988) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Blob (1958 and 1988)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.7/10
"It cannot be shot, stabbed, reasoned with or outrun."
Irvin Yeaworth’s 1958 film was made in Pennsylvania by a company that mostly produced religious shorts, with a twenty-seven-year-old Steve McQueen playing a teenager in his first leading role. He took a flat fee over a percentage and regretted it for decades afterward. Kate Phillips co-wrote the 1958 screenplay.
The creature is the best idea in fifties horror and almost nobody credits it. It cannot be shot, stabbed, reasoned with or outrun, it grows with every person it absorbs, and the only thing that works on it is discovered by accident instead of by anybody’s plan.
The 1958 effects were achieved with colored silicone on a miniature set tilted to make the mass move, and the cinema sequence with the audience running into the street still holds up as a piece of practical staging done for almost no money. Burt Bacharach co-wrote the title song.
Chuck Russell’s 1988 remake is considerably nastier and the better film. It kills a child, the phone box sequence is genuinely upsetting, and the reveal that the thing is an American biological weapon instead of a meteorite gives the remake an actual subject. Kevin Dillon leads the 1988 version.
Both versions understand that the horror is dissolution instead of attack. The victims are absorbed while conscious, the effects show faces still recognizable inside the mass, and nothing about the process is quick enough to be merciful. Frank Darabont co-wrote the remake. Aneta Corsaut plays Jane.
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.
Pitch Black (2000)
David Twohy stranded a transport crew on a planet with three suns and a long eclipse, and built the whole picture on the moment the light goes. Vin Diesel was unknown when it was cast.
Robot & Frank (2012)
A retired burglar with early dementia is given a care robot and trains it to assist with a job. Frank Langella plays it entirely straight and the ending is considerably sadder than the premise suggests.
Attack the Block (2011)
Joe Cornish put an alien invasion on a South London estate and cast unknowns, including John Boyega in his first role. The creature design is pure black fur with luminous teeth and nothing else.
Triangle (2009)
Christopher Smith built a loop on a drifting liner where the protagonist keeps meeting earlier versions of herself. The structure is rigorous and the ending closes it exactly.
The Endless (2017)
Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead directed and starred, returning to a cult they escaped and finding the loops it runs on. It shares a world with their earlier film Resolution.
The Vast of Night (2019)
Andrew Patterson made a fifties New Mexico film about a switchboard operator and a radio signal, for almost nothing, with two extraordinary long takes and a lot of people simply talking.
Sound of My Voice (2011)
Brit Marling plays a woman claiming to be from 2054, leading a basement cult, and the film refuses to confirm or deny her until a final shot that settles nothing.
Safety Not Guaranteed (2012)
Built from a real classified advertisement seeking a time travel companion, and the film spends its length on whether the man placing it is delusional or telling the truth.
Midnight Special (2016)
Jeff Nichols made a chase film about a father, a son with abilities and two organizations pursuing them, and explains almost nothing about what the boy is until the last reel.
Prospect (2018)
A father and daughter harvest organic gems on a toxic moon in a film built almost entirely from practical suits and a forest. Pedro Pascal plays the man they run into.
Devs (2020)
Alex Garland built an eight-episode series around a quantum computer that can render any moment in history, and a determinism argument that the show takes entirely seriously.
Ad Astra (2019)
James Gray sent Brad Pitt to Neptune to find a father who left, with a lunar rover chase and a commercial flight to the moon that treats space travel as infrastructure.
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.
Anon (2018)
Andrew Niccol built a world where everything anybody sees is recorded, and attached it to a routine detective plot that uses almost none of what the premise makes possible.
The Matrix Resurrections (2021)
Opens by restaging its own first film inside a video game studio being told to make a sequel, a real argument, and then makes the sequel anyway for another two hours.
Independence Day: Resurgence (2016)
Twenty years later with most of the original cast absent, a queen with a shield, and a closing scene that pitches a further sequel nobody had asked anybody for.
Chappie (2015)
Blomkamp followed District 9 and Elysium with a film about a police droid raised by criminals, and the tonal control that made the first one work is entirely absent.
Extinction (2018)
An invasion film with a genuine reversal at the midpoint, undercut by a first hour of dream sequences and a trailer that gave the reversal away before release.
Voyagers (2021)
A generation ship crewed by adolescents on suppressants, a workable premise, executed as a plain Lord of the Flies with none of the specificity that would have made it its own thing.
What Do You Think?
This tier is about rules. Total Recall gives you the list, The One builds escalation into the mechanism, and Fury Road refuses to state anything at all. Tell me which approach you trust more as a reader.
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