Part 4 – The Very Good
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 is mostly about rationing. Alien shows four minutes of creature across a hundred and seventeen, The Terminator states four rules in the first act and never grants an exception, and Buckaroo Banzai refers continuously to adventures that were never filmed and never will be. The other pattern is recruitment. A Clockwork Orange makes an audience enjoy Alex’s company before it makes his suffering unbearable, and Empire spends twenty minutes making Yoda irritating so nobody suspects a test until after it’s finished.
Eight out of ten is my score for a film I’d happily watch again with a complaint ready the second the credits roll. Every picture in this tier drew a complaint somewhere, and I’d still hand any of them to a writer who thinks restraint is dull. These directors kept their best material off screen when the studio wanted it on the poster, and I respect that nerve more than most of the spectacle Hollywood has sold me since.
Every rating is the one carried by the review it links to. Ties are broken by year, and this is the fourth of eight parts.
Alien rations four minutes of creature across two hours and The Time Machine measures decades against a shop window. Ration what you show in the Showing and Telling Handbook.
1. The Time Machine (1960) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Time Machine (1960)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.6/10
"He sits still and the world outside accelerates past him."
George Pal made it for under a million dollars and won the Academy Award for the time-lapse effects, and they were built from stop-motion on dressed shop mannequins and candle wax filmed melting in reverse. Rod Taylor carries the whole film almost alone. Rod Taylor plays the traveler. The machine itself is the best prop in fifties science fiction. Brass, a red velvet seat, a spinning disc behind the operator, and a dial that reads in years, and everything that’s attempted the subject since has borrowed the design. Yvette Mimieux plays Weena. The shop window sequence is the film’s argument in one location. He sits still and the world outside accelerates, fashions cycling in the glass, and time passes entirely through one unmoving viewpoint and a changing display. Alan Young plays Filby. Russell Garcia scored it. Wells published the novel in 1895.
The war material is Pal’s addition and it changes Wells considerably. The film stops in 1917, 1940 and 1966 to watch the same street get destroyed repeatedly, converting a Victorian argument about class into a mid-century one about self-destruction. David Duncan wrote the screenplay. MGM released it in August 1960.
The Eloi and Morlocks are simplified from the novel and the film knows what it lost. Wells wrote an evolutionary argument about labor and leisure, and the film delivers a rescue plot, but the sirens and the descent still carry most of the original horror.
The sirens and the descent still frighten me, and the rescue plot still falls flat. Pal had Wells’s argument about labor in his hands and swapped it for a damsel. I’ll forgive mannequins and candle wax, since he made it for pocket change, but the story was a choice, and he chose the smaller one.
2. Fantastic Voyage (1966) [full review]
► Read the full review of Fantastic Voyage (1966)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.7/10
"Sixty minutes, stated once, and every delay collects against it."
Richard Fleischer made the mid-sixties film about a submarine and crew miniaturized and injected into a dying man, and it won Academy Awards for art direction and effects. Fox built enormous sets representing the interior of a body at a scale nobody had attempted. Stephen Boyd and Raquel Welch lead.
The premise supplies a clock the film never has to explain twice. The miniaturization lasts sixty minutes, the running time is close to the same, and every delay the crew encounters costs them something the audience can measure directly against a stated limit. Donald Pleasence plays Michaels. The crew painted, lit and built the interiors instead of filming them, and the era forced the decision. Membranes made from plastic sheeting, corpuscles as floating shapes, and an inner ear sequence built as a cavern that the crew move through on wires. Ernest Laszlo shot it.
Isaac Asimov wrote the novelization from the screenplay and fixed the physics, the reason a great many people believe the book came first. He corrected the ending in particular, since the film leaves the submarine inside the patient without anybody remarking on it. Bantam published it in 1966. The saboteur subplot is the weakest element and the film wanted an antagonist. One of the five is sabotaging the mission, the reveal is telegraphed early, and the picture is stronger in the passages where the body itself is the only problem. Leonard Rosenman scored it.
3. A Clockwork Orange (1971) [full review]
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RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.2/10
"You have to like him first, or none of the rest works."
Kubrick adapted Anthony Burgess and then withdrew the film from British distribution himself after threats to his family, where it stayed unavailable until after his death in 1999. Burgess disliked the adaptation, largely because Kubrick used the American edition with the final chapter removed. Malcolm McDowell plays Alex.
The first act makes the audience enjoy Alex’s company, the trap the whole film depends on. The narration is charming, the Nadsat is playful, the classical scoring is witty, and the violence underneath all of it is presented with the same lightness. John Alcott shot it.
The Ludovico sequence reverses the position the audience has been put in. Alex is restrained, his eyes are held open, and the film makes his suffering unbearable to watch after ninety minutes of making his cruelty entertaining to watch. Wendy Carlos scored it. Patrick Magee plays Alexander.
Malcolm McDowell suffered repeated injuries during production. He scratched his cornea during the Ludovico filming, cracked a rib in the stage sequence, and the drowning scene involved a breathing apparatus that failed while the camera was running. Burgess published the novel in 1962. Warner Bros. released it in December 1971.
The missing final chapter is the argument Burgess never forgave. His novel ends with Alex choosing to change on his own, and the American edition and the film both stop one chapter earlier, turning a book about maturity into a film about the state. Michael Bates plays the chief guard.
I side with Burgess on that chapter. Kubrick made the colder and sharper film, and the way the first act seduces an audience still impresses me, but cutting the ending turns Alex into a lab specimen. A young man who grows up on his own is a harder and braver story than a state that breaks him, and the film took the easy road.
4. Dark Star (1974) [full review]
► Read the full review of Dark Star (1974)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.3/10
"The bomb considers the argument and reaches its own conclusion."
Carpenter and Dan O’Bannon expanded a student film into a feature for around sixty thousand dollars, and it’s the directing debut of one and the writing debut of the other. O’Bannon edited it, designed the effects, built sets and played Pinback. Brian Narelle plays Doolittle.
A demolition crew who have been in space too long and have stopped caring: that’s the premise. They destroy unstable planets, the mission has no urgency left in it, and the ship is falling apart around men who have run out of conversation. Carpenter scored it himself.
The alien is a painted beach ball with rubber feet and the film is entirely aware of it. The chase through the lift shaft is well staged, the creature is treated as an irritation instead of a threat, and O’Bannon wrote Alien five years later as the version played straight.
The bomb argument is the best sequence in it and the reason the film survives. A crew member has to talk an armed intelligent bomb out of detonating by teaching it phenomenology, and the bomb thinks about it properly before reaching a conclusion. It ran eighty-three minutes.
Hitchhiker’s plays absurd material completely straight and The Blob removes every tool a protagonist would reach for. Work the form in the Genre Mastery Handbook.
5. Alien (1979) [full review]
► Read the full review of Alien (1979)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.5/10
"Four minutes of creature across a hundred and seventeen."
Ridley Scott shot it in Britain on a budget around eleven million dollars, with the Nostromo built as three connected sets and the crew treated as working people on a haulage contract instead of as explorers. Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett wrote it. Tom Skerritt and John Hurt lead.
H. R. Giger’s design is the reason the film is still unmatched. The creature is biomechanical, sexual in ways nobody could name in 1979, and the derelict ship and the eggs come from the same visual vocabulary instead of being designed separately by different departments.
The creature appears for about four minutes of a hundred and seventeen. Scott shot more and cut it out, a seven-foot Nigerian design student wore the suit, and almost every appearance that survives is partial, shadowed or moving out of frame. Ian Holm plays Ash. The chestburster was staged with the cast not knowing what was coming. The plates and the blood came from a butcher, the reactions are genuine, and Veronica Cartwright’s response wasn’t directed in any way by anybody before the take. Derek Vanlint shot it. Jerry Goldsmith scored it.
The commercial subtext is the hard edge underneath. The company knew, the crew are expendable by written contract, and the film arrived to an audience that recognized the employment relationship immediately without needing any of it explained. It won the visual effects Academy Award. Veronica Cartwright plays Lambert.
Giger’s creature still scares me more than anything a studio has put on screen since, and Scott was smart enough to keep it in the shadows. My complaint is that the film is so controlled it runs cold, and I care more about the Nostromo than about most of the people aboard it. I remember the contract material most, because anybody who’s worked for a big company recognizes a crew written off in the fine print.
6. The Empire Strikes Back (1980) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.7/10
"Yoda is a nuisance for twenty minutes, on purpose."
Irvin Kershner directed from a Leigh Brackett and Lawrence Kasdan screenplay, with Lucas producing instead of directing. The production went substantially over budget, Lucas financed the overrun personally against the first film’s revenue, and the result is the best entry in the sequence. Peter Suschitzky shot it. The structure is the thing nobody attempted afterward. The protagonists lose, they’re separated, the rescue fails, and the film ends with one of them frozen and shipped away while the others fly off having accomplished none of what they set out to do. John Williams scored it.
Hoth is the best staging in the sequence and almost all of it is practical. The walkers are stop-motion against models, the snow is real Norwegian weather that nearly killed the crew, and the cable sequence has a geography an audience can follow completely. Billy Dee Williams plays Lando. Yoda works because Frank Oz plays him as irritating for twenty minutes before the reveal. He steals food, he pokes things, he’s rude about the ship, and none of it is signalled as a test until after the audience has stopped suspecting one.
The filmmakers kept the reveal from almost everybody including David Prowse, who spoke a different line on set. They told Mark Hamill shortly before the take, the crew heard the false version, and James Earl Jones dubbed the actual line afterward. Fox released it in May 1980.
Empire is the bravest sequel a studio ever released, because it sends its heroes home beaten and trusts the audience to come back anyway. My reservation is that it doesn’t end so much as stop, and a film should give me something complete even when it’s the middle chapter. Lucas bet his own money on Kershner, and I respect that gamble more than most of what he directed himself.
7. Heavy Metal (1981) [full review]
► Read the full review of Heavy Metal (1981)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.7/10
"Eight unrelated stories held together by one green sphere."
Ivan Reitman produced the Canadian adult animation anthology adapted from the magazine, with eight segments made by different studios in deliberately different styles. It was unavailable for years over music rights and became a video generation’s rite of passage because of it. John Candy and Eugene Levy voice several parts.
The anthology structure is held together by the Loc-Nar, a green sphere that appears in every segment. It narrates, it corrupts whoever holds it, and the device lets eight unrelated stories in eight visual styles sit in one film without anybody explaining the connection. Elmer Bernstein scored it.
The Taarna segment is the best work in it and has no dialogue at all. A silent warrior responds to a summons too late, the sequence is scored instead of spoken, and the animation quality visibly exceeds everything around it in the anthology. Columbia released it in August 1981.
The Harry Canyon segment is the other strong one and it’s a straight noir. A New York cab driver, a woman in trouble, a case everybody wants, and the science fiction elements are set dressing on a structure Chandler would have recognized immediately. Eight segments were produced. The tonal range across the film is enormous and mostly unmanaged. Broad sex comedy sits directly against serious horror and then against wordless tragedy, and the anthology format is the only thing making that arrangement survivable. A sequel followed in 2000. Don Felder contributed to the soundtrack.
8. Tron (1982) [full review]
► Read the full review of Tron (1982)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.8/10
"Programs treat their users as gods, and one stops believing."
Steven Lisberger made the foundational computer graphics film and the Academy refused to consider it for a visual effects nomination on the grounds that using a computer was cheating. Disney spent around seventeen million dollars and got roughly half of it back. Jeff Bridges plays Flynn.
Only about fifteen minutes are actual computer graphics and the rest is backlit animation. Every live action frame was shot in black and white, blown up to large format, and hand-colored through masks by a team in Taiwan working around the clock. Bruce Boxleitner plays Tron. The light cycle sequence is the reason anybody remembers it. The grid, the right-angle turns, the solid trails and the geometry of the arena are all legible instantly, and the sequence needs no explanation of the rules before it starts. David Warner plays Dillinger. Wendy Carlos scored it.
The film builds the world inside on an idea instead of on decoration. Programs are servants of users they regard as gods, programs treat belief in users as a religion, and the Master Control Program is an administrator who has decided it no longer needs them.
The film’s reputation is mostly about the look and the story underneath is sturdier than that suggests. A man robbed of his work by an employer, a system that’s absorbed the evidence, and a plot about getting proof out of a building. A sequel followed in 2010.
The Academy calling computer work cheating is exactly the kind of gatekeeping that gives awards a bad name. Lisberger built the future by hand, frame by colored frame, and the Academy shut him out for it. The acting inside the grid is stiff and the office plot takes its time getting going, and I don’t much care, because the light cycles carry the whole picture on their own.
9. The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.2/10
"It references adventures that do not exist and never will."
W. D. Richter made one of the strangest studio films of the decade, a picture that behaves throughout as though the audience has read several previous instalments that don’t exist. Fox had no idea how to market it and the film failed completely on release. The hero is a neurosurgeon, physicist and rock musician who leads a band that’s also a special operations unit. None of that combination is explained, defended or treated as unusual by anybody in the film at any point in the running time. Ellen Barkin plays Penny Priddy.
The references to unseen adventures are the defining device. Characters mention past events casually, invoke an old rivalry without background, and the closing titles promise a sequel that was never made and that a small audience has anticipated for forty years. Jeff Goldblum plays New Jersey.
Peter Weller plays Buckaroo completely deadpan and John Lithgow plays Lord John Whorfin as enormous. The contrast is the film’s engine, with one performance underplaying everything and the other treating every line as an opera. Christopher Lloyd plays John Bigboote. Michael Boddicker scored it. Fox released it in August 1984.
The Red Lectroids are from Planet Ten and are all named John, and the film states once and never explains further. Orson Welles is written into the backstory as the man who covered up the 1938 landing with a radio broadcast. Clancy Brown plays Rawhide.
Tron gives its programs a theology and Buckaroo Banzai refers to adventures that were never filmed. Build depth cheaply in the World Builder’s Handbook.
10. The Terminator (1984) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Terminator (1984)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.1/10
"Four rules in the first act buy ninety minutes of pressure."
Cameron made it for around six million dollars after a fever dream in Rome and a dispute with the producers of Piranha II. Harlan Ellison received a credit and a settlement afterward over similarities to two Outer Limits episodes he’d written. Linda Hamilton plays Sarah Connor.
The structure is a chase with almost no relief in it. The machine doesn’t sleep, negotiate, tire or stop, and the film establishes all of that in the first act so the remaining ninety minutes carry a pressure nothing in the story ever lifts. Stan Winston’s effects hold up in fragments and fail in wide shots, the reverse of the usual problem. The arm repair and the eye sequence are excellent, and the stop-motion endoskeleton in the final reel is visibly a model moving frame by frame. Arnold Schwarzenegger plays the machine.
Michael Biehn’s Reese is the emotional content and the film gives him almost no time. He’s frightened continuously, he’s been fighting since childhood, and the photograph he carries is explained in a single line that reframes the whole relationship. Adam Greenberg shot it.
The loop is closed and the film leaves it closed. Reese is the father, the machine’s own remains produce the technology it came back to protect, and Cameron doesn’t have anybody in the film remark on the circularity of any of it. Brad Fiedel scored it.
That stop-motion endoskeleton in the last reel distracts me, and I forgive it, because Cameron spent the first hour building a threat so relentless that a wobbly model can’t undo it. The bigger miss is Reese. He’s the heart of the story, and the film hands him about as much screen time as a delivery man gets.
11. Day of the Dead (1985) [full review]
► Read the full review of Day of the Dead (1985)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.1/10
"Rhodes is a tyrant and he is also entirely correct."
Romero wrote a considerably larger film and cut it down when the budget was halved to around three and a half million dollars, because he refused to compromise on an unrated release. The original screenplay involved a trained army of the dead and an island.
The bunker structure is the bleakest in the sequence. Twelve people underground, a military unit and a scientific team who despise each other, and the film opens with the survivors already past any hope of finding a solution to anything. Lori Cardille plays Sarah. Howard Sherman plays Bub.
Bub is the best idea in any Romero film. A dead man under a scientist’s conditioning, responding to a razor, a telephone and a Beethoven recording, and saluting an officer because some part of him still remembers what the uniform used to mean. John Harrison scored it.
Tom Savini’s effects are the most extreme of his career and the film was released unrated for that reason. The Rhodes sequence at the end is still among the most graphic things in American horror and was achieved entirely with practical work. It was shot in a Pennsylvania mine.
Joe Pilato plays Rhodes as a man who’s not wrong about the situation, the uncomfortable part. The scientists have no plan, the research is going nowhere, and his objection is reasonable right up until the point where he starts shooting people. Richard Liberty plays Doctor Logan.
12. Aliens (1986) [full review]
► Read the full review of Aliens (1986)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.4/10
"The unit that dismissed the briefing is the one taken apart."
Cameron wrote it while waiting for financing on The Terminator and made a combat film instead of a horror one, the decision that lets both pictures coexist. The Academy nominated Sigourney Weaver for Best Actress, and the genre almost never manages. Michael Biehn and Bill Paxton appear. The marines are established as overconfident before anything happens to them. They joke about the assignment, they dismiss the briefing, they’re carrying more firepower than anybody could need, and the collapse in the atmosphere processor lands for exactly that reason. Carrie Henn plays Newt.
The motion tracker is the best suspense device in the film because it supplies incomplete information. Something is approaching, the direction is unclear, and the sequence where the readings are already inside the room is built entirely on that gap. James Horner scored it. Adrian Biddle shot it. Stan Winston built the queen as a fourteen-foot puppet that several people operated from inside and below, and the practical work is why the last act still has weight. The film achieves almost nothing by removing mass from the frame. It won two Academy Awards. Ripley’s relationship with Newt is the actual engine and the loader fight is its statement. The film is about a woman who lost a daughter while in hypersleep being handed a second one, and the special edition makes that explicit in a scene the theatrical cut removed.
13. RoboCop (1987) [full review]
► Read the full review of RoboCop (1987)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.6/10
"The death runs past the point of entertainment, deliberately."
Verhoeven made a satire that a substantial portion of its audience took at face value, an outcome that met almost every American film he directed. Orion released it in 1987 and the sequels, television series and 2014 remake never recovered the original tone. Nancy Allen plays Lewis.
The argument is in the advertisements. A board game about nuclear war, a car with terrible mileage sold as freedom, and a medical product delivered with a jingle, all played straight and cut into the film as though it were ordinary broadcast material. Kurtwood Smith plays Boddicker.
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. Ronny Cox plays Jones.
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 the day. Basil Poledouris scored it.
The company is the antagonist and the film never softens the position. OCP owns the police department, the murder is a business outcome, and the resolution requires OCP to fire a board member before anyone can apply the law to him at all. Rob Bottin built the suit.
RoboCop is angrier and funnier than anybody had a right to expect from that title, and the fake commercials make me laugh out loud. My reservation is that Verhoeven plays the satire so straight the film can pass for the thing it’s mocking, and the studio proved the danger by building sequels that took it at face value. OCP is the villain I believe in most on this whole list.
A Clockwork Orange makes you enjoy his company first, and Day of the Dead gives its tyrant the accurate complaint. Two hard builds, in the Deep Character Handbook.
14. They Live (1988) [full review]
► Read the full review of They Live (1988)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.2/10
"Six minutes of fighting over a pair of sunglasses."
Carpenter adapted a Ray Nelson short story and made the most direct political film of his career, financed partly with his own money. He’s been explicit for thirty-five years about what it’s about and has spent much of that time correcting people who read it backward.
The sunglasses are the best single idea in eighties science fiction. Put them on and advertising becomes instruction, currency reads as an assertion about belief, and the film shoots those sequences in black and white against a color world. Keith David plays Frank. Meg Foster plays Holly.
Roddy Piper was a professional wrestler and the casting is the reason the film works. He’s physically enormous, he’s not a trained actor, and the flatness of the delivery suits a man who has been walking between jobs for years without complaining about it. The alley fight runs close to six minutes and exists because Piper and Keith David wanted it. It’s about a man refusing to put on a pair of sunglasses, the film’s entire argument staged as a brawl over nothing at all. Gary B. Kibbe shot it.
Nobody quotes the construction site scenes, yet the film is built on them. Men queuing for work, a shanty town bulldozed at night, and a television nobody can turn off are all established before any science fiction element arrives. Carpenter scored it with Alan Howarth.
15. Demolition Man (1993) [full review]
► Read the full review of Demolition Man (1993)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.7/10
"Nobody ever explains the three seashells, including the writers."
Marco Brambilla made his directing debut on a film that nobody in 1993 read as a satire, and the reading has shifted completely since. Warner Bros. spent around fifty-seven million dollars, Sylvester Stallone and Wesley Snipes were both at the height of their action careers, and Sandra Bullock got the role that made her before Speed did.
San Angelo is the invention and it’s considerably sharper than the marketing suggested. Profanity carries an automatic fine issued by a wall sensor, all restaurants are Taco Bell, physical contact has been abolished, and every citizen is pleasant, medicated and entirely unable to handle a single act of real violence.
Wesley Snipes is having a better time than anybody else in the film. Simon Phoenix delights in everything, he improvises constantly, the dyed hair was his idea, and the performance is closer to a cartoon than to an action villain without ever tipping into something the film can’t use.
The three seashells joke is the best running gag of the decade because the film never explains it. Stallone asks, nobody answers usefully, the audience never finds out, and Brambilla has said the writers themselves never agreed on an answer to the question at any point during production.
The underground resistance material is the argument’s payoff. Denis Leary leads people who want red meat and swearing, the film treats them as correct, and the resolution is a compromise between a sanitized surface and a rebellion that’s nothing to offer except appetite.
16. Independence Day (1996) [full review]
► Read the full review of Independence Day (1996)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.0/10
"The virus solution is planted a full hour before it is used."
Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin wrote it in about four weeks and Fox committed before the script was finished. It cost around seventy-five million dollars, took over eight hundred million worldwide, and Fox built the marketing almost entirely on a single Super Bowl advertisement showing aliens destroying the White House.
The model work is the reason it holds up better than its imitators. Almost everything destroyed on screen was built and blown up practically, at large scale, with high-speed cameras, and Volker Engel’s team won the Academy Award for effects in a year when digital work was already available and cheaper.
Three separate protagonists converge on the same event, and the film keeps moving because of it. A pilot, a satellite technician and a president each have a different relationship to the same event, and the film cuts between them on scale instead of on plot.
Bill Pullman’s speech is the most quoted thing in nineties blockbuster cinema and the filmmakers wrote it the night before. Emmerich and Devlin have both said they assembled it quickly, shot it in a single morning, and nobody involved expected it to become the thing people remembered thirty years later.
The computer virus resolution is the part everybody complains about and the film sets it up carefully. The film establishes the alien technology as recovered and reverse-engineered at Area 51 an hour earlier, scientists built the human systems from it, and the compatibility follows from something the picture already told the audience.
Independence Day is big, loud, dumb fun, and I enjoy it without any guilt. The models look better than the digital wreckage that replaced them, and Pullman’s speech moves me even though I know how corny it is. My problem is the people, who are types from their first scene and never get a quiet moment to turn into anybody.
The Terminator states four rules and never grants an exception, and Aliens makes its marines overconfident first. Build the pressure in the Conflict and Tension Handbook.
17. X-Men (2000) [full review]
► Read the full review of X-Men (2000)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.3/10
"It opens at Auschwitz, and nothing he does afterward needs explaining."
Bryan Singer made the film that established modern superhero cinema and Fox gave him around seventy-five million dollars, and it was modest for the ambition. The studio insisted on black leather instead of the costumes from the comics, and the film makes a joke about it instead of pretending the decision wasn’t made.
Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen are the reason the picture has weight. Xavier and Magneto have known each other for decades, they agree on the diagnosis and disagree entirely on the treatment, and every scene they share is two intelligent men who have had this argument many times before.
The opening in the camp is the smartest decision in the film. Magneto’s power manifests as a child being separated from his parents at Auschwitz, establishing his position completely. Nothing he does across the rest of the picture requires further explanation. Famke Janssen plays Jean Grey. Hugh Jackman was cast three weeks into production after Dougray Scott became unavailable, and he’d never seen the comics. Wolverine works because Jackman plays reluctance instead of menace, and the relationship with Rogue carries most of the film’s actual emotional content. Anna Paquin plays Rogue.
The mutant registration material is doing the political work and the film is direct about it. Senate hearings, a proposed database, a public argument about whether a minority should be catalogued, and the picture treats that as the actual conflict with the costumes on top.
18. Idiocracy (2006) [full review]
► Read the full review of Idiocracy (2006)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.5/10
"The argument collapses into the slogan that caused the problem."
Mike Judge made a satire that Fox declined to release properly, opening it in a handful of cities with no trailer, no press screenings and almost no advertising. It’s become among the most cited films of the century and it barely reached a cinema audience at the time of release. An average man, frozen for five hundred years, wakes as the most intelligent person alive. Judge establishes the mechanism in a short prologue about reproduction rates, delivers it as a documentary segment, and then spends the entire film on consequences instead of explanation.
The design work carries most of the joke. Advertising has colonized every surface, corporate names have replaced institutions, logos cover the clothing, and rope and improvisation hold the architecture together because nobody left understands how anyone originally built any of it. Maya Rudolph plays Rita.
The water and Brawndo material is the sharpest sequence in it. Crops are irrigated with a sports drink because it’s electrolytes, nobody can explain what electrolytes are, and the argument collapses every time into the same circular advertising slogan that started the problem. Dax Shepard plays Frito.
Luke Wilson plays Joe as ordinary instead of as a hero, the decision the film depends on. He’s not clever, he has no plan, he wants to go home, and the elevation to Secretary of the Interior happens to him instead of being anything he sought.
Idiocracy makes me laugh and then disturbs me a little. Fox dumping it in a handful of cities with no trailer is the kind of studio cowardice at its purest. The last stretch runs thin, as though Judge ran out of jokes and settled for plot, but the Brawndo scenes are sharper than whole careers’ worth of studio comedy.
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.
Sleep Dealer (2008)
Alex Rivera built a border film where Mexican laborers operate American machines remotely through neural connections, and the water supply is privatized and metered. It won at Sundance.
The Congress (2013)
Ari Folman mixed live action and animation around an actress who sells the rights to her own scanned likeness, and the second half takes place entirely inside a chemical hallucination.
Advantageous (2015)
Jennifer Phang made a quiet film about a mother who transfers into a younger body to keep her job, and the cost is handled as an ordinary employment decision instead of a tragedy.
Little Joe (2019)
Jessica Hausner built a film around an engineered plant that makes people happy and may be altering them, with a score and a color palette that keep the audience uneasy throughout.
Possessor (2020)
Brandon Cronenberg made a film about an assassin who occupies other bodies to work, and the practical transition effects are among the most upsetting of the decade.
Vivarium (2019)
Lorcan Finnegan trapped a couple in an identical housing estate they can’t drive out of, with a child left on the doorstep and a set of rules nobody ever states.
Rollerball (1975)
Norman Jewison built a corporate dystopia around a blood sport designed to prove that no individual matters, and James Caan spends the film proving the opposite by refusing to retire.
Zardoz (1974)
John Boorman made a film about immortals bored past the point of wanting to live, with Sean Connery in a red loincloth and a stone head that vomits firearms. Nothing about it is ordinary.
The Omega Man (1971)
The second adaptation of Matheson, with Charlton Heston alone in Los Angeles watching the same film every afternoon. The empty city footage was shot on Sunday mornings downtown.
Outland (1981)
Peter Hyams remade High Noon on a mining station orbiting Io, with Sean Connery as a marshal nobody will back and a countdown to the arrival of the men sent to kill him.
Flight of the Navigator (1986)
A boy vanishes for eight years, returns the same age, and the ship that took him has his star charts in its memory. The reflective hull was achieved practically with mirrored panels.
Innerspace (1987)
Joe Dante made the comedy version of Fantastic Voyage with Dennis Quaid miniaturized inside Martin Short, and the effects team won an Academy Award for the work.
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.
I Am Mother (2019)
A strong premise about a bunker robot raising a child, undercut by a third act that explains its own ambiguity in dialogue and resolves a question the first hour was better for leaving open.
Oxygen (2021)
A woman wakes in a medical pod with no memory and a falling oxygen level, a workable single-location premise, and the film keeps leaving the pod for flashbacks that release the pressure.
Tron: Legacy (2010)
The design and the Daft Punk score are excellent and the story is a father-and-son reunion that keeps stopping so somebody can explain the rules of a world the first film established without any explaining.
Stowaway (2021)
A lifeboat problem on a Mars transit, built carefully, and then resolved by a convenient sacrifice that removes the decision the entire film was constructed to force.
RoboCop 3 (1993)
Rated for a wide audience, removing the satire and the violence in one decision, and it gives him a jetpack. Peter Weller declined to return for it.
Timeline (2003)
A Crichton adaptation about archaeologists sent to fourteenth-century France, with the quantum mechanism explained at length and then abandoned for a siege nobody needed time travel to stage.
What Do You Think?
Every film in this tier is one I’d defend, and every one comes with a flaw I’d point out in the same breath. What they share is discipline about what to keep off the page, and I wish more writers had it, because putting the monster on page one ruins more books than bad grammar ever will. Alien hides its creature and Buckaroo Banzai hides a whole backstory it never meant to supply. Tell me which withholding you find hardest in your own work.
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
