Part 5 – The Solid Craft
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 what gets withheld and what gets scheduled. Under the Skin never says what she is or who sent her, Blade Runner leaves a question its own makers still disagree about, and Gravity states its debris interval once and lets the audience count toward every act break on their own.
The other pattern is a single element holding an unstable film together. Von Sydow plays Ming entirely straight inside a camp opera, Battleship finds one genuine tactical sequence inside a board game with no plot, and The Abyss loses its ending to a cut that removed the reason instead of the result.
Every rating is the one carried by the review it links to. Ties are broken by year, and this is the fifth of eight parts.
Demolition Man never explains the three seashells and Ghost in the Shell lets Aramaki answer in Japanese without comment. Build the frame in the World Builder’s Handbook.
1. Sunshine (2007) [full review]
► Read the full review of Sunshine (2007)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.2/10
"Eighty minutes of rigour, and then a slasher walks in."
Danny Boyle made a film about a crew carrying a bomb to reignite a dying sun, with Alex Garland writing and a physics consultant attached throughout production. It cost around forty million dollars and the cast lived together in halls of residence before shooting to build the crew dynamic.
The first two thirds are among the best hard science fiction ever filmed. Every decision has a stated cost in oxygen, mass or time, the arguments between the crew are about arithmetic instead of personality, and the film trusts an audience to follow a conversation about payload physics.
The observation room is the best invention in the picture. A screen that filters the sun down to a survivable percentage, a crew member who keeps asking for more, and a relationship with light that Boyle uses to establish something religious without a word of dialogue about it.
The sound design does the work the images cannot. Silence outside the hull, the communications delay with Earth growing across the voyage, and a score by John Murphy whose main theme has been used in trailers continuously for nearly twenty years since the film’s release.
The last act changes genre and the film never recovers. A slasher antagonist arrives, the photography goes deliberately incoherent, and a picture that had been rigorous about physics for eighty minutes resolves into something that could have happened in any corridor anywhere. Cillian Murphy plays Capa.
2. Total Recall (2012) [full review]
► Read the full review of Total Recall (2012)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.2/10
"It answers the question the original was built on not answering."
Len Wiseman remade Verhoeven and almost every review judged it against the wrong reference. Sony spent around one hundred and twenty-five million dollars, removed Mars entirely, and built a world where the only two habitable regions are connected by a gravity elevator through the center of the earth.
The Fall is the genuine invention and it is the reason to watch the film. A vehicle that drops through the planet, has a period of inversion at the core where everybody floats, and then decelerates into the other hemisphere, with the physics worked through and staged properly.
The world design is excellent and largely unremarked. The Colony is vertical, rain-soaked and stacked in layers reminiscent of Kowloon, and the United Federation of Britain is clean, spacious and full of light, and neither ever needs a line explaining the relationship. Colin Farrell plays Quaid.
Kate Beckinsale plays the pursuing agent for the whole running time and it is the best thing in the picture. The role combines two separate characters from the original, she is relentless instead of sadistic, and she is given a genuine grievance about the marriage she is walking out of.
What it loses is the ambiguity that made the 1990 version worth arguing about. There is no meaningful question about whether any of this is implanted, the film answers early, and removing the doubt removes the only thing the original had that the action could not replace.
3. Gravity (2013) [full review]
► Read the full review of Gravity (2013)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.7/10
"The debris returns every ninety minutes, stated once."
Alfonso Cuaron opened on a thirteen-minute unbroken shot and then destroyed everything inside it. The film took four and a half years to make, cost around one hundred million dollars, and won seven Academy Awards including direction, photography and every technical category it was eligible for.
The technique was invented for the film. A robotic arm moved a camera around an actor suspended in a twenty-foot LED box that projected the lighting environment, so the reflections on the visor and the light on the face are real instead of composited in afterward.
The sound design follows the physics and that is the boldest decision in it. Nothing outside a pressurized volume makes a noise, impacts are transmitted through contact instead of through air, and a station comes apart in near silence while the score carries the emotional register alone.
Sandra Bullock carries almost the entire running time alone and much of it in a single suit. The performance was recorded in near isolation inside the light box for hours at a time, and she was nominated for Best Actress for a role with almost no other performer present.
The debris cascade gives the film its clock and its structure. Kessler syndrome is stated once at the beginning, the orbital period is ninety minutes, and every act break arrives when the wave comes round again, and the audience can anticipate without being reminded of it.
4. Oblivion (2013) [full review]
► Read the full review of Oblivion (2013)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.0/10
"He collects books. That is what breaks the arrangement."
Joseph Kosinski adapted his own unpublished graphic novel and shot the sky sequences in Iceland at altitude, using front projection on enormous screens so the cloud light on the actors is genuine. Universal spent around one hundred and twenty million dollars and the film made most of it back overseas.
The design work is the strongest thing in it and it is unusually coherent. The sky tower, the bubble ship and the drones all share a white curved language, the interiors are glass and water above a cloud layer, and nothing in the world looks like it came from another film.
The premise depends on withholding and the marketing gave most of it away. A technician and a communications officer service drones over an evacuated Earth, their memories were wiped for security, and almost everything they believe about the assignment turns out to be constructed. Andrea Riseborough plays Victoria.
Tom Cruise plays a man who is good at a job nobody has explained to him, the correct register for the material. He collects books, he maintains a cabin he is not supposed to have, and the curiosity is what breaks the arrangement instead of any heroism.
The clone reveal is well staged and the film has planted it properly. Another technician with the same face, the same designation and a different partner, and the sequence where the two meet is played without explanation for considerably longer than most films would allow.
Independence Day plants its solution an hour early and Gravity gives its threat a ninety-minute schedule. Structure it properly in the Plot Handbook.
5. Under the Skin (2013) [full review]
► Read the full review of Under the Skin (2013)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.3/10
"No organization, no briefing, no purpose. Only behaviour."
Jonathan Glazer spent close to nine years developing it and shot substantial portions with concealed cameras in Glasgow, using non-actors who did not know they were in a film and were asked for consent afterward. Several declined and were removed from the finished picture entirely.
Scarlett Johansson drives a van through Scottish cities picking up men, and the film supplies no account of what she is, who she works for or what the harvest serves. The motorcyclist who cleans up after her is never named, and no briefing scene exists anywhere in the running time.
The black void sequences are the best images in recent science fiction. Men walk into a liquid surface without understanding they are walking, hang suspended in it, and a later shot showing what remains of one of them is among the most upsetting things the genre has produced anywhere.
Mica Levi’s score does an enormous amount of the work and was nominated for nearly every award available that year. Strings pitched a shade wrong, a recurring figure that arrives before the van does, and long passages where sound is the only information the audience receives.
The turn is the part most viewers miss on a first watch. She begins by observing humans and ends by experiencing something, and the cake, the mirror and the encounter with the disfigured man are stages in a process the film never names or explains to anybody.
6. Ghost in the Shell (2017) [full review]
► Read the full review of Ghost in the Shell (2017)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.3/10
"He speaks Japanese, everybody answers in English, nobody mentions it."
Rupert Sanders adapted Masamune Shirow’s manga and the 1995 Mamoru Oshii film, and the casting controversy consumed the entire conversation around the release. Paramount spent around one hundred and ten million dollars and the film lost a substantial amount of it worldwide. Pilou Asbaek plays Batou.
The production design is genuinely outstanding and almost nobody discussed it. The holographic advertising is built at architectural scale, the city is dense and lived in, and the geisha robots and the diving sequence are staged with real care by Jan Roelfs and his team.
The 1995 film is a philosophical work about identity and the 2017 version is an origin story about a stolen body. That substitution is the central problem, since the original asks what a person is and the remake asks who did this to her, and those are different questions.
Scarlett Johansson is doing real physical work and the shell movement was choreographed carefully. The thermoptic camouflage sequences are the best action in it, the weightlessness of the falls is handled well, and the performance suffers from a screenplay that explains her at every opportunity.
Takeshi Kitano plays Aramaki entirely in Japanese while everybody answers him in English, the most interesting decision in the film. Nobody remarks on it, the arrangement is simply how the section operates, and it does more worldbuilding than any of the exposition around it. Juliette Binoche plays Ouelet.
7. Dune Parts 1 & 2 [full review]
► Read the full review of Dune Parts 1 & 2
RLR: 7.5 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.0/10
"Herbert lives inside the heads and film cannot follow him there."
Denis Villeneuve split Herbert’s novel across two films and shot both largely in Jordan and Abu Dhabi with practical sets at enormous scale. Together they cost around three hundred and ninety million dollars, won a combined ten Academy Awards, and made Herbert commercially viable on screen for the first time.
The scale is the achievement and Villeneuve gets it from restraint instead of from clutter. The ornithopters move like insects, the ships are photographed against human figures for reference, and Greig Fraser shoots most interiors with a single dominant light source and enormous empty space.
The Bene Gesserit material is handled better than any previous adaptation managed. The breeding programme, the Voice, the Missionaria Protectiva and the deliberate seeding of prophecy are all present, and the films are clear that Paul is walking into a trap somebody built centuries ago.
What the films lose is the interiority that carries the novel. Herbert writes almost everything from inside several heads at once, the plans and counter-plans are explicit on the page, and the films replace that with faces reacting and a great deal of implication. Timothee Chalamet plays Paul.
Part Two is the better film and the Feyd-Rautha material is why. The arena sequence is shot in infrared black and white on Giedi Prime, Austin Butler plays him as genuinely unpredictable, and the film gives the Harkonnens a coherence the 1984 version never found.
8. Battleship (2012) [full review]
► Read the full review of Battleship (2012)
RLR: 7.5 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 5.7/10
"One sequence remembers what game it is named after."
Peter Berg made a film adapted from a board game with no plot in it, an unpromising origin, and Universal spent around two hundred and nine million dollars on it. It lost money domestically and the reputation has been fixed since release without much of anybody rewatching it.
The grid sequence is the one genuinely inspired thing in the picture. With radar disabled, the crew use tsunami buoys to detect displacement and call coordinates on a map, turning the board game into a legitimate tactical problem the audience can follow move by move.
The Missouri sequence is the emotional core and it should not work. Actual veterans crew the museum ship, several of them served on her, and the film treats them with genuine respect instead of using them as a joke about old men and old technology.
The alien design is coherent and the rules are stated. They do not attack anything not reading as a threat, their vision has a specific spectrum problem in daylight, and both limitations are established early and then used properly in the last act. Liam Neeson plays the admiral.
The rest is a standard blockbuster and the film knows it. A disgraced officer, an admiral’s daughter, a redemption arc arriving exactly on schedule, and none of it approaching the quality of the twenty minutes where the film remembers what game it is named after.
9. The Day of the Triffids (1962) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Day of the Triffids (1962)
RLR: 7 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.2/10
"Two harmless facts that turn lethal in combination."
Steve Sekely directed the adaptation of John Wyndham’s 1951 novel and the production was troubled enough that Freddie Francis shot an entirely separate lighthouse subplot to bring it to releasable length. The two halves never meet, share no characters, and were filmed months apart by different units.
The premise is the best in British science fiction. A meteor shower blinds almost everybody who stops to watch it, and the walking plants already being farmed commercially for oil become the dominant species overnight because nobody left alive can see them approaching across open ground.
The blindness is the actual horror and Wyndham is clearer about it than the film manages. A city full of people who cannot see, entirely dependent on the few who can, and the moral arithmetic of deciding who gets helped and who is left is where the novel spends most of its attention.
The triffids on screen are men in suits and they do not survive close inspection. Francis shoots them in fragments, in darkness and at the edges of the frame wherever possible, and the handful of sequences showing one clearly in daylight are the weakest material in the picture.
The lighthouse half is the better film and it was shot separately to pad the running time. A married couple, a siege, a great deal of alcohol and a discovery about what seawater does, and it has almost nothing to do with the story it was eventually attached to.
Sunshine breaks its own rules in the last act and Flash Gordon keeps one performance entirely straight. Two lessons in holding a register, in the Genre Mastery Handbook.
10. Barbarella (1968) [full review]
► Read the full review of Barbarella (1968)
RLR: 7 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 5.8/10
"Nothing endangers her, and the film has no shape because of it."
Roger Vadim adapted a French comic strip with Jane Fonda, who was married to him at the time and has been ambivalent about the film ever since. Dino De Laurentiis produced it in Rome, and the production design by Mario Garbuglia is the reason anybody still looks at it.
The opening credits sequence is the most famous thing in it and it was genuinely difficult to achieve. Fonda floats in zero gravity removing a spacesuit, shot on a horizontal sheet of glass with the camera above her, and the lettering was arranged to move with the performer.
The design is where the film’s real influence lies. Fur-lined spacecraft interiors, organic curved plastics, the Excessive Machine, and an aesthetic that has been borrowed continuously by music video and fashion photography for more than fifty years since the film failed commercially. Anita Pallenberg plays the Black Queen.
The tone is deliberately weightless and the film has no interest in danger. Barbarella succeeds through good nature instead of competence, every threat resolves into comedy, and the picture is uninterested in building tension of any kind at any point in the running time. Claude Renoir shot it.
John Phillip Law plays a blind angel who has forgotten how to fly and Milo O’Shea plays the villain with the machine. Both performances are pitched at exactly the register the film requires, sincere delivery of material nobody could take seriously. Bob Crewe scored it.
11. Planet of the Apes (1968) [full review]
► Read the full review of Planet of the Apes (1968)
RLR: 7 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.0/10
"He despised humanity before he left. That is why the beach lands."
Franklin Schaffner directed from a Rod Serling and Michael Wilson screenplay, adapted from Pierre Boulle. John Chambers won an honorary Academy Award for makeup that had no category at the time, and the appliances consumed roughly a fifth of the entire production budget. Maurice Evans plays Doctor Zaius.
The makeup is the reason it works and the design decisions were driven by performance. The appliances were built to let the actors’ own mouths and eyes move freely, so Roddy McDowall and Kim Hunter can act through them instead of gesturing around a fixed mask.
The society is properly constructed instead of sketched. Orangutans administer, chimpanzees research, gorillas police, and the caste arrangement is stated visually through costume color and then dramatized through an inquiry that behaves exactly like a heresy trial. Leon Shamroy shot it. Jerry Goldsmith scored it.
Charlton Heston plays Taylor as contemptuous of humanity before he arrives, and the ending lands because of it. He has left Earth because he thinks people are worth escaping, and the film spends two hours giving him a reason to change his mind. Linda Harrison plays Nova.
The final shot is the best ending in science fiction cinema and Serling wrote it. The beach, the wreckage, and a reveal that recontextualizes every frame preceding it, achieved with a single matte and a camera move that cost almost nothing. Four sequels followed. Boulle published the novel in 1963.
12. Futureworld (1976) – [full review]
► Read the full review of Futureworld (1976) –
RLR: 7 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 5.7/10
"The park reopened, and the new operation is considerably worse."
Richard T. Heffron directed the sequel to Westworld without Michael Crichton, on a larger budget and with a conspiracy plot instead of a malfunction. It is the first feature to use three-dimensional computer generated imagery, in a short sequence showing a rendered hand and face.
The premise is smarter than the film around it. The park has reopened, the failures have been declared solved, and the new operation involves replacing influential visitors with duplicates so the company can place its own people into governments and corporations worldwide. Arthur Hill plays Duffy.
Peter Fonda and Blythe Danner play journalists investigating the park, and the investigation structure gives the picture a spine the first film did not need. They are there under cover, they are being watched, and the film treats it as a paranoid thriller throughout. Howard Schwartz shot it.
Yul Brynner returns for a single dream sequence and the film is honest that it is fan service. He appears in the Gunslinger costume, the sequence has no bearing on the plot, and the studio insisted on it after the character became the most remembered part of the original.
13. Flash Gordon (1980) [full review]
► Read the full review of Flash Gordon (1980)
RLR: 7 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.4/10
"Von Sydow plays it straight and holds the whole film up."
Dino De Laurentiis spent around twenty-seven million dollars on a deliberately camp space opera with a Queen soundtrack, after failing to hire Fellini and then George Lucas, who went away and made Star Wars instead when he could not obtain the rights to this property.
The design is the whole film and Danilo Donati’s work is extraordinary. Every surface is colored, the skies are painted backdrops instead of composites, Ming’s court is gold and red at a scale nobody attempts now, and none of it is trying to look real for a moment.
Brian Blessed’s Vultan is the performance everybody quotes and he plays it at full volume throughout. The Hawkmen sequence, the wings, the bridge and the shouting are all delivered with total commitment by an actor who understood exactly what the film needed from him. Sam J. Jones plays Flash.
Max von Sydow plays Ming completely straight and that contrast is what holds the picture together. He is genuinely menacing, he delivers absurd lines with Bergman-trained seriousness, and the film would collapse if he had played any of it for laughs. Melody Anderson plays Dale.
The Queen soundtrack was the first rock score for a film of this scale and it does structural work. The theme announces the character, the Hawkmen material has its own motif, and the music carries transitions the editing would otherwise have had to explain. Topol plays Zarkov.
Barbarella removes every danger and loses its shape, and Triffids builds a catastrophe from two harmless facts. Build the pressure in the Conflict and Tension Handbook.
14. Blade Runner (1982) [full review]
► Read the full review of Blade Runner (1982)
RLR: 7 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.1/10
"Scott and Ford still disagree, and the argument outlived the film."
Ridley Scott made a film that failed on release against E.T. and has since been reissued in seven distinct versions. The theatrical cut carries a Deckard voiceover that Harrison Ford has said he delivered badly on purpose, hoping the studio would abandon the idea, and they did not.
The city is the achievement and almost all of it is built. Syd Mead designed the vehicles and the street level, Douglas Trumbull supervised the effects, and the Ridleyville set on the Warner backlot was dressed with rain, steam and neon at a density nobody had attempted before.
The film is unusually quiet for its reputation. Long passages have no dialogue, the pace is deliberate to the point of stillness, and the action sequences are brief, ugly and over quickly instead of staged as set pieces the audience is meant to enjoy. Sean Young plays Rachael.
Rutger Hauer rewrote his own final speech the night before shooting, cutting it down and adding the last two lines himself. Scott has confirmed it repeatedly, and the crew applauded after the take, and almost never happens on a film set at four in the morning.
The Deckard question has never been settled and Scott and Ford disagree about it publicly to this day. The unicorn sequence in the later cuts points one way, the theatrical version points the other, and the argument has outlived almost everything else about the picture.
15. Dune (1984) [full review]
► Read the full review of Dune (1984)
RLR: 7 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.3/10
"Everybody thinks in voiceover, taken straight off Herbert’s page."
David Lynch took the job after turning down Return of the Jedi, spent three years on it, and has refused to discuss the film seriously for four decades. Dino De Laurentiis produced, the studio cut it to a contractual two hours and seventeen minutes, and Lynch removed his name from the longer television version entirely.
The design is genuinely extraordinary and it is the reason the film survives at all. Anthony Masters built a Gothic industrial world with carved wood, brass and tile, and Bob Ringwood’s costumes give each house a distinct silhouette that reads instantly from across a room.
The internal monologue is the decision everybody argues about. Characters think in voiceover continuously, the device is taken directly from Herbert’s method on the page, and it converts the film into something closer to an illustrated novel than to a conventional adaptation. Kyle MacLachlan plays Paul in his first film role.
The weirding modules are an invention the novel does not contain. Herbert wrote a martial art, the film supplies sonic weapons activated by speech, and the change removes the physical discipline that made the Fremen formidable for a piece of technology. Freddie Francis shot it.
Kenneth McMillan’s Baron is the performance that divides audiences most. He is diseased, airborne, gleeful and entirely without restraint, and the film gives him a register nothing else in the picture operates at, and it either works completely or does not work at all. Toto scored it with Brian Eno.
16. Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984) [full review]
► Read the full review of Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984)
RLR: 7 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.6/10
"The resurrection costs him his son, his ship and his rank."
Leonard Nimoy directed after negotiating the role back into existence at the end of the previous film, and Harve Bennett wrote it as a deliberate bridge. Paramount spent around sixteen million dollars and the film exists to undo a death the audience had already accepted.
The Enterprise destruction is the sequence that justifies the whole picture. The crew scuttle their own ship to kill the boarding party, the countdown is intercut with the escape, and Nimoy holds on the crew watching it burn into the atmosphere for considerably longer than expected.
Christopher Lloyd plays Kruge and the performance is more interesting than the film needed. He kills his own gunner for a mistake, he keeps a pet that eats a crew member, and his cruelty is presented as a workplace culture instead of as personal appetite.
The structure is a theft instead of a battle, unusual for the series. The crew steal the Enterprise out of spacedock, disable the pursuing ship from inside, and the sequence is played as a heist by people who built and maintained the equipment they are stealing.
The cost is what makes it work. Kirk loses his son, the ship, his career and his rank, and the resurrection at the end is paid for in a currency the series had never charged the characters before at any point in seventeen years. Robin Curtis plays Saavik.
Taylor despises humanity before he leaves Earth, and Oblivion breaks its own system with a man who collects things. Build them in the Deep Character Handbook.
17. The Abyss (1989) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Abyss (1989)
RLR: 7 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.5/10
"The cut removed the reason and kept the result."
Cameron built two enormous tanks inside an unfinished nuclear reactor containment building in South Carolina and shot underwater for months. The production was brutal enough that several cast members have described it as the worst experience of their careers, and Ed Harris has refused to discuss it since.
The underwater work is the reason it holds up. Almost everything is genuinely submerged, the actors were trained in saturation diving, and the film was shot at depths that required decompression schedules for a crew working a standard studio day. Ed Harris and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio lead.
The fluid breathing sequence is real in the way that matters. The liquid is a genuine oxygenated compound, the rat in the demonstration was actually breathing it, and the sequence with Ed Harris was achieved with a mouthpiece instead of through any compositing. Michael Biehn plays Coffey.
The water tentacle was the first convincing computer-generated character in a feature and Industrial Light and Magic built it in about six months. It mimics faces, it moves like liquid, and the technique became the direct ancestor of the T-1000 two years afterward. Mikael Salomon shot it.
The ending is the problem everybody names. The theatrical cut removes the tidal wave sequence and the nuclear disarmament argument entirely, so the aliens arrive, decide humanity is worth keeping and leave without the film explaining what changed their minds. Alan Silvestri scored it. It won the visual effects Academy Award.
18. Phenomenon (1996) [full review]
► Read the full review of Phenomenon (1996)
RLR: 7 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.4/10
"The town withdraws before anybody has a reason to."
Jon Turteltaub made a Northern California drama that is nominally science fiction and actually about dying. John Travolta plays a car mechanic who sees a light, acquires extraordinary intelligence, and the film treats the whole thing as a small-town story instead of as a premise.
The town response is the real subject and it is handled with care. George becomes useful, then strange, then frightening to people who have known him his whole life, and the film is clear that the community withdraws from him before anybody has a reason to.
Travolta plays it entirely without ego, the reason the film works at all. He is delighted by what is happening, he wants to share it, he keeps trying to explain, and the performance never once reaches for the mystical register the material invites. Gerald Di Pego wrote the screenplay.
The explanation arrives late and the film is better before it. A medical cause is supplied, the transformation turns out to have a diagnosis attached, and the picture converts a story about a man being isolated into a story about a man being ill. Phedon Papamichael shot it.
Robert Duvall and Forest Whitaker anchor it and Kyra Sedgwick plays the chair maker. The supporting cast are given real positions instead of reactions, and the film spends more time on their discomfort than on anything George can do. Thomas Newman scored it. Touchstone released it in July 1996.
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.
Europa Report (2013)
Sebastian Cordero built a found-footage mission to Jupiter’s moon from ship cameras and crew logs, with the physics checked and the crew behaving like professionals throughout.
Monsters (2010)
Gareth Edwards shot a road film through an infected zone in Mexico for almost nothing, doing the effects himself on a laptop, and the creatures appear for about four minutes.
Counterpart (2017)
J. K. Simmons plays two versions of the same man across a divided Berlin where a crossing to a parallel world has been managed by a bureaucracy since 1987. It ran for two seasons.
Orphan Black (2013)
Tatiana Maslany plays close to a dozen clones, frequently in the same shot, and the technical achievement is invisible enough that people forgot it was one performer.
Utopia (2013)
Dennis Kelly wrote a British conspiracy series about a graphic novel that predicts pandemics, shot in saturated yellows and greens with a score by Cristobal Tapia de Veer.
Tales from the Loop (2020)
Built from Simon Stalenhag’s paintings into an anthology where each episode follows a different resident of a town built over a machine nobody fully understands.
Synchronic (2019)
Benson and Moorhead built a drug that moves the user through time at a fixed point in space, a genuinely original rule, and the consequences are worked through properly.
Spring (2014)
The same directors made a romance in an Italian coastal town where one of the pair has a biological condition considerably older than she is, and the film refuses every horror beat available.
Fast Color (2018)
Julia Hart set a superhero film in a drought-stricken America across three generations of women, with almost no action and a power that works through disassembly instead of force.
The Signal (2014)
William Eubank made a film that changes genre twice on a small budget, with a desert facility, a hazmat interrogation and a final shot that reframes everything before it.
Cargo (2017)
An Australian film about an infected father with forty-eight hours to find somebody to take his infant daughter, expanded from a short and built entirely on the clock.
Pandorum (2009)
Christian Alvart set a film on a generation ship where two crew wake with no memory and the ship has been traveling considerably longer than either of them expected.
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.
The Cloverfield Paradox (2018)
An unrelated script retrofitted into a franchise, released without warning after a Super Bowl advertisement, and the retrofit is visible in every scene that has to explain the connection.
Replicas (2018)
Keanu Reeves clones his own dead family in a garage over seventeen days, and the film treats the moral question as a scheduling problem instead of anything worth dramatizing.
Reminiscence (2021)
A memory-diving noir in a flooded Miami with genuinely good design, attached to a missing woman plot that resolves exactly where the first act said it would.
The Titan (2018)
A military programme engineers humans to survive on Titan, a strong premise, and the film spends its length on a marriage drama in a housing compound instead of on the engineering.
How It Ends (2018)
A road film across a collapsing America that never once explains what happened, a strength if the ending did anything with the withholding at all.
Spectral (2016)
A strong practical premise about hyperspectral imaging and an enemy visible only through it, abandoned in the last act for an origin story delivered as a briefing in a laboratory.
What Do You Think?
This tier holds things back. No seashells, no briefing, no answer about Deckard. Tell me which unanswered question you would have insisted on closing.
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