As writer-director-editor and cinematographer, Soderbergh does a remarkable job of echoing the original’s Soviet-era look and solemnity, yet moves the story along without compromising its intriguing musings on the knowability of self and others. It’s hard to imagine a Hollywood exec even sitting through Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris(1972), never mind stumping up for Steven Soderbergh’s US remake, but perhaps the presence of producer James Cameron facilitated this most introspective of space operas. TJĬast: George Clooney, Natascha McElhone, Jeremy Davies Young Lucas evidently believed in heroic individualism, fast cars and the possibility of escape, yet it’s the visualisation of an entire society shaped by universal surveillance, government-supplied sedatives and android police carrying very big sticks which rings darker and truer than the director’s subsequent, significantly more populist output. Viewed today – the only version available is Lucas and co-writer Walter Murch’s digitally spruced-up 2004 ‘Director’s Cut’ – its shaven headed-cast, chillingly benign language intoning state propaganda and oppressive widescreen palette of glacial whites make for genuinely unnerving viewing. The studio hated the result and the subsequent box-office debacle almost killed both their careers. George Lucas and his pal Francis Ford Coppola persuaded Warner Brothers to take a flyer on expanding George’s earlier student short into this Orwell and Huxley-influenced fable about free love and free will versus all-powerful totalitarianism. 🧨 The 101 best action movies of all-timeĬast: Robert Duvall, Donald Pleasence, Maggie McOmie 🦄 The 50 best fantasy movies of all-time 👽 The best sci-fi shows streaming on Netflix It’s sure to convert those few remaining holdouts. Don’t believe us? Check out our list of the 100 best sci-fi movies ever made. The best sci-fi movies deal as much with real-world issues as they do with interstellar conflict – it’s just that, in some cases, they may invent entirely new planets to discuss them. But the genre doesn’t just tell stories from long ago about galaxies far, far away. It’s hard to say if the geeks have taken over the entertainment industry or if the world at large has simply come to see the genre’s merits, but there might not be a bigger brand of movie than sci-fi around right now – in fact, it’s almost uncool not to be a fan these days.īut really, how could anyone in the third decade of the 21st century not appreciate science fiction to some degree? Sure, there are those who have an aversion to movies about alien cultures that inspire 4000-word theoretical treatises on fan forums. Dismissed for decades as the realm of nerds and shut-ins, the reputation of science fiction has undergone a dramatic makeover in recent years.

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