Friday, May 4, 2007

Best Sci-Fi of the Last 25 Years--Pah!

Via Cake, here's what EW.com considers to be the best Sci-Fi of the last 25 years. (Film/Tv only.)

And I must just beg to differ.

Sure there's some good stuff on this list but the omissions are glaring.

Viz.:

1. Farscape. Quirky, character-driven and very po-mo. And those fabulous puppets. Really cool aliens. Scorpius has to be one of the best Evil Villains ever, and they did an entire episode on crackers.

2. Space Above and Beyond. Okay, I didn't love this show, but it was one of the first tv shows to embed realistic military lifestyle into a science fiction world, so it deserves notice for that, if nothing else. In some ways, a fore-runner of BSG.

3. The Fifth Element. I know, I know, a Bruce Willis action vehicle. But the production design (via French comic masters Jean Giraud and Jean-Claude Mézières) and costuming (via Jean Paul Gaultier) was visionary. And as an action movie, the action was pretty darn good.

4. Lexx. I could never decide if I liked this show or not--but I kept watching it. Plot-wise it was surreal and bizarre. A half-cluster lizard half-love slave, a robot head, a dead Brunnun-G Warrior, and Stanley Tweddle travel through the Light Universe on the Lexx, the most powerful weapon in the universe--also a giant insect--encountering no end of weirdly menacing creatures and people. It's unlike any other Scifi show you've ever seen.

5. Red Dwarf. One of the few SciFi comedy series, Red Dwarf follows the adventures of slobby Dave Lister, who through a series of unfortunate incidents, finds himself trapped in deep space, three million years into the future, with only a hologram of his worst enemy, and a hyper-evolved cat for company. These adventures are very very funny.

6. Babylon Five. I never cared much for this show, but it was one of the first (if not the first) scifi shows whose adventures were driven not by exploration, but by politics. It was also one of the first shows to really push the use of CGI. Additionally, the show gave full screen time to its various alien races, creating fully formed characters who were just as important as the humans.

5 comments:

Paul Witcover said...

And what about Dark City? C'mon!

Cake said...

This is like shooting fish in a barrel, but...

"Iron Giant". For two reasons:

A) It featured the best scenes of giant-scale robotic ass-kicking in the history of cinema, and

B) It made me cry.

Unknown said...

What about Firefly and/or Serenity? Seriously...well, I could argue this further, but I'll just leave it at that.

Unknown said...

Oh god, Iron Giant, YES!

Dude, I cried not only in the movie, but while watching the trailer. I love that movie.

Ysabeau Wilce said...

Well, EW had both Firefly and Serenity on their list, so that's why I didn't put either on mine. I didn't care much for Firefly (the western in space trope didn't work for me), but I thought Serenity was excellent. The world needs more Joss.