Peter M. Floyd

In the summer of 1977, when Star Wars* came out, I turned twelve. That was, I would say, the perfect age to see it. Old enough to appreciate the nearly nonstop action, the astonishing scope, the tremendous cutting-edge visual effects, the smartass humor, and the refreshingly second-hand version of the future**, with spaceships that didn’t look fresh off the assembly line. And young enough not to notice (or at least care about) the hackneyed plot, bland dialog, and Carrie Fisher’s inconsistent accent.

I was a full-fledged Trekkie at the time, a full-on devotee of Gene Roddenberry’s Utopian vision of the future, which appealed to my overly left-brained nature. But Star Wars offered something that “Star Trek” did not. It bypassed the brain completely, aiming straight for the gut with its Joseph Campbell archetypes, awesome spectacle, and laser guns blasting at 24 frames per second. How could I resist? And to this day, whenever I see it again (I try to avoid the special edition for reasons too obvious to mention), even though I can recognize the movie’s numerous flaws, I revert to that almost-twelve-year-old kid and get sucked in as if forty-seven years hadn’t passed.

In the decades since then, Star Wars became a franchise, then an institution, and then a mythology. There have been so many TV shows, games, novels, comics, and, of course, follow-up movies that to try to list them all would be an exercise in futility. As in most such cases, each succeeding product seems to take away from rather than add to the spirit of the original. (It’s almost impossible to follow any of the Star Wars shows on Disney+ unless you watch all of the Star Wars show.) The law of diminishing returns has been in play for decades, now.

But that is now. Back in 1980, when The Empire Strikes Back was released, it was the very first expansion of the original. (If you don’t count a handful of novels, the Marvel comics series, and the Holiday Special, that is.) I was nearly fifteen when it came out, and was thus not the same starry-eyed kid from 1977. (Really, there is more change and growth between the ages of twelve and fifteen than there is between fifteen and fifty, but that is a subject for another day.) I had matured a lot, though probably not as much as I felt I had, and where science fiction was concerned I’d shelved my mania for “Star Trek,” having discovered the works of Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, and the like.

But of course, I was not made of stone, so I naturally went to see Empire. And, what do you know, I loved it. There were plenty of wonderful action scenes, of course, from the snow battle on Hoth to the Millennium Falcon dodging TIE fighters while trying to navigate an asteroid belt. But beyond that, the movie was richer than its predecessor. The characters were developing in interesting directions, what with Luke learning how to use the force, Leia and Han reluctantly falling in love, and C-3PO becoming less annoying. (Ha, I’m just kidding about that last one.) We are introduced to new characters like Yoda, who these days is a walking, talking cliché but back in 1980 was a fresh take on the mentor character, a wizened gnome speaking with the voice of Fozzie Bear. And Lando Calrissian, who provided both a dash of moral complexity and a break in the cavalcade of whiteness of the movie’s human characters.

And of course, there was the ending. First, the revelation of Luke’s parentage, as Darth Vader says “I am your father!” (I don’t have to mark that as a spoiler, do I? That’s probably the most well-known final-reel revelation in moviedom, beating even “Rosebud was his sled.”) I still remember hearing that line for the first time and thinking, “Okay, that can’t be true!” (Once again, it’s become a cliché in the Star Wars universe that everyone is related to everyone else — by the next movie, when it turned out that Luke and Leia were siblings, I was rolling my eyes — but in 1980 this was a major revelation.) And then there was the cliffhanger at the very end, with Han encased in carbonite. While there was some precedence for this — the movie serials that George Lucas grew up watching — this may be the first time that the audience was expected to wait three full years to see the resolution.

I have found that, unlike the first movie, Empire is a movie I can fully enjoy when seeing it again without reservation. The acting is much improved (Hamill and Fisher in particular have relaxed into their rolls), the dialogue is sharper and funnier, and the overall plot less hackneyed. This may be due to having an old hand like Irvin Kershner at the director’s helm this time. Or maybe it’s due to having an old hand like Leigh Brackett working on the screenplay. or, maybe it’s due to George Lucas keeping himself at arm’s length from the film’s production this time.

Whatever is the case, it was a nice peak that the franchise had been unable to match in the nearly forty-five years that have passed since then.

*Yeah, yeah, we’re supposed to call it A New Hope now, but does anybody do that?

**Yes, I do know that the setting is in fact “a long time ago,” not the future.

WARNING: This review contains spoilers for a 45-year old movie that you really should already have seen by now.

I was obsessed with Alien for years before I ever saw it.

The film came out in the summer of 1979, the year I turned fourteen. I remember the remarkably effective ads on TV, featuring an unearthly egg, cratered like the moon (and looking nothing like the eggs seen in the movie, by the way) starting to hatch, accompanied by that immortal tagline: In space no one can hear you scream. Woo! Cue the tingling of the spine.

And then I read issues of Omni magazine that featured articles and photos from the movie, showcasing designer H.R. Giger’s viscid creations: the ancient spacecraft shaped like a malformed horseshoe, slick corridors that seemed like the inside of a shark’s intestines, and the glutinous podlike eggs. There were no images of the alien* itself, of course, to limit spoilers, but what I could see was enough to get me hooked. This vision of spaceship that seemed more organic than mechanical was a kind of science fiction far removed from “Star Trek” and Star Wars.

But of course I could not see it then. At that time, I only went to the movies if someone in the family took me, and none of them was irresponsible to take me to a hard-R-rated horror flick, revolutionary visuals or no. And I wasn’t ready to see it, really; I was a bit too susceptible to the effects of horror movies and television. When I was a few years younger, I would eagerly watch “The Night Stalker” on TV, and then have to spend the night in my parents’ bed because I was too terrified to be alone. Later, after watching John Carpenter’s Halloween, edited and sanitized for TV though it was, I could not sleep a wink afterwards. So, even at 14, I was self-aware enough to know that I was not yet mentally prepared to see whatever horrible things the alien did to people.

At least, not on celluloid. In the local bookstore, I found a comic adaptation of the movie (by comic legends Archie Goodwin and Walt Simonson, though their names were unfamiliar to me at the time), which I paged through with eager hands. Later, I borrowed the book of film’s novelization, by Alan Dean Foster (the king of SF movie novelizations in the late seventies and eighties; he must have written about thirty of them), which prissily omitted all the profanity but kept all the slime and blood. These were poor substitutes for the actual movie, to be sure, but they kept me turning the pages.

It was not until my college years that I finally saw the film itself and, miraculously, it did not disappoint. Naturally, by that point I knew the plot backwards and forwards, down to the order that the crew of the space freighter Nostromo get picked off by the alien, but for the first time I could appreciate Ridley’s Scott’s masterful direction, with the suspense slowly ratcheting up through the first half as the crew land on a forbidding planet, investigate the derelict spacecraft, and then begin nosing among those alien pods, before turning up the horror factor as the alien goes on its killing spree. The visual design is key, not just with the organic derelict craft, but also with the Nostromo itself, whose interiors range from claustrophobic corridors to sterile medical labs to vast storerooms, all of which come across as sinister and unsettling places.

Another element that I could only appreciate by seeing the movie was the quality of the cast. This must be one of the best ensemble of actors to appear together in a horror film: Tom Skerritt, John Hurt, Ian Holm, Yaphet Kotto, Harry Dean Stanton, Veronica Cartwright, along with a little-known actress named Sigourney Weaver.

Weaver’s Ripley, the film’s sole survivor (aside from Jones the cat) of the alien’s rampage, would become the character primarily associated with the Alien franchise — so much so that it’s  hard to watch the movie and not see her as the heroine, whose survival is a foregone conclusion. However, she’s not actually played that way through most of the film. From the start, it’s Skerritt, playing the ship’s captain, who dominates the scenes and drives most of the action. Indeed, of all the cast, Ripley at first seems the most minor of characters. Certainly, Weaver was the least known of all the cast in 1979. In her early scenes, Ripley is officious and overly by-the-book, hardly what you’d call an action hero. But Alien is not an action movie.

In subsequent films of the franchise, Ripley is an action hero, most notably in James Cameron’s follow-up Aliens. There is much discussion in fan pages and movie review of which is better, Scott’s or Cameron’s movie, and more often than not (in the reviews I have seen) the consensus is that the latter is better, and the reason is often given that Cameron and Weaver made Ripley a true female action hero, a kick-ass woman armed to the teeth who could spit bullets and drop one-liners with the same panache as Stallone or Schwarzenegger.

I have to say that my own preference for Alien over Aliens is actually for pretty much the same reason. I find the flawed, everywomannish Ripley of the first movie far more interesting than the blaster-toting badass of the second. Not, I hasten to add, because I have any objection to having female action heroes, but because I generally find “ordinary” protagonists more interesting than superheroes. (I never really cared much for those Stallone and Schwarzenegger movies, either.) In the latter part of Alien, right up through the end, Ripley is half-insane with fear, muttering to herself hysterically as she sets the Nostromo’s self-destruct sequence and runs for the escape pod. There’s no grandstanding “Get away from her, you bitch!” moment, and this makes the climax far more terrifying, and more real, than that of Aliens.

I don’t want to give the impression that I disliked Cameron’s film; I think he did a great job of creating a sequel that respected the original but was not a simple retread. If it’s a bit more cartoonish in plot and characterization, it’s nonetheless engaging and entertaining. The same could not be said for any of the following sequels, Alien³ and Alien Resurrection. As for Scott’s 21st Century prequels, Prometheus and Alien Covenant, the less said the better. Not only are they filled with characters who make one stupid decision after another, but they provide answers to mysteries better left unsolved, with answers that are pretty stupid, as well.

Alien really works best if you ignore the excess baggage of the extended franchise and watch it as audience watched it in 1979: a simple and economical tale of a truly nasty boogeyman in a spacebound haunted house.

*Somewhere along the line, it became the norm in fandom to call the aliens “xenomorphs,” which I think is a ridiculous word, ugly in all the wrong ways. The term is never used at all in the first movie, so I will not do so here.

Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey can be considered the Citizen Kane of science fiction, in that it features a revolutionary visual style (a style matched with a bit of bravado, as if the director were saying “Look what I can do!”) that had an outsized influence on the movies that followed it. And, like Kane, it was controversial when it came out, and remains so to this day, with many people considering it arty and pretentious.

There’s no question that 2001 can be a difficult film to watch. It moves at a deliberate pace, not willing to speed up to satisfy those with short attention spans. The long and seemingly endless shots of spacecraft in motion can try the patience of the most ardent fan. When the movie was released in 1968, such sequences were intended to instill a sense of awe in the audience, giving them glimpses of space and future technology far beyond what had been seen in earlier sf films — though, even then, many viewers got restless waiting for something to happen. (Supposedly, Rock Hudson walked out of the premiere screening, muttering “What is this bullshit?”) In this day and age, when any hack moviemaker has access to technology far beyond that available to Kubrick and special effects director Douglas Trumbull, a modern viewer might well wonder what the big deal is. And where are the damned aliens already?

Obviously, given the fact that I’m including 2001 in my Ten Best list, I think the movie is still a big deal. I first saw it on TV when I was about fifteen. Catching the broadcast a small television, broken up by ads, is not of course the ideal way of seeing any movie, let alone 2001, which depends on its visuals for much of its power. Certainly, I didn’t fully appreciate the film until I saw it years later on the silver screen. But even on first viewing, I grasped that this was a very different kind of science fiction movie — or movie of any kind — than any I’d seen before. It was a story told elliptically, with images rather than words, with important elements (like those damned aliens) completely unseen, existing only in negative space.

Soon after seeing the movie, I read Arthur C. Clarke’s novelization. Clarke was of course instrumental in the creation of the movie, which was inspired by his short story “The Sentinel.” Yet I found the book disappointing; it lacked the radical power of the film. And I realized that this was because the novel was (of course) told with words, which by their very nature make meaning explicit. In Kubrick’s film, as opposed to Clarke’s novel, the words are restricted to the dialog, which is mostly mundane and trivial. The movie’s meaning is implicit — which makes watching it both more difficult and more rewarding than reading the novel.

I don’t want to fault Clarke too much. He remains one of the great sf writers of the mid 20th Century, with Childhood’s End being a classic that has not faded with age. And it must be said that his 2001 is far better written than your average movie novelization. But his narrative by its very nature takes away the very thing that makes 2001 the classic that it is. It’s like the Cliff’s Notes for the movie. (And don’t get me started on 2010: The Year We Make Contact, in which Clarke felt it necessary to explain exactly why the computer HAL went on a rampage. Some mysteries are better left as mysteries. Did Leonardo need to tell us why the Mona Lisa was smiling?) If you haven’t seen the movie yet (and why haven’t you?) wait until after you’ve done so to read the novel. In fact, wait a few weeks, or months, and let the movie percolate through your mind for a while before you pick up the book.

I said before that 2001 has been an influential movie, and that is certainly true in so far as its design and visual effects. But really, I would argue that it hasn’t been influential enough. There have been very few movies since (certainly not mainstream ones) that have engaged their audiences with such a distinctive visual, non-verbal style. (Offhand, for American films, I can think of David Lynch’s Eraserhead and Terence Malick’s The Tree of Life. I may be the only person on Earth to have actually liked the latter. Or seen it, for that matter.) On the whole, 2001 was a giant step forward in the possibility of film, and it’s a pity that so few have followed up on it.

Looking over what I have written here, I realize I’ve said precious little about the movie itself. Perhaps that’s just as well. The movie resists any kind of pat summary (“Oh, it’s about the evolution of humankind, the danger of artificial intelligence, and the pleasures of eating a decent meal!”) and seems lessened by any attempts to describe it.

See the movie on as large a screen as possible. Allow yourself to fall into its slow and inexorable rhythm. If you don’t get it, or you find it pretentious twaddle, then watch it again. Notice the themes that cross the various segments of the movie: Food. Tools. Murder. Intelligence. Sleep. Growth. Wonder. Things that link all of humanity from primitive hominids to angelic star-children. For all the starkness of its scenes in deep space, the movie is rich with meaning and life.

And I dare you not to be moved when HAL sings “Daisy Bell.”

This if the first of a series of posts about my ten all-time favorite science fiction movies. Note that I do not claim that these are the best sf movies (though I think all of them are legitimately great), but the ones that, for whatever reason, push my particular buttons. I’ll be treating them in chronological order.

I love 50’s science fiction movies, despite the fact that many if not most of them are terrible. Made in a decade that had a stick up its butt, they tend to suffer from a severe case of stodginess, with earnest humans (nearly always men) confronting menaces from beyond, either here on Earth or in what was then called “outer space.” Even the best sf movies from the decade — The Day the Earth Stood Still, Forbidden Planet, The Thing from Another World, It Came from Outer Space, and so on — carry this weight of stodginess with them. The tentacles of irreverence that were poking into the corners of popular culture — in, say, Mad magazine, “The Ernie Kovacs Show,” and the songs of Little Richard — never got their grasp on the Hollywood studios churning out endless movies about square-jawed heroes punching aliens in the face.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (from 1956) is the best sf movie of the decade not because it transcends that stodginess, but because it makes the stodginess work for it. Set in the small California town of Santa Mira, where everyone is white and middle class and totally square (the cast of characters includes children and adults, but no teenagers or twentysomethings), the movie depicts what happens when the residents are replaced one by one by alien pod people who are absolutely identical to the originals, except for being even more stodgy (having no emotions, desires, or dreams). While it was almost certainly not in the creators’ minds, one can see the pod invasion as an illustration of what Fifties conformity culture might be if carried to extremes.

The two protagonists, Dr. Miles Bennell (Kevin McCarthy) and his old flame Becky Driscoll (Dana Wynter) at first glance are as stiff and formal as everyone else in town. Miles is never without a coat and tie (except for the scenes when he’s in a bathrobe) and Dana swans about in a fancy strapless dress as she goes about her daily routine. But, significantly, they’re both divorced, an unexpected characterization for a time when divorce was considered morally questionable. And they’re both likeable people, generally interested in helping their friends and neighbors, which starts the plot rolling as they investigate what is starting a seeming outbreak of mass hysteria, when these friends and neighbors start insisting that their loved ones have been replaced by imposters. Soon enough, Miles and Becky find themselves surrounded by hostile creatures bearing the faces of their friends.

The direction, by Don Siegel (who would go one to direct the Clint Eastwood flicks Dirty Harry and The Beguiled, among others) is quite effective, considering the clear limitations in the budget. Body Snatchers starts off as a creepy mystery (what’s the cause of this seeming hysteria?). Then it becomes a horror movie, as Miles and Becky, and their friends Jack and Theodora (played by King Donovan and Carolyn Jones — yes, Morticia Addams) find first a blank, featureless body that slowly becomes a copy of Jack, and then (in a truly unsettling scene) a set of giant seed pods that disgorge frothy duplicates of all four of them in a truly unsettling scene. The final act of the movie is an exercise of true paranoia, as Miles and Becky realize they are the only two left in town who have not been assimilated, and try to escape with their souls intact.

There are many who prefer Philip Kaufman’s remake of 1978, which does have a lot to recommend it, including Donald Sutherland’s deft performance as the lead, Leonard Nimoy as a pop psychiatrist, and a lot of gooey visuals. (There were additional remakes in 1994 and 2007 which I didn’t see; I’m not sure anyone did.) Set in urban San Francisco, Kaufman’s version has a different feel and overall theme than the original (urban alienation vs. rural assimilation). I find myself preferring the simplicity and directness of the original; it’s far more terrifying to have your friends, rather than complete strangers, turn into soulless imposters.

The 1956 version is generally faithful to Jack Finney’s novel, but has (surprisingly for a Hollywood film) a more depressing ending. In the book, Miles and friends are able to defeat the aliens, and the pods end up leaving Earth. In the original cut of the movie, Miles is the only one in Santa Mira to escape the pods, and he ends up running up and down a freeway, raving like a maniac: “They’re coming! You’re next! You’re next!” The studio would not allow that to stand, however, and Seigel was forced to add a framing device in which Miles tells his story to a skeptical doctor (While Bissell, who appeared in half the sf movies coming out of Hollywood in the 50s), as word comes in that an overturned truck has spilled giant seed pods all over the highway. (Which is still a far cry from the book’s happy ending.)

Ever since the movie was released, there has been debate about its meaning. Do the pod people symbolize Communist infiltrators? Or McCarthyite demagogues? Siegel insisted that there was no political meaning, but of course no one had paid any attention to that. Honestly, the concept of friends and family taken over by an alien hive mind can be adapted for any age and political outlook; you could just as easily say the pod people are MAGA-ites, or the Woke. Conformity is in the eye of the beholder, I suppose.