1982, 1992 (Director's Cut) – Ridley Scott – Based on a novel by Philip K. Dick entitled Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Ridley Scott's Blade Runner offers a strange, bleak vision of the future that is nonetheless depicted with a sort of gloomy beauty. The year is 2019 and the setting is a perpetually dark and dirty Los Angeles. The city seems ruled by the monoli…
1977 – Steven Spielberg – Director Steven Spielberg's first blockbuster tale of aliens from another world (the second, of course, was 1982's E. T.) takes a familiar science fiction premise in new directions by suggesting that, if extraterrestrial beings do visit, their intentions might not be hostile—an idea generally absent from previous science fiction movies …
1980, 1997 (Special Edition) – Irvin Kirshner – The second installment in the Star Wars trilogy has often been praised as the most complex, and thus the best, of the three space fantasies. Whether its greater complexity makes it a better film is debatable, but The Empire Strikes Back certainly takes the saga in new directions stylistically and thematically. While, like its predecess…
1968 – Franklin J. Schaffner – It is strange to see an astronaut smoking a cigar on a space ship, but that is what happens in the opening scene of Planet of the Apes. George Taylor (Charlton Heston) dictates his final entry into an audio time capsule prior to putting himself to sleep for the rest of the journey … a journey through time as well as space, since he and his crew …
1983, 1997 (Special Edition) – Richard Marquand – The third chapter (actually Episode VI) in George Lucas' enormously successful Star Wars saga brings the trilogy to a sweeping, grand-scale conclusion with a story that involves heroic rescues, epic battles, the ultimate triumph of good over diabolical evil, and personal redemption. After saving Han Solo (Harrison Ford) from t…
1994 – David Carson – The first big-screen adventure of the crew from television's popular Star Trek: The Next Generation serves as both a bridge between the old and the new and at the same time essentially retires the adventures of the original cast, led by William Shatner's Captain James T. Kirk. As an adventure story, Generations is more lively, action-oriented, cha…
1979 – Robert Wise – Based on the popular original Star Trek television series, this first big-screen adventure for the crew of the starship Enterprise promises early on to be a huge spectacle of a movie, but unfortunately Star Trek: The Motion Picture raises expectations a little too high and then fails to meet them. The story's plot has potential as an epic adventure: A vas…
Star Wars: A New Hope 1977, 1997 (Special Edition) – George Lucas – Writer and co-producer George Lucas directed this amazing space adventure about a farm boy from the planet Tatooine who gets caught up in a great interplanetary war. This was Lucas' second big success after the innovative American Graffiti. Using astonishingly realistic special effects that revolutionized the…
1968 – Stanley Kubrick – On prehistoric Earth four million years ago, a strange black monolith appears among a group of apes and in some way ushers in the dawn of mankind as the apes reach a higher level of intelligence and learn to use tools to kill for food and to kill each other. In 2001, another mysterious monolith is discovered on the moon, sending a radio signal to Jupiter. Th…
George Pal's production of The War of the Worlds (1956), featuring amazing special effects for its day, adapts the classic novel by H. G. Wells, setting it in the mid-twentieth century and turning the epic battle between humans and Martians into an almost religious morality play. The team of Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich produced the adventurous Stargate (1994), a story that offers an exp…