I haven’t seen girl with all the gifts, but I had the same reaction to seeing Star Wars movies on the Rolling Stone list. And that’s despite being a new Star Wars fan since Last Jedi. It’s still not science fiction.
@Left_Empty, it’s not my list. :)
I suspect that it’s listed as Sci-fi partly for convenience and partly because it takes place in the future.
@Rock8man, the added bonus of watching Under the Skin is listening to the podcast afterwards. The Under the Skopsis probably has my favourite Kellywand line of all-time.
Wait, what? I mean you can say that at its heart it’s a WWII film or something like that, but it’s got lazer swords, space ships, and mystical midichlorian powers. It’s 100% sci-fi.
Pffft, no. You can call it a space opera if you like, but that’s just papering over the fact that it’s pretty much a fantasy movie that happens to take place in space. Much the same way Die Hard is an action movie that happens to occur around Christmas.
Look, I don’t want to pull rank on you or anything, but the world’s top movie scientists have taken a look at this question and come up with the answer. I think we already had a thread about this, so I think we can all agree that this can be the last post about this topic since the result is so conclusive.
Nobody ever learns from the documentary Event Horizon: don’t open the Pandora’s Box again.
One of the appeals of post-apocalyptic stories to me is exploring what humanity goes back to without the veneer of civilization. I watched this last night, and right away, I loved where they go. In the first couple of minutes, we meet our hero who is desperate to get laid. After some raiders get done with a hovel where you hear a woman screaming, he goes down there in the aftermath. To rescue a damsel in distress? No, to get laid. He is disappointed to discover a naked lady who is already bled and dead. “Awww man, they didn’t have to kill her. She could have been used a few more times”. He is so disappointed that he’s not going to get laid today.
I can see science fiction stories getting away with that in book form, but I was kind of shocked to see that make into a movie. I really enjoyed the whole movie. Unlike Logan’s Run, which I finally saw last year, it doesn’t become a disappointment by the end either. I really loved the ending so much, it’s really memorable and pretty much perfect.
Of course, I found out it doesn’t actually fit under the heading of this thread, since this movie came out in 1975, it turns out. But a good science fiction movie I would recommend, especially if you don’t mind a flawed anti-hero like I described.
I love the eternal semantic arguments over whether a given work is or is not science fiction, especially since there is no generally accepted definition of the term. I think it’s significant that neither the World Science Fiction Society(Hugo awards) or the National Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (Nebula Awards) attempt to define the term. I find this statement from the Hugo Awards FAQ instructive: “There will never be universal agreement about the precise distinctions between genres and sub-genres, so WSFS’s position is that eligibility is determined by the voters.”