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EW's Top Sci-Fi of the last 25 years (complete article)
Feel free to bitch about the list. I will.
List (and selected quotes)
25. V-: The Miniseries ( heh! I really liked this one. Sue me.)
Giant fascist lizards from outer space — it sounds like something you'd see on Mystery Science Theater 3000. But this parable of tolerance is far more complex and frightening than it seems. While the ''Visitors'' say they ''come in peace,'' they really want to drain Earth's water supply. Just in case you still don't get the point, their insignia looks suspiciously like a swastika.
24. Galaxy Quest
In this pitch-perfect parody, the cast of a canceled cult TV show much like Star Trek — featuring an egocentric commander (Tim Allen), his alien sidekick (Alan Rickman), and a buxom lieutenant (Sigourney Weaver) — gets enlisted to help save an alien race, who, thanks to intercepted broadcasts, think the actors are real space-faring heroes.
23. Doctor Who
The BBC's timeless Doctor Who is a 44-year argument for proper sci-fi priorities: (1) an ecstatically tangled, infinitely renewable story line and (2) an understanding that all science fiction, however time- and space-spanning, is local. (Top-flight special effects? Not, as it turns out, crucial.) The Doctor, a Time Lord, powerful but dispossessed, hops worlds and epochs like subway stops, but in spirit he never really leaves London
22. Quandum Leap
21. Futurama
20. Star Wars: Clone Wars (cartoon)
19. Starship Troupers (okay, they have to be kidding, don't they??!)
18. Heroes
A living, breathing comic book about a collection of people whose genetic evolution has led to extraordinary powers, Heroes takes the supernatural and both rationalizes and humanizes it. Thus does the office drudge (Masi Oka) bend time and space, the politician (Adrian Pasdar) learn to fly, and the cheerleader (Hayden Panettiere) become indestructible. As their stories intersect and an apocalypse looms, the blurry line between good and evil comes down to a battle for self-control. Can't say you don't identify with that.
17. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
16. Total Recall
15. Firefly
14. Children of Men
13. The Terminator
12. Back to the Future
11. LOST
A mysterious island that's home to a shape-shifting smoke monster, a weird science project tasked with saving the world, and a secret society of sinister ''Others'' who can't make babies — yes, Lost certainly has its fair share of sci-fi stuff. And yet, like the best examples of the genre, this unfolding saga about plane-crash survivors trapped in a tropical twilight zone doesn't wallow in its genre elements, but uses them to embellish an exploration of identity, community, and reality itself. Coyly sublimating everything from Jules Verne and H.G. Wells to Star Trek and Star Wars, Lost aspires to be an important entertainment for a pop-soaked, soul-searching age. Now, at the risk of missing the point, how about some damn answers?!
10. The Thing
9. Aliens
Seven years after Ridley Scott's creepy, chest-thumping space thriller Alien, James Cameron instilled war-movie testosterone in the sequel, as Sigourney Weaver's Ripley leads a pack of gung-ho Marines to an inhospitable planet now swarming with vicious, acid-bleeding critters. Ripley was the first of a new breed of female action hero, one who can lead a team of frightened men and get the job done on her own terms. And for her efforts, Weaver not only became the first action heroine to strike box office gold, she landed a Best Actress Oscar nomination as well.
8. Star Trek: TNG
7. E.T.
6. Brazil
5. Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan
Klingons. Romulans. The Borg. Over the better part of four decades, the crew of the Starship Enterprise has tangled with many a pesky intergalactic foe. But none had as much genetically bred wit, wiliness, and... well, wrath as Ricardo Montalban's Khan. Abandoned years earlier by Captain Kirk (William Shatner) on a barren planet (for trying to shipjack the Enterprise), Khan survived, sustained by his hunger for vengeance. The parallels between Montalban's leathery-pec'd Khan (Corinthian leather, of course) and Moby Dick's maniacal Ahab elevate what could've been just a bloated Trek episode. If revenge is a dish best served cold, then this movie is one chilling feast.
4. The X-Files
Once upon a time, the FBI sent no-nonsense special agent Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) to debunk the crackpot theories of special agent Fox ''Spooky'' Mulder (David Duchovny). What they got instead was a conspiracy-fighting team so powerful it threatened to bring down the shady men who'd infiltrated the highest levels of government with their dreams of alien/human hybrid technology. What did we get? One hell of a TV show — even if we never quite got the truth.
3. Blade Runner
2. Battlestar Galactica
The core of the Galactica plot — the last human survivors of a catastrophic genocide are on the run from their attackers, the Cylons — carried a new resonance in the wake of 9/11. And in keeping with science fiction's grandest tradition, BSG tapped into the power of allegory to enrich its outer-space dogfights and military pomp with the gravity of issues like abortion, terrorism, stem-cell research, racism, even the war in Iraq. The dysfunctionally awesome cast gives it all the ring of authenticity: from Edward James Olmos' crusty warhorse Admiral Adama and Mary McDonnell's tender-as-nails President Roslin to Katee Sackhoff's bedeviled pilot Kara Thrace and Tricia Helfer's glacially threatening Cylon known only as Number Six. But the real MVPs of the ensemble are Michael Hogan, who plays Adama's boozy right-hand man Saul Tigh, and James Callis, who makes you feel for Gaius Baltar, the best, most conflicted villain on TV.
1. The Matrix
Written and directed by Larry and Andy Wachowski — a pair of hyper-erudite, super-shy comic-book writers-turned-filmmakers who became overnight cult icons for their trouble — The Matrix was one geeky gumbo of brainy mumbo jumbo; a multi-megabyte compression of mythological and theological ideas, Hong Kong action-film aesthetics, and videogame special effects. Somehow, it worked. Brilliantly. Keanu Reeves was Neo, a spiritually numb computer programmer who learns that not only is his life an illusory sham — the world as he knows it is a virtual-reality prison, created by sentient machines who had won an apocalyptic war against humanity — but that he is destined to become a hero-messiah. The Matrix crackled with late-'90s millennial angst and tech-boom delirium — a freaky-fun fable for a ghost-in- the-machine culture. Bottom line: The Matrix was just...whoa.
Okay, I have some fairly major gripes about this list. I really, really do.
Feel free to bitch about the list. I will.
List (and selected quotes)
25. V-: The Miniseries ( heh! I really liked this one. Sue me.)
Giant fascist lizards from outer space — it sounds like something you'd see on Mystery Science Theater 3000. But this parable of tolerance is far more complex and frightening than it seems. While the ''Visitors'' say they ''come in peace,'' they really want to drain Earth's water supply. Just in case you still don't get the point, their insignia looks suspiciously like a swastika.
24. Galaxy Quest
In this pitch-perfect parody, the cast of a canceled cult TV show much like Star Trek — featuring an egocentric commander (Tim Allen), his alien sidekick (Alan Rickman), and a buxom lieutenant (Sigourney Weaver) — gets enlisted to help save an alien race, who, thanks to intercepted broadcasts, think the actors are real space-faring heroes.
23. Doctor Who
The BBC's timeless Doctor Who is a 44-year argument for proper sci-fi priorities: (1) an ecstatically tangled, infinitely renewable story line and (2) an understanding that all science fiction, however time- and space-spanning, is local. (Top-flight special effects? Not, as it turns out, crucial.) The Doctor, a Time Lord, powerful but dispossessed, hops worlds and epochs like subway stops, but in spirit he never really leaves London
22. Quandum Leap
21. Futurama
20. Star Wars: Clone Wars (cartoon)
19. Starship Troupers (okay, they have to be kidding, don't they??!)
18. Heroes
A living, breathing comic book about a collection of people whose genetic evolution has led to extraordinary powers, Heroes takes the supernatural and both rationalizes and humanizes it. Thus does the office drudge (Masi Oka) bend time and space, the politician (Adrian Pasdar) learn to fly, and the cheerleader (Hayden Panettiere) become indestructible. As their stories intersect and an apocalypse looms, the blurry line between good and evil comes down to a battle for self-control. Can't say you don't identify with that.
17. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
16. Total Recall
15. Firefly
14. Children of Men
13. The Terminator
12. Back to the Future
11. LOST
A mysterious island that's home to a shape-shifting smoke monster, a weird science project tasked with saving the world, and a secret society of sinister ''Others'' who can't make babies — yes, Lost certainly has its fair share of sci-fi stuff. And yet, like the best examples of the genre, this unfolding saga about plane-crash survivors trapped in a tropical twilight zone doesn't wallow in its genre elements, but uses them to embellish an exploration of identity, community, and reality itself. Coyly sublimating everything from Jules Verne and H.G. Wells to Star Trek and Star Wars, Lost aspires to be an important entertainment for a pop-soaked, soul-searching age. Now, at the risk of missing the point, how about some damn answers?!
10. The Thing
9. Aliens
Seven years after Ridley Scott's creepy, chest-thumping space thriller Alien, James Cameron instilled war-movie testosterone in the sequel, as Sigourney Weaver's Ripley leads a pack of gung-ho Marines to an inhospitable planet now swarming with vicious, acid-bleeding critters. Ripley was the first of a new breed of female action hero, one who can lead a team of frightened men and get the job done on her own terms. And for her efforts, Weaver not only became the first action heroine to strike box office gold, she landed a Best Actress Oscar nomination as well.
8. Star Trek: TNG
7. E.T.
6. Brazil
5. Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan
Klingons. Romulans. The Borg. Over the better part of four decades, the crew of the Starship Enterprise has tangled with many a pesky intergalactic foe. But none had as much genetically bred wit, wiliness, and... well, wrath as Ricardo Montalban's Khan. Abandoned years earlier by Captain Kirk (William Shatner) on a barren planet (for trying to shipjack the Enterprise), Khan survived, sustained by his hunger for vengeance. The parallels between Montalban's leathery-pec'd Khan (Corinthian leather, of course) and Moby Dick's maniacal Ahab elevate what could've been just a bloated Trek episode. If revenge is a dish best served cold, then this movie is one chilling feast.
4. The X-Files
Once upon a time, the FBI sent no-nonsense special agent Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) to debunk the crackpot theories of special agent Fox ''Spooky'' Mulder (David Duchovny). What they got instead was a conspiracy-fighting team so powerful it threatened to bring down the shady men who'd infiltrated the highest levels of government with their dreams of alien/human hybrid technology. What did we get? One hell of a TV show — even if we never quite got the truth.
3. Blade Runner
2. Battlestar Galactica
The core of the Galactica plot — the last human survivors of a catastrophic genocide are on the run from their attackers, the Cylons — carried a new resonance in the wake of 9/11. And in keeping with science fiction's grandest tradition, BSG tapped into the power of allegory to enrich its outer-space dogfights and military pomp with the gravity of issues like abortion, terrorism, stem-cell research, racism, even the war in Iraq. The dysfunctionally awesome cast gives it all the ring of authenticity: from Edward James Olmos' crusty warhorse Admiral Adama and Mary McDonnell's tender-as-nails President Roslin to Katee Sackhoff's bedeviled pilot Kara Thrace and Tricia Helfer's glacially threatening Cylon known only as Number Six. But the real MVPs of the ensemble are Michael Hogan, who plays Adama's boozy right-hand man Saul Tigh, and James Callis, who makes you feel for Gaius Baltar, the best, most conflicted villain on TV.
1. The Matrix
Written and directed by Larry and Andy Wachowski — a pair of hyper-erudite, super-shy comic-book writers-turned-filmmakers who became overnight cult icons for their trouble — The Matrix was one geeky gumbo of brainy mumbo jumbo; a multi-megabyte compression of mythological and theological ideas, Hong Kong action-film aesthetics, and videogame special effects. Somehow, it worked. Brilliantly. Keanu Reeves was Neo, a spiritually numb computer programmer who learns that not only is his life an illusory sham — the world as he knows it is a virtual-reality prison, created by sentient machines who had won an apocalyptic war against humanity — but that he is destined to become a hero-messiah. The Matrix crackled with late-'90s millennial angst and tech-boom delirium — a freaky-fun fable for a ghost-in- the-machine culture. Bottom line: The Matrix was just...whoa.
Okay, I have some fairly major gripes about this list. I really, really do.
