Sunday, November 17, 2013

Reader Top Ten: The Greatest Science Fiction Films of the 1970s: Pierre Fontaine


Designer, illustrator, blogger and friend Pierre Fontaine presents his list of the best science fiction films of the 1970s.

Pierre writes:

"It's difficult to come up with a top ten for the 1970's because I've really only seen the obvious examples and missed so many of the more obscure films.


10: Soylent Green:  A very powerful fable of how inhuman our society becomes when our resources are spread too thin.

9: Forbin: The Colossus Project:  An exciting film that portrays the power struggle between man and machine, the creator and his creation.

8. Rollerball:  Another powerful fable giving us a hero figure who has to choose between his personal freedom and the powerful elite who run everyone's life.

7. THX 1138:  The film proves that love is the most powerful drug of all.  The final chase through the tunnels and towards freedom remain extremely exciting and powerful.

6. Silent Running:  Douglas Trumbull's film makes us root for a mad person driven to extremes to protect the things he loves the most, and that's not necessarily his fellow man.

5. The Andromeda Strain:  An extremely clever and engrossing tech-heavy thriller where the world is nearly wiped out by a virus from outer space.

4. Star Trek The Motion Picture:  It's a grand movie with grand ideas.  It took me many years to start to see this film objectively without so much of the baggage I brought with me back in 1979.  All I wanted was a movie that was just like the TV show.  Instead, we got something much more epic and challenging.

3. StarCrash: The Adventures of Stella Star:  Truth be told, I really wanted to put this film at Number 1.  It's got everything I loved as a kid; stop-motion animation, spaceships zooming around, over-the-top characters doing over-the-top crazy things and so on.  Even better, the special effects looked like they were created in someone's garage and the movie just has this crazy "gee-whiz" quality of a bunch of people who were given the keys to the studio and told to go make a movie that could sell to drive in theaters everywhere.

2. Close Encounters of the Third Kind: This film and "Star Wars" perpetually duke it out for the number 1 position for me.  In the end, I probably saw Close Encounters a dozen times in the theater.  The fact that the story involved an "everyman" made the film all the more powerful to me and was probably the greatest "wish fulfillment" movie of all time for me personally.

1. Star Wars: You just can't deny the impact of Star Wars.  It had everything and it had it in spades.  It's remarkable that Lucas pulled off what he did with the budget he had.  It rewrote the vocabulary about what filmic Sci-Fi could be and overnight ignited the imaginations of an entire generation.

Honorable mentions have to go out to all the "Planet of the Apes" films from the 1970's. "Logan's Run" needed to make my list but I just couldn't fit it into my top ten, as did "Alien".  Both "The Golden Voyage of Sinbad" and the "King Kong" remake would certainly go into my list of top ten favorite films of all time but they were really fantasy films, not Sci-Fi films.  The "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" remake really should be on the list also but I consider the film to be a horror film rather than Sci Fi.

Pierre: I love your list, and I know of your love for StarCrash.  That film is crazy, nuts, gonzo, and made with incredible enthusiasm and naivete.  I understand the appeal!

I am also happy to see you share my love of Soylent Green (1973), a film which I think both forecasts and rivals Blade Runner (1982) in terms of visualization and imagination.  

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