Fred ,'A Hole in the World'
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great huge wodges of stuff went missing
Dear GOD. Me, as a non-historian, felt that for a story, wodges could have been left out, and I'd have liked it more. I have no interest in a Howard Hughes documentary.
Raquel, does the Company credits page not have what you want?
Raquel, I think Silent Running is a transitional film to the era you're describing. It even has them hauling a bit of earth out into space and then deciding that the green stuff is better off without man's pernicious influence. It's the first movie I remember that really made space look big and empty and emphasized human alienation.
All that AND the main character gives a moral lecture to a couple of air-conditioners at one point. Brilliant!
(Seriously, I was going to mention Silent Running too, but Hec beat me to it.)
It's a classic case of telling instead of showing.
The funny thing is that all of Zach's student films (that I saw) were show-not-tell, almost to a fault -- gorgeous pacing and composition, very very very sparse writing. I think he just got carried away here.
If the movie is in print, you can probably find the studio name on the packaging (or on the Amazon page). If it's not in print, I bet that movie dictionaries like Leonard Maltin's will list the studio. (Although, come to think, Matlin's book lists only movies in print.)
Alienation, as an SF trope, or alienation-in-space? Because, I can think of a couple of "the future sucks, and it's all our fault" movies (some of them true shlock, like Soylent Green ) but they don't take place in space. There are a bunch of evil-corporation-future-societies that just didn't have the budget for space ships, from THX-1138 on down.
Thanks, ita - a case of too many interface options, and a too-impatient Raq. I didn't see that choice at all.
OK, Silent Running definitely on the list.
Alienation-on-a-ship for preference. The idea being that the setting needs to be off Earth, or at least away from civilization (the farther the better), isolated, and fragile in and of itself. Horror and death are key players also.
I can't decide about 2001. It's got some aspects of this, but it's also got this feeling that we are all cosmically connected.
What if the last 2 minutes of 2001 hadn't happened? Because, that's the only part where we're-all-connected hoodoo predominates, in my mind. Cut that, and you've got a beautiful, massively inefficient, austere version of Cabin Fever going on.
It's been years since I saw it, but the loneliness of space was always the foremost emotional hit for me.
And HAL really puts it in this category.
I prefer the ending of the novel, where the Space Baby comes back to Earth and starts a nuclear war just for the hell of it.
Wow, totally did not recall that part. Now I'm wondering if I ever actually read the original rather than just its sequels.