Xander ,'First Date'
A place to talk about movies--old and new, good and bad, high art and high cheese. It's the place to place your kittens on the award winners, gossip about upcoming fims and discuss DVD releases and extras. Spoiler policy: White font all plot-related discussion until a movie's been in wide release two weeks, and keep the major HSQ in white font until two weeks after the video/DVD release.
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.
It was at the very end. Just a few sentences, IIRC. But it was a nice parallel to the beginning, when after the aliens improved the intelligence of the proto-humans, they begin to use their new intelligence to murder ....
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.
Mostly I just meant very important facts not mentioned at all, like that for the first two years of Hughes' life that the film portrays he was married. I know it's trying to focus on the throughline of aviation as his great love, but shouldn't his first wife merit a footnote?
Also, the fairly early cheapie Dark Star does a good job of evoking the mindfuck of staring into the black (in a black humored way).
Heh, love this movie. Best alien ever. Interestingly, one of the co-writers and actors was Dan O'Bannon (his character had all the interaction with the alien), who went on to co-write the original script that became Alien (though that was extensively re-worked by Walter Hill).
Also, does it need to be movies? Because a couple of the Firefly episodes really made that point - Bushwhacked, Our Mrs. Reynolds (for the ending), and Out of Gas being the main ones, but the first reavers sequence in the original Serenity gets some of that too.
Of course, they'll be a real movie for that soon, but probably not soon enough.