The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
This theme refers to films that take place in and around the Space Race, the Space Mission or concern themselves with realistically grounded attempts to explore the Solar System. These are stories in which we see:-
– the prediction of the Moon Landing and Space Race
– the employment of NASA or the cosmonaut space program, the space shuttle and International Space Station as fictional devices
– where the space program is extrapolated onwards to depict credible attempts to explore the Solar System based on known or probable advances in science and technology.
For a more detailed essay and overview of the topic see Films Depicting NASA and the Space Program.
One of the less remembered films from Jack Arnold who directed a number of 1950s SF classics in which the children of rocket engineers are used by an alien force to sabotage a space launch. Not one of Arnold’s greats but still a modestly effective work.
An animated film about NASA experimental chimpanzees. Not quite up there with Pixar but an amiable and unpretentious and amiable outing
Clint Eastwood directs a film about a quartet of aging NASA astronauts reunited for one mission back into space after forty years.
This comes with the unappealing concept of ‘Teenagers Trapped in Orbit in the Space Shuttle’ and vies between cliche and passable treatment
Adam Sandler plays a lone astronaut who befriends an alien. This falls somewhere between E.T. and Interstellar
In a whole bunch of ways this – plausibility being a big one of them – is a bad film. On the other hand, it does boast an entertaining array of giant spiders all emerged from a space shuttle crash
Strong intelligent SF film where a cosmonaut returns from a space mission with an alien parasite attached. On one level, not too different to a host of Alien copies but the difference is all in the approach
Long-awaited revival of the tv series on the big screen. While this has a mixed fan reception, it is well worth re-evaluation. It is the only one of the Trek films that reaches for epic, mind-expanding places to find something of a 2001: A Space Odyssey
Made-for-tv disaster movie released to theatres about the attempts to rescue a plane that becomes trapped in orbit
John Carpenter abandons horror to make one of the better E.T.-inspired cute and cuddly alien visitor films. The film’s grasp of science is sometimes shaky but the film gains an enormous amount from Jeff Bridges’ performance as the alien trying to adjust to being in a human body
In the vein of realistically grounded space movies such as Gravity and The Martian, a solidly effective film concerning the crew of a Mars mission who discover a stowaway aboard
Essentially a tv movie version of the Gerry Anderson film Doppelganger in which an astronaut comes around to find he is on a Counter Earth. The premise, an alternate history of sorts, is nonsensical and even then the film abandons it soon in to become a variant on The Fugitive
Shot back-to-back with the first Christopher Reeve film, this then became a mess behind the scenes. The end result emerges fairly well with the show dominated by the magnificent Phantom Zones villains and giving depth to the Superman-Lois relationship
The original version of Superman II became mired in problems over the firing of director Richard Donner. After the rediscovery of the original footage, Donner was able to go offer up a restored version. Seeing the storylines the way they were meant to be and Marlon Brando’s original scenes as Jor-el make for a work that is superior in every way
Thriller set around a NASA habitat built for future Mars exploration in the Arctic where the team is torn apart by the isolation and mental instability of team members. There is nothing here that holds you particularly gripped.
Likeable film about a kid with incredibly powerful farts who uses his ability to launch a rocket. It’s mind-boggling to think such a premise was ever given funding nd a greenlight
Conceptually highly ambitious SF film about humans being biologically modified in order to be able to live on Saturn’s moon Titan. After a highly promising beginning, the film falls apart in a badly cliched unethical scientist and lab experiment amok ending
Cinema’s first cuddly, friendly robot that is programmed according to Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, predating Forbidden Planet’s Robbie the Robot. A modest overlooked film of the 1950s SF era
Despite being another film based on a Disney theme park, I had high expectations of this because of Brad Bird. Alas, the initial promise of a retro-sf work that mainlined the wonderment of Jetsons-styled futurism turns into a surprisingly glum and message-heavy work about how the modern world is a depressing place
An SF film where a remote probe lands to Mars uncovers a mysterious artefact of possible alien origin on the Martian surface. And then things start getting weird.
A Disney version of Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court where the story of a man thrown back in time to Camelot is dragged into the era of Star Wars with the addition of space shuttles and androids
A sublimely funny comedy about a group in a habitat who have been selected to roleplay the astronauts on a Mars mission
Comedy in which Jerry Lewis and Connie Stevens are forced to marry to go to The Moon. The sexual politics play out pretty embarrassingly today
Eccentric Werner Herzog film where he tries to convince us that footage from a space shuttle mission and taken under the polar ice cap is documentary footage of a trip to explore an alien planet
The fifth James Bond film takes the series to Japan. New director Lewis Gilbert is determined to outdo what has come before in terms of the spectacular, especially WITH the construction of the massive volcano set