what are your thoughts/opinions on these old sci fi movies?

[Timewalker]

E.T. was mental junk food at the time - some new thing to try, and I don't recall seeing it more than once. Someone in my city made a snow-E.T. in their front yard one winter. They did a great job; it was instantly recognizable.

The movie was meant more to appeal to kids than adults, so in that way it worked. I think the part where they lost my ability to suspend my disbelief was when the kids went trick-or-treating in broad daylight.

That doesn't happen here, it looked not only weird, but stupid.

So did I cry for E.T.? Yeah, a little. Certain combinations of music and death will do that even if I'm not fond of the character.

I even cried for some of the bad guys at times (though this time was not in a movie; I was reading The Call of the Wild and when one of the mean sled dogs drowned, my mother couldn't figure out why I was freaking out and bawling about it... the point was that a dog was killed, no matter if that dog was a "good" character or not). I've since seen the movie but don't recall if that scene was included; some movies stress my emotions to the point where once is all I can manage).

 

[Christopher]

Cinema moves in waves & Lucas/Spielberg's era was certainly not the 1st to push substance to the background behind sentimentality & spectacle.

No, but just because something has happened before doesn't make it a good thing. Certainly the blockbuster era ushered in by those two directors led to more popularity and respectability for genre film, and to more innovations in visual effects and technique; but there were tradeoffs for those gains, as there usually are.

Idealized fantasy was Spielberg's whole schtick mostly, & for what he did there, I think he was doing it really well, but certainly it's not for everyone, least of all high art fans.

I'm not a high art fan, but I'm not a big fan of Spielberg's early movies either. It's not about the genre, it's about him individually as a filmmaker. I had no problem with other directors' films in the same vein; for instance, I was generally quite fond of Robert Zemeckis's works, and I was a big fan of Joe Dante's movies.

If you want a more realistic child worldview, Stand By Me grabs it pretty good from a Stephen King tale imho

Never been a King fan either. I keep hearing praise for Stranger Things, and I'm tempted to try it out sometimes, but people also keep saying it's an homage to '80s Spielberg and King movies, and that kills my interest.

I tend to think that him actually being able to make any viewer feel emotions for that hideously terrifying alien puppet (lol) is a sign of some true mastery of craft.

Yes, absolutely, and I totally recognize that. But as I said, I felt resentful that he used his mastery of craft to manipulate me into having an emotional reaction to something that didn't deserve it. It was a superficial response that disguised the lack of actual substance, and it made me feel used, not enriched.

Craft is important, but craft alone is not enough. It should be used for something of substance, not to give the illusion of substance to something hollow. A lot of Spielberg's later films applied that brilliant craftsmanship to more worthy subjects, e.g. Schindler's List. But early on, much of what he did was just too mindless for me, however superbly made it was.

 

[Roundabout]

Most of Westworld moved at a very leisurely pace. It wasn't until everything went haywire, that's when the real excitement started. I remember being creeped out by Yul Brynner-bot's freaky metallic pupils. There was a sequel called Futureworld. I saw that recently on Pluto TV. Westworld is much better.

I saw Logan's Run on tv, when I was a kid. I liked it alot. I thought the Sandman uniform was really cool looking.

And, come on, it had Michael York. How much more cool can ya get?

It had Farrah Fawcett as well . Speaking of Michael York, he also had a good performance in another 1970's scifi movie, The Island of Dr. Moreau.

Didn't like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but I did like the musical scene.

 

[Christopher]

Puppets cannot die.

Well, yeah, he came back to life.

 

[Timewalker]

There would have been nationwide riots if he hadn't.

I doubt that scene would result in tears from me if I were to see it again.

What does get me every single time is Dobby's death in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. There's one review channel where the guy doing the review stared at the screen in shock, started crying, excused himself, and stopped the video. He apologized when he came back with the final video, but I don't think any of us blamed him. People who like Dobby tend to not only like, but love him, and his death packs quite an emotional wallop (and unlike E.T., there's no reprieve).

 

[Admiral2]

I'm not exaggerating when I mention ESCAPE FROM THE PLANET OF THE APES has the saddest conclusion to any film I've ever seen. Killing Kim Hunter and her adopted kid was bad enough. God knows watching Roddy McDowall (my favorite male actor of all time) fall from a great height is gut-wrenching enough when the film is halfway done. TWO YEARS IN A ROW!!!! I can't go on......

Dude, "Beneath" ended with the whole world blowing up. How is that less sad?

 

[Timewalker]

Dude, "Beneath" ended with the whole world blowing up. How is that less sad?

The end of "Escape" showed the deliberate murder of a mother and an infant.

 

[DarrenTR1970]

Recently, CometTV ran a "Planet of the Apes" marathon, and by the end of "Beneath" (which I hadn't seen in years) I was rooting for Taylor to press the doomsday button, because, by that point, there was nothing left worth saving. Just like man before them, both the apes and mutants were proven to be equally bad, hiding behind their hypocrisy through rhetoric.

 

[Admiral2]

Recently, CometTV ran a "Planet of the Apes" marathon, and by the end of "Beneath" (which I hadn't seen in years) I was rooting for Taylor to press the doomsday button, because, by that point, there was nothing left worth saving. Just like man before them, both the apes and mutants were proven to be equally bad, hiding behind their hypocrisy through rhetoric.

Fair enough, but the fact that the world got to the point where you wanted it blown up is still sad, isn't it?

 

[Admiral2]

I return your Dude and remind you that Roddy McDowall ESCAPED. Though we wouldn't realize it at first.

Good point. I didn't look at it that way. I concede to your dudeness.

(Reason for edit: Victim of spellcheck.)

 

[fireproof78]

The end of "Escape" showed the deliberate murder of a mother and an infant.

I have not returned to that film. I cannot stand such scenes.

Dude, "Beneath" ended with the whole world blowing up. How is that less sad?

One is a lot more emotionally and individually moving while the other is harder to fathom so it becomes a mental exercise not an emotional one.

 

[Timewalker]

I have not returned to that film. I cannot stand such scenes.

One is a lot more emotionally and individually moving while the other is harder to fathom so it becomes a mental exercise not an emotional one.

I can honestly say that both freaked me out for different reasons. I was in high school when I saw them, and my high school years were during the Cold War. In both English and social studies classes, part of the curriculum was war-related (even to the point about literature and poetry about WWIII and writing an essay about WWIII; something I discovered was that most of the kids couldn't wrap their minds around those assignments because they could not imagine something that "hasn't happened yet" and therefore how can you write about it).

Let's just say that I went to schools where science fiction and recreational reading about science wasn't popular. There were few Star Trek fans there, and only throughout junior high nobody could figure out why I would read Asimov's essays for fun, rather than as school work.

 

[fireproof78]

I can honestly say that both freaked me out for different reasons. I was in high school when I saw them, and my high school years were during the Cold War. In both English and social studies classes, part of the curriculum was war-related (even to the point about literature and poetry about WWIII and writing an essay about WWIII; something I discovered was that most of the kids couldn't wrap their minds around those assignments because they could not imagine something that "hasn't happened yet" and therefore how can you write about it).

Let's just say that I went to schools where science fiction and recreational reading about science wasn't popular. There were few Star Trek fans there, and only throughout junior high nobody could figure out why I would read Asimov's essays for fun, rather than as school work.

Ah, well, my school and family was the opposite. Lots of imagination.

 

[Timewalker]

Ah, well, my school and family was the opposite. Lots of imagination.

My family wasn't the problem. My grandfather was proud that I liked science and praised me to someone else when he found me reading a book on paleontology. My dad, when he realized how serious I was about collecting rocks and studying geography in school, bought me a rock hammer and book on minerals and geology. We spent one summer in BC going rock-hunting, beachcombing, and treasure-hunting. I still have most of my "spoils" even though that trip was in 1977. He also bought me a couple of telescopes since I'm into astronomy.

My grandmother's contribution was a copy of the original hardcover edition of Cosmos, when the TV series first came out and the companion book was published. My mother, who couldn't relate to either science or science fiction, still acceded to my request for a globe for Christmas.

So family... very supportive. Classmates at school? Most of them thought I was nuts. My Grade 8 literature teacher was perplexed when she saw my choice for a free-reading session, and said she wouldn't have thought I would be "the sort" to read science fiction... her belief was that only boys read that. She herself had no idea that the school library actually had a pretty decent selection of science fiction, ranging from Andre Norton to Clarke, Asimov, and Heinlein with a generous sprinkling of several other authors. And the I discovered Asimov's essays in the reference section and those became my recreational and bedtime reading.

Wanna shock and perplex and mindcroggle your Grade 8 classmates in the astronomy unit? The teacher had assigned us a term project to write a paper about anything in the solar system. The others immediately snapped up all the books there were on the planets, so I thought it over and realized the Sun is part of the solar system... and had plenty of books available since nobody else had thought about this. Between the school library, the public library, and a reference book my great-aunt (another supporter of my science/science fiction preferences; she gave me a binder with pictures of astronauts on it) gave me. There were actually two articles in that book that helped me in school; one was about the Sun and the other was about penguins (which I didn't end up writing about until Grade 12).

Well, during the course of working on this project, I found The Concise Atlas of the Universe, browsed my way over to the part where it talked about the different types of stars, learned how they form, live, and die, was blown away by the Hertsprung-Russell Diagram... and was hooked.

So back in class, I uttered the words "stellar evolution" when answering one of the teacher's questions, and promptly had 30 other people staring at me with reactions that ranged from "huh?" to "OMG, she said EVOLUTION!!!"

I was 12 that year. I'll be 59 in less than a week. During all these years I've remained interested in astronomy and tried to keep up with new knowledge.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

BENEATH, like BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI, ends with a dying man blowing up objects, but not necessarily intentionally.

Oh, I think Taylor did intentionally blow up the doomsday device as he died.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

As he's dying, Taylor definitely seems to be struggling to say something like "fucking bastards" or similar. He's clearly some kind of pissed off. Definitely within his wheelhouse to deliberately set off the bomb as his final act of revenge.

 

[Timewalker]

I wrote too much homemade sci-fi for my fourth grade teacher's liking, probably because it was in my fourth grade comfort zone. I can say that even if you've memorized all the TOS episode titles by Blish-book order, it's still not likely to impress fellow sixth-graders. Maybe I should've listed all the Bond films in order instead, but that age I'd've pronounced Sean Connery with a ''seen'' sound.

I memorized all the TOS episode titles, and that actually did impress a couple of classmates in Grade 10. They weren't in any particular order, though, and the Blish books weren't in production or even broadcast order. Some of the scripts he worked with weren't even close to the final shooting script, which made for some confusion in some of them.

I got into Star Trek in Grade 8 and promptly made my junior high English teacher's life a living hell because I incorporated science fiction into as many assignments as I could (I'd promptly gone on a reading binge in the school library and public library before starting my now-massive SF/F collection that began with just 2 of the Blish books purchased at Woolco on November 28, 1975).

She couldn't wrap her mind around science fiction, or even science. She docked marks in an essay assignment because I'd capitalized "Earth." When I asked her why she'd marked me down for Earth but not for Saturn, she said, "Well, Saturn is a planet."

"So is Earth," I informed her, and she grudgingly restored my marks.

Science fiction did help me in a Grade 12 English assignment. The teacher was fond of "poetry interpretation" exercises and sometimes she would have us do them in groups. So I got into the usual group with 3 other students, and we started discussing the meaning of Edwin Muir's poem "The Horses."

This teacher had another habit: She would push her own religion in class, in assignments and comments. This was a public school, and so it profoundly annoyed me. But the students got used to the idea that it pleased the teacher when interpretation exercises contained a religious angle, so my classmates promptly decided that the horses were a metaphor for Jesus. I looked at them and said, "No, the poem is about World War III and the horses are real horses."

They looked at me as though I was nuts and said "But World War III hasn't happened yet" (take note of the word "yet"; in 1979 during the Cold War the idea of WWIII was something we took for granted could happen, but just didn't know when).

They argued that no war had come and gone in just 7 days (one of the lines in the poem refers to "the seven day war that put the world to sleep") and I explained that a nuclear exchange wouldn't need much more to destroy the higher technology we depended on. I was met with blank stares, and wondered if I was the only one who ever read science fiction, let alone dystopian science fiction outside of what might be assigned in school.

By this time the teacher had come around to our area of the classroom, overheard this discussion, and told the others in the group, "Listen to her. She's right."

I moved on to memorize the DIRTY DOZEN fictional names and the actor/numbers for the 12 ANGRY MEN jurors....not due to dedication, just obsession for certain kinds of quality product.

People memorize what interests them. I'm frequently croggled by some of what people have memorized about Star Trek, as there are some aspects that don't interest me even slightly. But there are some threads that are dozens of pages where people argue these things passionately.

Whereas me... I spent part of Grade 9 in the school library, learning the Greek alphabet. It hasn't led to much fluency in reading Greek and I can't even string a sentence together, though a Greek friend on my gaming forum has been willing to teach me a bit once he knew that I really do want to learn. At least I can recognize his name on the books he's published (he's published in Greece and has been trying to break into the North American market in English, specializing in horror fiction).

 

[Admiral2]

Actually, I'd have to say I'm more grateful to see Zira in ESCAPE than Cornelius, because my favorite scene in the movie was when the humans put her through the intelligence tests.

Clueless Human: "Why isn't she taking the banana?"
Zira: "Because I loathe bananas!"

 

[Timewalker]

Those who know all the TOS episode titles are likely to know most of the character names. So once the 1990s TREK board game came out, my best friend made the tactical error of assuming I wouldn't remember Jaegar [sic?] and DeSalle beaming down with McCoy in GOTHOS........as opposed Year 3's permanent Siamese-triplet-sandwich of Kirkspockenmccoy.

I'm unfamiliar with that game.

 

[DarrenTR1970]

I dug out my Malibu comics reprint of the Marvel comics movie adaptation of 'Beneath. . .' and the ending differs from the filmed version that made it on to the screen.

We pick up with Taylor and Brent entering the cathedral after the death of Nova, to see the apes pulling down the Alpha/Omega missile.

Taylor and Brent split up. As Brent is ducking behind a pillar, Zaius spots him and alerts Ursus, who turns and shoots Brent. Brent collapses to the ground. Zaius sees that Brent is still moving towards the rifle he dropped and says that the human is not dead. Ursus lunges at Brent and the two wrestle for the rifle. Zaius moves to pick up the rifle when Taylor yells, "Don't pull that trigger Zaius - -!"

Zaius and Ursus turn to see Taylor standing next to the missile with his finger on the firing trigger.

" - - Or it's doomsday. The end of the world Zaius and you know what I mean! One tiny button, - - Zaius. That's all it takes. All I do is press it, and it's over - - for good! So for God's sake, help me, Zaius! Help me stop this - -"

"Why should I?" replies Zaius.

"You damned dirty animal - -!"

"Don't touch the button, Taylor - -!"

"Then help me. Let Brent go. Convince Ursus to let me dismantle the bomb - - permanently. Help me, Zaius - - you must."

"No Taylor - - you are the beast, you are the destroyer. But the destroyer himself must inevitably be destroyed."

"So help me Zaius - - I'll do it. There's nothing left for me - - I want to do it. So you'd better stop me, Zaius - - you'd damn well better stop me!"

Ursus turns to Zaius. "What are you waiting for - -? Shoot the human - - shoot him!"

Zaius hesitates. "Ursus. . . I. . . I"

Ursus grabs the rifle from Zaius hands. "Weakling!!" and fires multiple shots at Taylor. Taylor collapses to the ground and struggles to reach the firing pin.

"Damn you Zaius - - Damn you - - You could have. . . stopped. . . him. . . could have. . ."

Ursus reloads and fires again, hitting Taylor. Taylor reaches for the firing pin.

"What's wrong with him? How can he go on - -? I hit him five times - -! He should be dead!"

Taylor smiles as he reaches the firing pin and pushes it. Fade to white, then black. "Tiny insignificant planet . . . now dead."

I'm disappointed that Malibu went under before they could complete reprinting the entire saga. It's promised at the end of the 'Escape' adaptation that 'Conquest' would be next; sure to be followed by 'Battle'.

That, and I wonder if 'Conquest' would have had the original ending where the apes kill Governor Breck, and 'Battle' would have had the deleted scenes that didn't show up until the 'Special Edition' DVD years later.