Came into this thread not feeling like I had any particularly spicy opinions, and maybe this is totally accepted and uncontroversial and basic but, reading these posts has just cemented my belief that sci-fi as a genre works much better in written form than it does in visual.
this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2023
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Space Odyssey is pretty close adaptation of book and has more dialogue than book. So there was this art approach which some like and others don't. For me book is amazing but film is boring.
New adaptation of Dune is similar but more digestible for regular viewer.
Blade Runner and its sequel are just too damned long.
I love the entire "2001" series, and I've even watched the "2010" movie. I understand where your opinions are coming from and I will not judge you for them; but I personally disagree. Then again, I'm also someone who genuinely enjoys watching Citizen Kane, so I might just have a skewed perspective. Mind you, I also enjoy the 1995 Johnny Mnemonic movie and have watched Overdrawn at the Memory Bank without MST3K - so I'm all over in terms of sci-fi.
Here's my big hot take lately: of the "virtual world" sci-fi movies of 1999, I'm honestly upset that the Matrix was the one that won the cultural zeitgeist, rather than The Thirteenth Floor and eXistenZ. I understand that a Cronenberg movie probably wasn't going to win the public even if it did have Jennifer Jason Lee, Jude Law, and cameos from Ian Holm and Willem Dafoe; but The Thirteenth Floor had a great story, a solid cast, and really nice set designs - not to mention the moment that the covers of the home releases have always spoiled.
As someone who's old enough to remember seeing 2001 on a huge screen when it was first released, it's hard to express how monumentally spectacular the effects were. It brought the moon and space alive in a way that no movie had done before. The closest comparison I can make is with the first Jurassic Park movie, which was the first time movie audiences experienced living, breathing dinosaurs.
The whole psychedelic transit thing, hotel room/zoo and star baby was pretty obtuse for most audiences. You really needed to read the book to suss out what happened.
I watched 2010 before I watched 2001, because back in the olden days you could only watch whatever was on TV.
Needless to say I was very confused multiple times throughout that process.
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Serialized scifi shows are very boring. Especially when the focus of the show is on the serialization instead of the scifi.
Episodic morality plays are much more likely to support the wonder and excitement of discovery that a truly great scifi is capable of delivering.
I read the entire space odyssey series before watching any of the movies and I really liked the books, they're pretty much what got me into sci-fi. But the movie was absolute garbage, I agree. And I say this as someone who's done LSD a bunch of times.
For me, 2001 was a great little mini episode about an awesome killer AI, surrounded by weird imagery about monkeys and fetuses.
But my unpopular science fiction opinion? Fantastic Four (the one with Ioan Gruffadd) was a good movie.
Heretics of Dune is the best of the series. Lots of sex in a SciFi doesn't necessarily make it bad.
Fair, but the suspension of disbelief is in trouble there when no one has logistical/comfort issues during such with the whole damn planet being made of sand.
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I fully agree with you. 2001 is literally the most disappointing movie I've ever watched. Not exaggerating. I heard so much about it and was excited to finally watch it, only to be extremely let down by how boring it is. Only good thing I got out of it is memes and references. I'd name my Google Home HAL if I could (but literally no major smart device lets you set their name).
One opinion of mine that may be unpopular is that Star Wars has very amateur writing. I say this this mostly in reference to how the villains are so comically evil, yet so incompetent that the galaxy spanning villain is frequently defeated by a band of a couple hundred rebels. There's many parts of Star Wars I really enjoy (I've admittedly seen nearly every TV show and movie), but the big picture writing is pretty much never one of them.
Andor had the best writing among any of the Star Wars movies/shows I've seen, because it frequently showed the villains as terrified themselves. Plus the very first "villain" we encounter isn't actually wrong (he's a security guard investigating the murders of some people and genuinely believes he's trying to stop a murderer).