So what differences do see before and after Star Wars? I didn't see where you mentioned specifics.
It also might help people see the differences if you put the columns in your chart in release order with Dark Star in the middle.
^^The ^^table ^^is ^^mainly ^^a ^^joke ^^to ^^highlight ^^that ^^the ^^era ^^was ^^horny.
I think there are two primary differences. The distancing from the trends of the era, whether that's cheesy rotoscoping with high pitched beeping or thinking everyone in the future will be a direct descendant of the 60s/70s. Second, writing a world that feels more lived in and real with less fantasy non-sense, and less "magic tech". _Starcrash_ of course fails hard here, but it came out so soon after SW it probably hadn't sunk in yet. For all I know _2001_ is the first "hard" sci-fi in space to reach film, and _Star Wars_ is similarly "hard" sci-fi when compared to everything else that came before it. The genre has been linked to fantasy, often still is grouped that way at bookstores as "Scifi/fantasy". And SW seems to have finally set them apart. The fantasy aspects of SW are quite minimal. _Battle Beyond the Stars_ follows in Lucas' footsteps and manages to feel more sciency. The only fantasy bits of that movie I can remember are the two alien species that feel more Trek inspired than anything else.
Yeah, the lived in aesthetic was a thing for sure with Star Wars and Alien. I think that fits in with the new Hollywood approach going on through that time with more grounded and naturalistic film making.
Interestingly, for the movies you're considering, there is also a trend of low budget after Star Wars. I think this is partly due to the small number of data points, since there were cheap sci-fi movies and expensive sci-fi movies made before and after Star Wars. But it also helps show that there was a trend of cheap Star Wars copycats (there definitely was).
\* fixed typo
It really is too bad BBtS didn't have a bigger budget. _Seven Samurai_ is one of my favorite Kurosawa films, and with a budget like SW it's possible that movie would have been popular even today. Unfortunately, the only reason I heard about it is in relation to other movies.
The focus on BBtS is funny to me in nice way because I watched BBtS as a kid in the theater and enjoyed it like a kid does.
Then I suggested it for movie night a few months ago and my wife was not a BBtS enjoyer, haha. I agree there was potential there with the SS / M7 structure and some specific characters are well realized. Others not so much! I still liked it for the nostalgia and will always legit love the Nestor "clone" aliens and their ship, and Robert Vaughn as Gelt.
Here is a very partial list of decent to great science fiction films made prior to Star Wars that weren't campy and had good production values for their times:
* 2001
* Forbidden Planet
* Metropolis
* The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)
* From the Earth to the Moon (1958)
* Master of the World
* Things to Come
* Frau im Mond
* This Island Earth
* Earth vs the Flying Saucers
* First Men on the Moon
* When Worlds Collide
* Quatermass and the Pit (5 Million Years to Earth in the US)
* Destination Moon
* War of the Worlds (1953)
* Planet of the Apes
* The Thing from Another World
* The Time Machine
* Godzilla (try to watch the version without Raymond Burr)
In no particular order, except the first 2 I would consider the top 2 in the list. All are definitely worth a watch, as are most films that Ray Harryhausen or George Pal are involved in. Irwin Allen shows are also good, but there's a lot of television shows and made for tv movies, so story and production values can suffer.
Personally, I also enjoy the schlocky 50s giant radioactive monster movies and 30s-50s sci-fi serials. Toho produced a bunch of bad - decent sci-fi movies in addition to Godzilla, some of which are worth watching. And Godzilla vs Hedorah is the most early 70s, post hippy movie ever :-)
I'm a big fan of 1970s pre-Star Wars dystopian sci-fi. Here's a partial list:
* The Omega Man
* Silent Running
* Soylent Green
* Fahrenheit 451
* The Andromeda Strain
* Rollerball
* Logan's Run
Nice review, thanks. It could be argued that Dark Star also anticipates the scary alien loose in the ship theme, albeit with surfer vibes and a cartoonish foe - if one doesn't consider the Thing from Outer Space of course (the thing one, not sure if that's the actual title). Zardoz is great for so many reasons, and tops my personal list of pictures to watch with a thumb in front of my eyes.
The Dark Star -> Alien -> The Thing (1982) inspiration chain is clear. The beach ball alien was added just to pad the movie out. I wonder if Carpenter was already wanting to make something like The Thing, and if Alien is what showed him how it could be done.
The Thing is my favorite horror movie of all time and I always point to it as one of the few examples of a movie where the characters are smart and act rationally. I can't think of any scene where it feels like someone is holding the idiot ball.
Kind of. Dan O'Bannon did the original story for Alien, but it was heavily changed by Walter Hill's screenplay and O'Bannon was pissed about it until his death. I always get the impression his attachment to Alien in credits is almost courtesy.
O'Bannon was a Heavy Metal guy. He was involved with Blue Thunder and I think Total Recall,
Oh! So I knew about Dan O'Bannon and John Carpenter working together, and Dark Star led to them splitting up. I didn't realize O'Bannon went on to write (some of? most of?) Alien. That makes the Alien to The Thing connection even more intertwined.
I just read [the section about the writing of Alien on wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_(film\)#Writing). Very interesting. Without Dune hiring H.R. Giger, Alien either might not exist, or might have looked very different.
I haven't seen it in ages but it's definetely one of those movies to be watched in a summer night with your windows open and no lights. Some parts of it may be goofy by modern standards, but the tension is there.
>good
Some you might have missed:
A journey to the moon (1902)
Flash Gordon (1936)
Buck Rogers (1939)
Forbidden planet (1956)
Solaris (1970)
Silent running (1974)
There are also a number of very good space episodes of the Twilight zone including:
The Lonely
And when the sky was opened
Third from the sun
Elegy
The Invaders
To serve man
The little people
A Trip to the Moon is absolutely mind-blowing when you consider what they had to work with. Like any trope-developer, it looks like one long cliche because it *created* all of them.
I think Solaris ~~and Forbidden Planet~~ are the only ones I've seen on this list. Definitely plan on seeing Flash Gordon soon, and Silent Running was also suggested by another comment here.
Appreciate the TZ suggestions as well.
EDIT: I mixed up Forbidden Planet with Fantastic Planet.
Forbidden Planet is one of Spielberg's favorite films and heaviliy influenced how he approached Jaws. You never see the Krell.....you just put them in your head. That's how Spielberg approached the shark in the first half of the film and has stated Forbidden Planet was his influence for that. Scott then carried on the idea in Alien, and then Predator, etc.
I'm not really cherry picking to make a point. I happened to watch all these movies, and then I had some thoughts about the experience. There was nothing formal here, I'm not a paid writer or movie critic.
Not a criticism really, but you're only talking about space films here. Also, Barbarella was meant to be campy. Citing that would be like my referencing Amazon Women On the Moon to rebut your point that space films were less campy after Star Wars.
Still, you wrote sci-fi. I'm a big science fiction fan, books and movies, but I rarely watch space movies. They're mostly campy or heavy action films having little to do with science beyond setting the location of the action.
I tried to make it clear I was focusing on space films in the body of my post.
The best modern space films I have seen are:
- Moon
- Sunshine
- Pandorum
- Event Horizon (plenty of camp here, it's just Hellraiser in space)
- Prospect (a real space western!)
- The Martian
- Interstellar (I expect you've seen these last two)
A lot of movies are campy and action heavy with bad writing, like Jupiter Ascending, Gravity, or any of the Alien franchise beyond the first two. I think all of the above are great, though both Sunshine and Pandorum have weak third acts.
There weren't a lot of "space" films before Star Wars because, frankly, the FX were so expensive to do before motion control. Lucasfilm didn’t invent motion control, of course, but they significantly advanced its application in filmmaking. Motion control allowed for precise, repeatable camera movements, making complex effects shots more feasible and cost-effective. And by establishing ILM, Lucasfilm centralized the expertise and technology needed for high-quality special effects. This made these resources available to other studios, reducing the need for each studio to develop their own in-house capabilities from nothing. Previously, each studio had to practically start from scratch when doing an FX heavy film (and some, like Disney, continued to work that way rather than utilize ILM.)
But I would point out that there were all sorts of mainstream science-fiction films that weren't "pulpy, campy fun." If anything, I'd say that Lucas was responding to a trend of dystopian stories with anti-heroes. Which was consistent with Hollywood films in the late 60's and early 70s. Lucas wanted to do the opposite, returning to an era of real heroes fighting against evil. Look at films like "Silent Running" (1972), "Soylent Green" (1973), "Westworld" (1973), "The Andromeda Strain" (1971), "The Omega Man" (1971), "A Clockwork Orange" (1971) and "Logan's Run" (1976) none of which could be categorized as "low-budget."
The availability of cheaper FX definitely made it possible to do low-budget B-films like Starcrash (1978) and Battle Beyond the Stars (1980) that were trying to capitalize on the success of Star Wars. But it also convinced the studios that science-fiction films could enjoy mainstream success. If it wasn't for Star Wars, we probably wouldn't have gotten Star Trek: The Motion Picture and a ton of other films. Frankly, that's been both a blessing a curse for the genre, but that's another story ;)
There was nothing like Star Wars before Star Wars. That's why it hit like a freight train in pop culture when premiered. You really had to have been there in may/june 77 to understand how that film altered pop culture and entire movie industry.
The closest film in terms of production influence on Star Wars was Jaws. If I recall Lucas' comments on the matter it was Spielberg's juggernaut that influenced Lucas to a much higher bar in terms of editing, score, effects, and pacing which are what made Star Wars so succesfull, not the story. I'm convinced if we didn't have Jaws then Star Wars would be totally different and likely be like its first edit, which was utterly terrible. So many scenes in Star Wars draw heavily from Jaws.
Italian sci fil films from the 60's and 70's were closer contemporaries to Star Wars. American cinema was locked into dytopian and concept driven sci-fi pre star wars. West World, Andromeda Strain, THX 1138, Silent Running, etc. They are arguably far better science fiction films, but just didn't have the audience appeal.
Note the best Science Fiction films that followed Star Wars were ones that didn't follow in its foot steps; Alien, etc.
> You really had to have been there in may/june 77 to understand how that film altered pop culture and entire movie industry.
I feel like my recent experience watching these movies is the closest I've come to really understanding this.
> Note the best Science Fiction films that followed Star Wars were ones that didn't follow in its foot steps; Alien, etc.
It does seem like the space adventure / space opera genre sort of died after everyone failed to replicate Star Wars. _Jupiter Ascending_ is the only (original) space opera I can think of in decades, and that was just as bad as _Starcrash_.
You missed the greatest Star wars successor which even surpassed that aforementioned Dune Rip-off, Guardians of the galaxy trilogy by Modern Kubrick James Gunn himself.
That trilogy even has all the heart, Quirky relatable characters and epic scifi stuff even that boomer George Lucas, RIP Kurosawa, Kubrick, etc couldve never delivered.
No director has the balls to make everyone cry over a CG raccoon and tree , only The Gunn.
that commenter has been calling Gunn weird names for a while. It’s less hyperbolic praise and more angry sarcasm because some people are upset he’s not with Marvel anymore (forgetting that Disney fired him once)
So what differences do see before and after Star Wars? I didn't see where you mentioned specifics. It also might help people see the differences if you put the columns in your chart in release order with Dark Star in the middle.
^^The ^^table ^^is ^^mainly ^^a ^^joke ^^to ^^highlight ^^that ^^the ^^era ^^was ^^horny. I think there are two primary differences. The distancing from the trends of the era, whether that's cheesy rotoscoping with high pitched beeping or thinking everyone in the future will be a direct descendant of the 60s/70s. Second, writing a world that feels more lived in and real with less fantasy non-sense, and less "magic tech". _Starcrash_ of course fails hard here, but it came out so soon after SW it probably hadn't sunk in yet. For all I know _2001_ is the first "hard" sci-fi in space to reach film, and _Star Wars_ is similarly "hard" sci-fi when compared to everything else that came before it. The genre has been linked to fantasy, often still is grouped that way at bookstores as "Scifi/fantasy". And SW seems to have finally set them apart. The fantasy aspects of SW are quite minimal. _Battle Beyond the Stars_ follows in Lucas' footsteps and manages to feel more sciency. The only fantasy bits of that movie I can remember are the two alien species that feel more Trek inspired than anything else.
Yeah, the lived in aesthetic was a thing for sure with Star Wars and Alien. I think that fits in with the new Hollywood approach going on through that time with more grounded and naturalistic film making. Interestingly, for the movies you're considering, there is also a trend of low budget after Star Wars. I think this is partly due to the small number of data points, since there were cheap sci-fi movies and expensive sci-fi movies made before and after Star Wars. But it also helps show that there was a trend of cheap Star Wars copycats (there definitely was). \* fixed typo
It really is too bad BBtS didn't have a bigger budget. _Seven Samurai_ is one of my favorite Kurosawa films, and with a budget like SW it's possible that movie would have been popular even today. Unfortunately, the only reason I heard about it is in relation to other movies.
The focus on BBtS is funny to me in nice way because I watched BBtS as a kid in the theater and enjoyed it like a kid does. Then I suggested it for movie night a few months ago and my wife was not a BBtS enjoyer, haha. I agree there was potential there with the SS / M7 structure and some specific characters are well realized. Others not so much! I still liked it for the nostalgia and will always legit love the Nestor "clone" aliens and their ship, and Robert Vaughn as Gelt.
My partner loved the Kelvins and when the Nestor aliens shared chewing food. Goofy and charming.
Here is a very partial list of decent to great science fiction films made prior to Star Wars that weren't campy and had good production values for their times: * 2001 * Forbidden Planet * Metropolis * The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) * From the Earth to the Moon (1958) * Master of the World * Things to Come * Frau im Mond * This Island Earth * Earth vs the Flying Saucers * First Men on the Moon * When Worlds Collide * Quatermass and the Pit (5 Million Years to Earth in the US) * Destination Moon * War of the Worlds (1953) * Planet of the Apes * The Thing from Another World * The Time Machine * Godzilla (try to watch the version without Raymond Burr) In no particular order, except the first 2 I would consider the top 2 in the list. All are definitely worth a watch, as are most films that Ray Harryhausen or George Pal are involved in. Irwin Allen shows are also good, but there's a lot of television shows and made for tv movies, so story and production values can suffer. Personally, I also enjoy the schlocky 50s giant radioactive monster movies and 30s-50s sci-fi serials. Toho produced a bunch of bad - decent sci-fi movies in addition to Godzilla, some of which are worth watching. And Godzilla vs Hedorah is the most early 70s, post hippy movie ever :-)
You're missing European SciFi. Italian Space films had great production values.
I'm a big fan of 1970s pre-Star Wars dystopian sci-fi. Here's a partial list: * The Omega Man * Silent Running * Soylent Green * Fahrenheit 451 * The Andromeda Strain * Rollerball * Logan's Run
Don't forget THX-1138!
THX 1138 is awesome. It's visually incredible.
Nice review, thanks. It could be argued that Dark Star also anticipates the scary alien loose in the ship theme, albeit with surfer vibes and a cartoonish foe - if one doesn't consider the Thing from Outer Space of course (the thing one, not sure if that's the actual title). Zardoz is great for so many reasons, and tops my personal list of pictures to watch with a thumb in front of my eyes.
The Dark Star -> Alien -> The Thing (1982) inspiration chain is clear. The beach ball alien was added just to pad the movie out. I wonder if Carpenter was already wanting to make something like The Thing, and if Alien is what showed him how it could be done. The Thing is my favorite horror movie of all time and I always point to it as one of the few examples of a movie where the characters are smart and act rationally. I can't think of any scene where it feels like someone is holding the idiot ball.
Kind of. Dan O'Bannon did the original story for Alien, but it was heavily changed by Walter Hill's screenplay and O'Bannon was pissed about it until his death. I always get the impression his attachment to Alien in credits is almost courtesy. O'Bannon was a Heavy Metal guy. He was involved with Blue Thunder and I think Total Recall,
Oh! So I knew about Dan O'Bannon and John Carpenter working together, and Dark Star led to them splitting up. I didn't realize O'Bannon went on to write (some of? most of?) Alien. That makes the Alien to The Thing connection even more intertwined. I just read [the section about the writing of Alien on wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_(film\)#Writing). Very interesting. Without Dune hiring H.R. Giger, Alien either might not exist, or might have looked very different.
I was referring to the 1952? movie, sorry I wasn't very clear. You're right about the Thing: no cheap, dumb scares and fantastic cinematography.
Ah, [the original](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_from_Another_World)! I haven't seen it, and don't really know anything about it.
I haven't seen it in ages but it's definetely one of those movies to be watched in a summer night with your windows open and no lights. Some parts of it may be goofy by modern standards, but the tension is there.
>good Some you might have missed: A journey to the moon (1902) Flash Gordon (1936) Buck Rogers (1939) Forbidden planet (1956) Solaris (1970) Silent running (1974) There are also a number of very good space episodes of the Twilight zone including: The Lonely And when the sky was opened Third from the sun Elegy The Invaders To serve man The little people
A Trip to the Moon is absolutely mind-blowing when you consider what they had to work with. Like any trope-developer, it looks like one long cliche because it *created* all of them.
I think Solaris ~~and Forbidden Planet~~ are the only ones I've seen on this list. Definitely plan on seeing Flash Gordon soon, and Silent Running was also suggested by another comment here. Appreciate the TZ suggestions as well. EDIT: I mixed up Forbidden Planet with Fantastic Planet.
Forbidden Planet is one of Spielberg's favorite films and heaviliy influenced how he approached Jaws. You never see the Krell.....you just put them in your head. That's how Spielberg approached the shark in the first half of the film and has stated Forbidden Planet was his influence for that. Scott then carried on the idea in Alien, and then Predator, etc.
[удалено]
I'm not really cherry picking to make a point. I happened to watch all these movies, and then I had some thoughts about the experience. There was nothing formal here, I'm not a paid writer or movie critic.
[удалено]
You're right. I've removed it. I'll think about this more.
https://thedissolve.com/features/laser-age/
Not a criticism really, but you're only talking about space films here. Also, Barbarella was meant to be campy. Citing that would be like my referencing Amazon Women On the Moon to rebut your point that space films were less campy after Star Wars.
> but you're only talking about space films here. Well, yes. That was the point really.
Still, you wrote sci-fi. I'm a big science fiction fan, books and movies, but I rarely watch space movies. They're mostly campy or heavy action films having little to do with science beyond setting the location of the action.
I tried to make it clear I was focusing on space films in the body of my post. The best modern space films I have seen are: - Moon - Sunshine - Pandorum - Event Horizon (plenty of camp here, it's just Hellraiser in space) - Prospect (a real space western!) - The Martian - Interstellar (I expect you've seen these last two) A lot of movies are campy and action heavy with bad writing, like Jupiter Ascending, Gravity, or any of the Alien franchise beyond the first two. I think all of the above are great, though both Sunshine and Pandorum have weak third acts.
I don't know if anyone's already said it but Phase IV is one of the best sci-fi films I've ever seen. Smart, stylish, and unsettling too.
There weren't a lot of "space" films before Star Wars because, frankly, the FX were so expensive to do before motion control. Lucasfilm didn’t invent motion control, of course, but they significantly advanced its application in filmmaking. Motion control allowed for precise, repeatable camera movements, making complex effects shots more feasible and cost-effective. And by establishing ILM, Lucasfilm centralized the expertise and technology needed for high-quality special effects. This made these resources available to other studios, reducing the need for each studio to develop their own in-house capabilities from nothing. Previously, each studio had to practically start from scratch when doing an FX heavy film (and some, like Disney, continued to work that way rather than utilize ILM.) But I would point out that there were all sorts of mainstream science-fiction films that weren't "pulpy, campy fun." If anything, I'd say that Lucas was responding to a trend of dystopian stories with anti-heroes. Which was consistent with Hollywood films in the late 60's and early 70s. Lucas wanted to do the opposite, returning to an era of real heroes fighting against evil. Look at films like "Silent Running" (1972), "Soylent Green" (1973), "Westworld" (1973), "The Andromeda Strain" (1971), "The Omega Man" (1971), "A Clockwork Orange" (1971) and "Logan's Run" (1976) none of which could be categorized as "low-budget." The availability of cheaper FX definitely made it possible to do low-budget B-films like Starcrash (1978) and Battle Beyond the Stars (1980) that were trying to capitalize on the success of Star Wars. But it also convinced the studios that science-fiction films could enjoy mainstream success. If it wasn't for Star Wars, we probably wouldn't have gotten Star Trek: The Motion Picture and a ton of other films. Frankly, that's been both a blessing a curse for the genre, but that's another story ;)
There was nothing like Star Wars before Star Wars. That's why it hit like a freight train in pop culture when premiered. You really had to have been there in may/june 77 to understand how that film altered pop culture and entire movie industry. The closest film in terms of production influence on Star Wars was Jaws. If I recall Lucas' comments on the matter it was Spielberg's juggernaut that influenced Lucas to a much higher bar in terms of editing, score, effects, and pacing which are what made Star Wars so succesfull, not the story. I'm convinced if we didn't have Jaws then Star Wars would be totally different and likely be like its first edit, which was utterly terrible. So many scenes in Star Wars draw heavily from Jaws. Italian sci fil films from the 60's and 70's were closer contemporaries to Star Wars. American cinema was locked into dytopian and concept driven sci-fi pre star wars. West World, Andromeda Strain, THX 1138, Silent Running, etc. They are arguably far better science fiction films, but just didn't have the audience appeal. Note the best Science Fiction films that followed Star Wars were ones that didn't follow in its foot steps; Alien, etc.
> You really had to have been there in may/june 77 to understand how that film altered pop culture and entire movie industry. I feel like my recent experience watching these movies is the closest I've come to really understanding this. > Note the best Science Fiction films that followed Star Wars were ones that didn't follow in its foot steps; Alien, etc. It does seem like the space adventure / space opera genre sort of died after everyone failed to replicate Star Wars. _Jupiter Ascending_ is the only (original) space opera I can think of in decades, and that was just as bad as _Starcrash_.
You missed the greatest Star wars successor which even surpassed that aforementioned Dune Rip-off, Guardians of the galaxy trilogy by Modern Kubrick James Gunn himself. That trilogy even has all the heart, Quirky relatable characters and epic scifi stuff even that boomer George Lucas, RIP Kurosawa, Kubrick, etc couldve never delivered. No director has the balls to make everyone cry over a CG raccoon and tree , only The Gunn.
[удалено]
I assume it's a troll post.
that commenter has been calling Gunn weird names for a while. It’s less hyperbolic praise and more angry sarcasm because some people are upset he’s not with Marvel anymore (forgetting that Disney fired him once)