![]() A pre- RoboCop Peter Weller effortlessly embodies the title character: physicist, rock star, the leader of the Hong Kong Cavaliers, he was a comic book hero in his own time. Ground zero for a pervasive geek culture that was still years away from materialising, WD Richter’s unclassifiable whatsit would have to settle for being a cult film in the dark days of VHS. TJĬast: Peter Weller, John Lithgow, Ellen Barkin Cliff Martinez’s seductive yet unsettling score sets the tone as we ponder the difference in this graceful, thought-provoking affair, where the never-better McElhone is heartbreaking as the woman discovering she’s not truly herself. Or rather, a reincarnation of his memories of her, which isn’t quite the same thing. Investigating a stricken space station orbiting the mysterious planet Solaris, shrink Clooney finds he has a ‘visitor’ – a spooky reincarnation of his late wife. As writer-director-editor and cinematographer, Soderbergh does a remarkable job of echoing the original’s Soviet-era look and solemnity, yet moves the story along without compromising its intriguing musings on the knowability of self and others. It’s hard to imagine a Hollywood exec even sitting through Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris(1972), never mind stumping up for Steven Soderbergh’s US remake, but perhaps the presence of producer James Cameron facilitated this most introspective of space operas. TJĬast: George Clooney, Natascha McElhone, Jeremy Davies Young Lucas evidently believed in heroic individualism, fast cars and the possibility of escape, yet it’s the visualisation of an entire society shaped by universal surveillance, government-supplied sedatives and android police carrying very big sticks which rings darker and truer than the director’s subsequent, significantly more populist output. Viewed today – the only version available is Lucas and co-writer Walter Murch’s digitally spruced-up 2004 ‘Director’s Cut’ – its shaven headed-cast, chillingly benign language intoning state propaganda and oppressive widescreen palette of glacial whites make for genuinely unnerving viewing. The studio hated the result and the subsequent box-office debacle almost killed both their careers. George Lucas and his pal Francis Ford Coppola persuaded Warner Brothers to take a flyer on expanding George’s earlier student short into this Orwell and Huxley-influenced fable about free love and free will versus all-powerful totalitarianism. □ The 101 best action movies of all-timeĬast: Robert Duvall, Donald Pleasence, Maggie McOmie □ The 50 best fantasy movies of all-time □ The best sci-fi shows streaming on Netflix As a result, it’s a list that crisscrosses the sci-fi universe, from Tatooine to Arrakis, Metropolis to Los Angeles circa, uh, 2019. To that end, in order to put together our list of the 100 best sci-fi movies ever made, we asked a wide-ranging panel of experts, from Nobel Prize-winning geneticist Sir Paul Nurse to Oscar-decorated film director Guillermo del Toro to Game of Thrones creator George RR Martin, along with a few regular old Time Out writers. In the end, though, the sci-fi that sticks out in popular consciousness is the stuff that deals with themes and issues anyone can relate to, not just the geeks writing 4,000-word theoretical treatises on fan forums. Sure, there may also be some convoluted time-travel involved, or fantastical technology, or odd creatures that are either benevolent or mean as hell. The only difference is that it might invent an entirely different world to do so. The best sci-fi films do what any good movie should do, and that’s tell us something about ourselves and the world around us. Patches will, no doubt, quickly fix the issues, at which point Beyond a Steel Sky will join its stablemates as a modern classic.Science fiction isn’t just for nerds anymore. ![]() A handful of bugs, including one that breaks the game and forces you to retreat to earlier saves, threatens the delicate relationship of trust that exists between player and designer, as each time you get stuck, you question whether the fault lies with your reasoning or simply a glitch. Unfortunately the game has a few logic issues of its own. Soon, Foster acquires a device that enables him to hack into everything from automated bridges to drinks machines and rewrite their internal logic to, for example, dispense free cans of soda, adding a technical dimension to the puzzle wrangling. The incessant challenge could be offputting were it not for the quality of the writing, which is thoroughly witty and engaging throughout. ![]() As players of Revolution’s classic Broken Sword series might expect, this is a world of nested puzzles each breakthrough is always met by some new, arcane resistance.
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