
The ballot, for anyone who has not looked yet, is The Fifth Element, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, The Empire Strikes Back, Back to the Future Part II, The Matrix, and Blade Runner: The Final Cut. Three sequels, four franchise films, five movies that made $100,000,000 or more. It would be tough to come up with a more mainstream list of SF films. The reasons given for each film's selection reveal some interesting similarities. Here's a summary:
- The Fifth Element: chosen because, in addition to a "fine" story and "adequate" effects, has a unique color scheme and soundtrack.
- Back to the Future Part II: chosen because it is a "gold standard in time travel literature"2 and depicts a believable-looking near-future.
- The Empire Strikes Back: chosen because it is a Star Wars movie with "believable" characters.
- The Wrath of Khan: chosen because, while it is "lacking any philosophical depth," it is "the greatest pulp adventure movie ever made."
- The Matrix: chosen because of an influential visual style and because it "changed the way we think about reality."
- Blade Runner: The Final Cut: chosen because of an influential visual style and explorations of the nature of humanity.
My intent is not to call anyone out as having poor taste. I like all six of these movies. But I want to point out the grade curve. When we say that these films have good characters, there is an an unspoken but understood addendum: this movie has well rounded characters for a science fiction movie. What we are really saying is, "this is a movie where everything takes a back seat to spectacle, and yet characterization was not completely ignored!" Damien Walter admits to this in his nomination post for Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan. He says that it is not a science fiction movie he would consider art, but is the most fun SF movie he knows. All of the movies on the ballot are clearly motivated, explicitly or not, in whole or in part, by this impulse. Blade Runner gave a visual aesthetic to then-nascent cyberpunk. The Matrix gave one to the CGI era. Back to the Future Part II is distinguished from its siblings by having a lit-up and hosed-down suburban version of the Blade Runner look. The Fifth Element is a beautiful empty box. Empire Strikes Back is Star Wars.
It is an excellent list, if you interpret "Best Science Fiction Movie Ever" to mean the movie that best encapsulates SF movie culture, with its history of pulpy power fantasies and glorious sprawling set pieces. But I would like to interpret it to mean the best movie that happens to be science fiction. I do not want to grade on a curve. When choosing whether to more highly value story and character or spectacle and cinematography, I choose the former. As such, this list looks nothing like my own.
More importantly, the moral weight of the story does not matter only to the characters, it matters to me. I have never felt anything remotely like Adam's claim that The Matrix "changed the way we think about reality" (I was already a guy who sits in front of his computer all night suspecting he is the most important person in the world, hey-o!). But Joel and Clementine's struggle toward an awareness that one must be accepting of one's own fallibility before it is possible to meaningfully connect with another resonates with my actual efforts towards maturity, the ones I wrestle with outside the theater. This is science fiction as it is best employed: not as set dressing, but as a lens for exploring true human experience.
As it happens, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is also a visually beautiful movie, brilliantly edited to be the most effective nonlinear storytelling I have seen in a film since Memento. But that is not why I love it, and while that might play a role in my placing Eternal Sunshine at the top of my fantasy ballot, it has nothing to do with why I want it nominated. I enjoy spectacle, but letting it be a determining factor when we decided what the "best" science fiction movies are is to diminish what science fiction is capable of. Yes, science fiction can present us with thrilling images we will never really encounter, but it can also be a tool for understanding things that we will. Just like any kind of storytelling. There is no reason to hold science fiction movies to a lower standard. There is room enough for truth between the spaceships.
1 Blade Runner. Some days I feel sentimental enough about The Matrix that I might let it slip in without complaint.
2 This is an aside, but Nathan Ilten's claim that the Back to the Future movies depict time travel in a manner nearly free from contradictions is unsupportable. Every moment of the film where a change has been made to the past that has not yet "caught up" to the protagonists constitutes a contradiction. Coherent time travel narrative is only logically possible within a deterministic framework, and the Back to the Future movies are aggressively libertarian (in the philosophical sense, not the political sense). For an actually coherent time travel narrative, try 12 Monkeys or, for certain values of "coherent," Primer.
3 I would not argue that awards are necessarily indicative of quality, but it is worth noting that Kaufman won an Oscar for this script. It is the only time the award for Best Original Screenplay has gone to a work of science fiction.