Let's Take a Rest

On the last break in our pilgrimage, I suggested we all kick back and stare into the daytime sky, taking in all that blue. Today’s rest stop is perhaps a bit more prosaic. Inspired by a recent attempt to organize my DVD collection (a hopeless task, by the way), it struck me how few really good movies have been made through the years dealing with "space". And this despite the fact there have been probably thousands of Science Fiction films made ever since the 1902 French-made silent movie A Trip to the Moon (Le Voyage dans la lune). But let's face it - they are nearly all crap, or at the very best just mediocre. Here are what I think are the best of the best (in chronological order):

1. Flight to Mars (1951) - Probably the best Grade-B SF film ever. It's the very first manned space flight, and they're headed straight for Mars! The explorers encounter a dying underground civilization with plans to conquer the Earth, just as soon as they can steal the Earthmen's space ship.

2. Forbidden Planet (1956) - Lifting the script straight from Shakespeare's The Tempest was only one of many brilliant ideas the filmmakers had here. Possibly my all-time favorite SF movie, it just gets better and better with each re-viewing.

3. Der schweigende Stern (1960) - an East German film, of all things. Magnificently captures the mystery of exploring an alien world. Saw this one when it was first released in the USA in 1962 under the title First Spaceship on Venus. Loved it then, and found it hadn't lost any of its sense of wonder when decades later I bought the DVD.

4. Phantom Planet (1961) - Like First Spaceship on Venus, Wonderfully captures the mood of interplanetary space travel, or at least what (in an ideal world) it ought to be. Why, oh why, were there not more films made like this one?

5. Solaris (1972) - A Soviet-made film directed by the legendary Andrei Tarkovsky, probably in an objective sense the best movie on this list. A deeply philosophical film about the Big Questions, and the spiritual effects of space travel on human beings. Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful.

6. Dark Star (1974) - The only comedy on my list, a stoner's vision of interstellar travel aboard a decrepit starship tasked with blowing up "unstable planets". The ending (I give no spoilers here) is absolute perfection.

7. Apollo 13 (1995) - The only non-fiction item on my list. Other than the HBO 12-part series From the Earth to the Moon, the only decent space-themed movie made thus far about actual events that isn't a documentary.

8. Gravity (2013) – Yeah, I know it’s scientifically stupid and Sandra Bullock’s character would have died multiple times over in real life, but I still LOVED it. I had to put my left brain on hold while watching it, or my head would have exploded. But hey, it’s no worse on that account than Phantom Planet!

9. The Martian (2015) – I can only hope that this (along with Gravity) is a harbinger of Things to Come – that is, space themed movies that are not science fiction, but just movies. Like movies that take place on an airplane or a train.

10. That’s it. I can’t think of a tenth film worthy of adding to this list. Perhaps Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964), or First Men in the Moon (also 1964), or even the German silent film Frau im Mond (1924) - but NOT Star Wars. There are just too many problems with that movie (and doubly so with its wretched sequels) for me to ever consider it.