Forsaken Stars

No other movie besides Star Wars has had as great an impact on my childhood imagination.? H. G. Well’s vision of an apocalyptic future and the tragic relationship between the timid Eloi and the underground? Morlocks was but the first adventure of the time traveler–he had dozens more in my mind, a few of which I put down on paper when I was six or seven years old.

Claude Rains is such a presence in this film that no one has ever been able to make as powerful a remake since.? And he is either invisible or bandaged from head to toe throughout the entire movie!? Not only was he a classically trained actor, but he taught at the Royal Academy (Sirs Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud among his most notable students).? His? raspy, maniacally laughing Invisible Man ‘rained’ supreme as the most iconic villainous voice in cinema until James Earl Jones, and later, you might say Anthony Hopkins evoked a similar timber in The Silence of the Lambs.? And it’s likely not coincidence that this is another adaptation of an H.G. Wells novel.

I loved the gorgeous vistas around the splashdown site of the astronauts’ ship, I marveled at the ape makeup that didn’t seem like makeup it was so realistic, and I felt the oppression of the enslaved humans.? I don’t think the ending impacted me until years later, but most of the Planet of the Apes films left me frustrated or confused, likely because I saw them out of order and extensively edited on Saturdayafternoon monster theater.? They bear re-watching.

Yeah, I know, a George Lucas sci-fi film before Star Wars.? For me, as a kid, it was all about that car.? Oppressive society, Donald Pleasance on the run, okay, I get it–but it was all about that futuristic car.

What can I say, I’m a fan of the works of H.G. Wells!? The guy could speak to our hopes and fears and a boy’s sense of adventure like few others!? Also, that spidery-sounding telescopic eye of the alien invaders is so primaly freaky that it’s still used in cinema, television and animated works today.

Yule Brenner as a robot gunslinger in a western-themed robot amusement park that goes horribly wrong.? Why do the scientists make them?!? I’ll tell you why:? because they are SCARY AWESOME.? Few remember there was a remake called Futureworld two years later with Peter Fonda and Blythe Danner.? It’s worth a look if you loved the first one, but it does pale in comparison.? (It had a lot of potential, and maybe someone might be brave enough to attempt a big budget remake, but maybe it already was, and it was called The Island, but with clones instead of robots, so nevermind.)

Stanley Kubrick’s Master Opus of sci-fi should be number one, but it is long, and to a young boy seeking action, girls in bikinis, ape men or aliens, it falls short of those expectations.? For an older, more philosophical audience, few films come close to capturing the history of human achievement, and frailty.

Bruce Dern is an astronaut forest ranger caring for the Earth’s last forests within several greenhouse domes aboard the space freighter Valley Forge.? He goes rogue when his superiors order him to jettison the domes and return to Earth.? He goes against his fellow rangers and spends much of the film alone with his maintenance robots.? A lonely, poignant film, don’t watch it if you’re already depressed.? But has a few great effects and one of the few “hard sf” films on this list.

A Disney film on a top ten list of Sci-Fi greats before Star Wars?? Huh?? Well, even Star Wars itself is more space opera than science-fiction, more driven by mythology than science, and this list is my attempt to list those films that captured my imagination when I was growing up, and this particular film of two extraterrestrial twins with psychic abilities trying to get back to their ship with the help of an elderly man in an RV did just that.? It helped develop my sense of wonder and adventure.