I love science fiction/space operas/space cowboys/you name it.
My all-time favorites came out within a year of each other:
Alien and
Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and both have Veronica Cartwright lending her genius at hysteria (I don't think anyone else matches her when it comes to portraying that type of emotion). I consider these two films to be among the greatest ever made in
any genre. I rank Alien in the top five, and Body Snatchers in the top 100 easily. Both could be called thrillers/horror as much as sci-fi films, but I don't worry too much about genre names if the movie is great.
Yes, the original
Invasion of the Body Snatchers is fantastic, but Donald Sutherland and Brooke Adams are so wonderful together, and Veronica Cartwright is fantastic (and Leonard Nimoy is in it as well!), so I think their remake is better than the original.
I really enjoyed
Pandorum with Ben Foster,
Avatar was quite good, and I liked
Sunshine with the glorious Chris Evans.
I won't argue that it's one of the greatest films of all time, but I really enjoy
Species with Natasha Henstridge (definitely one of the great beauties of the last 30 or 40 years). It's a very fun movie.
Regarding television shows:
The X-files is one of my favorite TV shows of all time, no matter the genre. There were some silly things I didn't like, and the series finale was rather awful to be honest. I keep hoping they will give us closure with one last great movie that deals definitively with the alien invasion.
The Outer Limits both the original
and the newer series from the 1990s were fantastic! So many great episodes.
Firefly (and the theatrical film
Serenity), pretty much wonderful all the way around. I loved the look of the show, the characters were entertaining, and I loved the bits of Mandarin thrown in. Morena Baccarin and Adam Baldwin were my favorite stars. A fantastic show.
Farscape is another masterpiece, and one of very few shows where the alien creatures didn't just appall me with their bad design. It's a shame Virginia Hey didn't feel that she could talk freely with the producers about her issues with the makeup/shaved head and eyebrows/etc. that were making her so uncomfortable. I don't know that the producers would have allowed her to grow her hair out or accommodated her in some other way, but the show lost part of its heart when she left.
Stargate Atlantis (okay, I hated that certain Canadian actors whose characters were supposed to be from the U.S. insisted on using Canadian pronunciation of a few words, even though no one in the United States EVER pronounces them that way--they should have just had Elizabeth Weir play a Canadian. Or they should have killed her in the first episode, since the actress was generally annoying!)
Stargate SG1 (even though that talentless hack who attempted to play Daniel should have sent his paychecks to James Spader, since all he ever did was attempt to mimic the inflections of Spader, who was gorgeous and charismatic as Daniel in the movie). I also hated Samantha Carter. I'm sorry, the actress wasn't talented enough to convince me that her character was anything other than an airhead bimbo, even though the other characters kept getting dialogue telling the viewers what an incredible scientific genius she was! :rofl: Despite all its faults, it was generally an entertaining show. I was glad when Ben Browder joined the cast.
Stargate Universe I quite enjoy, in spite of some characters that I truly despise. A shame it has been cancelled.
V (2009) with Morena Baccarin!
I used to read quite a lot of sci-fi/fantasy in my youth (from age 8 to 14 mostly)--nearly everything by Robert Heinlein, Andre Norton, Piers Anthony, Frank Herbert, and others lost to the sands of time/my faulty memory banks!
I have finally started reading Isaac Asimov's Foundation (bought it to read on my Kindle 3G) after many years of being derided for skipping that classic. :blushing:
