It took him seven feature films, but Scanners was the first movie from the visionary Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg to actually make some kind of mark (if a relatively small one) at the box office and set the stage for the director’s future triumphs. Greeted with mixed reviews and tepid box office, Outland is no classic but deserves another look as one of its star’s more striking, lesser-known efforts.
Connery is rock-solid in the role of Marshal William O’Niel, foreshadowing the tough cop he would play a few years later in The Untouchables. Connery plays a marshal sent to maintain law and order at the colony, only to learn that it’s a den of corruption in which he can trust no one and where he may not survive for long.ĭirected and written by Peter Hyams (who shows up again a couple of slots lower on this list), Outland doesn’t hide its Western roots and makes the most out of its frontier setting, where the living and working conditions are so tough that drastic measures are taken to keep the mining operation afloat. Still in his post-Bond wilderness years, Sean Connery manages to redeem his participation in ‘70s sci-fi misfire Zardoz with this loose remake of High Noon, set on a mining colony on Jupiter’s moon Io. It’s a slow-burn movie, very much of its time and its European aesthetic, but still incredibly prescient about the ever-present cameras that infiltrate every aspect of our lives. Made more poignant by Schneider’s own death at 43 just two years later, Death Watch is unnervingly on-target about the way that reality TV has become part of the fabric of our lives decades after the film was released. Although the woman initially accepted the network’s offer to make a reality show about her death, she has reneged on the deal and fled-only for Keitel’s character to find her and covertly keep the show going. Compton’s novel The Unsleeping Eye, Death Watch stars Harvey Keitel as a man who has a camera and transmitter implanted behind his eyes so that he can secretly film (for the TV network he works for) the last months of a woman (Romy Schneider) who is dying from an incurable disease. Altered States is exhausting, exhilarating, and intensely cerebral, all at the same time.įrom French director Bertrand Tavernier, the little seen (at least in North America) Death Watch seems almost like a throwback to the more socially astute sci-fi cinema of the ‘70s.
But the film really belongs to the always outrageous Russell, who unleashes a series of jaw-dropping sequences that find Hurt devolving into everything from a primitive ape-man to a blob of primordial goo. Hurt, Blair Brown as his wife, Bob Balaban, and the rest of the cast are spellbinding, particularly in the rapid-fire way they deliver Chayefsky’s dialogue and almost non-stop outpouring of mind-bending ideas. We’re not sure what Chayefsky was after, but Russell’s film is gloriously, deliriously weird, as a professor researching altered states of consciousness (William Hurt in a magnetic film debut) finds himself journeying first mentally and then physically backwards to the very beginnings of life itself. This genuinely trippy movie was directed by Ken Russell, the British provocateur known for films like The Devils, Tommy, and Lair of the White Worm, and it is based on a novel by Paddy Chayefsky ( Network), who also wrote the screenplay but clashed with Russell over the film. Some of these were heralded at the time, others less so, but they’re mostly all great (or at least entertaining) examples of filmed science fiction continuing to find new and different ways to move forward. That doesn’t mean the decade didn’t have its share of underrated favorites, however. Intriguingly, the more risky ones needed years to find their audience and critical acclaim.Īt the same time, sci-fi began to rely less on literary adaptations of the previous decade (like Logan’s Run, for example) and more on crossing its streams with other genres, like horror, the Western, and the action thriller-making somewhat of a turn away from the idea-driven films that had come before. The rise of the erotic thriller, the action superstar, and cookie-cutter safe high-concept star vehicles, perhaps? As for sci-fi, the decade was marked by both undisputed blockbusters, including the Star Wars and Star Trek sequels, Aliens, and E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, as well as some inarguable classics like The Thing, Tron, and Blade Runner. While the 1970s was known as a wild, bold, experimental time in modern cinema-which extended to all genres, including science fiction-the 1980s were best known for… well, we don’t know what, exactly.
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