Favorite Old Sci-Fi Films

But why?

It’s another avoidance mechanism, I guess!

Why these particular films?

Best as I recall, I was unemployed and bored, but had a little money in my pocket, so I visited a video store. (That would put it somewhere in the early 2000s.)

A video caught my eye, “First Spaceship to Venus.” It had a cool-looking rocket on the cover. Venus, really? Oh wow. It’s from the old Eastern Block countries, and based on a story by an author I’d heard of, but never read: Stanisław Lem. I hadn’t seen any sci-fi films about Venus…

Thing is, I saw a few sci-fi films on TV as a little kid, and loved them. Later, I was deeply affected by sci-fi TV shows, films, and books. So I began to scour the video stores, both for old science fiction films I’d seen, and ones I hadn’t.

The first idea was to revisit sci-fi movies I saw as a kid, to see if they still interest me or scare me as they did then. I can report that any of these gives me a thrill, of one kind or another. The scariest things are still pretty scary.

That is the list in the present page. Since making this list, I have incorporated its reviews into more comprehensive pages about films of each decade, so this page contains only links to those reviews.

Now, I find myself interested in the social and technological aspects of the movie. I’ve tried to identify all vehicles, weapons, and computers, those of both aliens and humans. On the social side, I have scrutinized each for roles that women and non-white actors play, and the nature of social behavior.

There are plenty of other web pages making fun of the script and plot, and how silly the special effects are. So there isn't much point in me simply indulging in film criticism. My focus will be on how these films depict scientific and social ideas, how they relate those to the ideas of the times, and how they affected later ideas both in film and in society generally.

Of course, the quality of the filmmaking is going to affect its dissemination of ideas, so it does make sense to point out what is better and worse done.

These movies don’t typically have a lot to say, but what they say to me, I summarize as “parables”.