Robert Emmett Murphy, Jr.

  100 best Science Fiction films Popular Mechanics list #90. War of the Worlds (1953)   “These recordings I’m making are for future history … If any.” -- An unnamed Radio Journalist, played by Paul Frees   H.G. Wells’ novel “War of the Worlds” (1898) was one of the most important of early SF novels. Reading it more than 120 years later, it still comes across remarkably modern, while most of Wells’ fellow journeymen in the new, still-un-named, Genre of SF are merely quaint. It was structured as a memoir by a Survivor of Disaster, with some additional materials provided by other sources to flesh out aspects of the cataclysm that the un-named Narrator couldn’t personally see, so it draws from the then-popular form of the Epistolary novel mixed with some Pseudo-Journalism. It still has a readership, and has had been adapted, parodied, plagiarized, and endured numerous Sequels-by-Other-Hands in every conceivable media. Direct adaptations and alleged sequels have ...

  100 best Science Fiction films Popular Mechanics list #91. They Live (1988)     Before I get into the nitty-gritty, let me summarize this film in four words that are totally to the point, but completely ambiguous without context, "They live, we sleep." Got it? Good. Now let’s get started… Filmmakers know they are communicators in the most mundane sense, but want to be seen as artists somewhat above that standard; this creates a conflict within the art because all narrative media is communicating some type of politics, even when it doesn’t want to, because the audience will tie that narrative to the real-world, and everything real has some kind of political implications/consequences. Both fiction and politics, both when honest or prevaricating, shares the struggle to mirror the real world, and so the mirror of fiction can no more escape the curse of its consequentialism any more than politics can, but unlike politics, fiction mostly doesn’t want it. When ...

  100 best Science Fiction films Popular Mechanics list #94. The Black Hole (1979)   "There is an inexorable force in the cosmos where time and space converge. A place beyond man's vision ... but not his reach." -- from the trailer   Introduction:   This is among the worst films ever made that deservers high recommendation. Unlike “Plan 9 from Outer Space” (1959) it’s not “so bad it’s good,” because it is often very, very, good, except when it’s bad which is an awful lot of the time. It was one of those projects that started to do something before the studio, in this case Disney, was fully sure what that “something” was supposed to be, and as public taste kept changing while it lingered in Development Hell, the studio kept changing its mind about what the vital “something” was and thereby kept going farther-and-farther astray. The project was kept alive by the studio’s investment in its concept art, so even though they didn’t know what they were doin...