Sleep Dealer
2009
Directed by Alex Rivera
Budget: $2,000,000
The CHUD Review
Money is no obstacle to someone with a real vision. Anyone else would have looked at their 2 million dollar budget and thought that a cyberpunk movie that tackles modern immigration issues and that features a high speed battle drone chase would be beyond their capabilities. Not Alex Rivera.
Sleep Dealer is set in near future Mexico. People no longer physically cross the border; instead they jack into the internet and work illegally from a distance. It’s outsourcing taken to the next level. But since these are the lowest class people conditions are poor and sometimes the technology backfires, blinding the workers… or worse. Meanwhile in the United States a Latino pilot flies battle drones remotely. His mission is to battle terrorists – a code name for desperate people trying to find clean water. He finds himself entangled in the life of one of those workers, and it changes everything about his own life.
Rivera’s film is fascinating because it reaches so high and does so successfully. His FX aren’t state of the art, but they work, and they are used to support a real story with real characters. What I especially love about Sleep Dealer is the feeling that this world is one that’s very near to ours, always the sign of a truly visionary scifi director.
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District 9
2009
Directed by Neill Blomkamp
Budget: $30,000,000
The CHUD Review is Coming Soon!
Is it hyperbole to call District 9 one of the great achievements of the year? Hold your judgment until you’ve seen this incredible movie, one that manages to out thrill every big budget science fiction film of the last couple of years while also maintaining lots of smarts and lots of wit.
I have a review coming so I don’t want to blow my wad on this little piece, but I have to say that watching the film at Comic Con this year was an experience I’ll likely never forget. Last year’s Comic Con saw some viral marketing for the movie, which I dismissed as it looked like it was for a video game. In the 12 months since then the anticipation grew as I understood what the film actually was, but expectations remained low. I especially thought District 9 looked essentially like a simple riff on Alien Nation.
While there are certainly similarities between the films, District 9 is a completely original work that does what the best science fiction does: makes us look at the world around us with new eyes, all while engaging our imaginations in exciting ways. The film’s alien species, the Prawns, are perfectly realized, and director Neill Blomkamp has created a film that slowly unwraps itself over two hours, finally ending up in a finale that’s exciting and rousing and better than any other scifi action I have seen on screen in 2009.
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Primer
2004
Directed by Shane Carruth
Budget: $7,000 (no, I’m not missing any zeroes)
The CHUD Review
I love this movie. The first – and to date only – film from Shane Carruth, Primer is the blueprint for how to make an indie science fiction film. You don’t need a huge budget. You don’t need a cast of professional actors. You just need a good idea, a great script and lots of chutzpah.
Like Timecrimes, Primer is a time travel movie that’s more concerned with how time travel affects the traveler then with how cool it would be to meet dinosaurs. The film uses time travel as a metaphor for technological advancement; it’s about two engineers whose garage project ends up having completely world changing implications and the way each of them approaches it.
Primer is dense with ideas and has a richly layered story that simply cannot be fully understood on a first viewing. That isn’t to say that it can’t be enjoyed on a first viewing but rather that engaging in some time travel of your own – going back to the very start of the film and reliving it again – reveals tiny hints and elements that were utterly hidden the first time through.
Carruth has been off doing whatever it is that he’s doing these days. For a while he had a script he was working on, but I don’t know what – if anything – is next for the writer/director (who also stars in the film). If this is the only movie he ever makes his track record will certainly be one of perfection.
The Host
2006
Directed by Bong Joon-Ho
Budget: $11,000,000
The CHUD Review
Today saw the news that another reboot of Godzilla is coming. But why bother, when Bong Joon-Ho perfectly recaptured the zeitgeist that made that original black and white film work so powerfully?
The monster in The Host may be much, much smaller than Gojira, but like that classic beast this monster is the product of the American military screwing around; this time it was washing toxic chemicals down a drain as opposed to atomic testing, but the results were no less awesome.
Wrapped around this tale of a huge monster attacking Seoul is a delirious family story, a political message and more than a little satire. Bong Joon-Ho pokes fun at the way the media reacts to crises, the way people react in front of cameras, the way societies fall for misinformation. Then he creates great characters who are funny and sad and has them get chased around by a huge, awesome looking mutation that rises from the river. An almost perfect monster movie.
The Fountain
2006
Directed by Darren Aronofsky
Budget: $35,000,000
The CHUD Review
Only one third of this film is really a science fiction movie, but that third is the kind of trippy, heady science fiction nobody makes anymore. And if you look at the box office for this wonderful, moving, beautiful film, you might understand why.
Director Darren Aronofsky is no stranger to science fiction; his Pi is low budget scifi that rivals Primer, but is way weirder and headier. The Fountain is his meditation on mortality and love, a deeply personal and earnest examination of the dichotomies of joy and pain. What I really love about The Fountain is the way it eschews Western concepts of grief and embraces a more Eastern view of death as a natural part of the workings of the universe.
To be fair the science fiction segment, which has Hugh Jackman hurtling through the cosmos in a clear bubble with a tree at its center, is pretty vague about the science in its fiction, but I think all the answers are there for the unraveling. Aronofsky uses the bubble in space segment to create gorgeous viewscapes that are reminiscent of 2001, ending in a scene of surrender that is glorious and touching.
I blame Star Wars for a lot of things (including my severe inability to get laid in high school), but perhaps one of the most insidious impacts of that film was changing the face of science fiction for decades to come. Rarely again would scifi films be about ideas or big concepts; most of them would be about people shooting lasers that go ‘pew pew’ at each other. Explosions, guns, robots, chases, big budgets: for the next twenty or thirty years, that was the main face of science fiction at the movies.
To be fair that hasn’t really changed in the 21st century. What has changed, though, is that there’s a new vitality to smarter science fiction, some of it costing next to nothing. Advances in computer FX make it possible for indie filmmakers to realize visions that would have been impossible for them a decade ago. That’s what makes me psyched for new technology – it isn’t how a server farm can make a photoreal character for a 300 million dollar shoot em up but how a director in Mexico with no budget can suddenly create a vision of the future that’s credible, and do it on his home computer.
The following ten films are great science fiction movies of the 21st century. There were three criteria that had to be met for these films to be listed: they had to be smart and thoughtful, and they had to cost less than a hundred million dollars. And they had to be damned good. A couple of the films here get pretty close to that hundred million dollar blockbuster number, but that’s made up for by the films that cost a pittance.
Be warned: this is in no particular order!
Children of Men
2006
Directed by Alfonso Cuaron
Budget: $76,000,000
The CHUD Review
Watching Cuaron’s Children of Men was one of the most exhilarating theatrical experiences of my life. This dense, dystopian vision of a future where mankind has lost the ability to have children is completely immersive and, in 2006, felt very immediate. Cuaron used imagery from the War on Terror in ways that didn’t feel expoitative but commentative; as in all the best science fiction the film wasn’t just telling a story set in another time or place but commenting on the world in which we live.
But what was really exhilarating about Children of Men was Cuaron’s style. Creating incredibly long takes, Cuaron managed to insert us into the action scenes. In an age when hyperactive editing has ruined more than one action film’s coherence, Cuaron’s steady slowhanded work still feels fresh years later.
I walked out of Children of Men moved as a film lover and as a thinking person. The movie gave me so much to chew over, so many moments of truth and beauty and horror, all wrapped up in a thrilling, inventive package. In many ways Children of Men remains a cinematic highlight of the 21st century.
Save the Green Planet!
2005
Directed by Jang Jun-Hwan
Budget: $3,000,000
The CHUD Review
What a bugfuck insane movie this is. South Korea seems to have been creating some of the craziest movies of the decade, and Save the Green Planet! may be one of the weirdest and the most underrated. A scifi gore comedy, the film will give you whiplash with its sudden tonal changes and its bizarre plot turns.
In many ways, Save the Green Planet! doesn’t belong on this list… or at least you might think that until you come to the totally nuts science fiction ending. You can spend half the film thinking that the movie’s psychotic hero, who believes aliens are infiltrating the Earth, is just another crazy person, especially when he kidnaps and tortures a high ranking executive. And then when it turns out that perhaps his beliefs come from delusions caused by a lifetime of turmoil at the hands of corporate types, the science fiction element almost disappears.
Until the aliens show up and reveal the secret history of humanity. You have to see it yourself to believe it. But amidst all the craziness and the wackiness, Save the Green Planet! ends up saying some sad things about the ways our lives are manhandled by the materialistic industrial world in which we live. And then it shows you a guy getting killed by a swarm of bees.
Timecrimes
2007
Directed by Nacho Vigalando
Budget: $2,600,000
The CHUD Review
When you first start watching Timecrimes the film’s greatness isn’t apparent. It looks sort of like a sweet natured low budget Spanish film, but the movie’s a slow burn. As it goes on it becomes twistier and stranger, looping around again and again on itself, finally pulling back to reveal a tightly coiled story that will leave you blown away.
Like Primer (elsewhere on this list), Timecrimes realizes you don’t need to spend a lot of money to make a really interesting time travel movie. The fascinating elements of time travel aren’t visiting the distant past or the farflung future, they’re the way messing with the timeline impacts your own life.
When a regular schlub gets drawn out of his own back yard by a beautiful girl taking off her clothes he finds himself stumbling into a time machine and discovering just what a cruel bitch causality really is. What I love about Timecrimes is the way director Nacho Vigalando takes his film from something comedic and slowly morphs it into something really creepy and scary. There’s a character in the film wearing a pink gauze mask and wielding scissors; he’s as completely iconic as a scary figure as any of the famous slashers. And the script keeps one step ahead of the audience at all times, playing with our expectations in order to thwart them.
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Idiocracy
2006
Directed by Mike Judge
Budget: $3,000,000
The CHUD Review
Shit upon by Fox, unfinished, unloved by the masses, Idiocracy is one of the funniest movies I have seen in years. And one of the scariest.
I called the movie as a cult classic years ago, and I think I was pretty right – you can say ‘It’s what plants crave!’ and a very cool segment of the population will totally get your reference. But that was the positive forecast about Idiocracy. There was a negative forecast as well, and that’s also coming true: we’re starting to look at this movie as a documentary.
When a man of normal intelligence wakes up a thousand years in the future he finds that the decline of humanity has made him the smartest person alive. Mike Judge extrapolates from our current world to create one that is filled with idiots who can’t speak proper English and who spend their days watching people get kicked in the balls on television, a world where Carl’s Jr’s catchphrase is ‘Fuck you, I’m eating!’ and where the most basic technology has broken down as everyone is too stupid to use it. Yes, he foresaw a world where Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen would be a huge hit.
Idiocracy is an angry movie, and if you’re still one of the few people left with a brain in their heads, it’ll make you angry as well. When you’re not laughing.
Moon
2009
Directed by Duncan Jones
Budget: $5,000,000
The CHUD Review
Acting! Duncan Jones’ debut film all boils down to the performance of Sam Rockwell as Sam, a guy who is finishing up a lonely three year contract at a lunar mining base and who suspects things may not be right. Especially after he finds himself in a wrecked lunar vehicle, bleeding and barely alive. Rockwell spends almost the entire film on screen alone, playing off a robot voiced by Kevin Spacey or sometimes off only himself. Literally.
Jones’ film is already a classic; smart, intriguing, mysterious and beautiful, it’s a personal story with big implications, and that’s my favorite kind of science fiction tale. Jones has created a world that feels real and populated it with a man who feels real; we have the opportunity to feel the crushing loneliness that Sam must live with and we feel our heads spinning as he slowly begins making discoveries about just what is going on at that lunar mining base. Along the way Jones upends expectations and defies conventions. And he does it all on a tiny budget.
Moon is playing right now. If you haven’t seen it yet, I don’t know what you’re waiting for.
2 comments
So many thanks for this list, I found many wonderful movies thanks to it. Great work, keep it up
I'd agree on most of the movies. But "The Host" is just a great bore with monster FX that are just acceptable, terrible actors, ridiculous dialogues and to a large extent no redeeming qualities whatsoever.
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