The rough guide to sci-fi movies

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Авторы: John Scalzi

Издательство: Peter Buckley

Год: 2006

Кол-во страниц: 364

Формат: pdf

Размер: 19 Мб

Язык: english

Like most people of a certain age, I became enraptured with science fiction film one summer day in 1977 when, as an eight year old boy, I flopped myself down at the local movie theatre, saw the words "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away..." fade onto the screen, and felt the blast of John Williams' Wagnerian score to Star Wars blow me back into my seat. Then I saw the space ship - which I would soon learn was a Corellian blockade runner - followed by another space ship. A much larger space ship. A space ship which just wouldn't stop scrolling across the screen. An Imperial cruiser. Just imagine how I felt about the Death Star.

Dazzled, I was, at Star Wars, and the new sort of movie it introduced my eight-year-old self to: The Science Fiction Film. Little did I know that what seemed so new, fresh and amazing to me was actually a summation of decades of previous work in the genre. Star Wars was built like a Flash Gordon movie serial from the 1930s, which in its time borrowed from the science fiction films of its own era (literally, in the case of some of its sets, borrowed liberally from more expensive films). It stole design notes from Fritz Lang's 1927 classic Metropolis, whose look and feel would be mined by other science fiction films as well: Blade Runner, Dark City and The Matrix, each of which would be cannibalized by other science fiction films. Its sound and visual design was influenced by director George Lucas's own earlier THX- 1138, a dystopian tale whose 1971 release coincided with a run of dystopic science fiction films like A Clockwork Orange and The Omega Man.