While now almost completely forgotten about, despite some idle talk about Joseph Kosinski (“ Tron: Legacy“) hadling a big budget remake, “ The Black Hole” is a true sci-fi oddity, for a number of reasons. And Crichton’s background in medicine shows that, aside from the alien origins of the organism, the whole thing is terrifyingly plausible, at least until it shifts into a disaster movie in its closing stages. While Wise’s film doesn’t include much in the way of spectacle (beyond some impressive production design from Boris Leven, who got an Oscar nomination for his troubles), it’s no less gripping for it, although it’s dry in spots. The survivors are brought to a secret underground facility where a team of scientists prepared for this kind of eventuality attempt to find out what happened, and how to stop it. The movie, efficiently directed by chameleonic veteran journeyman Robert Wise (“ The Haunting,” “ The Sound of Music“) gets underway when a government satellite carrying a microscopic alien organism crashes in a New Mexico town, gruesomely killing all but two of its inhabitants, an old man and a baby. And while there’s an alien threat at work in the film, it’s literally a tiny one, though no less dangerous for its size. Very much the model of the restrained sci-fi film - there’s very little eye candy on display, including the star-free cast who play the rare movie scientists who look like scientists - “ The Andromeda Strain” marks the first movie adaptation of a novel by doctor-turned-novelist-and-filmmaker Michael Crichton, the author who’d later bring us the worlds of “ Jurassic Park,” “ Congo,” “ Sphere” and “ Timeline” among others (and who’ll figure several times elsewhere on this list). Check out our list below, and let us know your own favorites in the comments section below.Ĭharlie Hunnam Opens Up About Being a Finalist to Play Anakin Skywalker in the ‘Star Wars’ Prequels And so we thought this felt like a good opportunity to run down 20 of our favorite - or in some cases, least favorite - odd ’70s sci-fi movies. One such example, Michael Crichton‘s curious western/sci-fi hybrid “ Westworld ,” hits Blu-ray for the first time this week, and celebrates its 40th anniversary this year. The result is one of the most distinctive and self-contained periods of sci-fi movies in the history of cinema, one where the films proved weirder, more distinctive and trippier than at almost any other time. Storytellers, perhaps inspired by the fizzling out of the hippie counter-culture, the still-dragging-on war in Vietnam and post-Watergate disillusionment, began to look at the future in a somewhat darker, more idiosyncratic way than had been the case before, shifting focus to recurring themes of environmental disaster, utopias gone sour, and the end of all things. Somewhere between 1968’s “ 2001: A Space Odyssey” and 1977’s “ Star Wars,” something happened in the culture.
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