RottenTomatoes' annual ranking of SciFi

In honor of Christopher Nolan's new movie Inception, Rotten Tomatoes decided to do their (roughly) annual run-down on top ranked Sci-Fi movies. The list they came up with looked like this:

Rank	Name	Year	T-Meter	Fresh	Rotten	Total	Precise
1	The Terminator	1984	100	41	0	41	100.00%
2	Blade Runner	1982	94	120	8	128	93.75%
3	Ghost in the Shell	1996	93	27	2	29	93.10%
4	Minority Report	2002	91	198	19	217	91.24%
5	12 Monkeys	1995	87	39	6	45	86.67%
6	The Matrix	1999	86	103	17	120	85.83%
7	Alphaville	1965	82	18	4	22	81.82%
8	The City of the Lost Children	1995	82	27	6	33	81.82%
9	Gattaca	1997	81	44	10	54	81.48%
10	Dark City	1998	76	57	18	75	76.00%

I have to say that this is a damn interesting list. This is one of the better looking lists I've seen. A lot of my all-time favorite movies are represented here. I would quibble with the order. Terminator is a huge crowd pleaser, but it is greatly over-rated. It should be lower on this list. I would put it much closer to 10 than to 1.

This is not say Terminator is a bad movie. I say that it is a Top-10 movie, so don't flame me fan-girls. However, I do want to go on the record declaring that Terminator got the top spot for just 3 reasons:

1. It is a 1984 movie, and that means it was reviewed long before RottenTomatoes.com was ever founded.
2. A small sample of critics chose to post-up.
3. Terminator got all the chick-critics because, at its core, The Terminator is a romance about a guy who fell in love with a girl's photograph and was willing to sacrifice all to father the hero of the future with her.

Ghost in the Shell is over-rated for similar reasons. It also features a small self-selected crew of back-posting critics who love the movie. At its core, Ghost in the Shell is also a reproductive drama in which the female heroine has to make the decision to risk all for the sake of reproduction. Chicks like that sort of story.

I have seen all these films, and generally love them. I am not so in-love with The Matrix. I feel that is a greatly overrated film. It owes much to Ghost in the Shell as it does to Dark City. There are two movies on this list I have not yet seen. I don't think I have seen Alphaville. I know I have not seen City of the Los Children.

I would love to see both of those movies. Perhaps this weekend.

How about Christopher Nolan's new movie. I am not sitting on pins and needles waiting for the clock to strike 5:00pm so I can get out of here and see Inception. Frankly, I am vaguely interested. Perhaps I will get to it, perhaps I will not.

Nolan's following is a point of upset for me. Personally, I think this guy is greatly over-rated. Batman Begins was solid, but The Dark Knight was considerably weaker. It carried a lot of excess baggage and needed a lot of trim. Memento was solid, but I didn't care for The Prestige at all. The Prestige just left me cold. It just didn't activate my mind & soul or make a memorable impression on.

The bottom line is clear: Nolan is the little girl with a curl. He's Jeckle and Hyde guy. When he is good, he is very good. When he misses, he's bad, but everybody pretends it is great. This reminds me of the Watchowski brothers (brother & sister?). Larry is now Lana. V was a straight-up piece of shit, but it got accolades due to the fact that it was interpreted as an anti-Bush screed. Nolan is a lot better than those guys, but he does miss, and his following never admits it.

Terminator Salvation: It's not bad.

Terminator Salvation is one of the surprising flops of the summer of 2008. Warners spent something like $200m and rolled out one of their hottest contract stars (Christian Bale) to reactivate this very profitable franchise. Unexpectedly, TS came in #2 on opening week, beaten by "Night at the Museum #2", a movie grandparents were expected to view with their grandchildren.

I personally heard all manner of consternation about this film. Big fans of the franchise bemoaned this episode as a catastrophic, epic disaster; a piss-poor addition to the saga; and a lousy way to sink the franchise. Personally, I don't know what they fuck they are talking about. I want to know what movie they saw when they wandered into the theater on that early summer night.

What it is:

1. This is a 100% pure unadulterated war story.
2. This is not a fucking romance.
3. TS takes place in the middle of the great war with Skynet
4. It does not end the great war with Skynet
5. This movie tells a very small and short story within that saga.
6. This movie unfolds over the course of 5 short days
7. It is the story of how John Connor met and saved his teenage father, Kyle Reece
8. John Connor is not the main character of the story
9. Kyle Reece is not the main character of this movie
10. Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington) is the main character of this movie
11. It is the story of how Wright is able to make atonement for past dreadful sins by saving and securing the future of humanity. He is very self-sacrificing in the process.
12. The visual effects are fantastic.
13. The seminal achievement of this movie is a virtual 3d version of Arnold Schwarzenegger. No that is not Arnold. Yes, that was nothing but 3d pixels rendered by a render engine. Totally stunning. Absolutely amazing, really.
14. It's basically good. There are some flaws and breaks in continuity, but it is not that bad.

My really big bitch involves the end sequence. I don't believe Connor could defibrillated Wright as he did. I do not believe Wright would be immediately ready for battle after being defibrillated. I don't think Connor could survive such a kill-shot through the chest. He would have died within minutes. Nobody bothered to check if Wright and Conner were even of compatible antigen types for a transplant. I find this all terribly difficult. The one terribly nasty fly in the story ointment.

So this movie is not perfect, but it is pretty good. Maybe even damn good. The first Terminator was better. The second Terminator was better. Certainly, this is better than T3 and better than the Series.

We should close with a word about expectations. I personally have liked movies I expected nothing at all from. John Tucker Must Die was such a film. 13 Going on 30 was another. I expected those movies to epic disasters. They were not. They were B flicks that were okay. I was surprised by that, and I ultimately liked them. I personally have hated movies that I had high hopes for which turned out poorly. Batman 1989, The Prestige 2006, V For Vendetta and King Kong 2005 were all such movies. Those were all massively-overblown hypetacular bullshit events. Long and boring and stupid for the most part.

Unfortunately, many Terminator fans were expecting something like the Second Coming of Jesus Christ from this movie. Naturally, this movie is not as world shaking as the Second Coming, ergo they were disappointed. Can't help that. Nobody could have fulfilled these expectations. This is a great warning to the Hollywood studios: You really need to be careful with the tactic of hyper-hype. You can create a level of expectations too high to ever be fulfilled. You can cover with an MTV fashion fad, making people afraid to express disappointment, however, disappointment will-out eventually.

Surprisingly, I don't think Warner engaged in that much Hyper-Hype in this case. It is almost a case where the crowd self-hyped to an insane level of frenzy. This is all very unfortunate. This will be a sleeper film that eventually will do well with residual income.