It’s a slightly click-baity title, but as we’re still generating more content for our magazines, this one included, why not?
My Sci-fi unpopular opinion is that 2001: A Space Odyssey is nothing but pretentious, LSD fueled nonsense. I’ve tried watching it multiple times and each time I have absolutely no patience for the pointless little scenes which contain little to no depth or meaningful plot, all coalescing towards that 15 minute “journey” through space and series of hallucinations or whatever that are supposed to be deep, shake you to your foundations, and make you re-think the whole human condition.
But it doesn’t. Because it’s just pretentious, LSD fueled nonsense. Planet of the Apes was released in the same year and is, on every level, a better Sci-fi movie. It offers mystery, a consistent and engaging plot, relatable characters you actually care about, and asks a lot more questions about the world and our place in it.
John Carter is such a fun romp, I think it really captured the spirit of old scifi, where things were a little silly compared to today bc they were really just flying by the seat of their pants imagining space travel and other planets. It was a real melding of scifi/fantasy. Today, we’ve seen pictures of the surfaces of those planets, and now current scifi is more like reading a thesis (nothing wrong with that), where the author really delves into the science, so the old stuff does seem corny. But it’s great. It’s like Jupiter ascending but good