With great anticipation I clicked on the link from Digg, wondering what interestingly geeky movies I might have missed.
Delightfully, however, it turns out I’ve seen all of them, and own most of them.
The comments hold a bunch of others, and I would have to say that:
1) The Star Wars and LOTR sagas both need to be in the list.
2) I would have put Blade Runner in place of Darkman
3) Sneakers was lame.
4) I liked Primer, but it is pretty confusing, and not for everyone.
5) same for Donnie Darko
6) 2001 probably should be in the list
7) Independence Day isn’t really imaginative enough to deserve to be on the list.
Tron - meh.
9) Jurassic Park is a must!
10) Dark Star is quite good, but definitely not for everyone.
11) Silent Runnings - the same
12) Alien and Terminator both belong. Predator, not so much
13) Big Trouble in Little China & Buckaroo Banzai are two of my all-time favorite geek movies.
14) The original Planet of the Apes series is great campy fun. The new one sucked.
Lists are very subjective. Even worse, the word geek is now a very vague stereotype. Lots of different geeks these days.
If I were to argue with the list the one film not on either the original list nor yours is Equilibrium. The movie combines the philosophy of Matrix with the backdrop of Fahrenheit 451.
Comment by grendel — February 7, 2007 @ 10:50 pm
Oh…and Logan’s Run or Forbidden Planet are more common place choices as well.
Comment by grendel — February 7, 2007 @ 10:52 pm
Yeah, Equilibrium is very good. I also forgot V for Vendetta
Comment by jb — February 8, 2007 @ 3:42 pm
Jurassic Park??? Sorry, gotta hork on that one. Any movie which purports itself to be science fiction and then pretends that DNA is all you need to make a living creature (conception? incubation?) suddenly spring to life after millions of years, to the purpose of making an empty plot which consists of (a) dinosaurs attack people (b) a few people survive (c) repeat for endless sequels and blitzkrieg marketing, deserves scorn even from the non-geeks.
But what do you expect from Michael Crichton?
Comment by Penguin Pete — February 23, 2007 @ 7:40 pm
Hmph.
While certainly the sequel-milking is appalling, the original concept was brilliant.
It certainly assumes that we have cloning technology and incubuation technology, but that doesn’t strike me as an unreasonable assumption to make.
Besides, at least as far as the book is concerned, the message is much more along the lines of: “You can’t manage Chaotic systems”
Lastly, any movie that includes a young girl who says “This is a Unix system, I can do this!” certainly falls well within the “must watch” category for me
Comment by jb — February 23, 2007 @ 8:01 pm