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Jibbs
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Nova Award Archives Oct 2, 2014 22:06:43 GMT -5

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Post by Jibbs on Oct 2, 2014 22:06:43 GMT -5

1950s Final Results

I have put my favorite choices in the decade for each category in bold.

H.R Giger Award

1951: The Day the Earth Stood Still – “Gort”
1952: Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla – “Brooklyn Gorilla”
1953: The War of the Worlds – “Martian”
1954: Godzilla – “Gojira”
1955: This Island Earth – “Mutant”
1956: Forbidden Planet – “Id monster”
1957: 20 Million Miles to Earth – “Ymir”
1958: The Blob – “The Blob”
1959: Dimetrodon – “Journey to the Center of the Earth”

Best TV Series Award

1959: The Twilight Zone – Season 1.0

Grand Prize

1950: Destination Moon
1951: The Day the Earth Stood Still
1952: Monkey Business
1953: The War of the Worlds
1954: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
1955: Tarantula
1956: Forbidden Planet
1957: The Incredible Shrinking Man
1958: The Fly
1959: On the Beach

1960s Final Results

H.R Giger Award

1960: The Time Machine – “Morlocks”
1961: Mothra – “Mothra”
1962: King Kong vs. Godzilla – “Godzilla”
1963: The Day of the Triffids – “Triffids”
1964: Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster – “Ghidorah”
1965: Daikaijû Gamera – “Gamera”
1966: Godzilla vs. the Sea Monster – “Sea Monster”
1967: King Kong Escapes – “MechaKong”
1968: 2001: A Space Odyssey – “HAL 9000”
1969: Gamera vs. Guiron – “Guiron”

Most Original Award

1960: The Time Machine
1961: The Day the Earth Caught Fire
1962: Panic in Year Zero!
1963: X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes
1964: The Last Man on Earth
1965: Alphaville
1966: Fantastic Voyage
1967: Five Million Years to Earth
1968: 2001: A Space Odyssey
1969: Marooned

Best TV Series Award

1960: Twilight Zone – Season 1.5/2.0
1961: Twilight Zone – Season 2.5/3.0
1962: Twilight Zone – Season 3.5
1963: The Outer Limits – Season 1.0
1964: The Outer Limits – Season 1.5/2.0
1965: Get Smart – Season 1.0
1966: Star Trek – Season 1.0
1967: Star Trek – Season 1.5/2.0
1968: Star Trek – Season 2.5/3.0
1969: Star Trek - Season 3.5

Grand Prize

1960: The Time Machine
1961: Mysterious Island
1962: Panic in Year Zero!
1963: X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes
1964: Robinson Crusoe on Mars
1965: The War Game
1966: Seconds
1967: You Only Live Twice
1968: 2001: A Space Odyssey
1969: Marooned

1970s Final Results

H.R Giger Award

1970: Beneath the Planet of the Apes – “Apes”
1971: THX 1138 – “Chrome Robot”
1972: Godzilla vs. Gigan – “Gigan”
1973: Godzilla vs. Megalon – “Megalon”
1974: Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla – “Mechagodzilla”
1975: Terror of Mechagodzilla – “Titanosaurus”
1976: Logan’s Run – “Box”
1977: Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope – “Dianoga”
1978: Attack of the Killer Tomatoes! – “Killer Tomates”
1979: Alien – “Xenomorph”

Stan Winston Award

1987: Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope
1988: Superman
1989: Star Trek: The Motion Picture

James Cameron Award

1987: Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope
1988: Superman
1989: Alien

Most Original Award

1970: Colossus: The Forbin Project
1971: A Clockwork Orange
1972: Slaughterhouse-Five
1973: Sleeper
1974: Zardoz
1975: A Boy and His Dog
1976: Logan’s Run
1977: Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope
1978: The Boys from Brazil
1979: Stalker

Best TV Series Award

1970: Doctor Who – Season 7
1971: Night Gallery – Season 1.5/2.0
1972: Night Gallery – Season 2.5/3.0
1973: Doctor Who – Season 10
1974: Doctor Who – Season 11
1975: Space: 1999 – Season 1
1976: Space: 1999 – Season 2
1977: Doctor Who – Season 14.5/15.0
1978: Doctor Who – Season 15.5/16.0
1979: Battlestar Galactica – Season 1.5

Grand Prize

1970: Colossus: The Forbin Project
1971: A Clockwork Orange
1972: Silent Running
1973: Sleeper
1974: Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla
1975: The Stepford Wives
1976: Logan’s Run
1977: Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope
1978: Invasion of the Body Snatchers
1979: Star Trek: The Motion Picture

1980s Final Results

H.R Giger Award

1980: Saturn 3 - ”Hector”
1981: The Day of the Triffids (Mini-series) – “Triffids”
1982: The Thing – “The Thing”
1983: Star Wars: Episode VI – The Return of the Jedi – “Rancor”
1984: The Terminator – “T-800”
1985: Brazil – "Samurai Warrior”
1986: Aliens – “Alien queen”
1987: Predator – “Predator”
1988: They Live – “Alien”
1989: The Abyss – “NTI”

Stan Winston Award

1980: Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back
1981: Time Bandits
1982: TRON
1983: Star Wars: Episode VI – The Return of the Jedi
1984: The Last Starfighter
1985: Brazil
1986: Aliens
1987: Predator
1988: Akira
1989: Honey, I Shrunk the Kids

James Cameron Award

1980: Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back
1981: Time Bandits
1982: Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
1983: Star Wars: Episode VI – The Return of the Jedi
1984: The Terminator
1985: Back to the Future
1986: Aliens
1987: Predator
1988: Akira
1989: The Abyss

Ed Wood Award

1980: Saturn 3
1981: The Incredible Shrinking Woman
1982: Firefox
1983: The Pod People
1984: The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension
1985: Lifeforce
1986: The Manhattan Project
1987: Spaceballs
1988: Killer Klowns From Outer Space
1989: Star Trek V: The Final Frontier

Most Original Award

1980: The Lathe of Heaven (TV Movie)
1981: Time Bandits
1982: TRON
1983: WarGames
1984: The Last Starfighter
1985: Brazil
1986: Flight of the Navigator
1987: RoboCop
1988: Akira
1989: Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure

Best TV Series Award

1980: Doctor Who – Season 18.0
1981: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Mini-series)
1982: Doctor Who – Season 19
1983: Inspector Gadget – Season 1
1984: V - Season 1.0
1985: Twilight Zone - Season 1.0
1986: Twilight Zone - Season 1.5/2.0
1987: Star Trek: The Next Generation – Season 1.0
1988: Star Trek: The Next Generation – Season 1.5/2.0
1989: Star Trek: The Next Generation – Season 2.5/3.0

Grand Prize

1980: Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back
1981: Time Bandits
1982: Blade Runner
1983: Star Wars: Episode VI – The Return of the Jedi
1984: The Terminator
1985: Brazil
1986: Aliens
1987: Predator
1988: Akira
1989: The Abyss

1990s Final Results

And once again I have put my favorite choices in the decade for each category in bold.

H.R Giger Award

1990: Tremors – “Graboid”
1991: Terminator 2: Judgment Day – “T-1000”
1992: Alien³ – “Alien”
1993: Jurassic Park – “Tyrannosaurus Rex”
1994: Stargate – “Guards”
1995: Screamers – “Screamers – Type 1”
1996: Mars Attacks! – “Martians”
1997: Starship Troopers – “Bug”
1998: Godzilla – “Godzilla”
1999: The Matrix – “Sentinel”

Stan Winston Award

1990: Total Recall
1991: Terminator 2: Judgment Day
1992: The Lawnmower Man
1993: Jurassic Park
1994: Star Trek: Generations
1995: Johnny Mnemonic
1996: Independence Day
1997: The Fifth Element
1998: Godzilla
1999: The Matrix

James Cameron Award

1990: Total Recall
1991: Terminator 2: Judgment Day
1992: Alien³
1993: Jurassic Park
1994: Stargate
1995: Species
1996: Independence Day
1997: Men In Black
1998: X-Files: Fight the Future
1999: The Matrix

Ed Wood Award

1990: Predator 2
1991: Critters 3
1992: Critters 4
1993: RoboCop 3
1994: Timecop
1995: Screamers
1996: Leprechaun 4: In Space
1997: Alien: Resurrection
1998: The Avengers
1999: Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace

Most Original Award

1990: Total Recall
1991: Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country
1992: Forever Young
1993: Jurassic Park
1994: Stargate
1995: Ghost in the Shell
1996: Mars Attacks!
1997: Men in Black
1998: The Truman Show
1999: Galaxy Quest

Best TV Series Award

1990: Star Trek: The Next Generation - Season 4.5/5.0
1991: Star Trek: The Next Generation - Season 5.5/6.0
1992: Star Trek: The Next Generation - Season 6.5/7.0
1993: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine - Seasons 1 & 2.0
1994: X-Files – Season 1.5/2.0
1995: X-Files – Season 2.5/3.0
1996: X-Files – Season 3.5/4.0
1997: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – Season 5.5/6.0
1998: Stargate SG-1 – Season 1.5/2.0
1999: Stargate SG-1 – Season 2.5/3.0

Grand Prize

1990: Total Recall
1991: Terminator 2: Judgment Day
1992: Alien³
1993: Jurassic Park
1994: Stargate
1995: 12 Monkeys
1996: Mars Attacks!
1997: Contact
1998: The Truman Show
1999: The Thirteenth Floor

2000-2013 Final Results

H.R Giger Award
2000: Dune (mini-series) - "Shai-hulud"
2001: Donnie Darko - "Frank"
2002: Reign of Fire - "Dragon”
2003: Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines – “T-X”
2004: Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow – “Robots”
2005: The War of the Worlds – “Tripod”
2006: Pan’s Labyrinth – “The Pale Man”
2007: Transformers – “Megatron”
2008: Cloverfield – “Clover”
2009: Avatar – “Toruk”
2010: Skyline – “Alien”
2011: The Thing – “The Thing”
2012: Prometheus – “Engineer”
2013: Oblivion – “Drones”

Stan Winston Award

2000: Hollow Man
2001: Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within
2002: The Time Machine
2003: The Matrix Sequels
2004: Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
2005: The War of the Worlds
2006: The Fountain
2007: Sunshine
2008: WALL•E
2009: Avatar
2010: TRON: Legacy
2011: Rise of the Planet of the Apes
2012: Prometheus

2013: Oblivion

James Cameron Award

2000: Pitch Black
2001: Planet of the Apes
2002: Minority Report
2003: Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines
2004: I, Robot
2005: Serenity
2006: Children of Men
2007: Sunshine
2008: Iron Man
2009: Avatar
2010: Inception
2011: Source Code
2012: The Avengers
2013: Man of Steel

Ed Wood Award

2000: Battlefield Earth
2001: Impostor
2002: Equilibrium
2003: The Matrix Revolutions
2004: AVP: Aliens vs. Predator
2005: Doom
2006: Pulse
2007: Alien vs. Predator: Requiem
2008: The Day the Earth Stood Still
2009: Knowing
2010: Skyline
2011: In Time
2012: Battleship

2013: The Host

Most Original Award
2000: The 6th Day
2001: K-PAX
2002: Minority Report
2003: The Core
2004: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
2005: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
2006: Children of Men
2007: The Man From Earth
2008: WALL•E
2009: District 9
2010: Inception
2011: Source Code
2012: Cloud Atlas
2013: Man of Steel

Best TV Series Award

2000: Stargate SG1 (Season 3.5/4.0)
2001: Farscape (Season 2.5/3.0)
2002: Firefly – Season 1
2003: Futurama – Season 5.5
2004: Lost – Season 1.0
2005: Doctor Who – Season 1
2006: Heroes – Season 1.0
2007: Doctor Who – Season 3
2008: Fringe – Season 1.0
2009: Dollhouse – Season 1
2010: Doctor Who – Season 5
2011: Falling Skies – Season 1
2012: Fringe – Season 4.5/5.0

2013: Doctor Who – Season 7.5

Grand Prize

2000: Frequency
2001: Donnie Darko
2002: Minority Report
2003: Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines
2004: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
2005: Serenity
2006: Children of Men
2007: Sunshine
2008: WALL•E
2009: Moon
2010: Inception
2011: Rise of the Planet of the Apes
2012: Looper

2013: Oblivion

Last Edit: Oct 2, 2014 22:16:27 GMT -5 by Jibbs

Jibbs: Oof, got a bad feeling about this.
IanTheCool: Yeah, but you kinda stopped liking things a while ago, didn't you?

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Nova Award Archives Oct 3, 2014 1:11:03 GMT -5

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Post by PG Cooper on Oct 3, 2014 1:11:03 GMT -5

Woot.

CS! Record Holder: Quickest Review in the Film Club (2 hours 19 minutes). April 18th, 2013, 9:24 PM - January 28th, 2021, 9:43 PM

I make video essays about movies: www.youtube.com/channel/UC_7BpJ5krodZJGERJ9JPNjQ?

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Nova Award Archives Nov 19, 2014 17:08:06 GMT -5

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Post by Neverending on Nov 19, 2014 17:08:06 GMT -5

www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/2mqmcr/trailer_for_the_2000_scifi_film_supernova/

It looked like they hired the set designers from both Event Horizon and Lost in Space, or at least they hired their assistants.

With the cinematographer from Biodome.

Whoever edited that trailer should be tossed into space.

It's seriously bizarre how good James Spader looks in this movie.

"There are no strings on me!"

If you can't stand the heat, get out of the universe.

MGM board member Francis Ford Coppola supervised an edit costing $1 million. This cut tested poorly with audiences and did not secure a PG-13 rating so the film was re-edited again. The movie was eventually released on January 17, 2000, almost two years later than planned. The director of THE GODFATHER couldn't make this any better.

I remember thinking that the ship must have somehow been powered by sex.

This is the most 2000 thing I've ever seen.

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Jibbs Administrator Join Date: May 2000 Posts: 75,725 Likes: 1,657 Location: Last Online Feb 20, 2024 18:06:23 GMT -5	Nova Award Archives Nov 20, 2014 19:22:15 GMT -5 Neverending likes this Quote Select Post Deselect Post Link to Post Back to Top Post by Jibbs on Nov 20, 2014 19:22:15 GMT -5 That is the most 90s thing I've ever seen. It felt like one of those fan-made goofy trailers people make these days with serious movie footage. And the music...
	Jibbs: Oof, got a bad feeling about this. IanTheCool: Yeah, but you kinda stopped liking things a while ago, didn't you?

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Nova Award Archives Nov 20, 2014 19:41:31 GMT -5 via mobile

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Post by Neverending on Nov 20, 2014 19:41:31 GMT -5

Nov 20, 2014 19:22:15 GMT -5 Jibbs said:

That is the most 90s thing I've ever seen.

It felt like one of those fan-made goofy trailers people make these days with serious movie footage.

And the music...

Did you include Supernova in your Nova Awards?

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Jibbs Administrator Join Date: May 2000 Posts: 75,725 Likes: 1,657 Location: Last Online Feb 20, 2024 18:06:23 GMT -5	Nova Award Archives Nov 20, 2014 20:39:24 GMT -5 Quote Select Post Deselect Post Link to Post Back to Top Post by Jibbs on Nov 20, 2014 20:39:24 GMT -5 Nope.
	Jibbs: Oof, got a bad feeling about this. IanTheCool: Yeah, but you kinda stopped liking things a while ago, didn't you?

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Nova Award Archives Jun 11, 2015 17:36:45 GMT -5

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Post by Neverending on Jun 11, 2015 17:36:45 GMT -5

www.avclub.com/article/1995-marked-birth-internet-paranoia-films-219879

1995 marked the birth of internet-paranoia films

While internet usage is an unremarkable part of daily life today, in 1995, at-home internet was just starting to become widespread. According to the Pew Research Center, just 14 million American adults used the internet 20 years ago, compared with 87 million last year. As the world became more plugged in, films started to home in on how we connect to the digital world, and 1995 saw a bumper crop: Virtuosity, The Net, Hackers, GoldenEye, Johnny Mnemonic, and Strange Days. Oddly enough, all of them focused not on the excitement of the emerging technology but on dangers of the internet and virtual reality, creating a new subgenre of internet-and-VR-paranoia movies.

The mini-trend in 1995 of internet-related movies didn’t come about because studios were chasing after the lucrative technological-paranoia market. Instead, there was just something in the air at the time; internet culture gave filmmakers the heebie-jeebies.

As a result, in these films the internet and virtual reality are pushed to characters who live on the fringes of society: outsiders, criminals both petty and powerful, and people who work in between, dealing in black-market goods.

In The Net, Angela Bennett (Sandra Bullock) isn’t a hacker or a criminal, just someone who works in cyber security, but she’s still depicted as person living outside the mainstream. While her technical skills are praised by everyone she works with, she’s still positioned as someone to be pitied, not admired. Bennett is little different from any other sad Bullock character at the beginning of her romantic comedies: She’s home alone ordering pizza for one over the internet with no friends except for a few chat-room buddies. (Even worse, her one sorta-friend in real life is Dennis Miller.) There are a few pixelated avatars, but no other humans enter the frame of movie—they’re just disembodied voices over the phone—until Bennett agrees to take a look at a weird virus one of her cyber-security friends asks her to investigate, running her afoul of a hacker group that calls itself the Praetorians.

From there, the Praetorians show themselves to be destructive on two levels. Their true aim is to cause nationwide chaos—crashing the New York Stock Exchange, snarling air traffic at LAX, blacking out the lights in Atlanta—ultimately to benefit another cyber-security company. And while those massive events do seem threatening, the scarier danger the Praetorians pose—the power to affect an individual person—is more devastating. Bennett’s life is wiped out from beneath her. Her identity is changed, the deed to her house is transferred to a stranger, the medical records of her allies are tampered with, and she’s given an outstanding criminal record so she can’t go to the police for help. The Praetorians apparently hacked her Blockbuster account, too, because they know the movies she’d rented most often (though it doesn’t really take a hacker to guess that a lonely, single lady would be into Breakfast At Tiffany’s). Her story underlines the clear message: There is too much information on the internet, and it makes us all personally vulnerable. Now, that kind of identity theft is such a common narrative device that it’s now cliché, but, at the time, it was as novel as the idea of ordering pizza through the internet in a pre-Seamless world.

In GoldenEye, the villainous Alec Trevelyan (Sean Bean) seeks to exploit the same vulnerability, though for revenge for Mother Russia instead of profit. It’s almost uncanny how much his aims align with the Praetorians’ strategy. “It’s not just erasing bank records,” says Trevelyan to Bond. “It’s everything on every computer in greater London: tax records, the stock market, land registries, criminal records. The United Kingdom will reenter the Stone Age.” He plans on crippling England the same way the Praetorians go after Bennett, by tampering with personal information.

But instead of employing a shadowy collective of baddies, all Trevelyan needs is a single hacker on his side. Boris Grishenko (Alan Cumming) has enough know-how to hijack satellites and set off weapons from outer space. And while Cumming might seem like an odd casting choice for a computer genius, he totally embodies the emerging stereotype of the ADHD hacker. Instead of acting stoic like the military-trained Trevelyan, Grishenko is wiry and fidgety—so antsy, in fact, that his inability to sit still without clicking a retractable pen accidentally sets off one of Bond’s explosive devices. He dresses in loud shirts, is boorish to his female co-workers, and is obnoxiously boastful, raising his hands and shouting, “I am invincible!” (though that last bit is almost endearing). More henchman than supervillain, Grishenko just might be the first depiction of an internet troll on film. Since the Daniel Craig reboots, Bond villains have gone back to being low-tech mercenaries, terrorists, and the odd former MI-6 agent. The closest thing they’ve come to manipulating the stock market is Le Chiffre’s short-selling of stock in Casino Royale, which he then cashes in on through terrorist attacks with nary a hacker in sight. After Grishenko, the world of hackers didn’t prove a glamorous enough foe for 007.

While hackers pose external threats in both The Net and GoldenEye, the problems the digital world raises in the messy cyber-steampunk Johnny Mnemonic are more internal. The film posits that, by the year 2021, people will have installed upgrades in themselves that will turn them into human flash drives; data too sensitive to send over the regular internet could be transmitted through human courier. (Don’t worry—if that seems gross, the fax machine is still in use in 2021.) Here, internet and virtual reality are basically one and the same; they’re distinct in other films, and virtual reality has pretty much ceased to be an ongoing concern today. In any case, this method of data transfer, while profitable if the courier feels comfortable working with shady people, is not without its costs. For his “one last job” before he’s out of the business, Johnny Mnemonic (Keanu Reeves) overloads his system, taking on more information than he has memory. (Get it? Memory? If that wasn’t clear enough, Johnny also had to get rid of some cherished childhood memories to make room for his last big score.) He spends the rest of the movie suffering from “synaptic seepage,” with the information leaking out of its storage center and causing him migraine-like pain. His virtual data is damaging his physical, real-life body.

Immediately, both the yakuza and a Jesus-like bounty hunter (Dolph Lundgren) start coming after the information in Johnny’s brain. It turns out that the package he’s carrying is the cure for 2021’s big pandemic, Nerve Attenuation Syndrome, which causes seizures and is ultimately fatal. What causes it? An unjustly discredited doctor, Spider, played by a bespectacled Henry Rollins, lays it out: “It’s information overload,” he tells Johnny. “We have all of this shit because we can’t live life without it.” Exposure to the radiation from all the electronics causes a worldwide plague, but people are just too addicted to get rid of it. In its convoluted way, Johnny Mnemonic is a warning that one day we’ll all be too reliant on the internet for our own well-being. It’s a theme that still resonates throughout popular culture, though usually without any priestlike bounty hunters delivering the message.

Virtual reality is also an addiction in Kathryn Bigelow’s underrated Strange Days. Set at the turn of the millennium (just four years away from the film’s release), the movie presents a world in turmoil: Fires, riots, and looming doomsday fears are the film’s constant, often-unremarked-upon backdrop. Yet even in a world in dire need of escapism, virtual reality has been outlawed. That makes former cop Lenny Nero (Ralph Fiennes, with a level of smarm and haircut that suggests today’s Bradley Cooper), a black-market VR dealer. “This is not like TV only better,” he explains to a potential client. “This is life—straight from the cerebral cortex.” Although it’s a passive medium—users can only watch and feel, and not participate or interact with others—it’s the good stuff.

Nero specializes in what he calls “street life,” or VR clips that feature dark and gritty sex, violence, and crime. What he chooses to watch himself, though, is altogether more wholesome: sunny clips of roller-skating with his ex-wife (Juliette Lewis) that, fine, also end in sex. But whether VR is used to live vicariously through others or recall happier days, it’s incredibly addictive. Characters talk about getting “strung out” and doing “too much playback,” which makes them turn violent and paranoid. Escapism turns out to be a dangerous drug.

Eventually, Nero is sent a “black jack,” or a snuff clip of a murder, and he’s compelled to solve it. In a twist on the old trope where a cop has to put himself in killer’s shoes, Nero has to actually live out a killer’s life, feeling his sense of elation as he claims a victim. For Nero, living through those moments is sickening and torturous. (In the course of his investigation, Nero finds a clip showing a police killing of an unarmed black man that feels oddly prescient today.) In Strange Days, VR isn’t just corrosive to the body; it’s corrupting to the soul as well.

Like Strange Days, the head-scratching Virtuosity uses virtual reality to get into the mind of a killer. In the film, a scientist creates his own digital version of a bastard son of a thousand maniacs—a computer simulation that amalgamates the personalities of more than 200 serial killers, affectionately called SID 6.7 (a playing-to-the-back-row Russell Crowe). It sounds like a terrible idea, and it is, but some lip service is given to how it can be used to help train law enforcement. By the opening of the film, however, it’s still too risky, and only convicts like former lieutenant Parker Barnes (Denzel Washington) are allowed to test out the virtual-reality system. His first felon-partner, though, doesn’t fare so well: He gets fried in the VR world, melting his neurons and dying in the real one. Even when safely ensconced in its own virtual environment, Virtuosity worries that the internet can jump out and kill you.

It does so more and more literally as the movie goes on. The only other personality program shown in the movie is a sex-charged female that SID 6.7 manipulates to escape his digital confines. He uses her as a distraction to somehow get ahold of an android body and goes on a crime spree in real life, with all 200 personalities—including, sigh, the one that killed Barnes’ family—in tow. Virtuosity’s vision of virtual reality is full of fear and panic: The internet is a repository for base human instincts—sex and murder—and we will somehow lose control of it, and it’ll be fatal.

The only thing worse than SID 6.7’s murderousness is his desire to broadcast his crimes, using poor Barnes as his audience until he eventually takes over the airwaves. The internet users of 1995 weren’t painted as the Instagramming narcissists that they are today, but SID 6.7 previsions a vain streak inside us that nothing matters unless someone else is watching.

Not every 1995 internet-paranoia movie is so fatalistic. Hackers does show the dangers of being plugged into the grid; as in the other films, the internet is used to mess with personal data, conjuring arrest warrants out of thin air, listing living employees as deceased on their company payrolls, and inserting phone numbers into embarrassing back-page personal ads. But for the most part, the hackers in Hackers—a band of them led by tech geeks with handles like Crash Override (Jonny Lee Miller) and Acid Burn (Angelina Jolie)—are seen as mostly harmless. The majority of their exploits are really just hijinx, like changing the programming on a local TV station. Hackers is one of the few 1995 films that shows internet culture as an offshoot of youth culture; as a result, it also looks the most rooted in the 1990s when watched today.

If youth culture gives us the heroes of the film, it’s an older hacker, who goes by the handle The Plague (Fisher Stevens), who represents the true danger. It’s not his technical skills that make him a villain; it’s the fact that he sells them out to a major corporation, one that controls oil tankers, then tries to exploit them for personal gain. He creates a virus that’s one of the only white-collar techie crimes available to filmmakers: the Superman III/Office Space “salami-slice” virus that rounds up pennies on a large number of transactions and puts them into a personal account. The Plague doesn’t believe in one of the basic tenants of the “Hacker Manifesto,” which is that all information should be free. And, as a final insult, he schemes to frame the hackers with purer ideals for the crime. (He also skateboards—a sure sign of villainy. Hackers came out during the brief window of time when rollerblading was the dominant mode of conveyance for true believers.)

But if hacking can cause problems like the ones The Plague creates, the film shows that it can also present a solution. To save our heroes, the hacker community across the world bands together and uses its powers for good, exposing the villain’s plot, clearing the names of the accused, and holding true to the ideals of making information free. It’s the one ray of hope in a year of films very, very scared of the internet.

The internet and virtual-reality films of 1995 also show the emergence of a problem that filmmakers are still struggling with today: how to represent a digital world on screen. You can see early attempts to create some sort of cohesive visual language to stand in for the internet. Status bars, for example, are used in more than one of these movies as a quick way to ratchet up tension; the heroes have to wait until the bar reaches 100 percent before they can flee to safety. It’s a cheap thrill, and one we sadly haven’t outgrown yet.

Mostly, though, attempts to create a new look for the internet are hideous, trafficking in cheesy, psychedelic swirls of numbers and symbols and environments that look like video games circa Nintendo 64. Hackers and Virtuosity both fall victim to the allure of pop-art colors: Virtuosity makes is virtual exit quickly, bringing SID 6.7 into the real world, but Hackers often goes into the “architecture” of circuitry, with skyscrapers of squares and rectangles standing in for the systems they’re trying to break into, and dreamy-looking equations standing in for the data they want to collect. Today, it looks dated.

You’d think that visual artist Robert Longo, who directed Johnny Mnemonic, would have better luck, but his vision of the internet looks like 3-D screensavers from Windows NT; the big climax shows a CG cartoon version of Johnny fighting viruses as if he were playing a video game, all while Ice-T narrates. Four years later, The Matrix would look much more slick and stylish using nothing but monochromatic green characters scrolling across the screen. (Johnny Mnemonic’s shortcomings is a major reason The Matrix was such a surprise hit.)

GoldenEye and The Net mostly avoid depicting the internet altogether, but that comes with its own set of problems. In The Net, where hacking is so crucial to the plot, Bennett has to spend some time at computer terminals. Here, the movie resorts to lackluster shots of Bullock furiously typing while talking to herself, explaining to herself what she’s looking at while a series of static web pages flash in front of her eyes. Strange Days acquits itself the best. Its virtual reality looks just like regular film footage—all conveyed in point-of-view shots for a more first-person perspective—that might have a tint to it if the recorder were colorblind. It’s simultaneously the most engrossing depiction of the virtual world and the one that looks most contemporary today.

It’d be easy to think that, in the past 20 years, filmmakers would have solved the problem of tackling the internet on screen, but they’re still struggling. Status bars still stand in as tension-mounting devices (as in The Amazing Spider-Man 2, which had an eye-roll-inducing race between a status bar and a plane crash). There are still visualizations of the internet as a psychedelic-colored version of the real world (though Futurama at least had some fun with this idea). And there are still shots that zoom along wires and down into circuits, like this year’s Blackhat (though Chris Hemsworth is a long way from Alan Cumming—good job, hackers). Blackhat, like its 1995 brethren, was a huge flop early in 2015 (even fewer people saw it than saw Hackers in its initial release). Even after two decades, during which the web has become fully integrated into our daily lives, the digital-paranoia subgenre still has room to mature.

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Deexan CS! Silver Join Date: Aug 2003 Posts: 18,196 Likes: 2,995 Location: Last Online Nov 13, 2021 19:23:59 GMT -5	Nova Award Archives Jul 9, 2015 16:14:45 GMT -5 Quote Select Post Deselect Post Link to Post Back to Top Post by Deexan on Jul 9, 2015 16:14:45 GMT -5 I was a big fan of The Net.
	DOROTHY MANTOOTH IS A SAINT.

Neverending CS! Platinum Join Date: Jul 2003 Posts: 65,773 Likes: 8,648 Location: Last Online Nov 22, 2024 18:30:10 GMT -5	Nova Award Archives Aug 20, 2015 2:50:07 GMT -5 via mobile Quote Select Post Deselect Post Link to Post Back to Top Post by Neverending on Aug 20, 2015 2:50:07 GMT -5 I'm not sure if Stargate is a good or bad movie. I love the premise and sets and costumes and music and the actors, but I'm totally bored by the actual story.
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Neverending CS! Platinum Join Date: Jul 2003 Posts: 65,773 Likes: 8,648 Location: Last Online Nov 22, 2024 18:30:10 GMT -5	Nova Award Archives Aug 26, 2020 9:41:08 GMT -5 Quote Select Post Deselect Post Link to Post Back to Top Post by Neverending on Aug 26, 2020 9:41:08 GMT -5 Oct 2, 2014 22:06:43 GMT -5 Jibbs said: Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure
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Jibbs Administrator Join Date: May 2000 Posts: 75,725 Likes: 1,657 Location: Last Online Feb 20, 2024 18:06:23 GMT -5	Nova Award Archives Aug 26, 2020 11:16:09 GMT -5 PG Cooper likes this Quote Select Post Deselect Post Link to Post Back to Top Post by Jibbs on Aug 26, 2020 11:16:09 GMT -5 Oh God, there's a whole decade now I didn't have.
	Jibbs: Oof, got a bad feeling about this. IanTheCool: Yeah, but you kinda stopped liking things a while ago, didn't you?

Deexan CS! Silver Join Date: Aug 2003 Posts: 18,196 Likes: 2,995 Location: Last Online Nov 13, 2021 19:23:59 GMT -5	Nova Award Archives Aug 31, 2020 2:39:20 GMT -5 via mobile Quote Select Post Deselect Post Link to Post Back to Top Post by Deexan on Aug 31, 2020 2:39:20 GMT -5 I've lost at least 2 decades worth of memories somewhere down the line. You'll live.
	DOROTHY MANTOOTH IS A SAINT.

Shoutbox

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Doomsday: It's been 7 months since anyone posted in this thing so I need to ask, Batman Returns is definitely a Christmas movie right? Nov 27, 2022 0:55:28 GMT -5

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Dec 23, 2022 16:41:02 GMT -5

John: Batman Returns is definitely a Christmas movie. Jan 6, 2023 11:46:34 GMT -5 *

IanTheCool: Forum is acting up on me. did my Andor rant go through? Jan 15, 2023 11:52:07 GMT -5

Doomsday: Yeah, lots of threads aren't available. I saw that you responded to the thread but haven't been able to open it so can't see what you wrote. I assume it's a doosey. Jan 15, 2023 12:57:04 GMT -5

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scottysair: www.comingsoon.net/movies/news/1558134-netflix-announces-baseball-documentary-on-montreal-expos-exit-from-canada Feb 21, 2024 22:45:32 GMT -5