Favorite scifi movie

Dune !

I kind of liked the atrocious nature of the Starship Troopers movie.  Sometimes schlock can be entertaining. 

Good picks on his list though, to be sure.

• District 9
• 2001: A Space Odyssey
• Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back
• TRON
• Plan 9 From Outer Space

And AVATAR, which I just loooooove to hate.

The Day the Earth Stood Still (Original)
The Time Machine (original)
Millennium
Star Trek - The Motion Picture
Planet of the Apes (Original)

You can add in all the rest of the Star Trek Movies as well, although the weakest was The Voyage Home.

Blade Runner

Dark City

Planet of the Apes (original)

Appleseed

Pitch Black

The Chronicles of Riddick

Ghost in the Shell

The Matrix

Screamers

The Arrival

Contact

Mimic

Event Horizon

Alien

Terminator

Predator

The Cave

K-Pax

Starman

District 9

The Road Warrior

They Live

Gattaca

Prey Alone (Atom films short)

2001 gets honorable mention as does Solaris and The Time Machine (2000), Serenity...and if you could combine the best strengths of The Red Planet and Mission to Mars into a single film it would have been pretty awesome.

...and Invader Zim should sooo have been a movie.

Interesting replies, I miss children of men.

Hmm. This is a bit of a hard one.

In no particular order:

I, Robot
Pitch Black
Alien
Aliens
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Titan A.E.
The Ultramarines Movie 

Also, all six Star Wars movies. Because they're all pretty epic.

I'll probably pick up flak for liking the Ultramarines Movie, as it was generally regarded as not very good. But it's also the only 40K movie around, so I like it anyway.

This. Because I hate that movie on principle. I mean really, a bunch of spear-toting natives beat down an interstellar-capable civilization? Do they not realize just how stupid that is?

Because any real interstellar civilization wouldn't have bothered with the natives. They'd just wipe 'em out, and then claim all the "unobtainium" (really, Cameron? Really? That's the best you could come up with?) for themselves.

Also, because I hate blue monkey people that are supposedly more moral than humans. Said blue monkey people don't have the slightest concept of what mankind has faced, and overcome. They are in no position to judge.

IIRC the excuse is that they were facing corporate mercenaries and not the human military proper.  But still, why oh why didn't the humans use spread shot munitions to perforate anything and everything living?  As for unobtanium, my guess is that he thought he was being witty in a dry, direct sense. 

I actually spent some time figuring out how the Human faction could have conceivably lost. They just need to have really substandard equipment and around 100-to-1 odds.

They were also fighting a jungle war against natives... Extremely bad idea.  They should have kept aerial watches around their mining equipment with fully automated weapons, mowing down anything blue that moves on sight.  Then, they simply threaten to decimate the mind tree if they continue to get attacked.  If the natives test them, blast off a few branches and tell them that it is their last warning.  Instead they dilly-dallied and somehow couldn't maintain a proper overwatch to save themselves when they finally did move in on the tree. 

My issues weren't so much with the many scientific, technological, and tactical slipups (although they most certainly did not help) so much as with the Gaiistic technology-is-evil nonsense. Ok, so it's probably not morally advisable to use big men with big guns and little accountability to force them off of their land, since they were technically there first and therefore own it by default. But that doesn't mean that the entire Human culture is responsible. The idea of Jake and the resistance Humans just throwing away all of the technological marvels they've achieved and going off to live in the jungle, hunt for food every day just to survive and finally die at around 30 is so messed up I can't even begin to put it into coherent words. Does he even realize that the only reason why he's there AT ALL is because he flew there on a STARSHIP and is walking around in a genetically engineered surrogate body?

"unobtanium"....'nuff said.

The anti-technology sentiment in Avatar was probably over emphasized.

I still don't understand why some Star Wars fans either hate the Prequels and refuse to call the original film A New Hope or hate the Original Trilogy, it is meant to be treated as one epic saga, not individual films.

The Thing. I really wish I had a hard copy of that movie.

That's about all I can think of that hasn't already been said. That, and, well, it's been a long time since I was a movie person.

Good discussions here

Any more people willing to share their favorites?

Some inspiration:

http://www.imdb.com/chart/scifi

I think it has to do with the fact that the Original Trilogy was a very fun series of movies; they were a bit serious but at the same time they were funny and, moroever, just plain fun to watch. The Prequels started to move away from this a little bit, particularly with Episode III, which was pretty dark, especially compared to the rollicking fun of the OT.

Rather ironic, though, isn't it, that even though in ANH a planet gets blown up and billions die from it, but it's not a dark and depressing film.

Indeed, some people forget that it is one story.

I know we are talking fav's, but a decent one that just came out:  source code.  Watched it today and it was a good time.  If you are a sci-fi fan, I think you'll enjoy.  Not the world's greatest movie, but it was fun.

2001: A Space Odyssey
District 9
The Last Starfighter
Robocop
Contact
Bladerunner
Terminator 2: Judgement Day
Children of Men
Stargate
Flight of the Navigator
Back to the Future Trilogy
Mission to Mars
Serenity
The Fifth Element
Star Trek: First Contact
Dune
Short Circuit
Demolition Man
Waterworld
Total Recall
Jurassic Park
Weird Science
Judge Dredd
Moon

Source code seems fun. I will give it a try once it is in theatre here.

Should one see the tv series first before watching Serenity?

Yes - Hell yes.  Under no circumstance (my opinion) should you watch Serenity before you watch firefly.  Parts of the movie might ruin firefly for you.

My number 1 pick is easy: Bladerunner

The remaining choices are more difficult so I'll list a few in no particular order:

2001 a Space Oddyssey, Gattaca, Sleeper, Forbidden Planet, Aliens, Brazil, Dark City, A Clockwork Orange

I would select ...

The Day the Earth Stood Still (made in 1951)

Well, crap. I saw the movie before I even knew that the series had actually existed.