In recent years, nerd culture has been big money, at least for the studios with the money to pour into sci-fi films that are rising to meet the awful stereotypes to become formulaic, watered-down versions of science fiction.
Nonetheless, there are still a few indie gems running alongside the Hollywood releases: with small, ponderous indie films like this year’s lo-fi thinkpiece Another Earth, it’s clear that the level of budget technology is finally starting to catch up with imaginations of penniless visionaries all over the world.
You may no longer need the backing of a major studio to make a great film out of your Big Idea, but that’s a relatively new situation: in the past, a great number of filmmakers have bypassed the studios and come out the other end with a smart, but small, sci-fi film. So, understandably, you might have missed a few great films through lack of marketing, or maybe they simply didn’t play in your town thanks to a limited release. We’re here to combat that situation with few suggestions for movies you might have missed out on.
#1 - Primer
Primer
Writer-director-star Shane Carruth made this small time-travel epic on around $7,000. Seven thousand. Just let that sink in for a moment. Roll it around your tongue. Seven thousand. What would you do with seven thousand dollars? That’s a lot of Twiglets, or a very expensive iPad case.
The setup is deceptively simplistic: two entrepreneurial friends accidentally make a time machine in their garage. The execution is not quite as simple. Primer is known as a “cerebral” film, which means that it’s utterly confusing on the first nineteen viewings, but it rewards your attention and gives up a little more every time you rewatch it. The technobabble makes a little more sense. You start to understand how the story unfolds over multiple timelines, which get rewritten by the next one. If you’re a certain type of person (and if you’re reading CSICON, odds are that you are that type of person) you’ll find yourself hunched over the internet at three in the morning, browsing forum posts from 2004 for some god damned answers. Damn you, Shane Carruth. Why did you do this to me?
It is not a date movie, let’s put it that way.
#2 - Moon
Moon
As the lone operator of a mining facility, Sam Bell is alone on the far side of the moon with only taped messages from home and a robot with the voice of Kevin Spacey to keep him company. A few short weeks from the end of his three-year shift, however, he stumbles across the unconscious body of another miner on the moon’s surface. It appears to be himself.
That twist makes the whole film worth your time: Sam Rockwell is always watchable, even in films like Iron Man 2 and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and as the duplicated Sam Bell, there are two of him! In what is essentially a one-man show, there was no better choice for the role.
I am coming to terms with my man-crush on Sam Rockwell in my own way, all right?
#3 - Cypher
Cypher
The second feature film from Vincenzo Natali, the director of 2010′s Splice and the underrated sci-fi/horror Cube stars Jeremy Northam, whom you might remember from a glut of films in the early 2000s, and Lucy Liu, whom you might remember in much the same way.
Northam stars as “Jack Thursby,” a bored accountant who becomes a slightly-less-bored corporate spy who discovers, via Lucy Liu, that he is only one of a whole ring of brainwashed spies and becomes a double agent. Again, yes, it’s confusing, but stick with it: Cypher is a great low-key thriller with some solid performances from its central cast.
#4 - The Quiet Earth
The Quiet Earth
Protagonist Zac Hobson sums up the situation better than I can: “One: there has been a malfunction in Project Flashlight with devastating results. Two: it seems I am the only person left on Earth.”
A very quiet apocalypse falls upon New Zealand in this 1985 thriller, forcing three strangers to band together to find out exactly what happened to everyone else against a backdrop of empty city streets, abandoned traffic and downed commercial aircraft (according to our friends at TV Tropes, the technical term is “scenery gorn“). A quintessential post-apocalyptic movie in the sense that once you’ve watched The Quiet Earth, you’ll have a rough idea of what to expect from any other post-apocalyptic movie. Some might call that derivative; I prefer to think of it as efficient.
#5 - Pi
Pi
Number theorist Max Cohen believes that everything in nature can be understood through mathematics. Putting his theory to use, he attempts to play the stock market with the help of his computer, which rather unhelpfully spits out a 216-digit string of numbers and then crashes. What follows is a cascade of Wall Street analysts, Kabbalah theory and the game “Go” standing in as a model for a chaotic universe. Then there’s a horrifying end scene that I don’t want to spoil for you or ever talk about again.
This is Darren Aronofsky‘s directorial debut, filmed in high-contrast black and white film and on a $60,000 budget, grossing more than $3million at the box office and selling pretty well on DVD ever since. While Pi lacks a lot of the themes present in Aronofsky’s later work, it’s certainly worth checking out to see the development of his signature style as well as for the cyberpunk-esque story and the awesome score from Clint Mansell, who later composed the score for Requiem for a Dream.
Or, depending on your age, that unbearably epic song from the Lord of the Rings trailer.
#6 – Dark Star
Dark Star
Four words: “John Carpenter does comedy”. Three more: “Beach ball with claws”.
The crew of the Dark Star have been alone in space for more than twenty years, blowing up planets that could pose a threat to future human colonisation. The crew are, predictably, going out of their minds due to the extreme boredom the job requires of them. But that’s all just background to the philosophical debate with a planet-smashing bomb and the aforementioned beachball, the mascot of the Dark Star which refuses to stay in the food locker.
Co-writer Dan O’Bannon later reworked the “beachball with claws” subplot by morphing it from comedy to horror and blending it with an unpublished story about gremlins aboard a spaceship, birthing another little sci-fi film you might have missed by the name of Alien.
As always, the CSICON gang like to open up the discussion to the comments! Feel free to educate us on any films we might have missed, argue over whether Pi is considered science fiction or slipstream, and send love letters to the author, who is flattered but considers himself married to the job.