Hammer's Top Ten Must See Science Fiction Movies

I can safely bet that there are more Sci-fi fans out there who appreciate Sci-fi at a whole other level than I do. There are large numbers who dress up as their favorite character and debate who is better : Luke Skywalker or Captain Kirk. What other film genre does that? I can't name one. Well here is my top ten list, and I guarantee I will have many disagreeing with me.

10. District 9 - This 2009 film was directed by Neill Blomkamp and stars South African actor Sharlto Copley. The story is about an alien spaceship that parks over a city in 1982 and hovers over Johannesburg, South Africa. Three months pass by and a team finally enters a ship to find malnourished E.T.s. They are taken from the ship and confined to an area called District 9. This movie decides to call the aliens "prawns" but I think they look like big cockroaches. Being a South African movie, the underlying theme is apartheid. I thoroughly enjoyed the weapons-testing scene. That's one badass railgun. That would be a sweet weapon in a video game.

9. Stargate - The 1994 film, directed by Roland Emmerich, is about a massive stone ring found in Egypt in 1928. Dr. Daniel Jackson, played by James Spader, discovers that the symbols on the Stargate are constellations corresponding with other planets in space. Jackson figured out that entering symbols in a certain order create a wormhole leading to other planets in another galaxy. Col. Jack O'Niell, played by Kurt Russell, leads an expedition through the Stargate to a planet that reminds me of the movie Dune. The explorers meet a group of people who speak an ancient Egyptian dialect. A big spaceship lands on top of the pyramid the explorers landed in and trouble ensues. The explorers meet Ra, who claims to be a god. I don't think this movie was liked by everyone but I found it to be new and refreshing at the time. The movie spawned great t.v. shows like Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis. The jury is still out on Stargate Universe.

8. The Matrix - The Wachowski Bros. directed this unique 1999 film starring Keanu Reeves as Thomas Anderson, AKA Neo. Keanu plays a computer programmer who wants to learn the answer to the question "What is the Matrix?" The film shows a future in which reality is perceived by most people as a simulated reality created by sentient machines to pacify and subdue the human population. Body heat and electrical activity from humans are used as an energy source. Neo is drawn into a rebellion against the machines. I heard Will Smith turned down the role of Neo to do Wild Wild West. Big mistake. Big. Huge. (That will be my only Pretty Woman reference. You're welcome, Cherry.) The movie boasted some sweet, groundbreaking visual effects, such as "bullet time," which allows us to view a moment in time in slow motion as the camera orbits the scene in regular time. Unfortunately I've seen this in movies since then and I commonly use the phrase "they stole that from The Matrix."

7. Predator - This 1987 film is a Sci-fi classic. It stars Arnold Schwarzenegger who leads a special forces unit into an unknown place in central America to free hostages taken by hostile guerrilla. On the way to the guerrilla stronghold, they find a downed helicopter and several bodies that are skinned. They find out these are the remains of a missing Army special forces team. They go in, kill all the guerrillas, and rescue one hostage named Anna who they take along. While all this is happening, they are unaware that they are being hunted by a 7 foot ET who is the Predator. The predator picks them off one by one using his cloaking capability, shoulder mounted photon gun, and heat seeking vision capability. It all leads to an Arnold vs Predator ending. This film was a simple story at the time and is thoroughly enjoyable. Jesse Ventura has a cool scene where he fires what seems like a million rounds into the jungle using a minigun and hits nothing. We see Arnold use the same gun a few years later in a scene in Terminator 2. All-in-all, Predator is one of those movies when it comes on TV and although you have scene it a thousand times, its always worth watching until then end.

6. Independence Day - this 1996 film starring Will Smith is simply about a hostile alien race coming to earth to destroy human civilization. Roland Emmerich (who directed Stargate - #9 on this list) directed and co-wrote this epic disaster movie with Dean Devlin. So the basic plot of this story is a mothership comes to earth and we try to communicate with it. Jeff Goldblum plays a cable expert who discovers that the transmission being sent is basically a countdown to our total annihilation. So the aliens deploy 36 motherships that are 15 miles wide and destroy just about every major city in the world. Will Smith plays Captain Stephen Hiller, a Marine Corps fighter pilot who is part of the counterattack that fails because the aliens have a impenetrable force field around everything. He is able to shoot down a small alien "glider" without shooting in down - it basically crashes. Without going on and on about the plot, they figure out how to get the force fields to go down and Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum fly in a alien craft to the mothership and upload a computer virus to the mothership (just go with it, I did). This movie was a whole lot of fun with a very simple plot to it. Randy Quaid has a minor role in this movie that is pretty enjoyable too.

5. Jurassic Park - This 1993 Stephen Spielberg film made dinosaurs cool again. It is about a billionaire philanthropist named John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) who created a zoo full of cloned dinosaurs. Hammond needs experts, Dr. Alan Grant (Sam Neill), Dr. Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern), and Dr. Ian Malcomb (Jeff Goldblum), to sign off on the park to open to the public. So they arrive at the island, learn about how the cloned dinosaurs are made, and take the tour in cars along with Hammond's two grandchildren who for some reason come along. They get stuck on the tour and the power goes out because of a large typhoon off the coast. All the dinosaurs are able to roam free and now humans are at the bottom of the food chain. This movie was really hyped by the studio when it came out. The movie boasted landmark computer graphics and also made the Velociraptor a really cool dinosaur with a wicked toenail. The big bad T-Rex comes into play at the end and ends up saving the day. The best quote of the movie is by Ian Malcomb, "If the Pirates of the Caribbean breaks down, the pirates don't eat the tourists." Just be sure to ignore the other 2 sequels - yuck.

4. Back to the Future - This 1984 flick stars Michael J. Fox as Marty McFly, a teenager who is accidentally sent back from 1985 to 1955 in a DeLorean created by Dr. Emmit Brown (Christopher Lloyd). Dr. Brown uses plutonium which he stole from Libyan terrorists to power the "flux capacitor" that generates 1.21 gigawatts needed to power the DeLorean. The car needs to reach a speed of 88 miles per hour in order to go back in time. So the Libyans come in a VW Bus, and end up shooting Dr. Brown and Marty escapes in the DeLorean where he goes back in time to 1955. There he runs into his mother, played by Lea Thompson, and his father George who is bullied by his nemesis named Biff. Marty's mom becomes infactuated with him. He also runs into Dr. Brown and has him help him get back to 1985. Of course Marty has to be sure the timeline is not disrupted with his arrival in 1955, so the story has several twists and turns in it to keep the action going. The movie was a huge success in 1984 grossing $380 million worldwide. There were two sequels made that, in my opinion, did not live up to the first film.

3. Total Recall - This 1990 film stars Arnold Schwarzenegger as a nobody construction worker named Doug Quaid who wants to someday visit Mars. He decides to visit a company called "Rekall", who can implant false memories of a virtual trip to any location. So he decides to have the trip to Mars and the story of himself being a secret agent named Houser implanted. The Rekall staff are about to implant the memories when they find that he has already had the implantation done. He wakes up and attacks the staff, but is sedated and sent home. When he arrives, he finds that his wife Lori, played by Sharon Stone, and his former friends are out to kill him. Quaid eventually learns that he was doing the dirty work for the Mars administrator named Vilos Cohaagen (Ronny Cox). Cohaagen is out to eliminate the martian rebels on Mars led by an alien named Kuato and Quaid realizes he was on the wrong side. The movie is solid and an entertaining sci-fi film that at the end will make you wonder if the story was real or part of his Rekall memories.

2. Terminator - This 1984 film almost was number 1 on my list. Arnold Schwarzenegger plays the Terminator, a cyborg assassin who is sent back in time to 1984 to kill Sarah Connor. The Human Resistance sends back Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn) to 1984 to protect Sarah Connor from the Terminator. Reese saves Sarah Connor from the first encounter with the Terminator and explains to her that an artificial intelligence network called Skynet will become self aware in the future and initiate a nuclear proliferation of all humans on the planet. He explains that her son will be the leader of the human resistance against the machines in the future. So they escape several times from the Terminator and eventually end up at a police station, where the Terminator tracks them down and he kills just about every police officer there. Reese and Connor end up escaping to a hotel and end up having sex together (which ends up being John Connor). They eventually have a final showdown with the Terminator where Reese is killed and Connor ends up crushing the Terminator in a hydraulic press. The story ends with Sarah Connor pregnant with her unborn son John. One interesting fact is that Arnold only had 18 lines in the movie which lead to him playing the perfect cyborg. This movie lead to several sequels which are all pretty good and that's rare to say.

1. Star Trek - This 2009 film tops my top 10 list for Science Fiction movies. J.J. Abrams directs this re-boot of a very successful movie franchise. This film is actually Star Trek 11. This film portrays the original characters of the franchise at Starfleet Academy and aboard the USS Enterprise as they combat Nero (Eric Bana), a Romulan from their future who threatens the United Federation of Planets to avenge the death of his family. The story was developed by the writers to take place in an alternate reality due to time travel by both Nero and the original Spock (Leonard Nimoy). This was done so the story could free the film and the franchise from established continuity constraints. Spock is trying to stop a supernova that threatens the galaxy and uses "red matter" to create a wormhole to stop the supernova. He is too late and the supernova destroys Nero's home world, Romulus, along with his wife. Nero's ship and the ship Spock was on get stuck in the black hole and come out 129 years in the past. The Federation starship USS Kelvin is investigating a "lightning storm" in space. The Romulan ship Narada emerges from the singularity and attacks the Kelvin which sustains massive damage. The Kelvin's first officer, George Kirk (Chris Hemsworth) orders the ship's personnel evacuated via shuttlecraft, including his pregnant wife, Winona (Jennifer Morrison). Kirk sacrifices himself by steering the Kelvin on a collision course with the Romulan ship. Kirk's wife gives birth to their son - Jim Kirk. I can watch this movie anytime it comes on. There is the perfect amount of drama, comedy, and action. I am usually leery of sequels, but I can't wait for this one.

I know some of you will be shocked that not one Star Wars movie made it on the list. Well that's because in my opinion, the films are a bit overrated and not that great. Besides, it's my top 10 list - you don't have to agree with me. That's going do it for this week's list - be sure to check back soon for my next top 10 list.