Word: fi
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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ALIENS Tall, wondrous Sigourney Weaver battles tall, terrible monsters in James Cameron's technically awesome blend of the horror, sci-fi and service- comedy genres...
Trekkies are the Moonies of pop culture. Since the tatty sci-fi series Star Trek went off the air in 1969, they have devoted themselves with canonical fervor to annotating and explicating the 79 episodes. To Trekkies it matters not that the show was bad science and worse fiction, or that its actors, outfitted in futuristic Dr. Dentons, read their portentous lines with nitwit solemnity. The show's only soaring spin-off was Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979), in which the cast took a back seat to a splendid special-effects light show that made an eloquent case...
...much of the dialogue is written in the flowery gee-whiz pedantry that misled adolescent trekkies into thinking Bradbury was a real writer. Fortunately, many of the scenes in director Matthew Cohen's production are improvised; unfortunately, the rest are not, and the merging of 1940s what-if sci-fi with 1986 improv is unnervingly schizophrenic...
...deliver such lines as "Law? The terms you are using no longer exist." Several improvised scenes, particularly a discussion about the digestibility of spaghetti, are genuinely funny; others miss the mark. On the whole, though, the comic breaks serve as welcome oases in a sea of burdensome sci-fi philosophizing...
...exactly, indeed. Byrne's band started out in the punk new-wave era but outlasted and outclassed it. His lyric for their 1979 song Life During Wartime has a spooky pertinence that sounds like sci-fi for a perpetual present tense...