Space Command - A Series Of 1950's Inspired Scifi Movies

[Snocrash]

Hey Guys,

 

There's a new project over at Kickstarter where they will be creating a series of SciFi movies inspired by the 1950 shows like Space Patrol, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Forbidden Planet, The Twilight Zone, etc. They've already reached their pledge goal, and so the project is guaranteed to be funded now, and they've also got some pretty cool talent involved. They have writers and visual effects people who have worked on Star Trek, Babylon 5, Battlestar Galactica, and it seems to be growing every day. Anyway, I'm pretty excited about it... seems like it could really take off, and it will be nice to see how an independently made SciFi will turn out.

 

I've even started a fan site, if anyone interested in joining my latest obsession: http://spacecommandfans.com

 

Here's the official sites:

 

http://www.facebook.com/spacecommandmovie

 

Cheers!

 

[CraigD]

You rock, snocrash! For you username alone, but especially for your intro to Space Commander, and your fansite. I just contributed a my-socioeconomic-bracket-appropriate contribution via its kickstarter site, and am looking forward to seeing the film in about a year!

 

My truest SF love is hard SF, the kind that doesn’t compromise real physical explanations for the sake of a story. I find this an even rarer genre than the kind of optimistic (In classical critical terms, borrowed from my old college Gothe, one might term uplifiting) space opera Space Commander promises to be, and the fond SF I grew up on: books like Asimov’s Foundation saga; RAH’s juvenile and adult stories (forget not that Space Caded, arguably the prototype for Star Trek and its many derivatives); Doc Smith’s Lensman books; and TV series like Star Trek.

 

So, while when Mark Zicree says

I often hear fans say, “Why are there so few good sci-fi shows on TV, and why do so many go south?” I can tell you – frankly, most of the network suits just don’t get it.

 

But you and I do.

I emphatically agree, but continue to sentiment. I often hear hard SF fans bemoaning the rarity of hardly any hard SF TV shows or movies, and believe the answer is most of even dedicated genre fans and veterans like Zicree “just don’t get” hard SF. On believe than, on a fundamental level, most of them don’t truly sense a difference between hard SF and the soft SF/fantasy that space opera usually is: they truly believe that physics, and depicted in STrek, Star Wars, etc, is plausible, requiring merely some key engineering advances to be realized.

 

My quest, unrealistic as it is (I barely have time and enthusiasm for my present mundane and fanish way of life) is to grow the subpopulation of SF fans who do “get” hard SF – to spread the gospel, as it were.

 

A great hard SF TV show or movie – one to rival STrek or SWars – would further my cause greatly.

 

Making an entertaining and uplifting hard SF movie seems a greater challenge even than making an optimistic space opera like Space Commander. Certainly, successful hard SF films have been made – 1968’s 2001, for example is one of the most famous SF movies ever made, 2009’s Moon, while less famous, was a critical and commercial success – but neither IMHO matches the entertainment and uplifting content of a good Star Trek episode. Many, including Moon are unambiguously dystopian.

 

Hard SF, with its requisite adherence to the real, seems prone to a sort of consequential spiral of pessimism. Travel between distant worlds takes longer than people live, unless the people live artificially long, through advanced medicine, or post-human abandonment of fleshy bodies, in which in either case they become weirdly unlike the real people of the audience. The many centuries lengths of these stories, taken with the history of human society and government, render the idea of an orderly civilization spanning hundreds of light-years of space implausible, and the future weird and disturbing.

 

Still, I’m confident entertaining, uplifting, hard SF is possible. To quote from a famous speech on the subject of non-fictional space exploration, such stories should be created:

… not because they are easy, but because they are hard.

[Snocrash]

Hehe, thanks. I loved Snowcrash... it seems a bit dated when I read it now, but was my favorite book for a long time.

 

I'm a big fan of hard SF too, though my definition is probably not as strict as yours :) I'm willing to overlook technology that may defy a few laws here and there as long as plausible explanations exist... because who knows, in a 100+ years, some of our scientific theories may need to be completely revised.

 

Having said that, a hard SF movie (or even better a TV series) like you describe would be pretty awesome, because... well I guess because it would seem within reach, you could relate to the story because it would actually be possible with the technology we have today. It might even inspire this country to invest in space exploration again, haha.

 

I think the key to making a more optimistic story might be to take a more philosophical / spiritual approach... humanity needs some kind of "grand" goal to achieve (like discovering their origins, acquiring new knowledge, helping an alien species), something that would inspire them to travel long distances at the cost of generations of people to get there. These families would be considered heros or have some sort of prestige attached to their missions. So it's no longer a story about technology turning on us (or being used wrongly), a dying planet, or aliens who want to harm us, its about finding our place in the universe.

 

Anyway, I'll be watching 2010 tonight. I can't imagine it's anywhere near as good as 2001, but just ran into it while browsing Netflix and can't believe I've never seen it before.

[Snocrash]

Forgot to mention... another thing that's cool about the Space Command project is they opened up casting about two weeks ago for two of the roles. So anyone can submit a video, you just need to upload it to YouTube to be considered, and the supporters over at KickStarter will be voting for who they think should get the parts. The roles are for COMMANDER MATT KEMMER, the main hero and commander of the Paladin, and CADET J.N. BRADBURY, the youngest member of his crew. I have attached their press release about it, and the scenes you need to act out and shoot, if anyone is interested.

 

No way I'll be submitting anything, my acting skills are pretty dreadful :blink: ... but can't wait to see what gets posted! Also, it's too bad we can't see more of the script, I'd like to know what kind of writing style and story arcs they have planned.

 

space_command_talent_search.pdf

 

space_command_sides_v32.pdf

[CraigD]

Qualms, and remembering a favorite old low-budget SF flick

 

So, curious to see an example of the work of Neil Johnson, I watched 2008’s [imdb=http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1249453]Humanity's End[/url].

 

I and my wife found it mind-wrenchingly, jaw-droppingly, appallingly bad, in nearly every way a movie can be bad. In the way it’s said that they cannot express, say, the pain of a difficult childbirth, words cannot adequately express how bad we found it.

 

It’s only good elements, IMHO, were some interesting space operatic spaceship models, and a few special effects shots.

 

Judging from the 10.7% of it’s 496 IMDB voters that rated it the maximum 10/10, a small but not non-existent minority of SF movie viewers truly liked it. 24.4% rated it minimum 1/10, and the weighted average was 3.5. This is similar to the 15.6%@10, 28.6%@1 IMDB rating for Ed Wood’s 1959 Plan 9 from Outer Space, a common candidate for worst SF film ever made, but many of Plan 9’s high viewer ratings are for it being “so awful it’s good”. I don’t believe viewers who high-rated Humanity’s End did so for this reason, but because they honestly found it entertaining, uplifting, enlightening, edifying, and all that.

 

So I now have qualms: Doubts that the main creative force behind with something I found so bad can and will make something I find good; That I am unbridgeably disconnected from the 10.4% (likely fewer – unlike the 3442 who gave Plan 9 10s, many of the 53 who gave Humanity’s End 10s were likely involved in its creation) who loved it.

 

In its defense, Humanity’s End was made on a small budget, about US$2,000,000. It’s badness, however, seemed not to me to be due to an inadequate budget. It was, simply, badly written, story, dialog, and stage direction.

 

My favorite low-budget SF movie is John Carpenter’s 1974 Dark Star, which was made for an estimated $60,000 ($260,000 in 2008 US dollars), and scores a respectable 6.5/10 IMDB rating, 14.8%@10, 2.8%@1, and won the moderately prestigious 1974/75 Saturn award for special effects.

 

I especially like that, faces with almost no special effects budget and pre-Star Wars state of the art, co-writer, effect supervisor and costar Dan O’Bannon cleverly used its necessarily cheap effects shots to reinforce its surprisingly semi-firm SF. For example, to emphasize that the movie’s eponymous spaceship is propelled not by ordinary rocketry, but by some non-Newtonian method, its motion is intentionally abrupt and jerky (see the 2:50 and 5:50 marks of this youtube excerpt – I recommend watching from the beginning, as it’s all an instructive example of effective exposition and foreshadowing)

 

I sorely miss Dan O’Bannon, who died far too young of a long, painful illness 2009. Present day SF filmmakers can take a lesson from him.

 

Thinking back on Dark Star, I realize, while not really hard SF, it managed to achieve a vague spirit of scientific plausibility, and while by no means cheerful, was about as uplifting as a “everyone dies in the end” story can be. Wipeout :)

[Snocrash]

Ha, yea can't say I've seen any of Neil Johnson's films, but you're right, the reviews aren't so good ...

 

... but then again you have Marc Zicree who got nominated for a Hugo for his Star Trek episode "World Enough and Time"

 

 

... and then Doug Drexler who has various awards, like an Oscar for Dick Tracy, a couple Emmys for Battlestar Galactica, and 2 nominations for Star Trek: TNG

 

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0237774/awards

 

So just depends how it all comes together... having a great script is key, then throw in some decent quality actors and you have a good shot at a home run.

 

Thanks, I'll be putting Dark Star on my to watch list, sounds pretty cool :)

Edited June 21, 2012 by Snocrash