A Century of Science Fiction

this film, narrated by the one and only Christopher Lee, suffers greatly in its callous dismissal of many wonderful B-movie classics and the fact it doesn't give near enough focus to the most important decade of all for 20th Century Sci-Fi: the 1950s!

Still this is a fascinating film to watch as it provides a pretty thorough examination of the many elements which make up the genre we today call science fiction. All in all not bad of its type.

The short two hour look at a couple of Scifi subjects via film clips (from trailers) is a companion piece to the similar One Hundred Years of Horror. This is a history of science fiction told through a few interviews as well as with clips from various movies culled from movie trailers which are in the public domain. Like the horror film this film also has a longer 26 part version. However where the short Horror film made you want to see the longer version (which is a masterpiece of Horror history when viewed in its entirety), this makes you want to move on to the next thing. Its a shame since the longer 26 part version of this film is actually pretty good. Its not the horror series but its still fun to watch thanks to all of the clips that it contains. The short version is narrated by Christopher Lee who simply links some of the segments with some oblique references.(Lee is not in the long version). Given the choice I'd opt for the longer version and skip this short one.

I watched the entire series and about half way through began to calcify. It was fun to see so many B-movie trailers, but when they started showing up for the third or fourth time, I realized that this was an editing project. Each episode has a focus: artificial intelligence, dinosaurs, and on and on. Obviously, many great movies were left out because rights to them would have been pretty expensive. Also, the script was really dull. I could tell the narrator was getting bored at times because we are talking about sixteen hours or more. There is very little new or educational about this.

This is a series of partial trailers and sound bites. It, of course, being 1998 is a tad dated but that can be overlooked.

Several times the narrator misses the point or misinterprets the films being displayed. Occasionally, he is quite funny. However, for the most part, he makes statements like the story 1984 was made into two films; he does not state which two films: 1984 - Studio One (1953) S6 E1 Eddie Albert as Winston Smith 1984 (1954) Peter Cushing as Winston Smith 1984 (1956) Edmond O'Brien as Winston Smith Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984) John Hurt as Winston smith

In the book "The Time Machine" by H. G. Wells the two races were created by economic or class differences. In the movie, it was where one chose to live (above or below ground). The narrator of this presentation said it was a class or economic problem.

We get similar misinterpretations on "The Planet of the Apes" film clips.

The actual section on H. G. Wells did a decent job of describing H. G. and his approach to authoring his novels. They did a good contrast of different versions of "The Island of Dr. Moreau."

Talking about repartition, many of the clips are used over and over again; to their credit, the narration is different over the same clip.

This is one of the worst documentaries ever made. Most of the Sci-Fi films featured were B-Movie clips. Even when it showed clips of better films, the quality was bad. When Christopher Lee was talking, you could see cutout lines from the bluescreen. The animation was terrible. When I saw this, I thought it was Chistopher Lee's grandson's high school project, but no, it was an actual company. It said "2 Hour Special" on the DVD Cover when it really went only for 1 hr 40 - 45 min. It gave none or not enough information about Star Trek films, E.T., Close Encounters Of The Third Kind and the Star Wars films. I think some amateur film-makers could make a better documentary than this.