Greatest Geek Year Ever! 1982

All in all good documentary - lots of famous commentators. Heartfelt recollections of their experiences making, being in, and watching the films. Really reminded me of how good I felt back then with seeing original story telling in the scripts; not all this triple-rebooting going on these days!

I only made it half-way through the documentary though, because the F-word was used at least twice by the end of the commentary by Director Nicholas Meyer...he was recounting his own personal experience with a studio executive, but the words could have bleeped-out, and it would have been just as informative.

1982: GREATEST GEEK YEAR EVER (2022/2025) - Documentary cobbled together from a CW series with the combined runtime is nearly three hours long. 1982 has long been pointed to a nexus year where the children of 70s blockbuster sci-fi, fantasy and horror films took over cinemas. E. T., STAR TREK II, POLTERGEIST, BLADE RUNNER and Carpenter's THE THING all were released that June.

The Doc does a decent job showing how STAR WARS, CLOSE ENCOUNTERS, ALIEN, SUPERMAN etc. Lead to the Summer of Geek. There's a pretty good range of interview subjects including Nicholas Meyer, Ron Howard, William Shatner, Roger Corman, Leonard Maltin, Cameron Crowe and many more who shed personal insights. The films covered extend to CONAN, FIRST BLOOD, DARK CRYSTAL, TRON and 48 HOURS. It does extend the net a bit too far towards the end to commentary that hasn't much 'geek' content to it (THE VERDICT? MISSING?), but, it's not a bad overview of the year in the movies.

It's entertaining and informative enough. See also Chris Nashawaty's book The Future Was Now.

No pun intended - you can always make a case for something ... and against it. But I have to admit, they do have quite a few strong points here. The movies that were released that year ... I mean geek galore! And while some are sequels (Star Trek), even those seem to have taken a turn. I love the first Star Trek movie, but it was weirdly serious. I reckon the sequel did try something different.

Of course you have many other films, like The Thing ... some...thing that was not that popular the year it came out (ET may have something to do with that), but has proven to have stood the test of time! One of the best movies ever ... same or similar things can be said about Blade Runner.

The documentary (which played as part of Frightfest) goes in depth with a few of those ... letting "famous" geeks ... well geek out! Or fanboy out or whatever you want to call it. It may have a frantic pace - but it is quite enticing to say the least ... if you are a Geek, you'll probably love this ... you may not agree with everything, but that is the fun of it ...

I can only review episode 1 of this 4 part series as the rest is not available to me yet, but so far it's good.

You can see it's not the highest budget documentary ever made, with title cards, fonts and flat graphics looking somewhat basic & home-made, but it's good where it counts, with the most important thing in place: plenty of interviews and soundbites with people who actually appeared in the movies, or were involved in making them, plus a surprisingly large number of names from the video game industry. For instance I was happy to see Nolan Bushnell of Atari. The early eighties console and arcade scene was inextricably linked to the films in the minds of kids of the time, one of which I am.

The first episode does have a few too many fast cuts, sometimes the rush of comments from different people spending no more than a few seconds on each person can get a bit messy, but I can see that they are trying to fit a lot in the first episode by way of an introduction to the whole thing, so maybe in the next episodes things will calm down a bit. In this episode, the main focus does eventually settle down on Poltergeist & E. T. and plenty of interesting and entertaining information is divulged, including quite a lot on Spielberg's cancelled project "Night Skies", which directly influenced E. T., which I was not aware of.

The most important thing you take away from it is the sheer Spielbergian wonder of the film and other films of the year, because of course Spielberg was possibly the single most influential person of the early 80s genre blockbusters, so he does deserve the spotlight he gets in the second half of the show. Even though he himself is not interviewed (the show is not quite made on the scale to get interviews with Lucas, Spielberg etc), plenty of people who worked with him and knew him are interviewed, so it works.

I will definitely be watching the coming episodes and can recommend this without hesitation.

The description of this mini series is "A remarkable new epic documentary spotlighting the pop culture milestones of 1982, including notable motion pictures, TV, music and video games of that seminal year." It is a pretty good series with a number of experts talking about the movies of 1982, but the description is very misleading. It is over 90 percent about the movies of 1982, which is fine, but I would have liked to hear more about the music and video games of the year.