arsonplus entertainment

1. FORBBIDEN PLANET: Far and away the single most prescient and influential piece of genre filmmaking ever to grace the silver screen. There was nothing quite like it in cinema’s canons beforehand and, these days, about the only outer-space-genre we see that it wasn’t a direct influence on appears in the form of George Lucas’ lonely Flash Gordon inspired franchise. Which means that It literally created science fiction’s most popular sub-genre and “our” collective vision of the future “where things get better” with one Walt Disney assisted Technicolor stroke; and everyone who’s mined its rather substantial depths -- from Roddenberry and Larson with Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica to Straczynski and Whedon with B-5 and Firefly should be paying its creator’s royalties. O’ yeah, and it was a damnably smart and damn fine film to boot.

Posted by Peter Collinson on Thursday, September 07, 2006 at 9:13 PM | Permalink