Babel Clash

Today, one of my co-workers on the borders.com side of the business sent me a message asking if he could contribute to Babel Clash.  After seeing what he had to offer, how could I refuse?  What I will post below is his list of the Top 10 science fiction/fantasy movies ever made.  Let us know what you think of his list.  Is anything missing?  His list does include some shockers I wouldn’t have necessarily thought about on my first pass, but after thinking further, they all belong here!

Take it away Aaron!

I hardly remember a time when science fiction wasn’t a big part of my life. One of the first non-picture books I can remember reading is Alexander Key’s The Forgotten Door, and I remember how much of a shock to my developing story-absorbing system it was. It starts with a young man who falls through some sort of time/space rift – I remember thinking that this must be a sequel to some other book, because up until then I had no idea that books could start anywhere other than the beginning! – and ends up on Earth. The details of the story are vague now, but I know that he was some sort of alien, arrived on Earth with telepathic powers, and had to evade the government to find his way home. I had never read anything like it, and have been soaking up the mythology of other worlds ever since. Here, then, is my list of the ten best examples of what people can come up with when they take what we know about ourselves and the Universe and let their imaginations run riot.

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1. Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)

“He says the sun came out last night… he says it sang to him.” I was instantly hooked by that line, which comes at the tail end of Close Encounters’ first scene. It was my introduction to the films of Steven Spielberg, and I’ve been in awe ever since.

Close Encounters chronicles the build-up to mankind’s first face-to-face meeting with alien intelligence. The interesting thing about it is that, even though the aliens’ intentions are totally benign, the human view of their first attempts at contact come across as frightening. By the time the movie’s over, though, it’s clear that they just lack the manners and tact that humans take for granted. They implant visions in the heads of those they’d like to meet (including a boyishly charming Richard Dreyfuss), which comes across as psychic torment… they physically abduct others, which is shown in a gut-wrenching scene of a little boy being torn away from his mother (played by Melinda Dillon) in the middle of the night… they return vehicles they’ve picked up over the years, resulting in empty American fighter planes being found in rural Mexico, thirty years overdue, or oil tankers being unceremoniously dropped in the Gobi desert. These occurrences are chased after and puzzled over by a team of government agents, led by Francois Truffaut and his assistant/interpreter, Bob Balaban. They are the ones who finally determine what it is the aliens are trying to say, and it’s that they want to meet at Devil’s Tower, Wyoming. And one world-changing night, they do.

It’s astonishing how long that final encounter is… it lasts almost forty minutes, virtually without dialogue. And it’s a masterpiece of special effects and emotional orchestration, gradually revealing layer upon layer of wonder until there’s nothing left to do but gawp.

In 1996, my wife and I got the chance to walk around the entire base of Devil’s Tower, and I was little disappointed to see that there’s really nowhere you could build a massive landing pad like the government did in the movie. However, it really put into perspective that climactic shot where the titanic mothership comes silently floating over the top of it. Both times I’ve seen the film in a theater, that shot brings a shocked gasp out of the audience, and I love hearing that. It’s an affirmation of exactly how much a movie can transport you, when done right, and that lights on a screen have the ability to add up to so much more.

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2. Star Wars - Original Trilogy (1977-1983) - a bit of a cheat lumping them all together, but whaddaya gonna do?

I was almost the exactly perfect age that the Star Wars movies were geared toward — 5 when the original came out, 11 when the trilogy finished. I was young enough for it to hardwire the love of movies into my soul, and I grew up enough over the course of those six years that I felt as if I had lived through the saga myself.

But you don’t have to be of an impressionable age to love Star Wars, and you can consider the reason inspired or crassly calculated and be able to base a legitimate argument on it. George Lucas was a self-proclaimed padawan of Joseph Campbell, the master of comparative mythology, and from him took lessons from every great story that had ever been told and retold throughout human history. The reason that the original trilogy resonates with so many different people, in so many different places and times, is because George took the time to learn what stories mankind has always told himself around the home fire to make his world seem more dazzling than it is, and distilled the best of that tradition, placing it in a timeless context that is simultaneously futuristic and “a long, long time ago”.

Do I sound like I’m overstating? Like I’m just a sci-fi nerd that lives and breathes anything having to do with intergalactic struggles of good and evil? Well, that might be true. But think about how the American culture changed in the summer of 1977. Star Wars not only lent legitimacy to an oft-maligned genre, it revitalized the film industry and connected the country – and the world – in a way that no one story had before, or has since.

Most of all, though, I think Star Wars opened up the process of moviemaking to the public, turning it into less of a mystical art that wizened old studio heads practiced in dark editing rooms, and made it a transparent, glowing thing, open and available to all. No one had ever seen making-of documentaries on that scale before, and I doubt that the general public had ever paid so much attention to obscure things like sound editing, bluescreen and puppetry. It became not only a cinematic thrill ride, but it indoctrinated us all into the living heart of moviemaking itself. It made us appreciate movies more by understanding everything that went into them. It drew us into its process, showed us around, and made everyone think, I bet I could do that. It turned us all into filmmakers, or at least into people who think like filmmakers.

I hardly remember seeing Star Wars for the first time. It must have been during its reissue in 1978, because I doubt my parents would have taken me until I was at least 6. There are only flashes of memory, and even then they’re only recollections of how I felt that first time… the only ones I can remember specifically are my revulsion of the bloody arm on the floor of the Mos Eisley cantina, and how I thought the movie must be over when everyone first escaped from the Death Star, only to be swept up into an even grander finale. The characters and situations have been with me, for all practical purposes, my entire life.

I had never seen a film without a neatly wrapped-up ending until The Empire Strikes Back. I remember stumbling out of the theater, almost unable to speak, not believing that so many things could be left unresolved, the answers still three years away (approximately a century, in kid-years).

The night a family friend took me to see Return of the Jedi, already a month into its run, the place was still packed. I remember it almost being like a religious revival, with people crowding the aisles, cheering and laughing together. I even liked the original Ewok song, which I’ve since grown to passionately hate. (Of all the changes in the Special Editions that came out in 1997, the replacement of that song was the only change that improved on the original.)

Then we all waited for sixteen long years. While I waited, I graduated high school, went to college, got married, started my career, and for all intents and purposes became a grown-up. And I have to admit, when someone at my work got access to the video of the teaser trailer for Episode I and showed it several times one afternoon, it stoked my inner child again. I couldn’t wait to see the real thing. It seemed strange, a whole new set of characters and places that didn’t really seem too consistent with the original nuts-and-bolts kind of style, but I knew I’d be in a theater seat anyway.

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3. Contact (1997)

There’s something about first-contact films that really reach out and grab me… I suppose that, being brought up without a clear-cut religion, meeting an alien civilization is the closest analogy to envisioning God I have. This is the second of three films of this type I have on this list, and it strikes a glorious middle ground between the other two: where 2001 is cold and remote, and Close Encounters comes dangerously close to going over-the-top with its lights and music and soft-eyed aliens, this one is the most subtle, the most realistic.

I’ve been a fan of Carl Sagan ever since I watched the original airings of his Cosmos television series in 1980, and this film is based on his sole fiction novel. In it, Jodie Foster plays a woman who has always been interested in listening for signs of life, from ham radios when she was little to massive arrays of radio telescopes in her adulthood. Then one day, The Signal comes… the one she, and everyone else on Earth, has been waiting for, the one that finally resolves the question of whether we’re really alone in the universe.

The answer comes in the form of instructions that illustrate how to build a machine that will transport a single person to an unknown destination. Through many trials and twists, Jodie ends up being the one to go. The machine revs up, the craft is launched, and she is sent through a hallucinatory journey that reveals much of the true nature of the universe to her, and to us. It’s clear that the story was written by a serious scientist; the plot is relatively straightforward, with rational thought upending sci-fi clichés in many tiny places, but the heart of the main character matches Sagan’s own. He was a scientist who saw through the lens of logic, physics, and faith in mankind, and to him no amount of scientific understanding could cause the world to lost any of its marvel or wonder.

I wish I had known going in how beautiful and dreamlike this meeting with another civilization would be… I guess at first I thought it was going to be another full-blown special effects extravaganza (Robert Zemeckis, Contact’s director, is a frequent collaborator with Spielberg, after all). In thinking that, I was disappointed, but after taking the time to think about the themes presented in the film, I realized that anything else would have been playing into the conventions that Sagan meant to dispel. And it’s also no accident that Jodie returns from her trip with no concrete evidence that she ever went at all. The underlying idea of the entire film, echoed by Jodie’s on/off romance with a young priest, is that religious faith and scientific faith are two sides of the same coin. The leap must always be taken, whether it’s God or the Universe itself that is there to catch you.

Even so, I have to say that there are choices the filmmakers made that I don’t quite agree with… a strange choice of special effect that turns Jodie’s face into that of her younger self at an inopportune moment, a plot clarification at the end that probably should have been left open to interpretation… but on the whole it’s a satisfying three-course intellectual meal.

Even if you decide not to see this film, watch the first three minutes. I think everyone should see at least that much, because there’s no way you can experience the first shot and not be humbled by our place in the Universe. That’s all I’ll say about it, except to repeat Jodie’s character’s rationale for there having to be intelligent life out there: “Otherwise, it seems like an awful waste of space.”

 

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4. Back to the Future (1985)

Sometime in 1984, my family (living in Ohio) was invited to an early screening of this movie, which was destined to become one of the biggest hits of the following year. It’s hard to imagine such a thing happening nowadays… I admit, I have no idea what kind of shape the film was in compared to its finished form, whether all the music and special effects were in place, but I do remember that it was an exhilarating thrill ride even that long before its final release.

Michael J. Fox, back in the decades-long span when he could convincingly play a teenager, plays a young man who seemed destined to be an underachiever the same way his parents were, who are dead-end suburbanites whose lives went downhill from high school. The only bright spot in Michael’s life is his friendship with a reclusive scientist, who one day reveals to him the biggest secret invention ever: a traveling time machine built out of a DeLorean. The hapless teen sends himself back in time thirty years and manages to break the time machine in the process. This, of course, sets up Michael having to find the younger version of his scientist friend to repair the thing. And like any Zemeckis/Spielberg film, never content to have only one conflict at a time, the situation is further complicated by Michael accidentally diverting his parents away from their fateful first meeting.

One of my favorite things about this film (and its two sequels as well, although the third film is better than the second) is how not a frame of film is wasted, and all actions have a payoff further on down the line. Not only that, but it’s about time travel, as challenging a mental puzzle as I could handle at the ripe old age of twelve. I’ve spent many a time pondering the old “grandfather paradox”, determining what would happen if you went back in time and killed your own ancestors. No answer seems satisfying or even sensible, and later I was just as mesmerized by the implications of other time-travel films from The Terminator to The Butterfly Effect that for a while I seriously considered writing a non-fiction book about the history of time-travel through literature and film. The whole obsession started here.

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5. Flash Gordon (1980)

There were two birthday traditions in my family: you got to choose dinner on your particular night, whether that was veal parmesan or The Ground Round, and also you got to choose one movie to go see. My brother’s choice for his eighth birthday was this film, one of the many members of the subgenre that should be titled “Foreign-Produced Star Wars Ripoffs”. It’s been one of our shared favorite films ever since, a pinnacle of pure Euro-cheese that hasn’t been rivaled.

The plot hews close to the Depression-era comic strips and movie serials that it’s based on: a trio of regular folks (a macho hero, a female news reporter, and a half-mad scientist) travel to another dimension to defeat an evil overlord that wants to somehow both destroy and enslave Earth at the same time…

I remember what a spectacle it all was the first time I saw it… first of all, it has an amazing roster of stage and screen stars in it, which I didn’t really appreciate until I was older (Max von Sydow? Peter Wyngarde? Brian Blessed? Timothy Dalton? Richard O’Brien? Chaim Topol?!?). It makes you wonder what kind of favors producer Dino di Laurentiis had to call in. Unfortunately, Dino missed the mega-franchise boat several times in his career, sometimes too late (Orca in 1977, Dune in 1984), sometimes too early (King Kong in 1976)… but had enough hits to keep himself going.

Flash Gordon should have been one of them. On paper it looks great; first of all, there’s that cast, although it’s effectively hamstrung by putting hapless newcomers Sam J. Jones and Melody Anderson in the lead roles. Secondly, there’s more art direction in here for four other films, from the flashy red ‘n’ gold disco/art deco look of Mongo City to the metallic sky-castle of the Hawkmen, down to the trippy day-glo liquid skies. Not only that, but the whole thing is set to a glorious score by arty-rock band Queen, which gave it as much street cred as you could get in 1980.

Sounds awfully kid-friendly, doesn’t it? But there’s a layer of pre-PG-13 adultness lying on top of the proceedings: skin-tight spandex outfits, sexual innuendo, even a strange kind of fetish with gross-out moments involving eyes (which are the two moments I simply couldn’t watch as a kid and still am a little squeamish about to this day). Still, the cast (with the exception of the aforementioned Jones & Anderson) play it so straight that even the campy moments are delivered without a wink, and it’s that sense of fun that makes it all work.
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6. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

Some people love this film. They believe it to be “the thinking man’s sci-fi film”, one that’s so ambitious and meticulous that it’s unassailable. Others see it as an old, inert bit of problematic filmmaking in which the computers have more personality than the humans. And I think they’re both right. You can’t approach it expecting it to be exciting and fun, but if you let it work its magic, it creates a unique kind of spell. I think it’s telling that the last time I watched it all in one sitting, I had a blinding headache and specifically picked it to let it wash over me, wanting both a minimum of mental stimulation and enough time passage for the Excedrin to kick in.

People also say that there’s a lot of things left open to interpretation in the plot, created jointly by the writer Arthur C. Clarke and filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, but I don’t see it that way. It hinges on the conceit that there’s an alien intelligence out there, one that comes along every million years or so to test us and help us achieve the next level of evolution. This idea is first presented in an extended prologue in which ape-like proto-humans find a black stone monolith suddenly in their midst. The one who overcomes his fear and actually touches the motionless intruder later begins using bones as tools. The film then flash-forwards to the titular year, in which mankind finds another monolith, this time unearthed in a crater on the Moon, which gives its discoverers a psychic command to travel to Jupiter. We follow this ill-fated mission, in which man (Keir Dullea) and machine (the omnipresent red eye of the HAL-9000) face off in a slow-motion duel to the death. Man prevails, and is rewarded by a protracted metamorphosis stage before emerging as the next step in human evolution, the Star-Child.

That’s the whole thing, and it takes two and a half hours to unspool. Kubrick loves to mediate on moments, and there are plenty of them in this film. It’s also full of recurring motifs (those black monoliths, birthdays, mankind’s similarly-shaped tools — from prehistoric bone to bleached-white spaceship). The music is amazing, using classical waltzes right alongside avant-garde soundscapes from Gyorgy Ligeti, and the special effects, even seen from the perspective of twentieth-century CGI, are still perfect.

For not having all that much happen, a lot is going on in this film, and is best enjoyed after a lot of thought later on. If that’s your idea of a good time, then you probably already love this film. I’m with you.

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7. Aliens (1986)

I have a theory about sequels to hit films. In order to truly succeed, they have to do one of two things: go for a completely different style from the original film, or expand the mythology of the original — make that first story a small part of a much larger canvas. Aliens does both at the same time, surpassing the original in every way, from effects to suspense to action. This was James Cameron’s first film after bursting onto the scene with The Terminator, and he brought that independent sensibility the big-budget sequel with an integrity and inventiveness that 99 percent of the sequels out there simply don’t have.

I have to admit, I was skeptical when I first saw the cardboard standee in the movie theater lobby stating, “Aliens… this time, it’s war.” Actually, I distinctly remember thinking, “Oh, I don’t think so.” But I never was a good barometer to measure a film’s success by (I was sure that Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings was doomed to abject failure before I saw it). But the plot is beautifully simple in relation to the original: it goes back to the fact that the ill-fated crew of the Nostromo, of which Sigourney Weaver was the only survivor, discovered a whole cache of alien eggs on that strange planet it landed on before being methodically picked off by the occupant of a single one of those eggs. Sigourney’s escape shuttle gets picked up after she’s been hibernating for almost 60 years. That haunted planet has since been colonized, and the thousand-odd residents have suddenly stopped contacting Earth. Sigourney agrees to go back with a platoon of space Marines, provided that it’s purely to rescue the colonists and exterminate anything else. Of course, it’s not quite that easy.

It’s amazing how Cameron ups the ante on this one… the most obvious being that there’s tons of the aliens to be dealt with, not to mention their gigantic Queen… emotionally, Sigourney has to contend with the fact that her daughter back on Earth has passed away in the years since she went away, and then finds the sole survivor of the infested colony to be a little girl. Also, she has to make her peace with an android, the very same type of character that betrayed her the first time around. And of course, there’s tons of action, which can almost be seen as a Vietnam parable… the technologically-advanced Marines have to contend with the natives, who can blend in seamlessly with their environment, and deal out a fate worse than death to their victims. There’s also a wonderful bit of payoff at the end for something that seems like a comedy bit near the beginning of the film (and involves an ancestor of the AMP suits used extensively in Avatar). It’s everything you want in a sci-fi sequel and more.

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8. Brazil (1985)

Ah, Brazil. The more years pass, the more the world looks more like Terry Gilliam’s black-humored distillation of Orwell’s 1984. But where Orwell’s vision was the ultimate in communist oppression, full of rationing and civilian monitoring, Gilliam’s government-gone-wrong depicts a society that is being eaten alive by its own bureaucracy. It’s one of the darkest comedies out there, and you have to know from the outset that it’s not going to end well.

Jonathan Pryce plays a man who (of course) works for the government, an accountant for a program where typographical errors can get a person arrested and killed – and then billed for the electricity and labors costs incurred by their own ”interrogation”. His soul-crushing job of shoving receipts into pneumatic tubes all day is tempered only by his dream life, in which he’s a majestic, flying superhero battling giant samurai warriors in a continuing quest to save a beautiful maiden.

His waking and inner lives collide one day when he literally sees the girl of his dreams… and he’s drawn into a twisty, surreal investigation of a man wrongfully abducted by the government, who has ties to a renegade terrorist/plumber(!) played by Robert DeNiro. Gilliam’s fondness for gigantic sets and visual metaphor follow him as Pryce becomes implicated in the very crimes he’s trying to solve… and it’s only through his dream life that he can save himself when his number finally comes up. Whether you consider Brazil to have a happy ending or not depends a lot on how you perceive your own world, and leaves you with a lot to ponder.

It’s the little things about this overblown production that make it human – Katherine Helmond’s parade of shoe-shaped hats and infatuation with plastic surgery, the gleaming vision of futuristic architecture that turns out to be a scale model next to a desolate industrial wasteland, the way Jonathan and the man in the next office have to share a single desk that sticks through a hole in their shared wall… One of the most chilling parts comes when Jonathan goes out to dinner with his fiancée and future mother-in-law. The restaurant where they’re eating is hit mid-meal by a terrorist bomb in the kitchen, and the waiters simply set up bamboo screens to shield the customers, who go right on eating, ignoring the flames and screams. It’s clear that this sort of thing happens all the time. Are we really that far from bringing that mentality into the real world, when we’re under a constant state of threat by unseen forces? And are we really that far from a world where the government abducts and tortures its own residents for information about insurgents? Maybe we never really were that far, and only now we’re realizing our own true colors. But whatever you think, you have to admit that Brazil looks more and more like the real world all the time.

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9. Krull (1983)

Here’s another entry into the foreign Star Wars rip-off genre, although it tries to mesh its sci-fi aspects with the multitude of swords-and-sorcery films that came in the wake of Excalibur and Conan the Barbarian… but so help me, it’s entertaining. It’s another one that ran perennially on HBO back in the day, and its flying glaive has carved out a special place in my heart.

Krull actually borders on copyright infringement, it cribs so much from the original Star Wars… it was even released in the same year as Return of the Jedi. You’ve got a feisty princess held prisoner in a literally “hidden fortress” by an inhuman villain and his countless white-armored minions. Meanwhile, a naïve hero with an ancient, mystical weapon (in this case, an indestructible, jewel-encrusted throwing star), an elderly sage, and a small band of outlaws try to save her. There’s even a thin, fussy British guy and his short counterpart (the immortal David Battley and a little kid) as comic relief!

Sounds awfully familiar, doesn’t it? But director Peter Hyams and his team tried very consciously to take every sci-fi/fantasy convention they could think of and shoehorn them in to create a solid two hours of entertainment unlike anything you’ve ever seen. Just name it, and it’s in there – a benevolent Cyclops, a blind mystic seer, shapeshifters both good and evil, Harryhausenesque giant stop-motion spiders, even horses that fly on hooves of fire!

Come to think of it, this film has a rather strong acting pedigree as well… Freddie Jones, Lysette Anthony, Francesca Annis, and a then-unknown Liam Neeson… It’s a great guilty pleasure that keeps presenting something new every two minutes. As a kid, it seemed like one of the biggest epic I had ever seen… and you know, it still kind of does.

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10. A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001)

It took the contributions of both Steven Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick to make a film that made me totally rethink the path of human evolution… I’m still half-convinced that human beings’ entire purpose on this earth is to create the next stage of evolution… the thinking machine. Watch this movie, then look at how the machines we use every day are getting more and more lifelike, and you’ll see what I mean.

The whole question A.I. raises is this: how should we, as human beings, deal with machines that are (for all intents and purposes) real, even better and smarter than we are? And how should those machines deal with themselves? Apparently, the day when we have to answer those questions is coming.

It all starts when a near-future couple whose child has gone into a seemingly unrecoverable coma decide to buy a replacement child, a “mecha” to take the place in their hearts that the real “orga” child has left empty. They grow attached to the robot boy, but things get confusing when their biological son wakes up from his coma. Conflicts and sibling rivalry arise, and since they can’t just return the mecha boy or shut him off, the agonized parents abanadon him out in the forest. The boy (in an astoundingly deep performance by Haley Joel Osment) finds a whole society of cast-off robots, and with the help of a kind of gigolo-tronic mecha played by Jude Law, begins the search for the answer to the ultimate question… who are we, and what’s the point of it all? It’s a robot’s question, but it applies equally well to real people, and this trip through a beautiful/sad future is a millennia-spanning mediation on the answer.

The history of the film’s production is rather convoluted: It’s originally Kubrick’s idea, but he died just when a collaboration with Spielberg was starting to yield some fruit, and also at the time when CG effects were getting close to pulling it off what they envisioned. Spielberg took the reins to finish the project, and it’s really a testament to Spielberg’s genius that so much of Kubrick’s vision makes it through intact. They made a great collaborative team: just like the way Lennon and McCartney forced each other to balance the fine line between pub sing-along and avant-garde rock, Kubrick’s sterile, cold storytelling both tempers and is enlivened by Spielberg’s sometimes over-sentimental tendencies. For every robot that’s brutally torn apart in a weird kind of gladiatorial rodeo, there’s a sweet Pinocchioesque subplot. It all makes for a supremely thoughtful and delightful film.

It’s actually a rethinking of 2001 in a very basic way… in that film, another intelligence comes along every now and then to boost primitive humans on to the next level in their evolution. This time, it’s the humans who elevate simple machines to the level of sentient beings. It’s probably not much of a coincidence that it was released in 2001, either.

Spielberg himself sums up the theme of the film in one of the making-of documentaries, and his short speech has made me think more about the human condition, and of the nature of life itself, than just about anything else I’ve ever read or heard. I’ll finish my list by recklessly paraphrasing it here: “Say you’ve got a mechanical toothbrush that speaks to you. It says hello every morning, knows your name, says encouraging things, and it makes you feel a little bit better before you go off to work every morning. Now, one day you come home, and your dog has chewed that toothbrush to bits. It was really just a piece of plastic and wires, but it seemed almost like a little friend to you and now it’s gone. Now… how do you feel about it?” His point is that it’s mankind’s natural instinct to give inanimate objects thoughts and feelings, and where is the line when you should start treating them as if they really do?

I caught a few minutes of Back to the Future II yesterday.  In the future, there’s a fax machine in every home, and there’s no e-mail or internet.  We see the challenge of near-future sci-fi… predicting future technology isn’t so easy.  Anybody else have any favorite anachronisms from sci-fil films?

Did anyone else watch the pilot episode of the new “V”?  I vaguely remember the original.  The aliens ripping off their human faces to reveal their true reptilian faces freaked me out as a kid.  I seriously had nightmares about it.  This new show is shaping up for solid entertainment, but I’m not expecting any nightmares this time.  It’s flashy and fun, but I miss some of the mystery and creepiness that came with the original.