SA is dead on with this one -22 most awful moments in Sci Fi

[Molyneux]

Starship Troopers apologists always argue that Verhoeven's version was wrong because it made Heinlein's idea look bad, whereas they think a proper adaptation would have made it look good. This pre-supposes that Heinlein's idea was, in fact, a good idea.

My reaction on seeing the Verhoeven movie was: "...where the hell is the powered armor? Why are they fighting giant meter-long-claw-wielding spiders in bulletproof vests? Where the fuck did the cool stuff go?"

[Junghalli]

In fairness to the SST book, all the book's franchise system really amounts to is that if you want to be able to vote you have to take a government job for a couple of years and put your name in a military draft lottery.

It's not a policy I would support, but I really don't see that as terribly much of a hardship for the average person. It's hardly some fascist Neo-Sparta where voting is limited to some ultra-restricted select group.

[Netko]

• Babylon 5: The Legend of the Rangers - AIIIE. I've seen fifteen seconds and a script for this. But, I can't comprehend why JMS did this. He's produced some other flops... but... To paraphrase a youtube comment said "Not even Satan could come up with a worse B5 movie if he tried."

I know I'm going to get flak for this... but I've found LOTR not quite that horrific as most seem to think it is - even within the context of the various B5 projects. While it has quite a lot of flaws (spinning monkey-on-crack targeting system, haunted ghost corvette, etc.), at its core its a fun action-packed romp in the B5 universe devoid of its usual political shenanigans. I think it could have worked had it gone to series. It would have undoubtedly lacked the depth of B5, but as a lighthearted action-adventure space romp I can see it working (roughly comparable to first season of Andromeda - hopefully without something comparable to Andromeda's metamorphosis into Hecules, in Space!).

It was, for me, more fun then roughly half the Crusade episodes, which was a lot of time boring, with forced sexuality and sex jokes - for anyone not remembering, just two words: Pak'ma'ra porn, not to mention that it had poor cinematography and atrocious music (really, it should be an example of how bad music can take the entire series down a notch or two). LOTR certainly was more fun then Lost Tales with its, again, bad cinematography , Crusade-like long moments of silence, one atrocious story (the first Christianity-is-true one) and one bland, forgettable one with a few nice character moments and scenes.

[Ford Prefect]

My reaction on seeing the Verhoeven movie was: "...where the hell is the powered armor? Why are they fighting giant meter-long-claw-wielding spiders in bulletproof vests? Where the fuck did the cool stuff go?"

This is what lots of people tend to say, but they seem to forget that the power suits make up an absolutely tiny percentage of the actual book comapred to everything else. It's not exactly Armor or anything.

[Darth Wong]

In fairness to the SST book, all the book's franchise system really amounts to is that if you want to be able to vote you have to take a government job for a couple of years and put your name in a military draft lottery.

It's not a policy I would support, but I really don't see that as terribly much of a hardship for the average person. It's hardly some fascist Neo-Sparta where voting is limited to some ultra-restricted select group.

It's not about the level of "hardship". It's about the fact that everyone must be indoctrinated by the State and conditioned to obey commands from the state apparatus for a period of years before they get their rights. Anyone who enters this system must accept orders from the State during his period of service. There are no voters anywhere in this entire system who have lived their lives without being servants of the State.

In short, under Heinlein's utopia, everyone must learn early in life that they serve the State, not the other way around. Otherwise, their rights are curtailed.

[Molyneux]

My reaction on seeing the Verhoeven movie was: "...where the hell is the powered armor? Why are they fighting giant meter-long-claw-wielding spiders in bulletproof vests? Where the fuck did the cool stuff go?"

This is what lots of people tend to say, but they seem to forget that the power suits make up an absolutely tiny percentage of the actual book comapred to everything else. It's not exactly Armor or anything.

Well, the other differences between the movie and the book aren't that obvious on seeing, say, a movie poster. The thrift-store armor catches the eye, though.

[The Yosemite Bear]

mind you the sci-fi channel movies should be listed as a crime against sentient life.

[Molyneux]

mind you the sci-fi channel movies should be listed as a crime against sentient life.

Does "The Man with the Screaming Brain" count? That was actually kind of fun in a severely campy way.

[Darth Wong]

If one is going to step out of the the shows and movies themselves and look at awful moments in the history of the genre itself, I'd have to point to the first episode of The X-Files. That was the moment that science fiction became popularly intertwined with:

1) Ghost stories
2) Supernatural bullshit
3) Conspiracy theories

Ever since then, the Space Channel has devoted at least as much time to crackpot nonsense as they have to actual science fiction.

[The Yosemite Bear]

mind you the sci-fi channel movies should be listed as a crime against sentient life.

Does "The Man with the Screaming Brain" count? That was actually kind of fun in a severely campy way.

exception that proves the rule.

while my roomate was just panning decoys, grendel, and the wraiths of Roanoke last night, he asked my if there was any good movies, or at least good campy movies not something that the crew of the satillite of love would gouge thier photoreceptors out over. I said yes, sci fi offered Bruce Cambell money to make waht ever he wanted, and than released to end result.

[Junghalli]

It's not about the level of "hardship". It's about the fact that everyone must be indoctrinated by the State and conditioned to obey commands from the state apparatus for a period of years before they get their rights. Anyone who enters this system must accept orders from the State during his period of service.

Isn't that true of any nation that has mandatory conscription, as many RL states do?

Granted, there's usually some kind of exception for conscientious objectors, whereas the SST Federation's system has no exception for people with a philosophical problem with the idea of serving the government, and I won't argue that's a very significant issue.

Just to be clear, I'm not arguing the SST book society is anything worth emulating. I'm just pointing out that, as far as imaginable societies go, it's really not all that bad. It's considerably more democratic than 1850 America, for instance.

[Covenant]

The difference is that service usually means service in some aspect, such as helping people, and not always conscription into the military. You could easily write a story about a benevolent society that requires public service, to help break people out of closed communities and give them all a sense of civic service and gives them an experience that allows them to feel rewarded for their efforts (as well as help redirect the eneergy of their teens, so instead of a negative perception of teens you have a positive one) but Heinlein didn't.

By forcing them all into his incredibly negative form of military, you're basically forcing them all through the facist cookie-cutter before they get their rights. Military service and civil service are not bad things, but when you wrap them all up with compulsion, propaganda, extreme obedience to the state and an environment of violence, judgementalism and hysteria, then you've gone from any sort of even-handed form of government to some kind of masturbatory fantasy meant to reward only those hardened individuals who feel they've earned it.

You're basically making the speech from "A Few Good Men" into national policy, without understanding that the reason having such a view is unacceptable is because it serves no end but it's own self-perpetuation. Starship Troopers' civilization was just a factory for the perpetuation of the state, not the achievement of any higher purpose.

[Junghalli]

Err, they weren't all forced into the military. Only a small fraction of the volunteers actually ended up serving in the military, most of them just ended up doing some random government job. That was my point.

[Stark]

If one is going to step out of the the shows and movies themselves and look at awful moments in the history of the genre itself, I'd have to point to the first episode of The X-Files. That was the moment that science fiction became popularly intertwined with:

1) Ghost stories
2) Supernatural bullshit
3) Conspiracy theories

Ever since then, the Space Channel has devoted at least as much time to crackpot nonsense as they have to actual science fiction.

Whatever it was seen as at the time, the X-Files really mishandled the idea of 'guy investigating wierd shit'. Most episodes, after some frank skeptism and demands for evidence which can't be met, there's a shot of the DEVIL, or SOME ALIENS, or JESUS HIMSELF, thus making all of Mulder's retarded, baseless, paranoid ravings correct. I think the show would have been much better if they left that sort of 'obviously it was actually the devil' stuff out, and simply had Mulder appearing to be correct but without any real evidence.

It certainly would have made the years and years of 'that's impossible Mulder' easier to swallow.

I'd never drawn the link between supernatural shit in the X-Files and bollocks like Medium, though. That makes the whole 'episode about magic from hell which is 100% real' crap even worse.

[Adrian Laguna]

The difference is that service usually means service in some aspect, such as helping people, and not always conscription into the military. You could easily write a story about a benevolent society that requires public service, to help break people out of closed communities and give them all a sense of civic service and gives them an experience that allows them to feel rewarded for their efforts (as well as help redirect the eneergy of their teens, so instead of a negative perception of teens you have a positive one) but Heinlein didn't.

He thought he did.

"In STARSHIP TROOPERS it is stated flatly and more than once that nineteen out of twenty veterans are not military veterans. Instead, 95% of voters are what we call today “former members of federal
civil service.” [Heinlein 1980:397, emphasis in original]

and

"No military or civil servant can vote or hold office until after he is discharged and is again a civilian. The military tend to be despised by most civilians and this is made explicit. A career military man is most unlikely ever to vote or hold office; he is more likely to be dead -- and if he does live through it, he'll vote for the first time at 40 or older." [Heinlein 1980:398]

The first quote is actually incorrect. It is, in fact, not stated anywhere in the book that 95% of the of voters are not military veterans. It was most likely either inadvertently left out or edited out, the man did write the whole thing in only a few weeks.

[Covenant]

Oh, so he actually tried to make the book a bit less explicit than he did? Well, that's in his favor, but it's sad he forgot to keep it in--that or he backpedalled later. Regardless, it's a scary civilization, and it's penchant for Genocide is not particularly heartwarming.

[Plekhanov]

The movie utterly fails to show how the bugs are a threat. Had it been any half-way decent 20th Century Earth military force doing the drop the bugs would have been slaughtered. Fuck, the god-damned Ethiopian Army would have probably defeated the bugs. I'd really like to see one of those warrior insects do anything to a T-55 other than scratch the paint. Meanwhile, in the book they've got bigass beam cannons and a considerable space fleet, which IIRC they used to bombard Earth.

Move the goalposts much? You falsely claimed that the bugs in the film were ‘helpless’ despite the fact that they dominate numerous planets, bombard the earth, take out terran spacecraft… and I called you on it.

Yeah because there's nothing the least bit fascistic about a utopian militaristic society set up by veterans in reaction to what Heinlein erroneously believed to be the failures of liberal democracy

The Terran Federation is clearly a democracy, and in fact they are more democratic than the United States in 1900, and way more democratic than the United States in 1800.

Bullshit even the US of 1900 with its restricted franchise was far more democratic than a society in which you can only vote & hold political power if you’ve passed through a rigorous indoctrination system.

Besides contrary to what you ignorantly seem to believe the mere presence of some element of democracy in a political system doesn’t stop it being fascist. Fascism is broadly defined as nationalist, statist, militaristic, anti-communist and anti-liberal Heinleins troopers society is quite obviously all of those things

[Junghalli]

it's penchant for Genocide is not particularly heartwarming.

I didn't get the impression of them being unwilling to negotiate with their enemies. They were trying to set up a prisoner exchange program at the end, and to make an alliance with the Skinnies even though they'd originally been at war with them.

Bullshit even the US of 1900 with its restricted franchise was far more democratic than a society in which you can only vote & hold political power if you’ve passed through a rigorous indoctrination system.

What "vigorous indoctrination system"? I don't remember one from the book. Rico's training mostly focused on the same kind of stuff modern military training would (unit cohesion and necessary skills), not ideological correctness. Though it's been a while since I read the book, I may have forgotten something.

[Patrick Degan]

In fairness to the SST book, all the book's franchise system really amounts to is that if you want to be able to vote you have to take a government job for a couple of years and put your name in a military draft lottery.

It's not a policy I would support, but I really don't see that as terribly much of a hardship for the average person. It's hardly some fascist Neo-Sparta where voting is limited to some ultra-restricted select group.

It is terribly restricted because it would be physically impossible to enroll any sizable segment of the population into civil service and put them into useful work. After you've got enough workers to build the WPA highways or any of the dozen other projects along these lines, or do rural work projects in the CCC, what do you do with the excess? You're either carrying millions of essentially redundant national service personnel, in which case you may as well dispense with this requirement for full political participation altogether, or you have a society in which only those in the tiny minority of the population who qualified for national service (it's not enough merely to enroll for it) are eligible to vote and hold office.

[Netko]

There was a point in the book where they explicitly point out that anyone who wants to serve must be allowed to, giving an example of a severely disabled individual akin to Stephen Hawking - and yes, even in the book they acknowledge that a lot of the jobs given out are basically busy-work.

While I don't agree with the book's worldview, the accusation that enfranchisement is limited to a small minority with little hope for others is very much untrue.

[Nephtys]

it's penchant for Genocide is not particularly heartwarming.

I didn't get the impression of them being unwilling to negotiate with their enemies. They were trying to set up a prisoner exchange program at the end, and to make an alliance with the Skinnies even though they'd originally been at war with them.

Bullshit even the US of 1900 with its restricted franchise was far more democratic than a society in which you can only vote & hold political power if you’ve passed through a rigorous indoctrination system.

What "vigorous indoctrination system"? I don't remember one from the book. Rico's training mostly focused on the same kind of stuff modern military training would (unit cohesion and necessary skills), not ideological correctness. Though it's been a while since I read the book, I may have forgotten something.

The only indoctrination in the book is a high school class that most people coast through. It's more or less the same as a 'citizenship' class some high schools in the US offer. Crappy ones too. Rico's dad and other people really seemed to give the military a disdainful tone, as a 'job for people who can't find real work'. That'd at least sound like the Military wasn't so omnipresent or controlling culturally. Not to mention a lot of 'service' options included stuff like terraforming crews, civil construction, R&D Work or something called the 'diplomacy corps'.

[Lonestar]

It is terribly restricted because it would be physically impossible to enroll any sizable segment of the population into civil service and put them into useful work. After you've got enough workers to build the WPA highways or any of the dozen other projects along these lines, or do rural work projects in the CCC, what do you do with the excess? You're either carrying millions of essentially redundant national service personnel, in which case you may as well dispense with this requirement for full political participation altogether, or you have a society in which only those in the tiny minority of the population who qualified for national service (it's not enough merely to enroll for it) are eligible to vote and hold office.

It's a big Galaxy out there, remember? Using mass numbers to help terraform Venus and whatnot.

[andrewgpaul]

DW, to be fair to The X-Files, it's first episode only dealt with conspiracy theories; Alien abduciton, while somewhat whacko, still comes under 'science fiction'.

Nephtys, the indoctrination isn't as obvious as a compulsory Poli. Sci class; it's simply several years of being conditioned to do what you're told.

[Big Orange]

I'm pretty sure that this came out roughly around the same time as Deep Impact, a film that's got the same concept done about a million times better, too. Better science, better actors (sorry Liv) better script... And Morgan Freeman as the motherfucking president. This film's only good points were the madman, the Russian, and Liv Tyler. Blockbuster my ass.

Deep Impact was pretty underrated and far less trashy than Armageddon, but that generally got mediocre reviews by many and my parents thought it was a bore (The Simpsons did a episode about an asteroid impact better as well).

[*]Starship Troopers (Movie) - You lazy bastard, Verhoven. You couldn't come up with a name for your (actually quite hilarious) film. I Robot also counts here, for the same trick of using a title and associated name of a well known writer to sucker people into seeing a film entirely different, even if that film is able to stand on its own.

As said before the Terran Federation seems incompetent because they want to make a insect race much more dangerous than they actually are by intentionally under equipping their ground troops and over exaggerating (if not lying about) the Bugs capability of launching asteroids at Earth (I see it as a spooky forshadowing towards 9/11 and the 2003 invasion of Iraq just half a decade later).

[*]Stargate: Infinity - There's going to be a lot of spinoffs on here. You know why? Because spinoffs often suck, that's why. I can maybe understand a 'Stargate' kids cartoon. But having experienced quite a bit of it during one particularly boring and masochistic weekend, I have to wonder why they were so slack about it. There's many, many 'kids' shows with much more adult and less preachy premises.

While I'm a gigantic fan of the original Stargate movie and the early to mid seasons of Stargate SG-1, I couldn't get into Stargate: Atlantis either (not that it is a genuinely bad show).

[*]Star Trek: Enterprise - I've seen a few episodes, and they're painful, but nowhere near memorable enough for anything but a generic mention grouped together as a show with a predictably poorly excecuted concept.

I found Enterprise to be generally better than Andromeda and unlike Andromeda it didn't get more rubbish in later seasons. Still a very flawed show though.

[*]Star Trek: TOS: Bread and Circuses - "Son of God" Christians? Rome? Gladiators? Goofy grins all 'round? Why? WHY?

I actually like this episode compared to most of the alternate planet episodes...as a dig on TV production.

You mean like that VOY episode where Seven wrestles with The Rock?

[*]Space 1999. How unscientific do you need to be to get onto this list? Nuclear waste exploding and blasting the moon into other solar systems. That's how.

I didn't mind Space 1999, but Thunderbirds, Stingray and UFO were far better. Not quite as turgid as (RUN AWAY!) Space Precinct.

[*]Torchwood - What happens when you take a concept with some potential, a highly likable main character, and beat it with sticks and have it sodomised by wolves on viagra? You get Torchwood, a show I seriously believe would be improved by making it into an an S&M fantasy series about the lead protagonist amusing himself with his nigh-brainless subordinates.

That's been kicked apart many times before, although I'm hoping things get better in the next season (BBC's Robin Hood is notably less shit when I saw it last weekend).
I agree with most of you list, but I still like The Matrix (despite the awful sounding sequels) and Alien 3 is partially good because it has a tangible WH40K feel to it.