Coolest "wow futuristic!" scene you've ever seen

[Vympel]

By way of example, the other day Chris OFarrell and I were watching Fifth Element (the Remastered Blu-Ray - it looks magnificent, a great release) and I was reminded how awesome the scene where Lilu is 'reconstructed' was. It was so imaginative and original, so visually intricate and beautiful, and just the essence of science fiction to me. What other examples can you think of.

[Serafina]

Do things you read also count, or does it have to be a visual impression?

I will pick something either way, but it will be a tough decision.

[Vympel]

Do things you read also count, or does it have to be a visual impression?

I will pick something either way, but it will be a tough decision.

Both if you like.

[Crazedwraith]

The thing that really leaps to mind for me is the view of the cityscape of Libria in Equilibrium. (The one Preston tears the paper off his window to see) Just a beautiful shot of a city with a rainbow and a Zeppelin with a hologram in the side.

Pretty naff choice really but like I said it was the first thing that came to mind.

[Darth Hoth]

The initial shot of the cityscape, and especially the Tyrell pyramid, in Blade Runner would be my best offhand example.

[Bilbo]

In Season 5 of SGA there were several times when they did shots of Atlantis at night with the entire city lit up. The shots were just beautiful.

[Nephtys]

Pretty much any landscape shot in Blade Runner would work. The future's been ripped off from there ever since

[cosmicalstorm]

The inner geography of a Rama cylinder would be so utterly fucking alien to the human minds understanding of gravity. I'd give anything to be able to spend just a couple of hours inside one.

[Lord of the Abyss]

The various descriptions and images of Ringworld were always iconic science fiction to me. here and here are nice looking pictures.

[Ford Prefect]

If I'm thinking 'wow, futuristic!' then I can't go past the launch scene of the YF-21 in Macross Plus. Unfortunately I can't find a clip of the sequence on YouTube, but everything about it just says 'check it out baby, we're in the future'. From the mind-machine interface the pilot uses to control it, to the way he cycles through visual modes on the cameras, showing him the skeleton and even beating heart of one of the technicians, to the way the wings don't have individual control surfaces but instead the entire wing morphs and reshapes itself ... it's great.

[Marcus Aurelius]

For planetary surface scenes I have to "me too!" and go for flying scenes in Blade Runner. For near-future semi-realistic space flight scenes 2001 is still unrivaled, especially since it has just the right pace to appreciate them properly.

[Sela]

I dunno - I think Coruscant in the Original Trilogy had to do it for me. That first scene (or one of them, I don't know which was first) where we see the air-traffic lanes; or perhaps one of the AOTC scenes with the reddening sky. . . . and buildings so dense that light no longer reaches the planetary surface.

Quite impressive.


By the way; obligatory music reference here: "Cities of the Future" by Infected Mushrooms.

[Aeolus]

The cityscapes in Blade runner and the Star Wars prequels and the chrysalis machine in The 5th Element are my picks.

[Starglider]

Exploring the alien derelict in Alien. Perhaps not so impressive now, but groundbreaking at the time, and still really chilling and atmospheric when I first saw it in the 90s. 2001 - particularly the initial trip to the moon, with the two different shuttles then the moon rover; all extremely well thought out and superbly presented. The final sequence of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, where the humans communicate with the alien mothership - it doesn't make much logical sense, but it's an audiovisual treat and a superb bit of cinema.

[Darth Wong]

My favourite had to be the scene in The Fifth Element when Leeloo came out the conveniently giant-sized ventilation duct and looked down ... only to see that she was standing on the outside ledge of a fantastically tall multi-km skyscraper. It was kind of like seeing Coruscant, before TPM came out and we could see the real thing. In some ways, Luc Besson's vision of a super-vertical metropolis was actually superior to George Lucas' vision of the same thing. Besson's version is grimier, more bustling, and more interesting, whereas Lucas' subsequent vision was somewhat sanitized and sterile by comparison.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

When they're wandering around inside the giant supermachine complex in Forbidden Planet. I still don't know how they captured those shots with 1956 movie technology.

[Shroom Man 777]

Between the ever-awesome Fifth Element and ever-rainy Brade Runner, I'll also echo Crazedwraith's comment on Libria. It wasn't that the city itself was grander or anything than the other great cities of sci-fi, it was just how Christian Bale all went loopy and desperate with an irrational unexplainable (to him) longing to just rip open his window lining to see what was out there - and now in that morning, with that guy being freed of Prozium, that bleak gunmetal grey dystopic futuristic landscape was instead presented with such a warm, humanizing way with the rising sun's light and the rain... mang.

Equilibrium was really a one-shot wonder for Kurt Wimmer, it wasn't a particularly mindblowing film, but it was pretty good and the guy ended up creating an almost identical but very much worse movie in Ultraviolet.


Also, goddamn those future war scenes from The Terminator and Terminator 2 (not so much the more recent sequels). Goddamn, they really made a "wow futuristic" but damn depressing and even frightening and downright apocalyptic presentation in those two films. Human beings hunted like rats by obscene chrome motherfucking metal monstrosities, and in T2 these things come with an army of skeleton robots unleashing fire and death and coming down from the sky with their turbofans and jets and phased plasma to kill the fuck out of humanity. I don't know why, but it seems like the older Terminator films end up having way more effective Future War scenes than the newer movies... even better than the Terminator movie that's about the damn Future War.

[tezunegari]

Not really futuristic but more of awesome:
*getting flak-vest, helmet and hiding in bunker*

Terminator 3: Skynet firing the US nukes and everyone else doing the same.
(Pretty much the only 'awesome' scene in the movie)

[Dahak]

I have to second the Forbidden Planet. First seen it as a child, and it was really a Woah! moment for me.
Though, Fifth Element is up there, too.

[Sheridan]

I have always been impressed by the scene in Aliens where the marines are stripping, cleaning, checking, and reassembling their equipment in the armory of the Sulaco. The prop and set design crews went above and beyond the call of duty for that one, creating a scene that truly makes you believe that these characters are soldiers, and damned good ones, involving all of the work that that entails. It's made even more impressive for me in that it's just a few moments long and not an extended shot that overdoes it, yet the quality of the design for that scene is just as important to the people who made it as the apocalyptic battles that occur later in the film.

I'm not sure that qualifies as a "futuristic" scene, other than the equipment being used is beyond what is (well, was then) the state-of-the-art.

Otherwise, I'd have to go with the scene in one of the Stargate SG-1 series episodes, where Maj. Carter and Col. O'Neill are in the cockpit of the X-302. The scene where they're running down the checklist and the dialogue goes something like this:

"...Autopilot?"
"Check."
"Inertial Dampers?"
<Pause>
"Cool. And, check. Phasers?"
"Sorry, Sir..."

It just nailed the series for me.

[Darth Wong]

People liked the Colonial Marines in Aliens because they did not seem terribly futuristic or fantastic. I don't know if they're the best example.

[Sheridan]

Probably true, and also why I included the semi-disclaimer after my first choice and definitely why I included the second example.

[Oskuro]

The Axiom from WALL-E. And I'm not being cynical about future humans being lazy (right now), I'm referring particularly to the scene where the ship where EVE and WALL-E come in docks, and the automated systems kick in.


Also, the spaceship scenes from 2001 an Space Odyssey, since they also felt plausible.

[Shroom Man 777]

People liked the Colonial Marines in Aliens because they did not seem terribly futuristic or fantastic. I don't know if they're the best example.

It was that their gear was slightly futuristic but nonetheless very modern-looking and "believable" and perhaps even in the realm of current-day tech, and really the overall aesthetic of the Aliens movies were really effing cool. But, yeah, it wasn't because they were woah ubercool flashy and superslick, but because they looked rough and rigid and hard and like something a modern-day Marine might use to waste some motherfucker through the proper application of killfuck.

I have to second the Forbidden Planet. First seen it as a child, and it was really a Woah! moment for me.
Though, Fifth Element is up there, too.

I saw Forbidden Planet on TNT ages ago, when I was still rather young, but I could never forget the lightshow that happened when the Monster of the Id attacked the spacemen and they activated their RAY SHIELDS and LIGHTNING WEAPONS! Oh, man. That was totally tits!

[saveyour]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QahzbgUVwk