Like Tears in Rain: Meditations on Science Fiction Cinema Read Online Free Page B

government; the western  El Topo  (’70) reveals a style as avant-garde and psychedelic as anything Pink Floyd or Herbert himself ever wrote.
    “ Soy Dios ,” declares the titular gunslinger—played by Jodorowsky himself—in  El Topo . Translation? “I am God.” And it appears, given what we’re shown of the director’s vision for adapting  Dune  throughout Pavich’s documentary, that he truly had a grandiosity and work ethic to match.
    Of all the conceptual work explored in the film, it is the artist  Moebius—a veteran storyboarder and designer who worked on such landmarks as  Alien ,  Tron , and  The Abyss —whose contribution seems the greatest overall loss to our culture: his costume and character designs, his futuristic weaponry, his sense of scope and camera movement. While we may have reaped some of the artful fruits of his labor years down the road, no doubt his imagination lacked some of the exuberant, reckless abandon on display in the production design and storyboards for Jodorowsky’s would-be masterpiece.
    Critics pose the question of what might have happened to popular culture, had   Dune preceded  Star Wars , noting that the blockbuster model and all the multimedia and merchandising that goes along with it may well have wound up a very different animal.
    On a somewhat cynical note, the structure of the Hero’s Journey monomyth could well have taken a back seat to the more problematic White-Messiah structure at the heart of so many recent films:   Avatar  (James Cameron, 2009),  The New World  (Terrence Malick, ’05),  The Last of the Mohicans  (Michael Mann, ’92)—the examples are fairly endless. This is perhaps the one thing we gained when production on Jodorowsky’s  Dune  collapsed, though Cameron’s  Avatar  has ensured that the myth will live on in big-screen science fiction.
    But what we lost with the film vastly outweighs this one small win. For instance, the drug culture of the sixties and seventies has been immortalized in a handful of films, ranging from   Easy Rider  (1969) to Terry Gilliam’s  Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas  (’98), but the spiritual, exoticized component of hallucinogens and nineteen-sixties countercultural thought left its mark on the eventual David Lynch  Dune  only as a plot element. One can’t help but imagine the kind of acid-trip visuals Jodorowsky might have crafted with the help of sci-fi pioneers like Moebius and Dan O’Bannon at his side. Not to mention the soundtrack, which would’ve been provided by the inimitable space-rockers who called themselves the Pink Floyd.
    While working on the picture together, according to  an interview with the director in  The Japan Times , Moebius and O’Bannon coauthored a comic called “The Long Tomorrow,” serialized in  Heavy Metal , which later influenced writer William Gibson’s worldbuilding in the seminal novel  Neuromancer , the design aesthetic of Ridley Scott’s  Blade Runner , and the Imperial probe droid seen landing on Hoth in  The Empire Strikes Back .

Ten of Sci-Fi Cinema’s Best-Kept Secrets
    A Partial List of My Personal Favorites , with Brief Reviews
     
     
     
    You’ve worked your way through  Clone Wars ,  Knights of Sidonia , and  Game of Thrones ; you’ve watched all the  Star Trek  films again and again to the point of fatigue. The latest Transformers  flick had you yawning and questioning your love of all things cosmic—and Guardians of the Galaxy  hasn’t yet opened in theaters.
    In these kinds of situations, what can you do? Well, it turns out that science fiction cinema is a vast and uneven terrain. Sometimes the best works slide out of memory or go unnoticed. Other movies, perhaps, don’t hit the right chord on a first viewing.
    To help you out, I’ve compiled a list of ten personal favorites that I think you’re likely to enjoy. You may have heard of some or even most of them, but such is the nature of the science-fiction