I had an amount of curiosity concerning this film when it was released. As a child I had watched the American-ized version of the television show and been entertained by the impossible antics of Speed and his racing family. My interest and fond memories people were not enough lure back into the theater for this baby-boomer bit of nostalgia. I had 
seen far too many properties from the baby-boom picked up and turned into utter dreck by producers, writers, and directors who had absolutely no respect for the original source material. So Speed Racer waited until I got around to it on Netflix, because that is one thing the service is great for, taking risky experimental leaps in your cinema viewing.
The Wachowskis; the sibling duo responsible for The Matrix franchise and the film adaptation of V for Vendetta, directed the film. Speed Racer displays all the visual style and experimentation one should expect from the Wachowskis. The story is simple, Speed and his family are a small independent racing team and motor car company. (Pops, play by John Goodman, builds the race cars in his home garage.) Speed’s older brother has been disgraced and killed in an earlier off road race. Speeds own inherent talent has brought him to the attention of a major motor-company mogul Royalton, played with villainous flair that seemed to strike a resonate cord reminiscent of the acerbic Christopher Hitchens by Roger Allam. Royalton tries to seduce Speed into signing on a corporate racer, and when rebuffed turns his energies to destroyed Speed and the Racer family.
If you have watched the 60’s animated show you know that the program constantly dealt in absurd impossibilities, cars that leap great distanced thanks to powered jacks, fantastic weaponry, amazing capable pet chimps, and so on. Adapting this sort of material into a film usually calls for eliminating as much as possible these cue that are acceptable in animation, but shattering to suspension of disbelief in photography; this was not the approach the Wochowskis employed. Rather they embraced the animated style, integrating into it the live-action performers, mixing CGI that had been rendered to reflect the style of animation and not photo-realism, while layering in the actors as real people. (Even Chim-Chim the chimp is real not a CGI character.) The final product is both mad-cap over the top, and layered with character moments and performances.
The film disappointed at the box officer and I think the stylistic approach is the final culprit. The animation elements, I believe in form the viewer the accept one level of reality and the live-action performances ask the viewer to accept quite a different level of reality. The dichotomy of these two very different expectations creates a jarring effect that is quite deleterious to suspension of disbelief.
That said, if you can find a way to let your mind work on the two levels simultaneously, the film has surprisingly entertaining moments. It was clearly crafted with an eye towards the source material. From my memory the Wochowskis nailed every major plot and character element of the show, while adding a level of story that the television program never explored. It was a bold, brash experiment that failed, but I salute them as artists for their vision and the risk taking. They could have made a bland cookie-cutter film, but instead that took real risks and that should be rewarded.
Star Trek: the Motion Picture (1979)
So after the racie war implications driving the plot of Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, 20th Century Fox, fearful that they had driven the kiddie away, took the next, and final, installment of franchise in a lighter and more optimistic direction. The screenwriter for the previous two sequel relinquished his duties, in part due to the dark nature of his proposed script and in part to ill health, while the husband wife team that penned the screenplay for The Omega Man came onto the scene.
favorite film of the series, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes. While I love me Planet of the Apes and it is wonderful film, more often than any other in the franchise I will pull out the blu-ray of Conquest and sit back to watch it over and over. Once I did get it on Blu-ray I also stopped watching the theatrical cut and exclusively watch the unrated directors edition. When the film was released in 1972 they had hopes of getting a ‘G’ rating, but thee scene of revolution were so intense the studio feared they might get an ‘R’ and ordered the ending re-written and the footage edited to be considerably less graphic.
progressed from pets, replacing the cats and dogs that died in a global pandemic into a servant and slaves. Armando, the kind hearted circus owner last seen saving the time-traveling apes’ baby has returned to the city, bring the circus for a need tour, and along with it the now adult intelligent ape Caesar. (Whom was named Milo as a baby in the last film but hey retcon is nothing new.) thing go badly and before long Ceasar is a slave himself, alone and friendless, subject to the same brutal treatment as his ape brothers and sisters, including the producer’s wife in appearance number 3 in the ape movies. In the end Caesar lives up to his new name and leads a revolt overthrowing the fascist power structure in a brutal, bloody, and revenge filled night. The film ends with images of the city burning and nearly all of our principle human characters dead.
Beneath the Planet of the Apes is the hastily consider sequel to 1968’s smash box-office success Planet of the Apes. However due to financial troubles at 20th Century Fox and boardroom infighting the film suffered from a trouble production from the get-go. Heston, the star of the first film hated the very idea of any sequel and only reluctantly agreed to participate as a favor to Daryl Zanuck, but even this came at the price with Heston insisting that his character of Taylor — spoiler alert stop reading if you care, serious stop reading — be killed off in the story.
I can clearly remember seeing Escape from the Planet of the Apes at the Sunrise Theater in Fort Pierce Florida. That was 1971 so I would have been 10 years old, and I remember laughing a full belly laugh as the ‘unmasking’ scene at the film’s open. Escape faced the challenge of crafting a continuation of the story when in the pervious film not only did your principle characters get killed, but the entire freakin’ world was turned to ash as a gravely toned narrator informed the audience that the world was now dead.
Guardians of the Galaxy (GotG) must count among the strangest concepts ever used to launch a major franchise. GotG concerns a collection of criminals and riff-raff that are thrown together with conflicting motives with the fate of the galaxy resting on their actions.
Stanley Kubrick’s brilliant and baffling masterpiece, 2001 is truly not only one of the most influential SF films of the 1960s, it is one of the most influential films of any genre of all time. It is groundbreaking in its style, scope, depth of concepts, technical mastery, and sheer artistry. Coming at the end of the decade, this movie raised the bar on what could be expected of a science-fiction film. Where Forbidden Planet brought in literature, 2001 demonstrated that SF, the genre of ideas in print fore decades and decades, could also be the genre of ideas on the silvered screen. Eschewing a traditional plot driven narrative, this film took us from the dawn of humanity through its eventual evolution beyond the cradle of Earth. It did this will a level of technical competence that forever changed what would be expected of a major SF film and set the stage for the dazzling spectacle in the next decade of Star Wars.
film! Yes it is both of those things, a horror film, just as Frankenstein was a horror film, and it is not just a zombie movie it is the progenitor of all modern zombie movies. It is also, quite clearly, a science-fiction film. First off, co-writer and Direct George A. Romero has mentioned in interviews that the inspiration for this film was Richard Matheson’s novel, I am Legend, a story about a world overrun by scientifically explained vampires. In the film Night of the Living Dead, quite unlike Romero’s other zombie films, there is a clear explanation given for the rise of the dead and their transformation into murderous cannibals – radiation from the Venus probe. This radiation is what ‘activates’ the ghouls’ brains (the term zombie is never used in the movie and was grafted onto these revenants later) and it is what destroyed the brain destroys the ghouls. The cause and explanation is grounded in a scientific reason, though it is terrible science. So, like Dr. No, this is a movie that one rarely thinks of as SF, but clearly falls within those borders.
Released in 1968 Planet of the Apes would certainly be on the short list for best SF movies of that or any decade, but I can tell you that it is not one of the two films I selected as most influential from the 1960s.