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Top 150 sci-fi films

Orang Utan said:
alternative reality is scifi though.
And why is Time Bandits not scifi but fantasy horror. All scifi is fantasy
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Orang Utan said:
What are the rules then?
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Obviously this is a debate that has raged for... a long time. I've definitely come across some useful distinctions over the years, but can't recall any of them at the mo, naturally ;)

But, again, without super-recall, I would agree that Time Bandits is more fantasy than sci-fi. Jurassic Park is obviously sci-fi, though, although arguably actually predominantly 'adventure'.

I think a lot of it comes down to where the non-real elements originate from. Is it more science and tech, or more mysticism and 'woo'. That's not a robust definition/distinction, though ;)
 
Lord Camomile said:
Obviously this is a debate that has raged for... a long time. I've definitely come across some useful distinctions over the years, but can't recall any of them at the mo, naturally ;)

But, again, without super-recall, I would agree that Time Bandits is more fantasy than sci-fi. Jurassic Park is obviously sci-fi, though, although arguably actually predominantly 'adventure'.

I think a lot of it comes down to where the non-real elements originate from. Is it more science and tech, or more mysticism and 'woo'. That's not a robust definition/distinction, though ;)
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That would make Star Wars a fantasy!
 
Orang Utan said:
Still don’t get why Time Bandits is fantasy rather than scifi
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Because it's magic maps and knights and legends, and the baddie is a literal manifestation of 'Evil'.

Tropes can obviously exist in both, but it's generally about how much they feature, and how they're interpreted/dealt with.
 
Found this quote from Lucas:

The Star Wars franchise has been debated as science fantasy. In 2015, George Lucas stated that "Star Wars isn't a science-fiction film, it's a fantasy film and a space opera".[9][10]
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and the Wikipedia article it's from is for 'Space Fantasy', a proposed hybrid of the two. It also gives this explanation of the distinction:

In a conventional science fiction story, the world is presented as being scientifically logical, while a conventional fantasy story contains mostly supernatural and artistic elements that disregard the scientific laws of the real world. The world of science fantasy, however, is laid out to be scientifically logical and often supplied with hard science-like explanations of any supernatural elements.
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Jurassic Park was really about chaos theory - which is a scientific idea, so its sci fi. Though I'd argue the film pretty much stripped out most of the sci fi content.
 
Yeah, I was thinking similar, in that the book is (far as I can tell, haven't read it :D) considerably more rooted in sci-fi than the film.
 
Used to be:

Science fiction = everything is scientifically possible if not necessarily possible yet.

Science fantasy = not all scientifically possible, likely got nonsense like magic and dragons and suchl.

So many (most?) sci-fi films are actually science fantasy.
 
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