SciFi Films

Making SciFi films is a near impossible task: by definition SF stories involve things that cannot be with today's technology, so it has to be fudged. Making believable SciFi is doubly impossible: SF books are designed so the action takes place in your head. The films that play in my head when I read SF are way more interesting than the flattened and compressed versions Hollywood comes out with.

Take "Dune". It's a hugely complex story in which the vast majority of the action takes place in peoples'  minds. Frank Herbert spent pages describing a single instant in real time. To even approach that level of complexity would require a very long and convoluted film covering each chapter, so Hollywood decides the visual imagery of riding the sand worms is the centrepiece and everything else is subordinate to it, dumbs down the story massively and it basically becomes The Lion King with worms. Ugh.
Quite why they had to do it all again in 2024 with better technology but the same story line eludes me - Peter F Hamilton's Nights Dawn trilogy would have been a more worthwhile subject or anything by Ian M Banks, for goodness sake.

That said, there are good SciFi films: Silent Running, Alien, Aliens, Interstellar, The Matrix, The Fifth Element, 12 Monkeys, 28 Days Later, Dark Star, District 9, Avatar, Blade Runner, Blade Runner 2049, Ex_Machina, Moon, Inception, Back To The Future, Star Wars among others. When Hollywood does it right, it works and works well.
But too often it's done by half measures: Doctor Who is poor SciFi (especially in it's latest guises), Firefly almost hit the mark, The X Files likewise, Black Mirror is flakey but occasionally spectacular beyond Charlie Brooker's wildest imagination.