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Independence Day (1996) -vs- The War Of The Worlds (1953)

March 28, 2010 Rodney Twelftree 4

Last year here at Movie Smackdown we got the idea to see what readers thought was the Best Alien Invasion Film of All Time. We thought that the genre really broke down into two sections — “Classic” and “Modern.” And so we did what we always do in these cases, we put it to our readers and let them weigh in.

We have two winners now, and we’re about to put them to the test against each other. For our purposes, we defined “Classic” as all the films that existed in the early 1950-1970 period (although all our candidates came from the 1950s), and “Modern” as everything that followed. Interestingly, fully half of our “modern” films were re-makes from the “classic” era. The “Classic” race was a close as hell, the “Modern” race yielded a clear winner. Here are our results: […]

Moon (2009) -vs- Solaris (2002)

June 15, 2009 Bryce Zabel 7

“Moon” (2009) -vs- “Solaris” (2002). “Moon” is the latest little film that could — made for $5-million — about a very big idea. It comes to us direct from director Duncan Jones who, helpfully I’m sure, is David Bowie’s son. Dad’s “Space Oddity” came out in 1969, the year after “2001: A Space Odyssey” was released and blew the minds of a generation of stoned college students. Besides, the granddaddy of science-fiction Jones’s sci-fi thriller has also been compared to “Silent Running,” “Alien,” “Outland,” and even, in one key element, “Blade Runner.” We’ve thrown our share of films into the Smackdown ring against “2001,” but it seems a fresher and more appropriate opponent is Steve Soderbergh’s re-make of “Solaris.” Both “Moon” and “Solaris” serve up disorienting helpings of the isolation of space, the sense that things are not what they seem, romance bent by quantum physics and leading men who think that, just maybe, they are losing their minds.
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