![]() ![]() When was the last time you watched the first fruit of Steven Spielberg’s post- Jaws harvest? Did you remember the extended, door-slamming scenes of marital discord between Richard Dreyfus and Teri Garr? Did you remember how long Spielberg delays the big reveal? Did you remember how easily Dreyfuss agrees to board the spaceship? Unlike 1977’s other sci-fi blockbuster, Star Wars, the secret to Close Encounters of the Third Kind’s greatness is how it takes the time to immerse us in a swirl of Seventies paranoia and Reader’s Digest-derived mysticism before blowing us away with a Manhattan-sized mothership. This is where the genre genuinely started to boldly go where it had never gone before. But each of these helped the decade redefine where science fiction could go on the big screen, whether it was in a grungy grindhouse or a state-of-the-art multiplex. ![]() Some of them belong in the greatest-of-all-time canon others, we will fully admit, are the cinematic equivalent of a ripe Camembert. So, in honor of the 10-year-period that made science-fiction filmmaking what it is today, we are counting down the 50 best sci-fi movies of the 1970s. And the influences of this period are still showing up in theaters near you. umbrella and helped turn the genre into a gamechanger. ![]() But by the end of the 1970s, it was possible to have checked out postapocalyptic action-adventures, future-shock case studies, technophobic nightmares, low-budget exploitation movies about what-if scenarios and big-budget space operas - all of which fell under the S.F. As the Age of Aquarius slowly slid into the beginning of the nation’s Watergate-and-disco period, you could still find sci-fi movies that wanted to blow an audience’s possibly addled, probably enhanced mind. But the Seventies were particularly kind to one specific cul-de-sac of cinema: the science fiction film, a subset category that was still buzzing from its late-Sixties head-trip phase courtesy of 2001: A Space Odyssey. It was the decade that gave the world the maverick New Hollywood drama, the Nixon-era paranoid thriller, the slasher flick, the all-star disaster movie, the gross-out comedy and the modern mega-blockbuster. ![]()
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