I have to go with star wars. I like the movies... hate the force. Hate.

That is all. No explanation.

ID4 was the tipping point. Before then, Gattaca and other thoughtful sci-fi movies at least got made, even if they didn't do all that well. Now, for man people, the only way you can tell it's a sci-fi movie is if Will Smith is in it and something blows up real good. Everything since Independence Day has just made it worse.

Though seriously, someone needs to sit the Wakowski bros. down and give them some god damn Ritalin.

Definitely Independence Day, as it was the first of the Bigger,Louder, and Dumber trend of summer sci-fi blockbusters.

Uhhh, can I vote for none of the above? I don't think Sci Fi has been ruined. In fact, the more sci fi movies made, the better.

You missed the one that, while fantastic, destroyed cinema in every aspect: The Matrix

Which (blah blah blah) did (blah blah blah) and (blah blah blah)ed?

What the heck? One week, scifi is becoming serious literature, this week it's dead. (Does everyone forget that scifi sucked far worse before Star Wars no matter how much you want to make Lucas your whipping boy? How hard is it to understand and accept that 90% of scifi like most genres sucks?) Can I vote for io9 for having little sense of history and cogency?

Good choices and good reasons for all. But come on... is Io9 just trying to bait my Spielberg-hate again today?

First the machine AI piece with a pic from that shit-tastic movie, then the ET headline pic?

I refuse to participate in this poll on the grounds that it is a retarded non sequitur.

Case in point: Children of Men.

Independence Day would not have been it but for that one moment...
..Randy Quaid.
..In the jet.
..at they end.
It chills my blood and makes me nauseous to think about it.

Hate E.T. HATE HATE HATE. Now I hate it even more because Spielberg's anniversary edition sanitized it further by taking out the one funny line which launched the epithet "penis breath." WTF people?

Oh, pardon.
I didn't realize this was "Which of these blockbusters did you hate most?"
I thought you were actually asking about some sort of tipping point for the cheesing of Gollywierd SciFi, and that point, if'n you was paying attention, was the return of Star Trek in the 70s. FatKirk and the Old Crew started the whole thing of defunct TV series to movies, endless serial sequels, flog-it-to-death "high concept" sci-fi movies (Veeee Jerrr says Persis "I've got hair now" Kambata).
And so on.

Burton's Batmans weren't great, but Joel Schumacher's Batmans made Americans dumb enough to vote George W. Bush into office. Twice.

I blame Spielberg, of course.

While I want to say Star Wars I just can't in good conscience because ID4 was the death of SciFi. Leaving the the theater after watching ID4 I vowed never to enter a theater again. Sure, I haven't kept that vow completely but some movies I just need to be seen big screen no matter how annoying an audience can be.

I'm with you B....if you're addicted to sci-fi then the local multiplex is your crack house in the summer, and that's not a bad thing; you just have to do more research to keep from consuming the truly nasty stuff.
But they became Sci-Fi Summers because of Star Wars. And they've become Comic Book/Sci-Fi Summers thanks to Batman.
And all of it makes me realize I should have taken computer science in college instead of those damn useless business/government/poli-sci classes, so I too could become a CGI Jedi Master...

70's Sci-fi would have died without Star Wars.

Jaws had as big a hand in nurturing the hollywood blockbuster mentality.

I'm going with Waterworld. It bombed so hard hollywood became really squeamish of sci-fi.

@Rus:
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos...

@Rus: Hey, even *I* am not going to blame Schumacher for that. After all, America reviled the Schumacher Batman and the stench of his involvment in the fourth one it hung around Clooney's neck like an albatross for many years.

@B: I agree with you.. I mean, if SF survived both makes of "The Blob" it is bulletproof. There was a ton of crap sf up to SW IV, and a ton afterwards. And SW IV was not all that great, intellectually. Just a 1930's Space Opera, and Homage to the 1930's serials.

Movies are inherently dumb, live with it.. The information density in a video medium is pretty low, no matter what.

Books are for the heavy stuff, vids are for fun. I have no problem with any of that.

It's just that movie critics are pretentious buttheads, trying to justify their salaries, and the great overwashed don't like to think under any conditions. Just like in Shakespeare's Day. That's why the drunk jokes.

The first modern action blockbuster, Die Hard.

@Annalee Newitz: A kindred soul! E.T. is typical Spielberg dreck. Smarmy, sappy, joyless. Hell, I'm pretty sure that's why Drew Barrymore got hooked on drugs as a kid!

Independence Day. It's the reason the last 1/3 or 'Sunshine' sucked.

I'm going to have to jump on the ID4 hate train...

It did seem to be the start of the "there's a cool idea in this movie, see if you can spot it between awesome explosions and awesome effects work!"

Although, for me, SciFi movies hit a new low with the "adaptation" of the Hitchhiker's Guide. That movie was a let down on so many levels.

@Seth L: It's not really Kevin Costner's fault that everyone decided to irrationally hate Kevin Costner one day.

@DarkPlaces: The Matrix wasn't a summer movie. Although one of the sequels was.

I'm gonna dust off the old crystal ball and say Hancock. Can't speak for the world, but its definitely gonna ruin Will Smith's Science Fiction Movie Summer.

Interesting omission: Terminator 2. Given the level of sophistication in CGI and effects and the powerhouse story, every movie after that was a case of one-upsmanship.

@Annalee Newitz: Wait. E.T. invented the phrase "penis breath?" I thought it had been around forever before that.

@codydog: Wha wha wha?! how in the hell are movies dumb? i'm pretty sure a film, just like any other cultural product (including books), is only as intelligent as it's audience.

Movie Scifi was ruined before any summer blockbusters came along. Remember Plan 9 From Outer Space, or Santa Claus Conquers the Martians? But if we must mention blockbusters, there's something to be said for all of the choices provided. Personally I vote for Star Wars Episode 1.

Independence Day just seemed to suck the soul out of SF in a way that few movies have been able to. I don't think SF is dead, by any shot, I think that it's not as good as purists would like it to be (as in, it relies too much on the CGI and the action and less on the cerebral aspects of the genre).

My very first thought was Spiderman, because it was huge and it felt like the first superhero movie to be a blockbuster.

But I went for Independance Day-because the ones before it you could at least argue were good. ID4 was really about blowing things up.

ID4 gets my vote for film that made it harder for decent sci-fi to get made over CGI reliant crap. Yes, there are still great sci-fi films out there, but unless they look great they're normally screwed at the box office.
Case in point - I thought Cypher was a great film, but I'd heard nothing about it at all until I stumbled across it on a movie channel.
It was clever, well conceived but looked like the inside of a cubicle for most of the time ergo: no-one watched it.

@codydog: The information density in a video medium is pretty low, no matter what.

Books are for the heavy stuff, vids are for fun. I have no problem with any of that.

I think you have a good point here. I think we can all agree that films don't hold the same bitrate as the printed page but there's still somethign to be said for using the available bit rate of film to it's fullest advantage. This can be done with either flashy CGI and explosions or with intellectual weightlifting but for some reason, it doesn't seem to be possible to do both.

I'm all for snarking at lame movies but seriously, why is it that we can't get a film with a more evenly distributed information density? Why aren't there more Blade Runners instead of the hundredth star Wars clone?

is it just as simple as market tatses veer towards dumb media? Or is there a more complicated variable in this equation?

Personally I voted for ID4 because it really did marry science fiction to the action flick. Now I don't think that SciFi action movies are a bad thing but they do feel overdone as of late.

@nuromansr: The thing about Burton's Batman movies is that while they showed that comic book movies could work, Schumacher killed the movement while it was still in its infancy with his more "comic book" ones. If you want to blame someone for the recent influx of comic book movies, blame X-men. It was a great film but it was also the catalyst for all the crap we're seeing now.

I will propose the idea that Jurassic Park is responsible for Scifi Channel's monster-movie happy trend. Nothing against Jurassic Park, but without it we would be free from Supergator and its cohorts.

Star Wars, no question. Pseudo-religious clap-trap grafted onto an aggressively low-brow cowboy movie. It was great for hard-core science fiction fans who could take it for what it was and who would still support real science fiction movies.

Unfortunately, it expanded the audience to include a huge number of eye candy fans, and they've been catered to ever since.

I voted Star Wars. Don't get me wrong, it was great at the time...which is the problem. It cemented Sci-fi in the minds of a wider audience as Star Wars, when Sci-fi could be so broad a genre that it defies categorization. Ever since, if Star Wars isn't the type of movie someone likes, they will try to avoid Sci-fi. The popular movies since then have had to shake off that stigmata to appeal to wider audiences. In addition, the movies that embrace the Sci-fi elements tend to do so with Star Wars similar space battles, which is where action really started becoming the focal point.

It would be a very different genre without Star Wars.

ewwwwwwwww

you guys voted id4 over transformers?!
michael bay's robotic abortion both crushed my hopes of a decent rehash of my childhood and promised to shit on me a second time...

THEY EVEN HAD FENG ZHU DESIGN THE ROBOTS; but bay likes to focus on ONE gear turning at a time- what a waste of talent.

bay should leave my nostalgia be and go back to making bad boys movies... jerk...

@Mathmos: While I'm with you on the movie Sci-fi already being a miasma, I'm alongside SavannahJack with ST:The Movie for the point of blockbuster decline

@codydog: Exactly. Not one SciFi movie has impressed me as much as a borderline adequately written book. I'd take Alan Dean Foster over Star Wars any day. These movies have their place of course: Insert popcorn, remove brain, enjoy.

@Rus: I suspected as much.

Well, if one must pick from that list alone, then it pretty much has to be Star Wars. I suspect that most here who vote otherwise are too young to have experienced the phenomenon that Star Wars was when it came out in 1977, and how it utterly shaped cinematic "sci-fi" for decades to come, and not always for the better.

@adaorardor: Information density. Spoken dialogue is less dense than reading, filling video screens with pretty pictures is less informative than print or graphs, for example.

Plus, historically SF has been a literature of speculation, satire and disguised political commentary.

Very little of that in any genre of motion pictures.

And as for dumb, i can find few other words for watching a movie a hundred times. I like movies, but as amusement, not as life lessons or philosophical treatises.

Nothing wrong with that. There are lots of dumb SF books, 90% of the genre, but there are a few that try to make one think. Rudy Rucker comes to mind, and Elizabeth Bear. Heinlein and Kornbluth/Pohl for the old guys.

@Gyrus: Least Common Denominator. A book costs one guy a year maybe, a thousand bags of cheetos and ten thousand cups of coffee. It might sell a few tens of thousands of copies, make maybe 50,000 bucks tops.

A movie takes hundreds of people years, costs a hundred mill, and has to sell to tens of millions of people to break even. So it has to be more general in appeal, ie "Dumber"

@DarkPlaces: The Matrix was the first movie I thought of, and it's not on the list.

As soon as that's on the list I'll vote.

Once again, I cannot vote because I cannot see the list or the results. What list? where? Can anyone help me so I can participate in polls???????????????????????????????????????? I have yet to be able to do this anytime they ask for vote.

@Grey_Area: Sure. I havent read him for years, but you know the stuff a writer can do with a half page of exposition, might take a whole more to do.

Like "Explain black holes" Or better example, the old Niven story about the spacemen getting killed by the tides around a Neutron Star. That would be a really bad movie.

@Chrysla: ummm, what browser are you using? works fine in firefox, safari, and ie 6.

"Before Star Wars, we had Silent Running, Soylent Green, Logan's Run. Afterwards... pew pew pew!"

I couldn't have said it better myself. I don't know if Star Wars really ruined it, but it seems to mark the point where movies like those stopped getting made or stopped getting made as easily. Plus I hate Star Wars so it makes for a convenient answer.

And just think, if Star Wars hadn't been so popular, George Lucas probably would have made THX 1139! Uh, maybe.

Maybe it goes further back: didn't Stargate's success pave the way for action/sci-fi?

We can definitely blame it for ID4, Godzilla, 10,000B.C...

Insult Transformers all you want, it wasn't a good film. But the CGI was a far cry from bad.

i voted for the Tim Burton Batman, even tho as an example of the genre it is highly suspect. But i hate jack Nicholson's Joker and his gross/weird mouth make up so much in that film that i felt it at least deserved a "Nay."

@Spiral: But what would I do on Saturday mornings without Chupacabra, Chupacabra 2, Supergator, and the entire suite of movies devoted to over sized snakes?

I thought of a better example. "A Scanner Darkly" Haven't gotten around to watching the movie, but the book was very far out. I guess the movie sucked, because nobody ever mentions it.

But as a book, it had a real impact.

@unplugandrun: I'm with you on the Transformers! Michael Bay single-handedly trashed an entire genre with that plotless drek and dismantled a cherished memory of an entire generation.

@firesign: Using firefox. Don't get me wrong - love this site and won't leave - just frustrated! This happens on both of my work computers and at the home computer.

If anything ruined/ruins science fiction, it was/will be the fans. There, I said it.