"The Last Man On The Planet Moon"
Will Eisner, Jules Feiffer and Wally Wood's August 31st 1952 episode of The Spirit was right in the middle of the Outer Space sequence of stories, but that didn't mean it lost its focus on small vignettes about the common man - In this particular case, about a man whose space madness meant that he hallucinated a world where he was the only man left from his mission, trapped all alone on the Moon. Forward thinking stuff from a period when Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon made space safe for newspaper comics readers.

Solaris
Stanisław Lem's original 1961 novel, that is, not the George Clooney movie. Lem imagined an alien being that prompted psychological responses in humans who tried to contact it, producing a particular strain of space madness - Trauma As Particularly Awkward First Contact. While Lem's novel depicts an unknowable and somewhat disturbing idea of such event, it was soon co-opted into cuddlier forms by...

Countless Star Trek Episodes
The various interstellar folk of Gene Roddenberry's future had a tendency to go insane every now and again, but there was always a comfortable external explanation for it all - An alien virus, mind-control of some sort, or Vulcans getting horny. Anything that could allow the Enterprise and her fine crew to leave after an hour, secure in the ultimate safety and pride of being outer space frontiersmen and insanity just being something that's akin to drunkenness:

Dark Star
Suicidal astronauts on a long-term mission who have to talk an intelligent bomb out of exploding, resorting to explaining philosophy because their cryogenically-frozen commander tells them to? No wonder that Lt. Doolittle (spoiler) surrenders to his dream of surfing to oblivion at the end of the movie. Never mind 2001, this was the movie that made a generation realize what space travel could do to your mind.

The Black Hole
...And for the kids that were too young to see Dark Star, there was always Disney's The Black Hole, in which mad Maximilian Schell (who had killed his own crew, turned them into robots, become obsessed with the black hole of the title and ends up melded to a killer robot and in Hell or something) managed to put another generation off the idea of going off into space. Those who weren't confused about the whole thing and/or distracted by the cuteness of VINCENT, that is.

Red Dwarf
1992's "Quarantine" demonstrated that it wasn't just humans who came down with space madness, when hologram Arnold Rimmer caught a virus that not only drove him quite mad, but finally introduced his latent crossdressing and puppetry tendencies. If only all other space madnesses came with their own Mr. Flibbles.

Event Horizon
Some have called Event Horizon the Pandorum or Sunshine of its 1997 day, but we prefer to think of this Sam Neill-starring SF-horror movie as The Black Hole for people who are afraid of robots. Again proving that hanging around cosmic events can lead to hallucinations and psychosis, Paul WS Anderson's thriller brought a spooky atmosphere, love of Latin and very little originality to the space madness genre, but we love it nonetheless.

Sunshine
Talking of unoriginal SF-horror movies, Danny Boyle's 2007 worst-case-scenario-fest (In turn, shamelessly ripped off by Ron Moore's failed pilot Virtuality) demonstrates yet again that, when your spaceship discovers a seemingly-abandoned spaceship floating in the void, the sensible thing to do is always to ignore it and carry on your mission. Points are subtracted for the unexpected and somewhat disappointing devolution into a generic slasher movie towards the end, but any movie where space + isolation + the sun = space madness can never be all bad.

Moon
Taking the traditional space madness ingredients (Namely loneliness, existential angst and improbable situations that can't be easily explained by what we know as science), Duncan Jones' debut movie comes up with something that, unusually, pays off without devolving into cliche or an "enigmatic" lack of answers. For that alone - as well as not succumbing to either space madness or movie hero syndrome - Sam Rockwell's Sam Bell takes the win.

The Ren and Stimpy Show
Surely the greatest example ever made of what space madness truly is. Oh my God, an ice cream bar!
See if you don't agree for yourself.

The worst space operas are not just campy or silly. They're idiotic and braindead. They're so intent on cramming the cliches of Westerns or adventure serials into an outer-space setting that they not only leave behind even the most basic space science, they actually strip the danger and excitement out of space travel itself. They're usually derivative of better works, and have little undigested chunks of pilfered greatness floating around... like a debris field.

So here are the dumbest space operas of all time, according to us:

Battlestar Galactica (original series.) Sorry. Ron Moore pretty much summed it up when he explained why this version of BSG had so much wasted potential: You have the destruction of an entire civilization in the first episode, and then in the second episode they go to the casino planet and par-tay. Plus the dorky helmets. And the daggit. And Boxey. To be fair, though, this wasn't the dumbest space opera Glen Larson gave us. That honor must go to...

Buck Rogers In The 25th Century. Oh man. We rushed out and bought this on DVD as soon as it came out. And it is just unbelievably atrocious. Like the original BSG, it features a post-apocalyptic setting... which is forgotten right after the first episode. There's Twiki the penis-headed robot, who goes around getting into one hilarious scrap after another, and Princess Ardala, who's always trying to collar the tight-pantsed Buck so he will be her husband/boy-bitch. But mostly, this show is known for its amazing disco set pieces, including this bizarre rock band, Andromeda:

Guardians Of The Galaxy (the original comics). Marvel Comics' answer (sort of) to the Legion of Superheroes, Guardians Of The Galaxy charted the adventures of Vance Astro, who spent 1000 years in suspended animation before arriving at Alpha Centauri and realizing that humans had long since discovered faster-than-light travel. In the mean time, Earth has been invaded, first by Martians and then by the cruel Badoon. So Astro gathers a team of interplanetary misfits to free the Earth. In a typical later storyline, they find Wolverine's metal skeleton still intact (even though Wolverine is long dead) and Wolverine's great-great-granddaughter fights Doctor Doom for it. But Doctor Doom can control the metal skeleton with his mind. Snikkt!

Starslayer. I'm tempted just to say "look at the cover." But if you want more info, here goes. He's a Celtic barbarian, who's about to die in the distant past, but then his wife's descendant, in the distant future, summons him forward in time. Where he frees Earth from some alien invaders, reignites our sun, becomes a space pirate, and then dedicates a black hole to a Celtic goddess. Or something. Oh, just look at the picture.

Warlock. Another weird comic book hero. He's artificially created, his face is so radiant that only blind sculptor Alicia Masters can sculpt it into a human likeness. He gets hold of the Soul Gem, which sounds like the name of a mid-1970s R&B band, and goes around the universe fighting Thanos.

Space: 1999. Okay, I'm fully prepared for some pushback on this one. But even though I love this show, think about it for five seconds. The Moon is blasted away from the Earth at such high speeds that it visits a different planet every week. And somehow this doesn't kill everyone on the Moon, because of their protective Moonbase. Okay. Even though the Moon is hurtling through space at speeds much faster than the speed of light. Also, just how many Eagles do they have? And every planet is like a sillly horror movie or a crazy mind-trip. And then there was the crazy-browed shapeshifter.

The legion of Star Wars ripoffs. Not surprisingly, in the wake of Star Wars' success, a huge wave of incredibly vapid Wars knock-offs flooded theaters, from all over the world. (And we've presented many of them in our regular "found footage" feature.) There were the Italian Star Wars knockoffs, like The Humanoid, Star Odyssey, War Of The Robots and many others. You had your Japanese knock-offs, like Message From Space. There were animated Star Wars fakes, like Starchaser: The Legend Of Orin. And don't forget Galaxina. And of course, Turkish Star Wars. These knockoffs all have one thing in common: they borrow from the trappings of Star Wars, and completely skip over what made the original movie great. It's like a generation of B-movie directors watched only the Star Wars Holiday Special, snorted a mountain of cocaine and crushed Dilaudid, and then fired up the cameras!

Here's the whole thing of War Of The Robots in just ten minutes:

Cosmos: War Of The Planets. This Italian space opera, which came out around the same time as Star Wars, is just sort of brain-dead, with very little direction or originality. Our heroes drift through set-pieces ripped off from 2001 and Barbarella, before coming to a planet ruled by an evil computer. Which they overthrow, of course. It's all thanks to the positive power of red headgear with funny ear-circles. The whole movie is public domain and you can watch the whole thing (if you really want to) online.

Battle Beyond The Stars. It's Roger Corman's space opera, which is really all you need to know. Oh, there's an evil overlord, Sador, and he's going to destory a planet unless they submit to him utterly. And only one plucky young hero (and eventually, his girlfriend) dare to stand up to Sador, stealing an old spaceship and going off to hire some mercenaries to help. Actually, all you really need to know is that there's a spaceship-shooting babe with a ridiculous boob window:

Event Horizon. They travel to the aid of a long-lost spaceship, which turns out to have punched a hole into a universe of pure oatmeal... sorry, I meant pure chaos and pure evil. Not oatmeal, because a universe of pure oatmeal would make no sense whatsoever. Unlike a universe of pure evil, which makes perfect sense. Anyway, it makes them have wacky head trips. Mmmm... Oatmeal...

Supernova: I have to admit, any movie that features James Spader traveling through space naked can't be all bad... but the rest of it? Ugh. There's an alien artifact and a giant star that's about to (you guessed it) go supernova... and everything is messed up, until Spader gets naked again. Why can't he just always be naked?

Solaris (remake). We loved the original Tarkovsky film, but the Soderbergh remake? Just sort of navel-gazey and pointless, with just a few too many trippy moments for trippiness' sake. George Clooney explains it best in this video: "Uh, all sorts of strange things start happening."

Captain Eager. A recent direct-to-DVD British movie about an old space hero who comes out of retirement to save the day one more time, this film sort of rides the line between pastiche, homage and copy, trying to channel Dan Dare and falling a bit flat in the process. Although Tamsin Grieg is great, as always. And we love Scamp the Rocket Dog. Here's the trailer:

The article over at EW's PopCandy blog, wonders why SFTV fails to draw a large audience when SF movies do so well:

What is it about science fiction that home viewers are turned off by? It can't be the genre itself: If you look at the top 10 grossing movies of all time, six of them are sci-fi (and the others have pirates, hobbits, and ogres...and, yes, a boat). Clearly, the American public loves their science fiction...why don't they want it on a regular basis, piped into their living rooms, for free?

The problem, I think, isn't with the cost of SFTV or SF movies, but the scale. Mainstream audiences aren't going to see Transformers or Star Trek because they're SF, they're going to see them for the special effects and giant explosions - and, often, big-name, familiar actors - that they offer. It's almost accidental that they're science fiction at all (And I say "almost" because, I think, science fiction offers the possibility for such explosions and special effects much more readily than other genres). Television science fiction, meanwhile, tends to concentrate on much smaller, more cerebral stories - through necessity of budget, as much as anything else - and those are the types of SF movies that fail at the box office (See Solaris, Sunshine). If there was a TV show that left its brains at home - or, at least, far in the background - and offered up fast-moving, special-effects-laden action on a reliable weekly basis (Like, say, the first season of Heroes, although I may be stretching with "reliable" and "action" there), then I'm convinced it'd be a massive hit... especially if you could find some fading A-list actor to headline it.

But what do you think? Is science fiction television doomed? And if so, why?

The Great Sci-Fi Divide: Why don't we want science fiction on TV? [EW.com]

In The Clone Returns, Kohei Takahara's twin brother dies by drowning, and Kohei blames himself. At his mother's death bed, Kohei promises that he'll live extra long to make up for his brother's death. But years later, Kohei is serving as an astronaut on a space station, and dies in an accident. His widow wants compensation, but then finds out that Kohei asked to be brought back in a clone body, implanted with his memories. Unfortunately, the process is faulty, and the clone is stuck on the traumatic memory of his brother's drowning, and can't remember anything after that. The clone finds the dead body of the original Kohei, and mistakenly thinks it's his twin brother's corpse. The clone decides to carry his own dead body all the way back to his old home town, where he makes a shocking discovery. It sounds incredibly arty, but possibly also brilliant. And here's the trailer:

The Clone Returns to the Homeland trailer

[The Clone Returns, via QuietEarth]

On the heels of Jason Stoddard’s “Happier Science Fiction” manifesto, Solaris has announced that science fiction writer and former Interzone magazine editor de Vries will be soliciting manuscripts for stories depicting a kinder, gentler future:

Shine is a collection of near-future, optimistic SF stories where some of the genres brightest stars and some of its most exciting new talents portray the possible roads to a better tomorrow. Definitely not a plethora of Pollyannas (but neither a barrage of dystopias), Shine will show that positive change is far from being a foregone conclusion, but needs to be hardfought, innovative, robust and imaginative. Most importantly, it aims to demonstrate that while times are tough and outcomes are uncertain, we can still bend the future in benevolent ways if we embrace change and steer its momentum in the right direction.

De Vries is looking for stories set within the next 50 years that would persuade “the biggest skeptics on the planet” that the near future can be a better place. He has also set up a blog for Shine, hoping to create an “open platform” for discussing the nature and challenges of an optimistic future.

[Shineanthology’s Weblog via Jason Stoddard]

To some extent, it's understandable that space adventures play fast and loose with physics. After all, who wants to watch Han Solo spend years on the journey to Alderaan, only to find that the planet has twice Earth gravity and he can barely stand up, much less swagger?

The categories of mistakes in our report card should be pretty self-explanatory, but just in case, I'll expand on them a little bit:

• There's no sound in space
• Not all planets have Earth gravity
• Planets should have diverse climates, instead of one unified climate across a "desert planet" or "forest planet."
• It shouldn't be too easy to communicate with alien creatures, without some kind of high-technology "translator" explanation.
• And it definitely shouldn't be too easy for humans to interbreed with aliens.
• Humans exposed to vacuum without a spacesuit shouldn't explode or shatter. And a "hull breach" where the ship's crew is exposed to vacuum should kill everyone instantly.
• You can't have fires in space, unless there's oxygen leaking out somehow.
• Asteroids or other objects shouldn't be able to float close together without falling into each other's gravity
• People shouldn't be able to dodge lasers and other speed-of-light weapons
• And there's no reason why someone would move in slow-motion in zero gravity.
• Faster-than-light travel is probably not ever going to be possible.

Famous Names: Andrei Tartovsky (Director, Co-writer).

Crunchy Goodness: 4

Re-makes: Steven Soderbergh's 2002 re-make was surprisingly good ... but died at the box office, as people don't want to see George Clooney confront the existential problems of the universe.

Most Painfully Dated Moment: Actually, the whole movie is pretty damn Soviet.

Life Lesson: Talk things over with your loved ones before you have to do it as part of a telepathically-induced hallucination.

Review of Solaris at the Sci-Fi Movie Page