100 Sci-Fi Movies - The First 10: 2001, Star Wars, Empire, Alien, Aliens, Terminator - SPOILERS

[@inerdius]

I misspoke early in the video and said "one hundred novels" when I meant "movies."

[@HawkORama]

So many first sequels have been the best movies in a franchise, but I never really thought about it in a unified way until you pointed out so many all at once. I think one obvious reason a Part II movie is better is if the first movie was good enough that the sequel had a much larger budget (e.g., Empire Strikes Back, Terminator 2, Aliens). A larger budget not only means better production values, but it also means that they can be more ambitious. For example, many of the effects in Terminator were actually pretty cheesy, and there's just no way they could have done the liquid metal effect on the same budget; the same with Aliens -- if they'd tried to film such an expansive story on the budget of the original movie, they would have had to limit the scope so much that it would have looked like bad set pieces. But what really made thos sequls better than the originals was that they used that increased budget to tell a bigger story -- not necessarily a better story, but a different one, and definitely bigger. Alien was a haunted house in space, a quiet, understated horror movie; Aliens was a huge mutlifaceted action movie. Superman introduced the character and his backstory, but it was really a small movie -- it didn't do anything exceptional with the character; Superman 2 had the big battle scenes that really showed off his abilities. Plenty of sequels have been terrible because they had a bigger budget but no idea what to do with it, whereas these movies used bigger budgets to tell bigger, *grander* stories. Not necessarily better stories (Superman 2 wasn;t an especially *good* story....), but definitely more expansive than the originals. Aliens was kind of an obvious choice -- "Hey, insteadof just one alien, let's have abunch of 'em this time!" -- but instead of just rehashing the original with three aliens stalking everyone on a spaceship, they made it a much BIGGER story in every way. And this I think is one reason that following sequels struggle to live up to the promise of that first sequel. Wow, Aliens was HUGE! We should make another one -- but we already used the "more aliens" idea, so what do we do now? Okay, T2 made Arnold a Good guy, so what do we do now? It's easy to expand the original concept into a bigger, better movie, but once you've done that (once), it's a lot harder to up the stakes *again* in a different enough way that it's not going to seem derivative. I think that's why so many open-ended TV shows jump the shark (literally, in the case of Happy Days) -- the writers get to the point where they canlt think of anything new that isn't completely ridiculous or out character. (And another problem is with the studios. When T2 or Aliens make a gazillion dollars, the studios want another movie *just like that one* that is going to make just as much money. But, of course, another movie *just like that one* isn't going to be original enoug to make *that much money*. The nest movie needs to tella different story -- but if it;s *too* different, the studios won't greenlight it.....)

[@inerdius]

Good analysis! I do think that, at least in the case of the Alien movies that followed, there was an attempt to do something different each time, but for different reasons they didn't work as well. I think it was the same with Terminator. It made sense to try and tell the story of the future, but it lacked heart. With Return of the Jedi, Star Wars opted to appeal more to kids, and it isn't necessarily a bad movie, and the main characters had all grown considerably by then. Star Trek: The Voyage Home was actually really good. Superman movies were terrible after the second one, and really that character only blossomed on TV afterward.

[@stevebeef4818]

You need to rewatch 2001 about 100 more times!

[@inerdius]

OK, Mr. "Beef," calm down...