10 replies on “Greatest Science Fiction Film Tournament Week 2: Round 1”

    • You’ll see a fair amount of variability. The lists were constructed as follows:
      Step 1: count how many times each movie appears on every one of the other lists.
      Step 2: Sort all movies, first by the number of appearances on all lists, and then by title in alphabetical order.
      Step 3: Break the 384 movies into 24 lists of 16 each, by putting movies 1, 25, 49, etc. on the first list, movies 2, 26, 50, etc. on the second list, and so forth.
      This was designed to spread out popularity, so each list will have very popular films mixed in with the obscure.

      • Wait, the first list had the movie that was #1? I don’t remember seeing “Empire Strikes Back” on that list. ;-)

  1. I’ve actually seen fewer of these than the last list.

    I also find it hard to believe that some of these made any “Best” lists at all….

    • That’s part of the reason I linked to all the lists in the announcement article. I think the “Popular Mechanics” definition of “best sci fi” was made up of “movies I liked to watch on late night cable while stoned in the 1980s.” The Timeout.com list was done by fan submission, and may have been trolled. I left them in hoping there would be discussion about them, confident that most would be booted out of the top 128.

      • Having taken a peek at The Timeout list I’m not sure why you even bothered to include it except, perhaps, to add some comic relief to the weekly discussions. Not only does it appear to have been seriously trolled, but they arbitrarily decided to exclude dystopian films, so no “Blade Runner”, or “Fahrenheit 451”, etc., but the likes of “Battle Beyond the Stars” made the list.

        I did for a moment think that the list might have deliberately included some terrible films as examples of how not to do it – 50 films running the gamut of SciFi rather than the 50 best. But then I looked at some of the comments and decided that their average readership probably isn’t all that smart, and the rather obvious omission of the classic “Plan 9 From Outer Space” kind of rules that out too.

        Roll on the #128…

        • Yeah, this was a first tournament deal, and some of those entries I gathered were awful. We’re looking at doing other tournaments with other “seed” options. (Greatest SF TV is in the works to follow this next year, as well as greatest superhero film/series, greatest animated film/series, greatest fantasy film/series…)

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