Annal:2000 Saturn Award for Best Science Fiction Film

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Results of the Saturn Award in the year 2000. For a ranked list of films, try an honor roll:

The Matrix: Part 1 of The Matrix Trilogy

Andy Wachowski, Larry Wachowski

By following up their debut thriller Bound with the 1999 box-office smash The Matrix, the codirecting Wachowski brothers—Andy and Larry—annihilated any suggestion of a sophomore jinx, crafting one of the most exhilarating sci-fi/action movies of the 1990s. Set in the not too distant future in an insipid, characterless city, we find a young man named Neo (Keanu Reeves). A software techie by day and a computer hacker by night, he sits alone at home by his monitor, waiting for a sign, a signal—from what or whom he doesn’t know—until one night, a…

 

Galaxy Quest

Dean Parisot

You don’t have to be a Star Trek fan to enjoy Galaxy Quest, but it certainly helps. A knowingly affectionate tribute to Trek and any other science fiction TV series of the 1960s and beyond, this crowd-pleasing comedy offers in-jokes at warp speed, hitting the bull’s-eye for anyone who knows that (1) the starship captain always removes his shirt to display his manly physique; (2) any crew member not in the regular cast is dead meat; and (3) the heroes always stop the doomsday clock with one second to spare. So it is with Commander Taggart (Tim…

 

EXistenZ

David Cronenberg

Exciting stars Jennifer Jason Leigh (Dolores Claiborne), Jude Law (Gattaca), and Willem Dafoe (Speed 2, Affliction) challenge the boundaries of reality in this futuristic, critically acclaimed adventure thriller! During the first closed-door demonstration of an amazing new virtual reality game called eXistenZ, the system’s brilliant designer, Allegra Geller (Leigh), is violently attacked by a crazed assassin intent on killing her and destroying her creation! Forced to flee into hiding, Allegra enlists a young assistant (Law) to help her in…

 

Pitch Black

David Twohy

Owing a major debt to Alien and its cinematic spawn, Pitch Black is a guilty pleasure that surpasses expectations. As he did with The Arrival, director David Twohy revitalizes a derivative story, allowing you to forgive its flaws and submit to its visceral thrills. Under casual scrutiny, the plot’s logic crumbles like a stale cookie, but it’s definitely fun while it lasts.

A spaceship crashes on a desert planet scorched under three suns. The mostly doomed survivors include a resourceful captain (Radha Mitchell), a drug-addled cop (Cole…

 

The Thirteenth Floor

Josef Rusnak

Computer scientist Hannon Fuller (Armin Mueller-Stahl) finds something extremely important. Knowing that he’s marked for assassination, he leaves a message in the virtual reality world he’s designed, hoping it will be found by colleague Douglas Hall (Craig Bierko). Hall is a suspect in Fuller’s murder and indeed finds a bloody shirt in his house, with no recollection of what he did the night before. Hall plunges headlong into Fuller’s world (a re-creation of 1937 Los Angeles) to try to unravel the slaying and is soon knee-deep in confusion and trouble. What this…

 

Star Wars: Episode 1. The Phantom Menace

George Lucas

“I have a bad feeling about this,” says the young Obi-Wan Kenobi (played by Ewan McGregor) in Star Wars: Episode I, The Phantom Menace as he steps off a spaceship and into the most anticipated cinematic event…well, ever. He might as well be speaking for the legions of fans of the original episodes in the Star Wars saga who can’t help but secretly ask themselves: Sure, this is Star Wars, but is it my Star Wars? The original elevated moviegoers’ expectations so high that it would have been impossible for any subsequent film to meet them.…

 
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