It’s a slightly click-baity title, but as we’re still generating more content for our magazines, this one included, why not?
My Sci-fi unpopular opinion is that 2001: A Space Odyssey is nothing but pretentious, LSD fueled nonsense. I’ve tried watching it multiple times and each time I have absolutely no patience for the pointless little scenes which contain little to no depth or meaningful plot, all coalescing towards that 15 minute “journey” through space and series of hallucinations or whatever that are supposed to be deep, shake you to your foundations, and make you re-think the whole human condition.
But it doesn’t. Because it’s just pretentious, LSD fueled nonsense. Planet of the Apes was released in the same year and is, on every level, a better Sci-fi movie. It offers mystery, a consistent and engaging plot, relatable characters you actually care about, and asks a lot more questions about the world and our place in it.
I think this might be a truly unpopular opinion, but I could not get into the expanse at all. Just never got invested in the characters enough to stick with it. I’ve retried watching it 4 times due to everyone recommending it, kind of given up now!
Also the latest star wars films killed any interest I had in star wars.
well, I love The Expanse, but I applaud you for posting an actual unpopular opinion!
The books are great. Show does a good job moving the intrigue and conflicts to a screen but man if Avasarala and Amos aren’t the absolute best portrayal of those characters.
Avasarala has a heart of gold and a fist of iron in equal measures.
This means she’ll do horrible things (even at her own expense) for what she believes is right and she doesn’t put up with any kind of nonsense.
And yet she plays the political game so well all while pretending she’s above it.
And the Shohreh Aghdashloo knocks the character out of the park. Every move and word both foul and sweet personifies the character in the book that it’s impossible to convey how absolutely masterful the performance is.
And Wes Chatham as Amos is a close second. A man whose moral code is simple because he’s broken, knows it, and so he defaults to “who is the most likely good person I can use as a guide.” Chatham portrays the violence is necessary like doing the laundry.
Turns it on, does the job, goes back as if nothing happened. Oh, I should do this instead? You got it boss.
Or how he conveys in the simple things how Amos feels there is a moral right but having grown up as he did it’s hard to know what that is and who has the authority to enforce it it just chefs kiss
What? Stop beating this guy? Ok. Sorry fella, buy you a drink?
All I can do is apologise, I really tried, so I’m going to chalk it up to a me problem. Desperate for a good Sci fi series as well, that’s the most annoying part!
That means you’ve missed out on Andor, which I think is better than any live action Star Wars (including, perhaps controversially, Empire Strikes Back)!
It’s mature, deep, detailed, grounded, and very political. The characters and world are built up phenomenally, and it’s much more contemplative in its pacing, and it definitely treats its audience as intelligent rather than beating them around the head with obvious exposition. It feels more like an HBO show than your standard Star Wars affair, frankly. And it works as a standalone, too - it’s not just yet more Skywalker family drama.
I’ve always loved anything Star Wars that didn’t really involve Jedi. The universe is incredibly diverse and interesting, and cutting out the light side vs dark side trope most star wars content is centered on lets writers make really interesting characters and situations. Like in Mandandolrian the scene with Bill Burr confronting the Imperial officer that spearheaded the Burning Khan massacre was just fantastic, regardless of it being star wars.
Like in Mandandolrian the scene with Bill Burr confronting the Imperial officer that spearheaded the Burning Khan massacre was just fantastic, regardless of it being star wars.
Bill Burr crushed that entire episode. He showed acting chops he’s rarely had the chance to flex before, honestly. The guy is so self-deprecating in his humor, almost aggressively so, that it’s easy to miss his talent. Heck, I did, and for a damned long time.
You ads selling that to me! I don’t have Disney + so that might be an issue. I loved rogue one, but that was the last star wars thing I enjoyed.
Oh my sibling in Xenu, Andor is mandatory viewing if you have any love for Star Wars at all, but ESPECIALLY if you love Rogue One. It is absolutely incredible.
“Andor” refers to Cassian Andor, the team leader in Rogue One. It’s his origin story, basically
You know how OP said 2001 was pretentious nonsense? That’s how I felt about Andor. It was actively bad, and I struggle to see all the praise it gets as anything other than Morbius level trolling! It was badly written, badly plotted, was trying to be about three things at once and didn’t do any of them well, and was about six episodes too long. It’s what really turned me off Starwars!
Talk about trolling. Jaysus. Is there a way to tag users here yet, or do we wait for Sync? 😶
If you are least made it past s1e4 CQB then you gave it a solid shot. That episode imo is where you either pick it up and like it or move on. The first 3 episodes can be a bit slow and introduce so many characters.
I heard this, and so I think I get to episode 4 or 5 drop it and then I leave it too long, try and watch it all again but I’ve seen the first 4 episodes too many times.
Maybe I’m due trying to watch it again!
Maybe on re watch just read the synopsis of episodes 1-3 if you’ve now seen the “boring” ones a few times now as a reminder, then start at 4.
I imagine you’ve probably heard this a few times as well, but give the books a try instead, I read them first and now I can’t watch the show.
How far do you usually get before giving up on it? Not saying you should force it more, just curious.
You’re valid. It took us a couple tries before we really got into The Expanse.
As for Star Wars, we stick with the Dave Filoni shows now. If I may suggest, try a Clone Wars rewatch with a viewing order that emphasizes the story arcs. That’s what brought me back to Star Wars, and I hated the sequels and the prequels.
Unpopular? Yes. Wrong? I don’t think so. I finished The Expanse and at the end I didn’t feel like it added anything to my life but I didn’t hate it either. There was definitely some standout moments but I would not rewatch it.
I would say that while the show does a fantastic job of bringing the books to the screen, it misses the interpersonal intimacy that makes the book series so fantastic. The plots are cool, but at its core, The Expanse is really about its characters. If you like to read or listen to audio books, I HIGHLY recommend them. A big part of where the show fails, is it was impossible for them to tell the story and also deal with the internal dialogues of each character. In the books, every chapter is told from the point of view of a specific character, so you get to know their inner thoughts and feelings on an extremely personal level.
This is one of those series where I will tell someone that if they read the books and enjoyed them, they would enjoy the show - and vice-versa. That said, if you didn’t enjoy the show for the reasons you stated, and you’re willing to give it a go, I think you’ll probably enjoy the books.
My sci-fi unpopular opinion is probably that I don’t consider Star Wars to be sci-fi. It shares more with fantasy in that it’s more character and story driven and less about philosophy and the way technology changes the human experience which imo is what defines sci-fi.
Unpopular opinion: Star Wars is in space and has spaceships and aliens. Good enough, it’s sci-fi.
People attribute these silly, gatekeepy characteristics to sci-fi, but sci-fi doesn’t need to be about anything. Sci-fi is allowed to be shitty or irrelevant.
Sci-fi is allowed to be shitty or irrelevant, but that is absolutely unrelated to Star Wars not being sci-fi. Star Wars isn’t shitty, and it is relevant.
The reason it isn’t sci-fi is because it a) makes no attempt whatsoever to explore the implications of the differences between its world and ours, and b) it makes no attempt to scientifically explain those differences.
There has been exactly one time when SW has attempted to explain its universe, and midichlorians have been a meme for decades because it was trying to introduce scientific explanations into the wrong genre.
To be clear: this is fine. Saying Star Wars isn’t sci-fi is not an insult. It’s just a genre, and genres aren’t better or worse than each other. If Star Wars did try to be sci-fi, it wouldn’t be able to tell the grand good and evil story it’s trying to tell - that’s the advantage of fantasy.
Isn’t it not sci-fi? It’s usually more classed as sci-fantasy, if memory serves.
True sci-fi is rare most of it is sci-fantasy. Great recent sci-fi is Expanse - author was pissed about these warp nonsense so he grounded it in physics and only added few technologies which could be made in future.
Yeah, usually sci-fi has a point to make about the human condition or some underlying philosophy that guides all of it, or at least a philosophical idea that guides each episode. I find if you ask yourself to finish the phrase “What would society/humanity look like if we had to access to _______?” if the answer to the blank is clear then it’s sci-fi. Some sci-fi goes the opposite route though “What if we did NOT have access to ______?”
A thought I’ve been having that might be more controversial: Star Trek isn’t sci-fi.
It’s basically a series of morality fables with magical premises. There’s always a paper-thin sci-fi explanation, but for all that these matter to the story, they might as well just say “fairies did it.”
(And many of Gene Roddenberry’s “godlike being” characters, like Q, are almost literally fairies).
There’s also its treatment of space. Just as Star Wars’ combat was an excuse to do WWII fighter combat in space, Star Trek is an excuse to do WWII submarine combat in space. They’re equally unrealistic in that regard.
My unpopular opinion is that I don’t like space operas. I’d rather read pages of explanation of technology and world building. I don’t care that the star princess in exile has to assemble a rag tag bunch of fringe worlders to take back the throne from the cruel council of the galactic core. How dat engine work tho?
Seriously most of these stories might as well be written by AI for how original they are. I am trying to read scifi and fantasy for the originality that just doesn’t exist. Authors will even accidentally add great ideas to the books on background characters or in random world details and do absolutely nothing with them. They instead will repeat the most generic trope driven story every. They might aswell be plagiarizing for how little their stories add to the genre at least then I could just throw their book away without trying to read it.
Have you read the Three Body Problem or Children of Time?
Those are the most imaginative Sci Fi works that I can think of.
I think the Expanse also does a really good job of bridging the gap between space opera and hard Sci Fi.
Popular-unpopular opinion - Space opera hits a lot of tropes that have been constanly re-told since ancient Babylonia and Greece, and people like when a story hits familiar beats.
Unpopular-unpopular opinion - Worldbuilding is important for the story to be grounded and coherent, but if there is no story to be told atop of it you end up with a catalogue of author’s personal anthropological and technological obsessions.
I think sci-fi writers constantly make their stakes far too high, stack the odds far to heavily against the protagonists, and go for a scope far to broad. I don’t need 3 people to save the entire intergalactic population from a super mega back hole bomb with .002 seconds to spare. I’ve seen it and read it a thousand times.
Give me the guy who thinks maybe his spaceship could take on exploring one planet, tell me what he finds and why it was wise for him to run home and call for extra resources to be redirected to that planet. Tell me how the technology of your imaginary world brought 2 characters together and allowed them to build a beautiful life together.
That’s why I adore The Martian and can’t get excited about Star Wars.
This is exactly the problem I also have with Marvel movies. Once you’ve raised the stakes so far it’s impossible to go back without seeming less than your predecessors. It’s why Iron Man worked so damned well as it was a pretty small, personal story… same for most of the early Avengers movies. Ever since Endgame it seems like everyone wants to either make it even bigger still (???) or challenge these people who have saved literally the entire universe with… emotional trauma? I don’t know… I’ve seriously lost interest.
Becky Chambers books tend to be pretty low stakes, so you might want to check those out.
Was going to recommend them, and also point out that they go pretty far in the other direction. Once I digested Long Way to a Small Angry Planet and kind of actively decided I was cool with her approach, I really enjoyed her stuff. That first one felt like a bait & switch in the moment, though.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is highly overrated!
The main characters were obnoxious, I didn’t end up caring about any of them, and quite frankly, I wished the towel guy had died at the beginning along with everyone else on Earth (except the dolphins). I wasted hours of my life over those 3 books!
