[Sci-Fi Month] My Unpopular Sci-Fi Opinions

Tuesday 29 November 2016


We can't all agree on everything. That's just a fact of life. However, there are times when you don't agree with the vast majority of people and end up being the black sheep. That's me, hello, I am a black sheep. I don't necessarily take pride in having different opinions but I'm not ashamed of it either, it's just how it is. Not everyone has the exact same taste, and if we did the world would be so incredibly boring. So, I am here today on this hopefully glorious today to share with you all my unpopular opinions on sci-fi!



This is probably the most unpopular opinion I have when it comes to sci-fi, but I genuinely think that Alien is the best movie in the series, mainly because I didn't like Aliens. The tone was so different to me that it felt off. I went in expecting another horror style movie, but instead it's a full on sci-fi action movie with lots of shooting, which isn't usually my kind of thing. Obviously I still liked Ripley and the aliens themselves, but the Marines kind of let the movie down so much for me. I thought they were a bunch of meatheads who just went in there guns blazing after being told that Xenomorph blood is acidic and then just mow them down like zombies, instead of the supposedly unstoppable monster that the Alien was in the first movie. I'm not a James Cameron fan anyway (apart from the first two Terminator movies), but I just remember being so let down by Aliens.


I can feel people's browsers being closed right now. I don't just think that Batman v. Superman wasn't that bad, it's my favourite movie of the whole year. I love this movie, and I honestly don't care about what other people think. If other people don't like that, that's fine because it doesn't affect me. It's not fine when people tell me that I'm an idiot or a "fake geek" for liking a movie, that's never okay, that's rude. Anyways, Man of Steel is one of my favourite movies, so obviously I had incredibly high hopes for BvS and I think that Snyder and Co. really delivered. The story moves at the same pace as a comic book (which is sort of Zack Snyder's trademark), has a good balance of action and dialogue, and most importantly, has incredibly accurate portrayals of the characters. Ben Affleck is now my absolute favourite Batman because his Bruce Wayne is pretty much lifted from the pages of the comics. I know that a lot of people prefer Christian Bale, and I did too at one point, but to me, Bale's Bruce Wayne is pretty bland. His scenes cut between him at home, him in public acting like an idiot, and him as Batman with very little transition. With Affleck, we see those transitions and how different each one of Bruce's personas is. I think the most common complaint with this movie is that it was "confusing" and too full of symbolism and imagery, and also "too dark". That's just the way that DC is and they've been that way since the 1970s/80s. DC stories tend to be larger than life and tackle issues such as what it means to be a hero, what it is that makes people good, compared to Marvel stories that are much more grounded (i'm probably wrong about that though, because i'm not a marvel fan). These days I think a lot of people expect every superhero movie that is released to be exactly like an MCU movie, which is not going to happen. Different comics companies do their own things and if they all just copied each other, they would be boring. What I'm basically getting at is, I think people were a bit too hard on BvS. It wasn't for everyone, but it didn't deserve to be ripped to shreds.


I actually have a full post on this point (clickety-click, so I'll keep this brief. Superman has basically become a punching bag for people who are not only a part of comics fandom, but other fandoms too. Lots of people say that he's "boring" or "overpowered" or "doesn't have a personality", and I completely disagree with all of those points. Obviously Superman is incredibly strong, but to me it's his personality that makes him the hero that he is. If Superman didn't have such a compassionate heard and wasn't intelligent, he would be a very different kind of hero. He'd be an anti-hero, which is not what Superman is. He doesn't throw regular people through walls or into concrete because he knows that it would kill them. He's about doing things the right way, and working with the law to keep people safe, instead of doing things his own way and basically landing criminals in the hospital like one certain hero that we all know (but i do still love, though).


I will admit that this opinion is a little bit uninformed because I haven't experienced a lot of space opera, but what I've seen is just not for me. I personally like my sci-fi to have an emphasis on the science part, like Star Trek does, rather than showing a cool spaceship and not really explaining how it works. Obviously there needs to be plot and characters and all that good stuff to, but my tastes definitely tend to lean more towards the science part of sci-fi. But who knows, maybe my opinion of this will change one day, and I'll open up to it more.


I'm not sure if this even counts as a sci-fi opinion (it's becoming unpopular on the internet in general), but I really don't. There's no proof of aliens existing apart from blurry and possibly fake images of "UFOs", and they've never made contact so how could I believe in them? Don't get me wrong, though. I like the idea of aliens, but I don't think that they're real because there's such a lack of evidence out there other than people saying that they do exist. If other people want to believe in aliens, then that's fine because it doesn't affect me at all, but I'll acknowledge the existence of extraterrestrial life when it's actually found.

Tell me some of your unpopular opinions!

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