Must Watch Movies

There are a few movies that I simply HAVE to re-watch every so often. It isn't an every year thing, but more like if I haven't seen them for awhile my brain starts to drop hints that I need to pull out the disk soon.

The first of these should be no surprise to anyone that knows me (or has read this blog, or listened to my podcasts), and that is "Star Trek: The Motion Picture."

This is not only my favorite Star Trek movie, it's one of my favorite movies of all time. I've said it before, but this is the only true science fiction story out of all of the movies, and the further we get away from 1979, the less and less Star Trek movies seem to be concerned with being sci-fi. The more recent entries on the series want to be action movies more than deal with any thinking (unless they're just poorly rehashing Star Trek 2).


The next movie that I just the itch to re-watch quite often is "Star Wars". Much like with Star Trek, this is the first movie to come out and it is also my favorite. Not only is is a good adventure story (which is what Star Wars should be), but it is also self contained. You don't need to have seen anything else to get a full, satisfying story out of this one. Unfortunately, that can't be said about the rest of the entries in the franchise.

Oh, and as long as we're on the subject, my preferred version is the original, which you can find in very high quality if you do a search for "Team Negative 1". It's a BIG file, but worth it IMHO.

As you might guess, the last movie that I'm going to talk about today is also science fiction and comes from the late 1970's, and that would be "The Black Hole". (And just typing the title has the John Barry score starting in my head.) This is much more of a "hard sci-fi" story, than Star Trek, but it still has it's fantastic elements (like being able to sit and watch a black hole). The major thing about the story is the ambiguous ending, which leads to more questions than answers and makes you think (there's that word again).

You can read more about my thoughts on this movie from my rediscovery of it 5 years ago.




There are a few more movies that I like to re-watch more often than others, like "Tora, Tora, Tora" and "A Night to Remember", but I don't feel the NEED to watch them like I do these three. I think it's telling that I have watched all three of these movies at least once since we moved to Florida in July.