Here's a fun time-waster

[sholio]

On io9: March Madness bracket showdowns to determine your favorite science fiction movie of the last ten years.

This was so much fun and SO HARD. I ended up with my final brackets being Black Panther vs. Wonder Woman and Inception vs. The Martian, and I just sort of ground to a halt there because HOW DO I CHOOSE. (They're not even my top faves out of the entire field necessarily -- Inception, for example, I've only seen once, ages ago, though I remember it was really trippy and fun -- but some movies that might've won against these washed out earlier because of how the brackets were set up.) I think BP edges out WW in my personal bracketing, but Inception vs. The Martian is a total toss-up because they're just such utterly different movies, and then putting either of them up against a superhero movie it's like ... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

... so yeah, it's fun! Go play! I ended up doing my brackets on a sheet of paper alongside the computer to best keep track. I also haven't seen a number of these, so anything I hadn't seen washed out against anything I had seen, unless I'd absolutely hated it.

Comments

[rachelmanija]

I got Annihilation vs. Black Panther for the final two. UGH I CAN'T CHOOSE. They were both so brilliant and mind-expanding and groundbreaking and one-of-a-kind, but in totally different ways.

[sholio]

I haven't seen Annihilation! Actually, doing these also reminded me of how many SF movies from the last decade I haven't seen yet (though I think I can happily continue forever never having seen any of the Planet of the Apes ones; I didn't even know there were so many ...).

[rachelmanija]

I really liked the first Planet of the Apes movie, and the second is also fun. I lost track after that.

Annihilation is such a strange movie. I wish you could see it on a big screen - I have a feeling it's much better with total immersion, especially given how important sound/music is in it. If you watch, I'd at least turn off the lights. It's kind of horror and kind of sf, with overtones of trippy New Wave sf, but really its own thing. A lot of movies on that list were lots of fun to see but they didn't stick with me. This one did.

[jb_slasher]

Yeah I can't even decide between Fury Road and Rogue One without an existential crisis so... XD

[sholio]

LOLOL I know right?? Some of the match-ups are just completely unfair.

[snickfic]

I ended up with quarterfinal matchups of Mad Max vs Logan and Pacific Rim vs GotG1, and those are just not decisions I can make. 😂

[sholio]

OH MAN. I don't know how I would choose between those either! It's interesting how tiny differences in the relative merits of the early matchups results in very different brackets down the line - I think some of these are very much "catch me on a different day, get a different result." Those are all very excellent choices. :D

[yalumesse]

OH WOW is that hard. Those four you mentioned? Also my top four! (I suspect they are for a lot of people). Nearly impossible to choose between. But The Martian took #1 with WW as the runner up and Inception as a stupid close third.

I had some brackets where I didn't know one or both movies but that's always going to be the case I suppose.

[sholio]

SO HARD TO CHOOSE!!

Yeah, I had a number of brackets where I didn't know at least one of them. I generally tried to choose the one I knew unless I'd absolutely hated it (it seemed fairer than thinking "well, I MIGHT have liked this movie based on what I've heard about it"), and on the brackets where I didn't know either one, I figured it didn't really matter because whatever I chose would just wash out as soon as it came up against one I'd seen.

This game certainly did a good job of reminding me of a bunch of movies I want to see and/or rewatch. :D

[sophia_sol]

Oh fun! My top four ended up being Fury Road, Wonder Woman, Thor Ragnarok, and Into the Spider-Verse, and between those four Fury Road would win but the other three are like....a very close tie with each other. But Black Panther should have been up there as well, it was just hard done by because it had an early match-up against Fury Road.

Though it was also funny how many times I had to write "no award" into the early brackets because I hadn't seen either movie in a match-up :P

[sholio]

Yeah, with the ones where I hadn't seen either I just figured it didn't matter because whatever I picked would wash out as soon as it came up against something I'd seen. :P

Some movies would've made it farther but ended up matched up against something I liked ever so slightly more! The initial matchups did make a huge difference.

[trobadora]

I ended up with Fury Road vs. Winter Soldier! Fury Road wins.

[sholio]

Oh, that's a fun match-up. :D

[minim_calibre]

I'm at Snowpiercer vs. Winter Soldier.

I'm totally stuck here.

Snowpiercer is far more sci-fi, though, and genre match in my head may be what I use as the tiebreaker.

[sholio]

Yeah, the "more scifi-er" metric was part of why some movies got farther than others for me; in fact, I think it's why Winter Soldier didn't make it to the final bracket, because it doesn't read as sci-fi to me as whatever it lost out to.

[lokifan]

Yeah, I ended up with Attack The Block vs Get Out (...I mean, Attack The Block, but that's just hometown partisanship because I can't choose otherwise) and then Ex Machina vs Black Panther (Black Panther). Definitely involves a lot of weird comparisons.

[neonhummingbird]

Very VERY difficult; I ended with Black Panther vs Pacific Rim (my heart cannot choose!) and Arrival vs Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse (both so cool and innovative!). Black Panther won narrowly as innovative AND fun AND damn cool. It was not a simple choice...