Lo-fi Sci-fi
5 science fiction films without the special effects
Science fiction has the opportunity to show us entire new worlds, and tell us bold, exciting new stories that could never exist in the world we live in. So why do so many of them look exactly the same? Many production teams spend so much screen time on expensive special effects and Apple Store aesthetics that they neglect to do something new with them.
Here are a few movies that ditch the special effects, and simply show us something we’ve never seen before.
1. The Sleep Dealer
The Sleep Dealer is about a Mexican border town where workers remotely operate drones to do jobs in the US. It takes place in a world filled with amazing, shiny new technology, but in a part of said world without access to it.
If you’ve ever been to a place like this and had to sit on a lawn chair in the local internet cafe waiting for your e-mail to load on a cigarette-stained computer that existed before Google, you’ll understand this movie’s technology. We’re looking at future tech, but it still feels old and outdated.
The bootleg old tech isn’t what’s important here- it’s the lives of the Mexicans using it to remotely work in the US, and the Americans using it to remotely keep them ‘in line.’
Watch the trailer here. ★★★★★
2. 11 Minutes Ago
This is a film about a scientist who can travel through time, but only for 11 minutes per trip. But when he arrives for the first time, everyone already knows him. It seems that further in his future, he has already traveled further in their past. He spends years of his life weaving through a single evening out of sequence to put the pieces together.
Time travel epics take a lot of special effects, right? Not if the destination is a modern day wedding reception. You know what you need to do to shoot that? Invite all your friends over and throw a fake wedding reception.
That’s what Bob Gebert did. In one day. The entire film was shot in less than 24 hours, with more time and budget put into balloon animals than special effects.
The results are outstanding.
Watch the trailer here. ★★★★☆
3. The American Astronaut
Shot on black and white film, with effects that break down to wiggling paintings in front of a camera and straight up pretending that a hotel room is a spacecraft, this film is more analog than most made 100 years ago. But it has enough weird ideas to take us across the universe.
This amazingly bizarre movie will keep your brain doing so many mental gymnastics that (if you’re like me) it will take you a full day to readjust to reality. It’s coo-coo bananas.
You can hypothetically watch the trailer here, but dang is it so much better if you go into it knowing nothing. ★★★★★
4. Ghosts With Shit Jobs
As a film about crappy future jobs, (digital janitor, human spam, arachnoid silk gatherer, baby assembler) this movie needs a LOT of future technology. Most movies tend to think future tech gets bigger- in order to fill up a set, wires, screens, and digital readouts flood the screen. This movie goes the Google Glass route. Everyone in the movie is constantly operating complex computer systems- that only they can see.
Even when we finally do get a glimpse inside the machine, it’s inside this movie’s equivalent of time travel- an expanded version of Google Street View that allows you watch in real time, rewind and fast forward. Coincidentally, on screen, that kind of just looks the same as walking down a street.
Watch the trailer here. ★★★☆☆
5. Zonad
Finally, the easiest way to avoid needing any crazy sci-fi special effects in your sci-fi movie…. is to not have any sci-fi in it at all. Zonad is not at all the type of movie you would expect as director John Carney’s followup to Once. It’s an alien invasion comedy so cheesy that you half expect the Mystery Science Theater 3000 crew to start commenting on it.
However, there’s no alien in the film. Zonad is a rehab escapee who passed out in someone’s house during a post-costume party B&E. They assume he’s from another world, and he’s more than happy to put on his worst Mork from Ork impression if it means free beer and starstruck women.
Watch the trailer here. ★★★☆☆
Written by Ryan Estrada.
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I know you were expecting me to talk about Primer or Time Crimes, but I think they’re kind of boring.
