Director Woody Allen's Best Sci-Fi & Fantasy Films

George Lucas (Star Wars), Steven Spielberg (E.T.) and James Cameron (Terminator) are Hollywood's reigning sci-fi kings. Spielberg is working on another science fiction outing, Interstellar to be released in 2011. Lucas is prepping a live action Star Wars TV series, and James Cameron's epic CGI alien movie Avatar opens on December 18, 2009. Mention sci-fi or fantasy and the last film director which comes to mind is probably Woody Allen. While most of his distinctive movies are complex dramas or wild, sexually rich comedies, Allen has crafted some of the more uniquely entertaining and memorable science fiction and fantasy stories.

As a sci-fi writer myself who wrote for Star Trek: The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine, I not only admire Allen's down to Earth human dramas, but I marvel at the cinematic skill he uses to craft these compelling speculative tales. To pull off any sci-fi or fantasy story effectively, there has to be more than a little human humor to ground the other worldly elements. In that respect, Woody Allen possesses more than many writers. His screenplays are laced with a genuine human dynamic to make the fantastic milieu of these weird tales seem not only possible, but inviting.

Sleeper (1973)

Allen poses no danger in overshadowing the swashbuckling Buck Rogers or the Lothario Captain Kirk in this raucous sci-fi romp, but we get to see what a wacky future may look like through the inimitable eyes of Woody Allen. Based on H.G. Well's The Sleeper Awakes, and co-starring Diane Keaton, Allen plays Miles Monroe a jazz musician and health food store owner who is frozen for 200 years. When he's thawed out, a subversive group of political rebels employ him to fight against the dictatorship of America.

Like other sci-fi comedies such as Galaxy Quest or Spaceballs, the silly Sleeper uses great gadgets, props and costumes to weave a fun sci-fi world. One of the wackiest and most irreverent is the discovery of a newspaper from the then far off year of 1990 with the outrageous headline, "Pope's Wife Gives Birth To Twins."

Purple Rose Of Cairo (1985)

Mia Farrow plays a bored, neglected and most sadly of all abused wife of Danny Aiello. To escape her dreaded real life, she takes refuge in the movie theater and watches The Purple Rose Of Cairo, starring Jeff Daniels.

Like some wish fulfillment granted by the magic of the celluloid gods, Jeff Daniels walks off the screen into real life. The movie never provides an easy answer to Farrow's tragic character, yet always provides a magical sense of fantasy and fun, a true metaphor for the power of motion pictures. Allen says the screenplay came out closest to how he'd originally envisioned it, something rare for his movie writing and Time Magazine listed this bittersweet fantasy as one of the 100 best films of all time.

Alice (1990)

Lead Mia Farrow once again plays a bored, neglected housewife. This time she's married to the very wealthy William Hurt, and having an affair with jazz musician Joe Mantegna. Plagued by backaches, she visits mysterious Dr. Yang, a Chinese acupuncturist and herbalist. Yang played by Keye Luke (Gremlins) hypnotizes her and gives her herbal concoctions. The herbal potions not only relieve her pain, they her render invisible. Allen loosely based this flick on Italian film master Federico Fellini's Juliet Of The Spirits.

Classics like The Invisible Man, Star Trek or even the Harry Potter movies employ invisibility and cloaking gadgets as plot devices. They usually emphasize action, violence or the more wondrous things being invisible would bestow on a person. Here, Woody Allen deftly probes the possibilities of using invisibility in a subtle, real world way. Farrow eavesdrops on her friends gossiping about her, she snoops around her boyfriend's life. Best line: When Joe Mantegna and Mia Farrow exit a cab, while niftily cloaked under the invisibility potion, he cracks, "Nothing shocks NYC cab drivers!"

Zelig (1983)

Is the title character Zelig (Woody Allen) a marvelous X-Man? Is he secretly a sci-fi mutant? He certainly seems to have a mutant like super power, considering that he's a human chameleon.

Leonard Zelig impresses, and disturbs all he encounters as a strange man with a strange ability. While spending even a short amount of time around people, he can morph his voice and even his physical appearance to match the looks and sound of others. As easily as a chameleon changes its color, Zelig changes his personality. Mia Farrow plays his psychiatrist and as she studies the weird, walking science exhibit, she begins falling in love with him. Shape shifters are a classic science fiction notion, and here Allen makes us believe they could really exist. The film won Oscar nominations for Best Cinematography and Best Costume Design, and it's no wonder, because the perfect look of the period piece aura Allen's crew crafted, makes them talented Zelig like chameleons themselves.

Sources

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000095/