Roger Ebert, almost certainly the most well-recognized film critic of all time, was a science fiction fan from way back. He was a hardcore sci-fi geek in high school — running clubs, attending conventions, and writing letters to sci-fi fanzines. It’s no surprise, then, that he wrote many a loving review for sci-fi movies — but the films he chose to lavish that love on could be surprising.
It wasn’t just the expected classics of the sci-fi genre, like “Star Wars” and “2001: A Space Odyssey,” that Ebert raved over. He also granted some of his highest ratings to movies with mixed or controversial — if not just plain bad — reputations. Sometimes Ebert’s unique positivity came from his approach to analyzing films based on what they’re trying to accomplish, as opposed to what the viewer wanted them to accomplish. Many of these surprising four-star reviews were for films that hit on a particular theme Ebert connected with, or displayed qualities he prized more than other critics. Even if you hated these movies, Ebert could explain where his love was coming from — and if you loved them, it was great to share your opinions with such a high-profile defender.
Tron
Show Roger Ebert special effects he’d never seen before and he tended to give your film a positive review. He was kinder than most critics to “Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace,” “Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within,” and even “Spawn,” giving those three films 3.5 stars almost purely for their eye candy. 1982’s “Tron,” the first movie to extensively combine computer animation and live-action, was groundbreaking enough to get all the way to four stars.
Ebert’s review of “Tron” praised the film as “a technological sound-and-light show that is sensational and brainy, stylish, and fun.” Ebert would later become a controversial figure among gamers for his stance that video games could never be “art,” but he still appreciated how “Tron” worked the style of video games into a film, and applauded how the script presumed its audience could keep up with all its computer knowledge, instead of boring them with exposition.
Most of all, he was amazed by the computerized effects. He acknowledged that the story wasn’t as impressive as its style, but didn’t want such acknowledgement “to sound like a criticism.” The Disney feature is “is not a human-interest adventure in any generally accepted way,” he said, but, “That’s all right, of course. It’s brilliant at what it does, and in a technical way maybe it’s breaking ground for a generation of movies in which computer-generated universes will be the background for mind-generated stories about emotion-generated personalities. All things are possible.”
The Cell
Tarsem Singh’s genre-bending 2000 thriller “The Cell” has the worst Metacritic score of any of Ebert’s four-star sci-fi favorites. The general consensus from most critics was that, despite some gorgeous visuals, the film’s story about diving into the mind of a serial killer was hollow and convoluted. In his review, Ebert mentioned hearing negative buzz about “The Cell” from a TV producer and various folks online, to which he responded, “Did we see the same movie?”
Ebert found Mark Protosevich’s screenplay “ingenious” in how it combined science fiction concepts, fantasy landscapes, and a race against the clock criminal investigation. He embraced the confusion and R-rated content of “The Cell” as a “challenging, wildly ambitious and technically superb” counterpoint to the state of safe PG-13 Hollywood movies. When trying to figure out why so many hated it, he came to the conclusion, “I guess it just overloads the circuits for some people.”
The review compared the energy and ambition of Tarsem’s first feature to the early works of Spike Lee and Oliver Stone, as well as contemporary emerging directors including Spike Jonze, David O. Russell, Paul Thomas Anderson, and M. Night Shyamalan. That last comparison prompted Ebert to speculate that India, “a culture where ancient imagery and modern technology live side by side,” might be the source of the next wave of great filmmakers free from the dumbed-down mass marketing of American culture. “The Cell” found a place on Looper’s list of critically hated movies that are actually awesome.
Watchmen
Roger Ebert died a few months too early to wade into the discourse around the DC “SnyderVerse,” but there was one Zack Snyder superhero movie he loved more than almost any other professional critic: 2009’s “Watchmen.” Snyder’s (mostly) hyper-faithful adaptation of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ influential comic series was divisive among fans, who questioned if what worked on the page worked as well on the screen, and whether the director missed the point of certain aspects. Ebert, who had not read the book, stayed out of these debates and simply reacted to what he saw with awe.
Comparing the film favorably to “The Dark Knight,” Ebert’s review declared “Watchmen” to be a “bold exercise in the liberation of the superhero movie.” He found it to be “a compelling visceral film — sound, images and characters combined into a decidedly odd visual experience that evokes the feel of a graphic novel” and is “charged from within by its power as a fable.” He was particularly taken with the character of Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup), praising his sequence on Mars as “the film’s most spectacular scene.”
Ebert concluded his review stating his intent to see the film a second time — less for the purposes of analysis than “just to have the experience again.” He nonetheless wrote an extensive blog post of further analysis of the movie after this second viewing, focused primarily on the questions of quantum mechanics and existentialism raised by Dr. Manhattan’s story.
Knowing
“Knowing” has a slightly better score than “The Cell” on Metacritic (by one point) but an even worse one on Rotten Tomatoes. Most critics dismissed this 2009 film, in which a professor (Nicolas Cage) discovers a time capsule with a document predicting every major disaster of the past 50 years (and a few to come), as implausible self-serious nonsense. Roger Ebert called it “among the best science-fiction films I’ve seen — frightening, suspenseful, intelligent and, when it needs to be, rather awesome.”
Ebert might have been more willing to embrace this strange apocalypse tale because he was a huge fan of the director, Alex Proyas. He was the loudest advocate of Proyas’ 1998 cult classic “Dark City,” enshrining it in his “Great Movies” collection and recording a DVD audio commentary. It’s also clear that, like “Watchmen,” “Knowing” appealed to Ebert’s interest in debates of free will vs. determinism: he wrote a spoiler-heavy blog post analyzing the ending of “Knowing” in depth on such themes.
Yet another blog post of Ebert’s sought to defend “Knowing” against the many critics who hated it. He argued that the “preposterous” plot is “part of the charm,” and defended two aspects of the film he suspected were the source of the hatred: Nicolas Cage’s over-the-top acting and the religious overtones of the ending.
Cloud Atlas
Somewhat surprisingly, Roger Ebert didn’t love “The Matrix.” He liked it well enough, giving it three stars and praising both the acting and the action, but considered it a step down from the Wachowski sisters’ debut feature “Bound” and less mind-blowing than his beloved “Dark City.” The one Wachowski sci-fi film he did love enough to give four stars happens to be one people either really love or genuinely loathe: 2012’s “Cloud Atlas” (co-directed by Tom Tykwer).
If “The Matrix” was just ambitious enough for Ebert to find himself wishing it went further, “Cloud Atlas” pushed everything further to become, in the words of Ebert’s review, “one of the most ambitious films ever made.” Much of this review consists of different descriptions of just how the strange and mysterious Ebert found the interconnected stories, set between 1849 and 2346 with the same actors playing different roles (sometimes involving controversial race and gender swaps) in each timeframe.
“Cloud Atlas” was too strange for most viewers, flopping at the box office. But as confused as Ebert was by “Cloud Atlas,” he was “never, ever bored,” and made sure to watch it a second time before writing his review. “On my second viewing,” he wrote, “I gave up any attempt to work out the logical connections between the segments, stories and characters. What was important was that I set my mind free to play.”