So Bride of Frankenstein doesn't quite fit. Neither does The Black Cat, or for that matter, any of the original trilogy Star Wars movies, which have absolutely no patience for science of any kind. So what? They're all great movies. And so what if there are actually 120 movies in this book of the 100 Greatest Science-Fiction films (Brode clumps together all the movies in select franchises in single entries). And so what if some of these movies, like The Phantom Menace, objectively suck. Brode still does a good job of selecting ones that tell the story of science-fiction on film quite well, since he arranges them chronologically. He provides rankings for each movie too but does not justify his numbers. Again, so what? You know what they say about opinions.
So what this book lacks in critical assessments it makes up for in interesting trivial tidbits and some good recommendations. I've seen 86 of these movies. Now I'm looking forward to checking out The Satan Bug and Abre los ojos. Hopefully they're more Bride of Frankenstein than Phantom Menace.
Originally published in 2015, Fantastic Planets, Forbidden Zones, and Lost Continents is now being reprinted as a paperback. It hasn't been updated since its hardcover press, so it doesn't get further than 2014's Guardians of the Galaxy. So what?
