Blade Runner gets top spot

2004-08-26 08:40

London - Blade Runner by British director Ridley Scott is the best science fiction film to date, according to a poll of 60 of the world's top scientists to be published on Thursday.

The 1982 movie came top in a Guardian newspaper poll of scientists including British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins and Canadian-born psychologist Steven Pinker.

In the film, a retired cop, acted by Harrison Ford, hunts down renegade human replicants amid a dark futuristic vision of Los Angeles.

Stephen Minger, stem cell biologist at King's College, London, said Blade Runner was the best he had seen.

"It was so far ahead of its time and the whole premise of the story - what is it to be human and who are we, where we come from? It's the age old questions," he said.

US director Stanley Kubrick's epic, 2001: A Space Odyssey, came a very close second in the vote, followed by the first two films of the Star Wars trilogy, Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back, directed by George Lucas.

The other films in the top 10 were: Alien, Solaris (the 1972 version), Terminator, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, The Day the Earth Stood Still, War of the Worlds, The Matrix, Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

The scientists also voted for their favourite sci-fi authors, and Russian-born writer Isaac Asimov topped the list for his Foundation Trilogy and the novel I, Robot which has just been made into a film starring Will Smith.

Englishman John Wyndham, author of Day of the Triffids and Chocky, came second.

- AFP