Another Turkey Day is past, the trytophan slept off with nary a trace of hangover, and I’ve just had a slice of apple pie for breakfast. Yummy. I’m now ready to set off on our next blogging adventure, a journey that will take us deep, deep into the very heart of blackest geekdom. Don’t be afraid, though. I’ve got a flashlight, and a good blaster at my side. And it’s definitely not set for stun.

(Hm. Here’s a random thought: do all blaster-type weapons in the Star Wars universe have a stun setting? Or do Imperial troops have some kind of special crowd-control blasters? Inquiring minds want to know, Uncle George!)

Anyway, I saw earlier this week that a web site called FilmCritic.com had posted a list of the Top 10 Movie Spaceships as determined by the site’s editorial staff. The criteria used to determine “topness” were vague, consisting mostly of which examples struck the editors as “awesome.” However, awesomeness is in the eye of the beholder, so naturally I have a few quibbles with their selections. To begin, here is their list:

1. Millennium Falcon (Star Wars series)
2. U.S.S. Enterprise (various versions) (Star Trek series)
3. Nostromo (Alien)
4. Heart of Gold (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy)
5. Apollo 13 (Apollo 13)
6. Discovery One (2001: A Space Odyssey)
7. Klingon Bird of Prey (Star Trek series)
8. Mothership (Independence Day)
9. Gunstar (The Last Starfighter)
10. The Thunder Road (Explorers)

The Millenium Falcon is an obvious choice for the number-one spot — it’s quite possibly the most iconic movie spaceship of all time, and it’s as much a character in the original trilogy as any of the creatures or droids we see walking around. (One of my complaints with the prequel trilogy, in fact, is the lack of any central, recurring starship. I thought at first that Amidala’s chrome-mobile might fit the bill, but considering she got a new one in each new film…) The Nostromo and Discovery are good choices as well, and the Enterprise is as natural as the Falcon. (However, I think the list-compilers should’ve been more definite as to which Enterprise they felt was “awesomest”; there’ve been four distinct designs seen in the film series, and if you want to get really technical, there are five different Enterprises from a story-perspective — the refit 1701, the 1701-A, the 1701-D, and the 1701-E. And it gets even more complicated if you consider that the “refit” which appears in the first three films has a different appearance in each of the three, owing to the use of different special-effects miniatures.)
The FilmCritic.com list loses me with some of its other choices, though. The Heart of Gold? I wouldn’t have remembered what that one looked like if there hadn’t been a photo along with the list. The Independence Day Mothership? Come on… did we ever even get a good look at that thing? Seems like it all we ever saw a bunch of shadowy forms and pieces of the whole, without ever seeing the entirety of the ship. And if we did see the entirety, I was obviously not impressed because I don’t recall it. I’ve never seen Explorers, but wasn’t The Thunder Road supposedly built from a cement-mixer? That’s not terribly awesome in my eyes. And finally, the Gunstar? The Last Starfighter is a fun little movie, and the Gunstar is notable for being the first entirely computer-generated starship seen in the movies, but I never thought it was all that cool. Again, eye of the beholder, I suppose.

And on that note, here is my take on this subject, Bennion’s Top 10 Movie Spaceships:

1. Millenium Falcon (original Star Wars trilogy)
   Duh. See above for my reasons why.
2. Imperial Star Destroyer (original Star Wars trilogy)
   No one who saw Star Wars on the big screen back in the ’70s can forget our first glimpse of a Destroyer, when it filled the screen and just kept coming… and coming… and coming… the biggest thing ever… The funniest joke in Mel Brooks’ Star Wars parody, Spaceballs, was play on the Star Destroyer’s first appearance.
3. X-Wing fighter (original Star Wars trilogy)
   For a time after the release of Star Wars, every space movie and television series around featured small, one- or two-man fighter planes, but none of them ever matched the X-Wing with its opening “S-foils” (shouldn’t they have been called “X-foils”?) for sheer beauty or, dare I say it, awesomeness. This was the spacecraft that burgeoning young geeks like myself imagined themselves flying. (Well, okay, the Colonial Viper from Battlestar Galactica figured in a lot of my daydreams, too, but we’re talking movie ships here…)
4. U.S.S. Enterprise (Star Trek: The Motion Picture version)
   As I indicated above, there are lots of different Enterprises to choose from, but the prettiest, most affecting version was in the very first Star Trek movie, when the ship had a sort of bronzed appearance and lots and lots of lights. Younger message-board trolls often make fun of the lengthy “starship porn” fly-over sequence, when Admiral Kirk gets his first look at the newly reborn love of his life, but for old-school Trekkies who’d been hoping for a new Trek adventure for a long, long decade, this was truly heartwarming stuff.
5. Nostromo (Alien)
   Alien is essentially a haunted-house story in space, and Nostromo is the spookiest house you could ever fear to be in, filled with shadows and weird, organic-looking machinery. Not to mention unusual weather patterns. Rain in a cargo hold? I still don’t understand why, but it’s really creepy…
6. Discovery One (2001: A Space Odyssey)
   One of the icons of science fiction, period. Also one of the most realistic spaceships ever seen in movies, right down to the centrifuge section used to simulate gravity, rather than the magical “artificial gravity generators” presumably used in all the other movies.
7. United Planets Cruiser C-57D (Forbidden Planet)
   An oldie but a goodie, this was the prototypical movie “flying saucer,” only this one is driven by Earthmen instead of little guys with big heads and tiny mouths. Forbidden Planet was hugely influential on a generation of science fiction fans, a fine, intelligent movie with high-caliber special effects that still hold up reasonably well, and it’s arguably one of the inspirations for Star Trek, as well.
8. Valley Forge (Silent Running)
   Silent Running is somewhat obscure these days, and the story of a space-travelling ecologist trying to keep the last of Earth’s vegetation alive aboard a giant, domed spacecraft is the early ’70s at their most ridiculous, but the spacecraft itself is a top-notch piece of design and effects work. The Valley Forge‘s creator, John Dykstra, would go on to work on the first Star Wars movie and Battlestar Galactica, setting the bar for what was then state-of-the-art miniature work. (The Valley Forge made an appearance in Galactica, by the way, as that series’ “agro ships.”)
9. Klingon battle cruiser (Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country)
   The Klingon Bird of Prey shown on the FilmCritics.com list has somehow become the iconic Star Trek baddie vessel, but I myself have always been more partial to the big D-7 or “k-tinga”-class cruisers seen in the first and last of the original-cast films. Like the Enterprise, the movie battle cruiser was an “upgrade” of a ship seen on the old TV series, and it is simply wicked looking.
10. Alien Mothership (Close Encounters of the Third Kind)
    It’s funny: I remember Spielberg’s Close Encounters as being at least as big a deal as the original Star Wars when I was a kid, but somehow it’s fallen from prominence over the years. Damn shame, too, as it represents Spielberg at the height of his youthful talent and energy, when he was simply a storyteller with a strong visual style, before the success of E.T. started transforming him into an institution. Most of the alien ships in this film are difficult to see clearly, being little more than clusters of neon tubes, but when the Mothership finally appears, it is truly awesome, in the original definition of that word: a gigantic ornament of color literally the size of a mountain, at first appearing to be a thing of magic that, as we move closer, resolves into something far more industrial, an ancient, battered construct reminiscent of an oil refinery. I had two favorite t-shirts as a kid: one featured Han Solo in a action pose with his blaster pointed at the bad guys; the other showed the Close Encounters Mothership rising over Devil’s Tower.

And there you have it, my Top 10. Looking back over it, I see that they’re all from movies I saw as a kid. I won’t apologize for my rampant nostalgia, but it does raise an interesting question: have there been any truly iconic movie spaceships in the last 15 years, by which I mean a design that non-geeks would recognize if they saw it on a poster or t-shirt? I think just about everyone could identify the Millenium Falcon or the Enterprise, and I think most folks would probably recognize Discovery One, even if they didn’t know which film it came from, but can anyone think of any more recent examples that have made that kind of penetration into the mainstream? Come to think of it, Star Wars prequels aside, have there even been any spaceship movies in recent years? I can think of only one or two. Maybe it’s not nostalgia driving my selections so much as the fact that the whole phenomenon of spaceships in the movies was largely confined to the fifteen years or so when I was growing up.

Weird. That angle hasn’t occurred to me before. This may bear further consideration…