Dune, 1984
Who hasn’t had the experience of chancing upon an unexpectedly empty passageway in a subway station or an airport and thinking, “Maaaan, they should really use this place for a sci-fi movie!”
I’ll bet you that Serafín Álvarez has experienced that feeling. He’s been running his blog Sci-Fi Corridor Archive since 2012, and in that time he has posted pictures of notable and not-so-notable corridors from a whopping 192 science fiction movies spanning the entire history of sound-enabled cinema (the earliest movie in the set is Yakov Protazanov’s Aelita, from 1924).
There really is something about corridors that seems to describe sci-fi in a way that wouldn’t be true of, say, westerns, gangster movies, gladiator movies, musicals, pirate epics, and hard-boiled crime flicks. Indeed, the image of a hermetically sealed passageway that clearly connects two other chambers floating precariously in space is very close to the heart of the sci-fi that we all know and love.
In fact, I would argue that the witty 1999 classic Galaxy Quest was more or less commenting on this fact, seeing as how a good portion the scenes you probably remember best seem to take place in anonymous hallways.
Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, 1977
2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968
Alien, 1979
Flash Gordon, 1980
Solaris, 1972
Tron, 1982
The Fifth Element, 1997
Logan’s Run, 1976
THX-1138, 1971
Metropolis, 1927
Brazil, 1985
Terminator 2: Judgment Day, 1991
Blade Runner, 1982
Robocop, 1987
The Matrix, 1999
Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 1977
Planet of the Apes, 1968
Inception, 2010
Star Trek: The Motion Picture, 1979
Galaxy Quest, 1999
Oh, what the hell, here’s another nice one from Galaxy Quest
via Coudal Partners
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
The Vintage Lesbian Tumblr Blog
Posing DJs: A Tumblr chock-full of douchey awfulness