What makes it different from others?

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

If you're looking for people evaporating in ("high technology") energy bursts, or gritty complex characters suffused with (yawn) adult tension and drama... or cataclysmic danger so obvious with a heroic quest so clearly laid out and evident that it (may as well, probably has) come to life from the pages of a comic book... with all due respect, please keep on looking, you're sure to find lots of what you're looking for. But as regards slapping this up against Blade Runner or Star Wars... please don't. Leave it be.This is on an entirely different plane. It is low-key, the dialog is mostly narrated, the story deliberately paced, as slowly unfolding as a bedtime story. Hint! This IS a bedtime story, of a kind that technology has given us the ability to produce, but is seldom produced. The plot is surprisingly realistic -- in fact it more closely tows the line with what we sincerely desire in the thing called 'reality'. The concept of forward-seeing planners catching sight of and resisting a foreseen future disaster -- a shortage of water that might result in emigration back to Earth -- this is the 'real' stuff heroes are made of.The perspective and the beauty shots of the colony are simply awesome, inside and out. This is a beautiful film for children with a story they can grasp and understand. And adults too... if they find themselves hyped with boredom fast forwarding thru the movie to jump onto IMDb and lob a 'sucks' review at it... just perhaps, it is time to switch to Decaf.

Today, most if not all science fiction movies are in fact action movies with science fiction elements. Thus _Men in Black_ is an action movie with aliens, _I, Robot_ is an action movie with robots, and so on. There's really no reason a science fiction movie couldn't be a slapstick comedy in an undersea colony, a tear-jerker romantic tragedy on the moon, or an intellectual puzzler with robots. But no, so many SF movies are action thrillers that many people seem not to realize that they can be anything else.This brings me to _L5: First City in Space_. This is the story of a city in space (the first, in case the title wasn't enough of a clue) which is running low on water. The story is mostly from the point of view of Keiko, an adorable little girl. The basic storyline has been well described by ian-woollard and mikecombs, who seem to have actually paid attention while watching the movie. I will add only that there are no laser battles, no homicidal maniac robots (or homicidal maniac anything else), and no martial arts. Again: THIS IS NOT AN ACTION MOVIE!Don't get me wrong, I like sci-fi actioners. I really hope that Jackie Chan gets the chance to do his thing in zero-G before he dies or retires. But this isn't the movie for it. This is the movie for adorable little girls and brave scientists and engineers who undertake risky but not flashy missions for the sake of the city their family lives in. The science is (mostly) good, the story (mostly) plausible, and did I mention that Keiko is adorable?OK, time for my gripe against this movie, aka the reason I didn't give it a 9 or 10. Here also is this comment's spoiler. After the water is secured, Daddy is alive, and Keiko has grown up to be mayor of L5, they have finally built another city. Yeah. One more. In thirty years. According to the NASA/Ames study the makers of this film used for reference, the time for one city to build another was three years, not thirty. Even if we assume that for some reason (politics, scarce water, whatever) it takes five years, this still means that five years after the First City in Space, there would be the Second City in Space, and over the next five years they would EACH build another, for a total of four. In five more years there would be eight, five years later sixteen, then thirty-two, then sixty-four. That's thirty years. So the final shot shouldn't have been two glorious cities side by side, but somewhere from sixty-four to ONE THOUSAND TWENTY-FOUR glorious cities (the 1024 number is thirty years of growth with a three-year doubling time).Oh, and they should've been making satellite solar power stations.

I first saw this movie at Moody Gardens at Galveston, Texas in the original IMAX and 3-D format. I've been pestering Sony ever since with enthusiastic inquiries as to when it would be available on DVD. At long last our wait is over.The plot: Chieko is a little girl living on L5, and we see the colony through her eyes. The voice-over narration is her as an adult. A crisis arises: They need more water for their life-support system (and evidently can't afford to lift it up from Earth). Chieko's grandfather (also Senior Scientist of L5) makes a proposal. There's a comet passing by Jupiter. He advocates attaching a rocket to the comet to make it swing past Jupiter in such a way as to slingshot it around to where it will pass by L5 at regular intervals, and hence can be conveniently mined.A robot spacecraft implants the rocket. But it won't fire. Chieko's father, Flight Commander Mori, is dispatched to repair the rocket. She is very concerned about him making it back safely, as indeed is everyone. As bad luck would have it, a solar flare interrupts communications at a critical juncture.This is a great movie, in addition to being a wonderful introduction to the "High Frontier" concepts of Gerard O'Neill. Many aspects of the design of the L5 habitat are taken from an actual NASA study which looked with great detail into the necessities for sustaining an entire human community in orbit. The plot is simple, but then the movie is only 35 minutes long, so it's the fault of the medium, not the writer (in the days this movie was made, it was the rare IMAX feature which went any longer than 40 minutes). There are the few inevitable science blunders, but they're very minor compared with most other shows set in space. L5's depiction of the surface of a comet nearing the sun is a good deal more realistic than the considerably-hyperbolized version we saw in "Armageddon", or even "Deep Impact". By and large, these people did their research, and got it right.There's only thing in this movie which I dislike: a brief jaunt into Virtual Reality (VR). Chieko discovers a snow globe which her mother has bought for her. Later on, she plays with friends on Earth in a simulated reality comprised of the snow globe, only life-sized with the children inside. Ever since "Star Trek: The Next Generation" there seems to have arisen a common belief that no one will want to go into space until there's a magic room which can simulate any reality. I hope not.I would have far preferred to have seen Chieko ask if it could ever snow in L5, to be told, "No, we could make it cold enough, but there isn't enough water vapor in the air." Then later, after the comet retrieval, and when water is in greater supply, Chieko's grandfather could have arranged for it to snow on Christmas Eve. We could have had a very touching, human scene out of this more-realistic approach. But instead, "L5" chose to jump on the same VR bandwagon the rest of Hollywood was scrambling over at that time.But don't get me wrong. This is a truly outstanding movie. The awesome visuals and competent acting (Chieko's grandfather is particularly likable) will pull you into the story, largely compensating for the simplicity of the plot and characterizations.There are two bonus features on this DVD. One is a Korean educational short named "Journey to the Planets". It combines traditional animation (in the form of funny little space creatures) with the same kind of computer animation derived from actual space probe photography which we saw in "L5" (but in this case we get treated to fly-overs of Venus in addition to Mars). The space creatures are searching for a new home. As various planets of the solar system are encountered, the outstanding features of each are discussed. It's a curiously sedate short, with soft-spoken characters and periods of quiet.The other bonus is the standard (but quite thrilling) trailer for the "IMAX Films on DVD" series."L5: First City in Space" offers a realistic glimpse of a possible future for us beyond our planet of origin. If you want a view of the High Frontier... this is the best we're going to get for a while.I hope it's not a long while.Mike Combs

If you are like me, you are a sucker for IMAX movies. The scale of the story, be it Elephants, Egypt or Space usually pays off at least a dozen times as huge objects fill my field of vision. I've seen a lot of IMAX movies, and this one is truly, truly the worst.I knew there was trouble when the first sign of a space ship looked like an Estes model put against a mediocre galaxy scene. Think Battlestar Gallactica and divide by two.The story is some garbage about some little girl and her life on the first city in space ( a phrase uttered so many times, I wonder if the repetition was intended as a dare ). A comet threatens something, and her daddy needs to fly to the meteor where a previously launched rocket misfired and fix it. This makes little to no sense, but why quibble- its a 35 minute movie in 3D, and we'll get over it when we see the money shots.Allright, OK, this is where I let everyone know the dirty little secret of this movie. Her daddy guides his spaceship to the meteor, manuevers inside the rocket exhaust of an enabled rocket and starts the procedure to have the rockets thrust the meteor out of harms way. You might think that this scene would offer up every great or even cheesy special effect known to man. But how is the story conveyed? Aside from some brief (and pretty cool) 3D footage, the story is carried from the point of view of the little girl. We see the rocket's daring procedure from the L5 control room, in their simulation!! We see close ups of a by now not so cute little girl thinking!! And the most unbelievable thing of all- a shot in IMAX 3D on Kieko or whatever the hell her name is looking off pensively in a ball room !! Meanwhile, we get desriptions of her daddy's doings, then a brief narrated conclusion and it ends.I would suggest anything rather than wasting money on this piece of garbage.