Seattle Cinerama's Sci-Fi Festival returns! It's first incarnation in 2012 featured both blockbuster wonders, cult oddities and even some of the of the more adventurous auteur works within this genre cinema. It's second iteration was bumped from the schedule last year due to the extended screening of "Iron Man 3", but thankfully returns this May for a twelve day run. Like the inaugural fest, many of these are single screenings, with multiple films being shown throughout the day. With sci-fi being a common foundation of the pop culture lexicon, I don't feel a need for exposition here, nonetheless 35mm and even 70mm prints of the selections are rare treats. Requiring no small amount of effort to procure a 70mm of Kubrick's "2001: A Spacy Odyssey", (with effects maestro Douglas Trumbull in attendance!) or even of "Tron" for that matter. This year again features a number rare opportunities to witness these spectacles of design, concept and execution of a screen and soundsystem of the immensity as the Cinemrama. David Lynch's proto-Steampunk vision of "Dune" makes a return, as does Terry Gilliam's stylistic Dystopian "Brazil", and the bodily horror of David Cronenberg's "The Fly". There are also double-hitters from both Stanley Kubrick with "A Clockwork Orange" and John Carpenter, with the return of his arctic biological terror, "The Thing" and the 1980's dark urban camp of "Escape from New York". A lot has been said recently about Ridley Scott's collaboration with Dan O'Bannon and the dream design team of Mœbius, H. R. Giger and Martin Bower on "Alien", and groundbreaking in quite a different light, the animated adaptation of Katsuhiro Otomo's epic paranormal Cyberpunk manga, "Akira". Speaking of Otomo, his first animated short film anthology in two decades "Short Peace", featuring works by his contemporaries Hajime Katoki, Hiroaki Ando and Shuhei Morita's award winning "Possessions", will be playing at the Grand Illusion Cinema for three nights only later this month. Rounding out the bill at the Cinerama, one of the anomalous transmissions from the French New Wave, Francois Truffaut's adaptation of Ray Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451", and another space oddity, in the form of Nicolas Roeg's "The Man Who Fell to Earth". Lastly, a smattering of original 1950's classics, including Fred Wilcox's "Forbidden Planet" (with it's groundbreaking score by Louis and Bebe Barron), and a rare theatrical showing of Henry Levin's "Journey to the Center of the Earth". To get a sense of the series' scope, here's the full line-list of titles: 2001: A Space Odyssey (70mm) • Akira • Barbarella • Brazil • A Clockwork Orange • Close Encounters of the Third Kind • Dune • E.T. • Flash Gordon • Forbidden Planet • Star Trek 2 • Star Trek: First Contact • Terminator 2 • Tron (70mm) • War of the Worlds • The Road Warrior • Planet of the Apes • The Thing • Escape from New York • The City of Lost Children • Fahrenheit 451 • 12 Monkeys • Logan's Run • Alien • Aliens • Tron (70mm) • The Man Who Fell to Earth • The Matrix • Journey to the Center of the Earth • Gattaca • The Fifth Element • The Fly • Predator • Brainstorm (70mm) • UFOTOG • Dark City •
