The serious science fiction film genre is dead.
OK, maybe not actually deceased, but definitely on cinematic life support. With exceptions that are becoming rarer and rarer as the new millennium marches forward, and an omnipresent production paradigm that substitutes spectacle for smarts, futurist filmmaking is definitely gasping for breath.
There are several villains in this creative cabal, elements and individuals that want to see the motion picture category cater to fanboys, geeks and the easily entertained.
But it seems a real shame that the one literary ideal best suited for the most visual of all media is constantly countermanded by issues that have nothing to do with either art form’s visionary nature.
When one charts the course of cinema’s entire history, such bumps in the aesthetic road are really par for the commercial course. All categories of film go through phases; comedies veer wildly from sophisticated to gross as dramas emerge from a stint in suburban seriousness and into dour self-indulgent drivel. Horror can be subtle, offensive, gory, satiric or even Asian-ized, while action never seems to find sure footing.
But the situation with sci-fi is different. It’s been dominated for decades by a single storytelling dynamic. Instead of reaching for intelligence and stretching the boundaries of imagination, it decides to take hoary old clichés, lots of narrative formula and one man’s F/X-laced legacy, and completely rewrite the rules of acceptability.
Bought by the Dark Side
Where once the speculative spectacle questioned the existence of man within the cosmos, today it’s all Westerns with robots.
It would be easy to lay all the blame at the feet of George Lucas.
After all, his “Star Wars” saga – six films, a couple of TV stints and billions in merchandising later – often sets the current gold standard. The dollar doesn’t lie. In the past four decades (leaving everything before the 1960s out of the equation for the moment) there have only been eight serious sci-fi triumphs – movies that readily define what one means by a thought-provoking, inventive approach to speculative subject matter.
In conjunction with the equally important TV triumphs of “The Twilight Zone,” “The Outer Limits” and the “Star Trek” saga, this influential octet – “Planet of the Apes,” “2001: A Space Odyssey,” “Soylent Green,” “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” “Brazil,” “Dark City,” “The Matrix” and most recently, “Children of Men” – represent real attempts to address the category’s myriad issues and possibilities.
Serious science fiction is not a question of storytelling reclassification, but of innovation spawned by creative conjecture.
Indeed, Harlan Ellison, in defending his use of the term “speculative fiction,” argues that science fiction (or its hated abbreviated form, sci-fi) reduces the ideas that artists craft by sticking them into a certain set of formulaic loopholes.
Bereft of an away team
Indeed, when one hears the detested movie moniker, the mind is instantly swept away to planets unknown, where intergalactic entities battle it out for control of their dying dystopian societies – or even worse, a centuries-from-now situation where technology or terror has run amok, and a brave few survivors have been left behind to battle a mechanical menace, or post-apocalyptic warriors bent on destruction.
What’s missing is the element of exploration.
This is the main reason why the “Star Wars” films fail the serious sci-fi test. In essence, creator Lucas was trying to revitalize another dying genre – the Western – when he took parts of Akira Kurosawa’s “The Hidden Fortress,” fashioned some additional morality-play elements to the narrative and injected a proto-religious reduction of mangled metaphysical meaning.
The result was a phenomenon, a box-office triumph whose impact lingers to this very day.
With the recent release of Alfonso Cuaron’s masterpiece “Children of Men,” we can literally look at how far the genre has fallen.
Lucas had to try to reinvent what he already had reconfigured, putting out three pathetic “prequels” that had little to do with innovation and everything to do with a jaundiced generational grab for personal glory.
But Cuaron countered the notion of needing eye candy to sell science fiction. In fact, he avoided almost all the trappings of the recent popcorn predilection within the genre by bringing back a main missing element – ideas.
Not exactly a rebirth
“Children of Men” is overflowing with them, concepts that boggle the mind in their connection to reality (society split apart by catastrophe and a lack of security) and their frightening, unfathomable nature (a world gone barren, a Britain under menacing martial law).
Hints of technology pepper the fringes (a floating computer monitor, an omnipresent media eye), but overall, the director’s vision of London post-infertility is like the U.K. after the Blitz. We see civilization hanging by a thread, while all around cooler heads, personal desire and terror translate into hostility, rebellion and death.
While it would be nice to think that the film signals a rebirth for serious science fiction, the truth remains that the bottom line still rules the majority of our cinematic endeavors.
“Children of Men” rode a decent wave of pre-Oscar publicity to an average box-office return. What we’re looking at, then, is the anomaly, not the trend. Anyone hoping for a real renaissance in serious speculative storylines will be waiting quite a long while.
Case in point: “I Am Legend.” For decades, Richard Matheson’s post-apocalyptic novel has been scheduled for a big-screen adaptation. When it was announced that Ridley Scott, the man behind “Blade Runner” and “Alien,” was on board to direct, it looked like the author would finally get some respect.
Unfortunately, budgetary demands destroyed the project, and it sat dormant until … Will Smith signed on. Now, early buzz is that “Legend” is getting “mainstreamed” for mass consumption – i.e. rewritten to avoid the story’s inherent doom and gloom and amplify the blockbuster hero factor.
