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The Sci-Fi Movie Stigma
An anonymous reader writes "MSN has up an article that explores why Sci-Fi is associated with cheesy Space-Operas and children's movies, and cerebral Sci-Fi films don't make it unless they are adulterated into 'Action' flicks. The piece covers upcoming projects like 'The Last Mizmey' and 'Next', and points the finger at the ultimate culprit: George Lucas. 'When Lucas made Star Wars in 1977, he was paying tribute to a subgenre of science fiction that he loved dearly as a boy: the space opera. But although the breathless serial adventures of Flash Gordon and his ilk had their pleasures, they were often treated with tolerance, at best, by more serious science-fiction writers and readers. Nevertheless, the success of Star Wars changed the movie industry's perception of science fiction forever. As much as we love Star Wars for what it is, it nearly killed Hollywood's willingness to fund science-fiction movies that actually said something about the human condition.'"
It was always this way even before Lucas, with the possible exceptions of 'Things to Come' and '2001 A Space Odyssey'.
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
As fun as it might be -- George Lucas is not the ultimate reason for this. The ultimate reason is that the major film studios are afraid to innovate and want every film to be a sure thing. He didn't make hollywood that way.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
Hollywood's willingness to fund science-fiction movies that actually said something about the human condition
"human condition" what is that ?
what "human condition" does Flash Gordon series contain ? or early superman series ? they are run-off-the-mill american dream robotized characters that are fighting absurd evil characters that contain no humane feelings - just evil, for evil's sake.
im not a star wars fan, but boy, star wars contain heaploads of stuff for "human condition" than any of the sci-fi stuff this guy is talking about - its about humane fears, good and evil, greed, comradeship, high ideals and lowly cravings.
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The SCI FI channel. They seem to cancel all the good series and throw on mindless movie of the week drivel. (And WRESTLING? What's up with that?) It's too bad, I used to like the network.
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
I remember pre-SW sci-fi.
With only a few exceptions, it was all cheesy, and almost all action based. Lucas just made the action part look damn good for the time.
1970 Science fiction movies:
"The Andromeda Strain" (1971)
"Silent Running" (1972)
"Soylent Green" (1973)
"West World" (1973)
"Futureworld" (1976)
"Rollerball" (1975)
"Omega Man" (?)
"Planet of the Apes"
Some thinkers, mostly action based.
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There is quite a bit of popular science fiction cinema that's not space western. It's simply not marketed as such. Off the top of my head...
The Truman Show
Being John Malcovich
Manchurian Candidate
Movie makers and marketing companies want their films to attract as broad an audience as possible. To call something "science fiction" automatically creates expectations in people's heads.
It happens in publishing as well. Margaret Atwood is a very famous example of someone that has intentionally distanced themselves from the label.
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Hollywood are a fickle bunch anyway. They rarely take chances, and when one succeeds, they copy it for for years. How many movies have there been about the urban kid who no one believed in who was good at dancing? Flash and 30 second trailers sell more than substance. Oh and Star Wars says nothing about the human condition? Are you kidding?
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Science Fiction, hell. Star Wars (And Jaws, was it?) changed the way the production studios looked at film. The amount of money involved got so much bigger suddenly that it overwhelmed the vestigial idea that movies ought to be pieces of art. It's similar to the move in publishing over the last half-century, away from a climate where your goal, when looking at a book, is to decide whether it ought to be published because it's well-written or well-crafted or has an important message, towards a climate where you decide how many dollars it's going to rank in according to a simple formula or two. Does it catch my eye on the first page? Has the author written twenty books in the genre before? Does it have a snappy snyopsis? Will the language hold someone's eye, even if it's not saying anything, because it's snappy enough?
There are still good films and good books made, but greed has pushed the idea of being "good" rather far from the central idea of the major production houses, to the point where "good" and "bad" become conflated with "popular" and "unpopular." It's all about the money. The most popular actors are generally good, but there are countless incredible actors who never attain that sort of popularity, including some who are far better than some among the popular... because the popular people are part of the formula, and tend to bring in more money, even if their acting is worse than the acting of an unknown. The same applies to writers, and to almost all art where it's a producer/distributor generating the money, and more in it for the money than for the quality of the product. If art and culture really are the metrics we ought to use to measure the output of our civilization--if it wasn't just the Industrial Revolution that mattered, but also the Renaissance--then greed can be a terrible enemy to the quality of our productions.
(Though I'll admit it can also help, at times--the rich artist can grow soft, with no need to change and grow. Look at how comedians change as their success does.)
Lynch's movie captured the "ambiance" that many people associated with Dune, but slaughtered the story. The SciFi channel series, with more time on their hands, did more justice to the story, but completely slaughtered the ambiance.
Battlefield Earth for example, once you take out the scientology crap out of the ecuation, is a eminently fun and well done sci-fi novel. Yet the movie was a fucking disaster.
What's the difference between the success of say, the Harry Potter and LOTR movies and the failures that are Dune and all the other crappy film treatments of fantasy/sci-fi books? I'm not sure, but hopefully someone will figure it out soon. There are a lot of excellent books out there - who wouldn't want to see a movie based on Niven's Ringworld series? Or Saberhagen's Berserker opera? - that would make fantastic movies.
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Cuaron and James aren't the only ones who shy away from the title. Even hacktastic authors like Margret Weis and Tracy Hickman don't like the term science-fiction. In their introduction to the "Star of the Guardians" series (if you haven't read it? Don't.) Weis used the term to distinguish their books - which took place in space but only peripherally involved science - from books like, say, those by Greg Bear or David Brin.
Of course, regular folks like you and me would call the one variety of books "science fiction," or maybe "space opera" (or, if you've read them, "bad"), and the other books "hard sci-fi." But if you're inherently ashamed of the genre you're exploring, I suppose such a distinction isn't sufficient.
Bah, I say.
I'm a fan of Star Trek. All of it. Even Nemesis and Enterprise.
However, I am also a fan of Frank Herbert, Isaac Asmiov, Kurt Vonnegut, William Gibson, and Phillip K. Dick.
With all that said I'm going to reiterate something I said in college.
Star Trek killed science fiction. With a phaser. Star Wars helped, but Gene Rodenberry has a lot to answer for.
See, what they both did was take the science out of the fiction. Dune too, to a great extent. More and more often these stories are less about how science changes the human condition and instead are about how science simply enables a new setting for the same old story. The fiction goes from involving the scientific aspect to working around it.
For instance if anyone ever tells Oedipus Rex as a science fiction story you will know it's horseshit. In any scientific culture Oedipus would have had his DNA tested to reveal his ancestry.
IEEE Spectrum had an article on this many years ago where they pointed out that for all the SCIENCE in TOS it was always the captain and rarely the science officer or engineer who finally saved the day.
In all fairness maybe we shouldnt blame the writers but the publishers. Whose idea is it to put Sci-fi and fantasy in the same section of the bookstore. There's nothing more iritating than browsing in a bookstore for a good scifi book and finding something with sword laden dragon hunters or somesuch. What I'm saying is that Tolkein, Leguinn, and Pratchett should go find their own damn shelves.
This is the best argument that good sci-fi that's more than action can be made in modern times.
Firefly, may she rest in peace, BSG, the new Dr. Who and Torchwood are "grown up" Sci Fi with a wider appeal. This is evident by the ratings they're getting. Either that, or there are many more nerds now than there ever were.
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I think SciFi lends itself more readily to taking the easy way out. Throw in some lasers, a sweeping scene of an alien world, and you're good. But if you look at the LoTR, you can also see how well a movie of this type can be made. (I realize that Fantasy is different from SciFi, but from a Hollywood perspective they are essentially the same.) But doing so requires enormous effort and great risk- the two things for which Hollywood is least known.
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Ignore the scifi angle, and compare something like Dark City to Memento.
Both were really good mysteries, both did 'meh' business. Guess which one cost more to make and therefore, made the studios more dough?
The only real 'stigma' against SciFi/Fantasy is that it's expensive. As a general rule, the bigger your budget, the more the studios insist on playing it safe. They aim at the big audiences more likely to earn back the investment and dial down anything challenging/quirky/contentious/etc.
The natural target? The 18-25 action/adventure crowd.
Why should a studio spend the extra money doing a SciFi mystery, if they cost more and gross about as much as a contemporary mystery? Similarly for a drama, comedy, horror, etc.
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Didn't seem to stop Ridley Scott from making Alien and Blade Runner right after Star Wars. There is and will always be smart sci-fi out there. And there is and will always be pulp. I would actually argue that Star Wars is more than just pulp, especially in Empire Strikes Back, but nonetheless smart sci-fi continues to be made.
In fact, I can think of several recent films like The Fountain, Sunshine, and Solaris just off the top of my head; none of which could be described as "space opera" by a longshot.
-Eric
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I've always wondered the same thing... IMHO, the problem is that there's a misunderstanding of what constitutes science fiction. It's almost like watching a play versus a movie. In a play you don't think about the set so much as the story and the acting. If the clouds in a play look like pillows it's OK. But in a movie we want a lot of visual realism.
Many science fiction movies do a similar thing with theme. In a conventional movie it's desirable for the theme to be hidden. Apocalypse Now is only a war movie on the surface; same with Platoon or Saving Private Ryan. But with science fiction it's quite different. It's expected that the theme *is* the story. What are the consequences of genetic manipulation? What are the consequences of atomic power? If machines could think, should we give them the same rights as humans?
But critics have been trained since high school to look for the subtext, the hidden theme. Confronted with something new, they fall into their learned prejudices. Maybe they should red more literature from non-European, non-dead authors instead of being so closed-minded.
I think I'm turning into an old sap, but I liked BSG better when the humans were the good guys and the cylons were the bad guys. Seasons 1 and 2. I'll even give them the 2nd captain showing up and being a bitch since they disposed of her in a couple episodes.
Now BSG definitely IS a soap opera. We've got custody battles, affairs, elections, trials, family squabbles...
I liked it better when it was a Sci-Fi show about ships in space, not a daytime soap opera that just happens to take place on ships in space.
Just scan something and shoot it, damnit!
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This is something I could never get about network executives... They treat humans like a homogeneous blob which can be attracted, and never like the subgroups with diverse interests that humans actually are. SpikeTV has the SpikeTV market because it's aiming for that subgroup. If the Sci-Fi channel desires it, it can have an almost exclusive stranglehold on the sci-fi market by making more good shows like Battlestar Galactica or the Stargate franchise.
Here's the thing though -- crappy "reality" programs like Scare Tactics using random people or C-list actors are -dirt cheap-. Plus, you don't need any actual plot, so instead of hiring writers and actors, all you need is Joe Rogan. Science fiction can be expensive not only to shoot, but the special effects budget can be pretty hefty too. For the cost of one Battlestar Galactica, you could make five Scare Tactics or wrestling shows, and the TV executives want the largest return on their investment.
Bladerunner is almost the exception that proves the rule.
It's a a good action movie that uses ideas from the book it's based on as texture. It has some excellent dialog, almost none of which comes from the book.
Oddly enough, Philip K. Dick is pretty much the most filmed SF author, and every one of his books, including Bladerunner, ends up being an action movie, despite the fact that none of his books even remotely resemble something that might be made into an action movie.
Bladerunner is perhaps the most faithful rendering of a Dick novel in that the hero of the book is a bounty hunter who shoots androids for a living. That's about the end of the resemblance, since every detail of the book at best is snuck in through a back door. Roy Baty isn't a philosopher poet uber warrior -- he's a victim, gunned down matter-of-factly by a guy who finds it easier to kill people than face his wife's scorn.
The fundamental problem -- as always -- has been economics. SF movies were expensive to make (today, it's almost cheaper to make them since virtual sets are getting to be cheaper than filming on location) and expensive to make means you need a mass audience (including overseas non-English speaking markets) which means dumbing your content down to the lowest common denominator.
Going back to Bladerunner -- it was made very cheaply for what it is, it was mangle by the studio in an effort to reach a mass audience, and it was a commercial disaster anyway. "Gee," thought the studio execs, "we ought to make more of these."
The one hope for SF fans is that Studio Execs will look at Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings and think, "maybe it's better to base movies on well-loved books than on something George Lucas pulled out of his ass". More likely they'll produce Eragon. D'oh.
TNG was all about how science changing the human condition. That's why it was the best Star Trek show. DS9 was a simple soap opera, Voyager was a simple adventure in space, Enterprise was...better not tell, and TOS was cheesy.
h e_Next_Generation_episodes for the list of episodes and the tremendous catalog of topics TNG dealt with.
Where to start from...let's see...
artificial forms' rights? the whole story of Data was about that.
AI? Data, again. He even created a child.
3d hologram technology and consequences? lt Barcley's holodeck excursions, LaForge's love with a virtual character.
The consequences of very advanced weaponry? lots of stories here about balance of war.
Racism? Federation values and mistreatment of alien races.
Sexuality? Riker's affairs with asexual races, the trill woman and the doctor.
Cloning? Riker's brother, Lore.
What reality means in the presence of technology? Riker's episode in the hands of alien mind benders.
The consequences of nanotechnology? the episode with the nano-machines.
History and archeology? the episode where Picard finds out the common ancestor race for most races of the A and B quadrants.
Sociology and biology? unification.
Cyborg technology? the whole Borg story was about that.
Religion? many episodes where Picard was treated as god.
Politics? quite many episodes.
Money? the structure of the Federation as an advanced form of society that does not need money.
Evolution of civilization? Federation citizens evolved into people that aim to better themselves and not simply consume resources.
Strange stellar and time-space continuum phenomena? plenty of episodes as well.
Time travel and consquences? yet again, many episodes.
Terrorism and 'cause justifies the means'? season 3, episode with terrorists possessing a super-transporter device. Maquis.
Anti-gravity? Star Trek's home.
Psionics and telepathy? besides Deanna Troi, there were lots of episodes where telepathic races did various things with various consequences.
Espionage? plenty of Romulan-related episodes.
Tortures and human rights? 'I see 4 lights'.
Parenthood and what it means to raise children? lt Worf, his wife, his child Alexander.
Actually, La Forge and Data saved the day in quite a lot of episodes...in fact, in more episodes than Picard did.
See this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Star_Trek:_T
TNG is above and beyond all other sci-fi shows.
Odyssey 2001? was HAL science? it was more magic than science. Artificial gravity in Odyssey 2001? yeah, it could work, but man will not go to the Stars in rotating cylinders. The monolith? increbible black magic box.
Blade Runner? yeah, cloning. Big deal. Seen and discussed a thousand times in TNG.
Doctor Who? let me laugh. The doctor, travelling in time, battling injustice? with a ship bigger from the inside? what kind of science is this? where is the science, actually?
Farscape? nothing that Star Trek has not shown before.
Galactica 2003? firearms instead of lazer guns, Christian God preaching instead of ancient Gods? no thank you sir. It is ridiculus. Galactica 1978 was much better.
So...Star Trek did not kill Sci-fi. TNG was the most popular show, because of its tremendous diversity in topics.
Sci-fi was killed by the mindless stupid and silly shows that followed.
SF and pretty smart