Guest essay by Phil Salmon (“ptolemy2”)
“When science had no shame, Part 1: Why are nearly all sci-fi movies fire-and-brimstone anti-science dystopia?”
(I repeat the title since on the mobile phone WUWT page, titles of articles appear to disappear after the first click – at least on my iPhone.)
This is the first of two articles under the title “When science had no shame”, which looks at how the movie genre of SciFi has transitioned balefully from celebrating science to damning it with fire-and-brimstone dystopia. The second article under the same title will look at the remarkable nineteenth century poem “Passage to India” by American poet Walt Whitman which looks back at an era when science had no shame and it was OK to be excited by humankind’s technological progress and the prize of a connected and united world.
A new Prohibition?
Are we living in a new prohibition era? A generation of straight-laced environmental puritans have been teaching us and our children to be ashamed of science and technology. The internal combustion engine, instead of an empowering transport technology connecting the world, is a guilty emitter of a demonized CO2. We are forbidden to take pride in rockets to space, which instead of being a fulfilment of an age old dream to soar and fly to other worlds, are connected to nuclear warheads and threaten our survival. We flip-flop absurdly between favoring petrol then diesel then petrol again for vehicle fuel as the pantheon of hero pollutants sashay and process in and out of fashion. Even light bulbs have become ensnared in a morass of guilt-laden virtue signaling.
For the self-appointed guardians of our environmental rectitude, technology is the new sex, business is the new gambling and CO2 the new alcohol. All strictly finger-wagging no-no’s. An eco-puritanical army pervading the political, academic and media establishments lash themselves into unceasing moral outrage in order to drive forward an agenda outlawing all three of these new moral evils.
In the above image (right) from the recent WUWT post about the “March for Science”, the 500 women (remember that “every measurement is a model”, and the image above input into an ensemble of multiparametric crowd-counting models gave us 500 – just saying…) marched, apparently, for science. They marched bearing placards purporting to show their respect and devotion to the scientific method. Although these placards broadcast intellectual snobbery and superiority – everyone disagreeing with us is an idiot – it is on one level still refreshing to see what looks like popular support for science and technology.
But how many of these (no doubt mostly well-meaning) ladyfolk realize how profoundly anti-science the AGW movement is, that they are supporting? Marching for science and at the same time for climate change alarmism, is as profound an inconsistency, even impossibility, as the 
in one of the placards. It really doesn’t add up.
While we can have fun with images like the ones above recalling prohibition zeal, it is notable that women often play a special motivating role whatever our society’s morality-de-jour happens to be. Often this is good, of course, when one thinks about the suffragettes campaigning for the female vote and anti-slavery campaigners. However the likes of Carrie A. Nation (image right) who liked to descend on saloons and bars with a hatchet pursuing her agenda of righteous indignation against alcohol, perhaps took moral crusading a little too far. We can only hope that we do not see an equivalent rise of what today would be rightly called terrorist acts, in support of protests against oil and gas pipelines, coal and nuclear power stations and scientists holding views skeptical of climate alarmism.
Prohibition’s history shows that, no matter how persuasive the moral case behind comprehensive censure, if in practice it proves unrealistically disruptive of economy and society, it will soon be discarded. The carbon prohibition is likely to go the same way as the alcohol one.
Why is nearly all Sci-Fi dystopian?
Anyway so much for pre-amble. For me and no doubt many here at WUWT, Sci-Fi is one of my favorite film genres. For that reason I find it deeply annoying that such a large majority of SciFi movies, when special effects veneer is peeled away, are little more than anti-technology Luddite tracts. Can’t we celebrate science anymore? Has SciFi become LuddFi? The blasted dystopian future-scapes that we view with monotonous regularity through theatrical off-stage blown mist, all communicate a not-so-subtle political message: if you don’t pay attention to our endless protest movements that are anti-science, anti-technology, anti-vaccine, anti-energy, anti that atom with the atomic number of the Beast, then look at all the bad stuff that’s heading your way! Only a small minority of SciFi movies rise above the rest and actually fulfil SciFi’s purpose, that is, to inspire us with the possibilities of science and technology – while also addressing its dangers and ambiguities but in a positive and hopeful spirit.
But rather than ranting on with my own prejudices, the purpose here is to set out my own list of forty or so SciFi movies of the last half century. These are somewhat randomly chosen from memory, and I have given my own brief assessment of the movie in terms of its underlying attitude to science, whether positive, negative or ambiguous. To this end I have divided them into three categories: the dystopian, which are anti-science and imply that science is leading us to a bad place; the hopeful, which show positive idealism toward science, and those I would describe as “half-and-half” – dystopian yet ambiguously hopeful in their message about science. Perhaps I am wrong about some of these films – I have not seen all of them. I hope that this provokes a discussion about people’s views on films, ones you love and hate, the important ones I have missed, and on their philosophical messages in relation to science, technology and human curiosity.
Category 1: Dystopia (science is leading us to a bad place).
| Soylent Green. | Trail-blazing dystopia. This 1973 classic is ahead of its time in positing fantastical CO2 global warming carnage to the environment. For the “science” story behind its blasted future-scape it plays with atmosphere and ocean like a baby playing with bricks. The moral of this story is that CO2 will turn us into cannibals. |
| James Bond | I have entered this as a single SciFi film since all the Bond movies ever made, with the exceptions of “On her majesty’s secret service” (both versions) and “Skyfall”, have one and the same story. MI6 sniffs something suspicious, Bond meets Dr Evil at a high-class social event, Bond finds and then trashes Dr Evil’s temple of doom. The Temple of doom always symbolizes high technology, perverse scientific idealism, clean efficient organization and psychopathic evil. Routine dystopia. |
| Children of Men | Routine dystopia, in an apocalyptic future becoming pregnant makes you an outlaw. |
| Avatar | Routine dystopia; brilliant future technology for space travel and mind transfer end up in the hands of corrupt corporate hacks. The protagonist returns heroically to the stone age. Corporations are bad, military is bad, technology is bad, trees are good. Fantastic effects and some decent acting but Luddite brainwashing nonetheless. |
| Minority Report | Routine dystopia; in this Tom Cruise vehicle paranormal future-seeing technology is exploited by a repressive totalitarian regime, which needless-to-say TC takes on and defeats single-handed. |
| Ex Machina | Nice movie but routine dystopia, a synthetic human kills and escapes. Mobile phone technology attacks. But at least it generates sympathy for the robot, and humans can be bad too. |
| Mad Max | Routine dystopia, a post-nuclear future, the earth turns into a ruined degenerate anarchic wild-west. |
| Gravity | Routine dystopia. Orbiting satellites and space craft destroyed in an urban-legend disintegration cascade, Hollywood racism alive and well in the 21st century as the Russians are the obligatory bad guys again. |
| Looper | Routine dystopia, future society is disintegrated, anarchic and crime dominated, the highest technology – time travel – in the hands of criminals. Cool roles by Bruce Willis and Emily Blunt and a clever time dichotomy, but reinforcing the technology-is-evil message. |
| Jurassic Park | Routine dystopia. Brilliant science rampages out of control immediately with mind-numbing predictability. |
| Transcendence | Routine dystopia and a criminally bad movie – literally. A blonde femme-fatale who murders scientists in protest against artificial consciousness becomes heroine. Advocates murder to stop technology. |
| Dr Strangelove | Routine dystopia, fountain of a generation’s technophobic one-liners. |
| Hunger Games | Routine dystopia with the added gruesome spectacle of gladiatorial fights by children. A post-nuclear dystopia in which a rural underclass is ruled by an urban elite with criminal hairstyles. Only Jennifer Lawrence can save the world. |
| Alien (all films including Prometheus series) | Dystopic with Oedipus complex. Psychopathic aliens with telescopic dentistry turn out to be the creation of an advanced race who also, it turns out, created us in the first place. Confused? I hate the unphysicality of aliens growing from the size of a prawn to the size of a cow with no apparent source of food to sustain such growth. Grrr! |
| Deja-Vu | Routine dystopia, albeit a great movie. Here the sense of technology-shame is tangible. Scientists who develop a method to loop time backwards by 4 days confess their guilty discovery under moral inquisition. Time travel technology saves the day but somehow remains the villain. |
| Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind | Routine dystopia. Zany Jim Carrey dystopia about memory editing technology, the little guy takes on the evil machine. |
| Surrogates | Routine absurd dystopia not even saved by Bruce Willis. |
| Never let me go | Routine dystopia, but artistically melancholic and good quality film-making. In a future society organs harvested from an underclass give the elite eternal life. |
| Dawn of the Planet of the Apes | Routine post-apocalyptic dystopia but great visual effects and story, newly sentient chimpanzees take on humans for world domination. |
| Arrival | Much heralded big budget SciFi turned out to be another dismal tract. Aliens show up and do nothing, but this is nowhere near the class of District 9. After a protracted quiz show about circular symbols, a bomb appears for no apparent reason. Anti-war cliché, preciously introspective, and pointless. |
| The Arrival | (Not the later “Arrival”); I had to include this as the worst ever sci-fi movie. Routine dystopia, aliens disguised as Mexicans try to heat up the world to their advantage by pumping CO2 into the atmosphere. (Yes, seriously!) |
| Brazil | Routine dystopia. The little guy against a future techno-totalitarian state flees persecution picking up leading lady en-route. |
| Empyrium | Routine dystopia. In yet another AGW-blasted future-scape, a rich elite inhabit an orbiting space station while an underclass inhabit a contaminated earth’s surface. Predictable, as bad cinematically as scientifically. |
| The 100 | OK a Netflix series not a film, but essentially the same story backdrop as Empyrium, with a similar verdict. Routine dystopia. Cinematically better but scientifically even worse; astonishing ignorance and inaccuracy about radioactivity, fallout and biological effects of radiation (“they’ve evolved to filter radiation out of their blood!”) A young cast easy on the eye but a plot of endless formulaic jumping between contrived dichotomies. |
| Event Horizon | Routine dystopia. In a bizarre mix of anti-science sci-fi and medieval religion, a spaceship approaches the event horizon only to pop unexpectedly into hell. Yes hell – complete with punishment for sin, Gothic decor and Sam Niell. |
| I am Legend | I am Will Smith. Routine dystopia. A bio scientist with posh London accent develops a cancer curing virus which turns most of the world’s population into demented killing machines. Another day in the office for Will Smith, saving the planet after technology goes disastrously out of control. |
| I, Robot | I, Will Smith. Routine dystopia. One more Will Smith ego-trip with the most clichéd anti-technology dystopian script imaginable. Robots attack, Will Smith saves the day, the end. |
| Moon | Routine dystopia; a corporation clones astronauts manning a lunar helium mine, until a heroic escape by one to earth leads to every progressive’s dream, the public damnation of the evil corporation in front of Congress. Technology bad, corporations bad, media hacks good. |
| V for Vendetta | Routine dystopia with – like transcendence – the disturbing sub-plot that terrorism is OK if the targets are “right wing”. Euro-leftist wishful thinking of an American collapse is combined with a formulaic virus apocalypse unleashed with wretched predictability by the go-to-movie-Satan USA. (Who did all this bad stuff? OMG what a total surprise it’s a secret branch of the CIA-US military!) The left are trying to get intellectually creative with this near-future right wing dictatorship under “Adam Sutler”, while in the real world the risk of dictatorship from the “progressive” left is demonstrably much greater. |
Category 2: Hopeful: SciFi positive about technology
| AI (Artificial intelligence) | A personal favorite, a powerfully refreshing break from routine sci-fi dystopia and an exception that proves the rule. Human society is failing to adapt to robots and becomes seized with violent anti-technology prejudice in a highly realistic portrayal of threatened human societies. Robots good, humans bad. A poignantly evocative role by the boy robot David and a great ending tinged with beauty and sadness. |
| Star Trek (all films) | Boldly going where no SciFi has gone before or since – wonderfully refreshingly positive and imaginative science-technology idealism, penned by the great Gene Roddenberry. |
| The Martian | An exception and great movie – realistic technology and a rarity for Hollywood, a gripping and highly believable sci-fi adventure. Based on real and good science and technology practically all accessible today. |
| District 9 | Cool movie, visiting high-tech aliens are the victims, humans doing what humans do are the bad guys. The portrayal of the MSM being swept up passively in politically driven prejudice and violent repression is noteworthy. Great twist at the end, hope there’s a sequel. |
| The Fifth Element | This Luc Besson film is a heart-warming extravaganza of exotic techno-futurism wonderfully devoid of political messages except that “love is the fifth element”. Another with Bruce Willis – his films are in all three of our categories. |
3 Half and half (dystopia but with some positivity about technology)
| 2001 a Space Odyssey | While human technical progress is apparently celebrated, with a famous musical score and inspiring visual effects, once the plot gets going technology is the villain, as Hal the computer is evil and kills people. |
| Star Wars | Classical cinematic story-telling that is great for all ages, and clever enough for the dystopia to be subversive. On one level it creates an inspiring and attractive galaxy-scape of shiny technology and an interplanetary community. But why does every Empire spaceship look so sleek and cool, while every rebel craft appears to have been make of cereal boxes and toilet rolls? The more technology, the more evil. And the repetitive kill-the-death-star endings are mere James Bond fare. |
| 12 Monkeys | Classic Bruce Willis, dystopia but with a twist. Biological warfare nearly annihilates humanity but with time travel there is a chance to save it. |
| Blade Runner | The backdrop is routine dystopia, a technology-blasted futurescape. However the film, increasingly recognized as one of the best SciFi of all time, develops another dimension in which the question emerges “are humans really any better than replicants?” In the end a very cool movie, rich in ambiguity, in which robots are treated sympathetically as they are hunted down by humans including one – Harrison Ford – who it turns out might actually be replicant. |
| Interstellar | Ambiguous. The backdrop is routine dystopia, humans killed the earth by climate change (yawn). However interstellar space-craft technology provides possible salvation. We find out that a black hole is actually a supermassive library. |
| Terminator | Routine dystopia but with a sting in the tail: Computers go self-aware and try to destroy humans but some robots (especially ones looking like Arnold Schwarznegger) change sides to help out their human friends. |
| Robocop | This Paul Verhoeven cyberpunk SciFi is set in a dystopic crime-ridden future, however the protagonist is a prosthetically recreated human – the robocop – who is portrayed sympathetically as the hero lawman who tries to reconnect with a former humanity. |
| Tomorrowland | Mix of routine dystopia with positivity and optimism about technology. An amusing introduction parodying manic dystopia and technology-phobia in teachers and society at large, probably guaranteed this film damning reviews in a climate of anti-technology puritanism. Schrödinger-like, reality flickers between a bright optimistic technological future and a darkly dystopic techno-apocalypse. With two wonderful child-teenager acted roles as well as quirky acting by George Clooney and High Laurie. |
Final Score:
Dystopia: 29
Positive: 5
Half-and-half: 8
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Good work, except you left out Jurassic Park: The Lost World, where an ecoterrorist character directly causes mass death in the camp of the corporate animal hunters and then survives with the main characters in the end.
..or should we say the PETA terrorist character
There has always been a dystopian view of the future. The Time Machine is not an optimistic tale and you don’t get much earlier SciFi than HG Wells.
The change is that the utopian views are no longer being told.
Or maybe they are and they just don’t look like it to the reader.
Starhawk’s “The Fifth Sacred Thing” is clearly a Utopian counterpart to Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale”. But both look dystopian from an urban, masculine viewpoint.
Most fiction books are read and bought by women. That has increased recently – books aren’t cool for boys.
That probably makes a difference.
WHAT????!!!!
Been true for years.
The NYTimes estimated out 3 out of every four fiction books was bought by a woman way back in the 90s.
And as school achievement has become more biased to the distaff side since then I doubt it’s changed.
the big money makers were romance novels churned out as boiler plate using standardized templates.
The success of Clancy and others’ technothrillers owed to the fact that they were books that males would buy and read.
3 of 4 “FICTION” books, not sci fi. in general women read more than men, Med read more sci fi tho…
And the reason there are no “utopian” storied is because they are boring as hell.
Point 1 – fair enough. But the larger potential market will attract the publishers.
Point 2 – Utopian societies can be settings for stories where the Utopia is under threat. They would only be boring if the writer is boring.
That’s what I was thinking – the first and still arguably the most influential sci-fi movie ever was Fritz Lang’s Metropolis – well worth seeing the remastered and restored version if you haven’t seen it! The acting is hammy, as was common in the silent movies of the day, but it’s pluses:
– the wicked Rotwang is the very FIRST portrayal on film of the character of the “Mad Scientist”, using his Knowledge for Evil. All of the “mad scientists” done since then have just been riffs on Rotwang’s character.
– Wicked Robots, created by Rotwang to work the ruler’s will on the people. Technology as a tool of oppression.
– The conversion of a Wicked Robot into the False Maria, designed to bring about the destruction of the workers. The very first time, to my knowledge, that anyone suggested the idea of manmade replicants that could take the place of humans and, of course, work unspeakable evil. (And it’s a very sexy replicant, too!)
– Mankind being run by technology, rather than the other way round.
It still amazes me that this could have come out in 1927.
Metropolis is indeed an amazing film for the period, but it’s pure socialist filmmaking, the pampered, uncaring capitalists, the repressed workers, etc. The acting isn’t hammy, just very demonstrative as is required in silent films where you keep getting interrupted by caption frames.
If you can find a copy of the Metropolis novel by Fritz Lang’s wife, Thea von Harbou, you’ll find its writing style is even more awesome than the film. My copy is perfectly illustrated by W. Michael Kaluta, some of his finest work.
You are totally wrong about Bond.
It is never about ‘evil’ technology itself but about the nut jobs controlling it.
In fact, Bond is the poster child for science and innovation, Have you never heard of Q and all the gadgets?
Perhaps it was wrong to lump all the Bonds together. There was of course Quantum of Solace in which the chief baddie was an allegorically named Dominic Greene who built his empire on an ecological narrative. This negative portrayal of environmentalism guaranteed the film lukewarm reviews, but puts it in a category with Kingsman with its ecomaniac Samuel Jackson, and Crighton’s State of Fear.
Quantum of Solace was ruined by the editing. It was too fast and incoherent.
There was a stunt with a crashing plane that they did for real – no CGI. It was unwatchable because of the edit.
If it was recut it could be a hit, even today.
I’d say James Bond is a superhero-without-powers in the vein of Batman. Like Bats he has lots of cool hi-tech toys, and a rogues’ gallery of over-the-top villains. Very much unlike Bats, he feels no need to disguise himself when going from playboy to world-saver. He’s supposed to be a “secret” agent yet everybody knows who he is.
Correction: Bond has one power–super sex appeal. All the women want to sleep with him (even those who want to kill him afterwards). Maybe some of the men, too.
What about “Starship Troopers?” The makers of that movie 180ed the theme of Robert Heinlein’s book (he was dead by then) by turning the military into Nazis and eliminating the powersuits that were dropped from orbit. They used some cheesy-looking troop ships instead. The book detailed a philosophically coherent society where service in the military was required to earn citizenship and the right to vote. The science was very interesting, enhancing the abilities of humans. The movie was clearly distopian, probably because its makers did not like the positive image of the military in the book.
i got into that upthread, as one of the worst adaptations made. “The Puppet Masters” was even worse as a movie. i don’t think either production was by anyone who appreciated Heinlein.
I thought that at first. They changed *everything*!
Then I reread The Puppet Masters and realised they *had* to change everything just to make it filmable. What they didn’t change was the characters (although Donald Sutherland was an odd casting choice) or the action, or the ideas behind the story.
There aren’t many Heinlein adaptations out there, but this is one of the better ones.
Oh? The Puppet Masters was several things going on at once. A horror story, which the movie botched. A love story between Sam and Mary, which was even worse a botch, a spy story and political novel, which the movie ignored. What made the novel work was the interaction between the plot themes, which the movie was a total failure with.
It is your judgement as to what is “filmable”.
“What about “Starship Troopers?”
The book was a lot better than the movie.
The movie was ok but it portrayed the military characters as bloodthirsty, out-of-control killers, itching for a fight with anything and everything, as the Left always portrays the military. It was pure anti-military propaganda from my point of view. That detracted from my enjoyment of the movie.
The dystopia is a plot device. It motivates the conflict in the movie.
Correct. There must always be a setting where the drama takes place and a villain for the protagonist to overcome. In cheap fiction the setting is as dire and the villain as evil as possible. In good fiction, they are ambiguous.
Where would you put “Men in Black”?
Comedy. I really had in mind the more earnest SciFi movies.
You did leave off one of the best “earnest” SciFi movies, Forbidden Planet! I would say it’s been quite influential, since arguably the entire Star Trek franchise grew out of that movie.
yeah, things are superficially different, because Roddenberry didn’t have the copyright to FP, but all of Star Trek exists inside the world that FP first created. Not to mention that it is simply a great and fun movie to watch!
“MONSTERS FROM THE ID! MONSTERS FROM THE ID!!!”
And now that I think about it, it does a nice job of combining both the optimistic and dystopian views of the future. Humanity has interstellar spaceships and a very high level of technology and skill, so technology is treating humans quite well; but they are exploring a planet where an extremely advanced race was wiped out because they let their technology get away from them. Nice way to play both sides of the issue.
OK I’ll watch Forbidden Planet.
Generally in a movie–music is for developing mood and sound effects aid the action. When they use the same music for both (as in “Forbidden Planet”), it becomes confusing. Is the music you hear for the audience’s benefit only or do the characters on the screen hear it too?
“Forbidden Planet” is Robby the Robot’s first appearance in a film. Here Robby is a good robot. He appears in other shows and films and is usually playing the part of an evil robot. The usual movie depiction of a robot is evil–they can’t be controlled–but there are some exceptions.
Jim
There are a lot of movies where the sci fi portion is incidental to the plot. They just needed something weird to set the stage for the story they wanted to tell.
Weird Science would also fit into this category.
Another good example is “Moon Zero Two” released in 1969. It was billed as the first “space western” and that’s exactly what it is. Starring James Olson and Catherine Schell, the story involves asteroid rustling and lunar claim jumping. About the only western archetypes missing are an indian attack, a cavalry charge and a cattle stampede. It is pure transplanted western fun, but having been made just after and probably inspired by 2001, they made great efforts to get the science right. It’s become something of a cult classic and I recommend it. I found it on youtube, where you can also find the MST3K version, if you’re into that.
A nice detailed analysis of SciFi old and modern but do remember there are exactly 37 ways to skin a cat.
Surprisingly you cannot find the reference easily on google. Oh, joy, oh bliss !
There are good science fiction books out there they could build a movie around. One is INHERIT THE STARS by James P. Hogan
It is a science based mystery about something they found on the moon. Scientists play a big role in the book,with the unusual positive corporations involvement in being part of the science detective venture.
He wrote a Three book series,but the first book is the best in my opinion.
Two Faces of Tomorrow would be another interesting one.
I like all of Hogan’s novels. I do have a problem with Inherit the Stars, however. While the final outcome is fine, there are more logical solutions to what was reached by the protagonist.
daved46, the screenplay can smooth over some of it.
A couple years before he died,I used to have occasional e-mails with him on climate stuff,yes he was a climate realist,who also had a section on his website about global warming. His death was a surprise to me as he never mentioned it.
Has there ever been a SF movie as good or better than the book? Blade Runner may be one. I have not read P.K. Dick’s story yet. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
To me, “Blade Runner” is one of those rare films that achieves something very rare, in that it transcends its basic storyline and leads you to wonder about deeper questions – what is sentience? Does “being human” mean anything, and if so, what does it mean? Are the androids really “more human than human” as Tyrell Corp says they are? (I think the movie strives to show that they are) And if their “sin” is that they are “more human than human”, by what right do the original humans enslave them and then hunt them down so viciously?
The androids are of course extremely violent, but then escaped slaves on the run usually are. Especially when they’ve already been sentenced to death.
I would say that these questions were always the intent of Philip K. Dick, but that the film actually did a better job of raising them than the novel.
As a Christian, I do not think anything made by man is other than a machine that can be turned off when appropriate. I will have to read the novel after I finish Fallen Angels (see my comment below) to see what Dick intended. Despite my beliefs, I did like the movie. Thanks for your comment wws.
South,
Who is to say that the God, as imagined differently by various different Christian sects, is beyond imbuing a machine with a soul? If God can put souls in bipedal apes, then why can’t He put souls in machines made by those apes?
As has been mentioned before, this is an OLD topic. The question of whether it is permissible to examine the workings of God’s world in order to learn new things, or whether this is an evil activity encouraged by Satan in order to separate us from true obedience, faith and eternal paradise was examined, amongst others, by that early scientist Roger Bacon in the 1260s.
You forgot the the best ski-fi movie ever: Forbidden Planet.
Two of the worst Sci-fi movies were the film versions of Heinlein’s “Starship Troopers” and “The Puppet Masters”, given the source material and the film budgets involved. Neither movie had the least regard for the source material, and Starship Troopers had bugs producing escape velocity bolides from their butts.
Tom you gotta have more fun and let the Physics go. Starship troopers was an amusement park ride and a parody. Maybe I liked it because I didn’t read the graphic novels.
Yeah and the absurd flight path of the asteroid that can travel from galaxy to another in a short time,smash an area in Venezuela,without destroying the planet.
I saw an article that Verhoven, the director and general producer of the movie ,never read the novel, and disliked science fiction in general. Another sillyness was casting someone who looked like a Waffen SS poster for a Fiilipino character.
I saw it as entertaining, but full of plot holes and impossible events, like sending those blue bolides from ugly bugs butts quickly, to smash ship in orbit.
A movie to watch only once and never again.
Heinlein’s novel was also very political, and the movie mostly reversed the politics, as well as ignoring all the neat gadgets recycled by later writers, like powered armor suits.
You should put the movie in perspective- Look at the director’s previous two films (his first and second) which were Robocop and Showgirls, and bless whatever gods you worship that the first Starship Troopers turned out as well as it did. It may in fact be the high point of the director’s career.
In “Starship Troopers” – apart from the comet-farting beetles, the science and effects were not too bad. Aside from the bug war, the society portrayed on earth was a utopia of sorts – but not one following a socialist-liberal narrative. The military were portrayed sympathetically. Many assumed the film was done in irony or parody – the alternative was too bewildering.
The movie was pure parody, played straight. The book, a bit, but not so much given the times.
US Naval Academy grad Heinlein underwent a political transformation of his own, from Left of New Deal Democrat (supporting Upton Sinclair for CA governor) to libertarian conservative, reflecting his marriages. After marrying Ginny, who held a higher Navy rank than he, in 1948, he turned conservative. Starship Troopers (1959) and Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) preceded his support for Goldwater in 1964.
Starship Troopers was the first SF novel I read. I was in the 4th grade.
I read Heinlein’s “Space Cadet” as a kid. I still have that original 1954 copy on my book shelf. The sci-fi view of Venus back then was very different than what Venus actually turned out to be. Heinlein’s concept of a future space academy probably came from his Naval Academy experience.
His “Stranger in a Strange Land” came out in 1961, but it was all the rage in 1972-1973. I remember reading it just after finishing my flight training. It was something to “grok.”
Jim
I have watched that movie several times, I am a special effects junkie. It still gets me that Doogie Howser wears a black uniform with a high peaked cap that is a dead copy of an SS uniform. And their weaponry seems barely updated from what we can do today; assault rifles quite reminiscent of M-16s, hand grenades and some mounted cannons. The suits in the book had grenade and missile launchers with the ability to launch tactical nukes (not sure how they overcame critical mass to make them that small). No wonder the bugs were overwhelming at times.
Well-designed fission weapons can be made quite small.
At least teens and adults are the ones watching these shows. I remember my kids watching “The Smoggies” back in the late 80’s where “The Suntots join forces to stop evil garbage mongers from polluting the world”. This repugnant anti technological mind set has been indoctrinating our children for generations. Fortunately technology has so many advantages that our children are still getting driver’s licences, want high paying jobs and keep their ears plugged in to iPhones.
Right up there with Captain Planet. Villains trying to destroy the environment for no other reason than, they can.
Children of Men- Summary is wrong. Pregnancy is NOT illegal. Dystopian, yes, but with no explanation.
Interstellar- Sorry, climate change was NOT identified as the culprit. Beautiful to watch, but many blatant, distracting physics errors.
Dr. Strangelove- Calling it “anti-science” is a stretch. Anti-nuke maybe, but it’s brilliant and hilarious.
2001 is NOT anti-science. It’s a celebration of space exploration & the human sense of wonder… and so much more. A masterpiece. My #1.
Blade Runner- another masterpiece. One of my top ten.
Brazil is much more anti-bureaucracy than anti-science. Loved it.
I liked Minority Report. Portrayal of technology was fairly positive. Did not like AI.
Loved Ex Machina. Actual intelligent dialogue for a change.
Loved The Martian but there are significant errors and plot holes.
I liked Arrival, too.
I loved Fury Road because I’m a Mad Max fanatic.
Star Wars is great but not serious science fiction, nor was it ever meant to be.
I HATE Prometheus. I loved the original Alien and the sequel, but Prometheus is the easily the worst film of the decade. An spit-in-your-face insult to real, professional scientists and space explorers.
P.S. You left out Close Encounters.
Yes I thought about Close encounters and for instance Independence Day. But I was really aiming at SciFi movies that predicted an anthropogenic future rather than aliens visiting a more or less present day earth.
Good point, understood.
The best thing about Close Encounters is the PEACEFUL scientific/military collaboration to welcome and meet the aliens. When I left the theater I was thinking FINALLY, someone did a movie where everyone didn’t start shooting first.
Thanks for your other feedback btw.
With films like Dr Strangelove it’s not just about what was in the film, but how it has been interpreted and become part of an anti-science narrative.
Based on your comments I should rewatch some of these films.
Dr. Strangelove is called a BLACK comedy for a reason,which are all based on political paranoia,that was started by a psychopath,who mutters about “precious bodily fluids”
Ptolemy2: I have to agree with Eustace Cranch above. I do not believe Dr. Strangelove was anti-science, generally speaking. It was anti-Cold War and (specifically) anti-nuclear. One should not necessarily associate being anti-nuclear with being anti-science. BTW, Peter Sellers was terrific in it. Playing multiple roles in a film is probably not easy for an actor to do.
Second, you left out George Lucas’s “THX-1138” from your list. IIRC, this was Lucas’s first film. It came out back in the early 1970s–years before his Star Wars series. Definitely dystopian in its nature where high technology is used to control society. THX-1138 was, in my opinion, an early taste of Lucas’s considerable skills as a movie director. He appears to have been inspired somewhat by Orwell’s “1984” when making it.
CD
In 1971 I was living in Asia – and was 6 years old. Still – I’ll look out for THX 1138.
Yeah, I think you got some “confirmation bias” going with 2001 a Space Odyssey ;
“While human technical progress is apparently celebrated, with a famous musical score and inspiring visual effects, once the plot gets going technology is the villain, as Hal the computer is evil and kills people.”
I didn’t see technology as “the villain”, just Hal . . as in, something went wrong with sometechnology . . and even then it was depicted more as a self preservation programming malfunction, than as an evil robot that wanted to kill people. Kinda sad, really, Shelley’s Frankenstein in space . . ; )
In 2010, Hal’s malfunction was explained as a psychosis caused by conflicting priorities that Hal was given.
The first one was that the mission was about discovery and Hal was supposed to keep the astronauts informed about everything that was happening.
The second was added at the last minute by mission managers without consulting the programmers, and it was to keep all information about the obelisk from the astronauts.
Apparently Hal decided that the only way to resolve the conflict between these two objectives was to kill the astronauts.
I’m watching Prometheus now in a hotel room in Salzburg (business not pleasure). And boy is it bad! Just as well the speech is in German.
The final word on Prometheus, for me, was when I saw someone had gone to the trouble of writing out a different script, and showing that if you mostly kept all the visuals the same, but threw out every piece of the original script and substituted new lines, then you could actually have a pretty good movie.
And he was right – that’s the only thing that could fix it. Dump every stupid line that every character says, and start from scratch.
It spawned an entirely new meme: “The Prometheus school of running away from things.”
What got me in Prometheus was the octopus thing locked in the operating room growing from the size of a cat to the size of a cow in a matter of a few days WITH NO FOOD SUPPLY except plastic and steel instruments and maybe some paper tissues and rubber gloves. (OK maybe a computer or two as well.)
How many of these movies got tobacco money to show onscreen use?
Unless they were showing a particular brand, I doubt any did.
Tobacco use was common and pretty much expected back then.
Death Race 2000
The year is 2000, technology and pollution have caused society to degenerate into a violent blood bath!
The ORIGINAL Death Race 2000, not the horrible remake! That has to be one of the best dark-comedy movies ever made, and that’s actually a fairly decent little political satire hidden inside it.
My brother and I need to be sent to re-education camps to rectify our minds, because we used to quote these lines to each other constantly on the road:
“To recap those revisions: women are still worth 10 points more than men in all age brackets, but teenagers now rack up 40 points, and toddlers under 12 now rate a big 70 points. The big score: anyone, any sex, over 75 years old has been upped to 100 points.”
A limit to imagination is explored in SciFi generally. I don’t mean this dismissively. It takes imagination further than most genre (the good ones that is). It occurred to me years ago when thinking about, of all things, fashion designer’s (my sister, among other things was one) frustrating limits: a human has only two arms, two legs, a torso and one head. Dresses, long, short, colors, fabrics…well you get the idea.
I began to think, what about other areas of endeavor? Watching some of the original star wars ithe first time hing I noted was the fashion designer:s dilemma and the result was even worse. They regressed back to medieval costumery and even with swords, suits of armour and riding horses (I suppose you could say ‘iron’ horses, but still.. ). Their dialogues are Shakespearean.
Hey for science we have 92 plus a few elements but these are all actually made with varying numbers and combinations of only a few particle types, the members of each type indistinguishable from one another. There are only a few kinds of forces holding things together and their energies released in separation or coming together or interacting in electromagnetic or gravitational fields (logic wants us to unite these fields into one) . Resolving the secrets associated with this stuff would seem likely to take forever. Maybe scientists are lagging behind the fashion designer. My sister would have liked this thought.
Talking about Star Wars and Shakespeare, the original Star Wars trilogy has now been written as a set of Shakespeare-style plays, by Ian Doescher. I dipped into it in a bookstore and it seems well written. The trilogy Shakespearian titles:
Verily a New Hope
The Empire Striketh Back
The Jedi Doeth Return
I find your criticism if 2001 interesting but unfair, since the so called sequel explains that Hal was that way because of bad people in government. They created a “HOFSTADER-MOEBIUS” loop in the computer with secret programming added,thus trapping it:
“2010: Odyssey Two
In the sequel 2010: Odyssey Two, HAL is restarted by his creator, Dr. Chandra, who arrives on the Soviet spaceship Leonov.
Prior to leaving Earth, Dr. Chandra has also had a discussion with HAL’s twin, the SAL 9000. Like HAL, SAL was created by Dr. Chandra. Whereas HAL was characterized as being “male”, SAL is characterized as being “female” (voiced by Candice Bergen) and is represented by a blue camera eye instead of a red one.
Dr. Chandra discovers that HAL’s crisis was caused by a programming contradiction: he was constructed for “the accurate processing of information without distortion or concealment”, yet his orders, directly from Dr. Heywood Floyd at the National Council on Astronautics, required him to keep the discovery of the Monolith TMA-1 a secret for reasons of national security. This contradiction created a “Hofstadter-Moebius loop”, reducing HAL to paranoia. Therefore, HAL made the decision to kill the crew, thereby allowing him to obey both his hardwired instructions to report data truthfully and in full, and his orders to keep the monolith a secret. In essence: if the crew were dead, he would no longer have to keep the information secret.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAL_9000
In the movie Dr. Heywood said he didn’t know this could happen,as the politicians who ordered him to do it, caused the failure. Hal 9000 computer was innocent.
Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.
I am glad you put Star Trek in the hopeful category. The original TV series was on balance, the best ST ever written. Timeless stories some of them were. It had a morality that represented the best of humanity, and what democracy represented as seen through the lens of USA/Commonwealth societal values, and transplanted into the 23rd century. Timeless…
I think it’s important to remember two things.
1) The old Chinese curse, ‘may you live in interesting times’.
2) the not quite as old, but similar saying, ‘An adventure is somebody else having a bad day’.
I mean, sure, we could make a movie about a perfect Utopia where everyone live peaceful and easy lives of plenty. But would anyone want to see it.
No Outland! Technology or not, man remains the same.
Not surprising that Hollywood has embraced AGW as an ideology. Considering their surroundings and their peers, it would take someone of great fortitude and independent thought to resist what amounts to peer pressure – but true character, particularly in this demographic, is sadly lacking.
And it’s not like they have real artists there anymore – there are people with artistic TALENT, but their creativity is pretty much limited to conformist repetition of standardized themes, usually in congruence with some politicized Progressive government-pushed message – which makes them more than just mindless clones, but actual propagandists.
Which dovetails nicely into the sub-theme, by the way, which is totalitarian government takeover – which ironically, seems to be exactly what they’re pushing – all to ‘save’ us from their own paranoid fantasies. (not to mention the all-important mechanism of absolving themselves). In a way, all these cautionary tales have actually been a primer for modern progressives to act out.
The sad fact is, and is likely to remain so, is that it costs less money to shoot a film in abandoned structure/neighborhoods/facilities than it does to build sets and create special effects, even with cgi. It will always be cheaper to tell a story in blasted rubble than to tell a similar story set in a chrome and glass future with glittering spires and interstellar travel, especially if these must be an integral part of the story. For the same reason, time-travel stories that take place in our present will always be the most prevalant of the genre. The exception to this rule is animation, where anything is possible because the costs to animate with cgi, or just draw a scene, is similar regardless of subject matter. I suggest that cost may be the primary factor in the prevalence of dystopian sf films, and for this reason it might be better to examine and rate animated films, with anime separated into it’s own category.
It is cost, but a lot of what is going on is dislike of the genre by the writers and other “creative” staff. Jurassic Park was sort of science fiction as a novel, but the changes made tended to make the movie a remake of Frankenstein as far as philosophy.
Climate change in Interstellar?
“Ambiguous. The backdrop is routine dystopia, humans killed the earth by climate change (yawn). However interstellar space-craft technology provides possible salvation. We find out that a black hole is actually a supermassive library.”
I don’t think so,have watched this movie about 8 times now,never any specific climate change claim being stated as the cause, but they talk about BLIGHT a lot.
It was BLIGHT, used as a plot device to create the reason for leaving to a new planet:
The Blight
http://interstellarfilm.wikia.com/wiki/The_Blight
Maybe you’re right. But in today’s “climate” , a film portraying climatic doom scarcely needs to state that its anthropogenic – that will be the automatic assumption.
Surely the key point about Interstellar is that…
Having researched climatology to develop the fantastic worlds…
The Nolan team decided to make the villain a ‘Dr Mann’ who fakes climate data for personal gain.
Hmmm.
What disturbed me about Interstellar was the easy way they re-wrote history! When the teacher was arguing with Cooper about the moon landings. Disturbing and we see it today.
>>
When the teacher was arguing with Cooper about the moon landings.
<<
Yeah, that bothered me too. But isn’t it usually we, the “Climate Deniers,” who are tarred with the “fake Moon landing” scenario?
I also didn’t like the way they handled the time dilation effect on the planet. The whole thing didn’t make sense. Apparently they were near a black hole, but the planet was orbiting a “sun,” so the whole solar system was near the black hole. Yet the time dilation effect only happened on the surface of the planet. I need to re-watch the movie, but it’s obvious the writers didn’t get the physics right.
Jim
What about “Forbidden Planet” Which was likely the inspiration for the original Star Trek series
Originally there was an economic reason that green lights dystopian movies versus hopeful successful futures: When your primary locals/sets are static burned out buildings or desert waste land, your production costs are down significantly. When you have to have thousands of extras to make a scene believable, you schedule shooting around the extras to get them in and out as quickly as possible. CG is changing that, but in the early days dystopian movies were significantly less expensive to make. That being said, yes the Frankenstein Complex is alive and well in Hollywood.