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
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Dystopia? It’s the mindset of people whose lives are narrow, who see nothing coming to them in the future. They’re stuck in place. That’s the point of A Brave New World, Logan’s Run, all the ‘something-something from outer space’ threat movies form the 1950s including The Blog, The Thing, and It Came From Beyond Space (or something like that), and the consistently idiotically bad versions of ‘War of the Worlds’. Orson Welles’ radio theater broadcast of WofW on a Hallowe’en night in 1938 had truly people worried, but the panic was generated by the newspapers of the day.
The pessimism that oozes out of those silly movies is easily cast aside when you wonder where the characters get their clothes, where the power comes from to run their silly settlements, etc. Reality gets cast aside in the effort to be dismal. I have never understood why no one thought about hacking the mainframe of the Terminators and injecting a self-destruct virus into the mix.
The dystopic mind of Hollywood the Industry sees no future for any/all humans. They need some serious therapy. The movies they produce in that theme reflect their dismal disfunctionality.
You made one mistake: in Children of Men, women who got pregnant were NOT outlaws. They were worshiped. Humans were dying off because something caused sterility (loss of the ozone layer? loss of the geomagnetic shield? a blast from a nova not too far away?) Any woman who could get pregnant was a miracle, a small glimmer of hope for a dying world.
The problem with dystopic stories is that the focus is too narrow. You never see what’s going on elsewhere. The first Mad Max movie takes place in a world that still has trees and green grass. By the most recent movie, it’s become a completely barren desert, with no explanation for the progression into oblivion or what the future may be, if there is a future.
On the Beach did at least give us a valid reason for its dystopic theme.
98% of all species that have ever lived on this planet are extinct. Let’s let them go in peace. – George Carlin.
Just remember: This IS Ceti Alpha VI!!!!!
The pessimism that oozes out of those silly movies is easily cast aside when you wonder where the characters get their clothes, where the power comes from to run their silly settlements
Or who maintains their hairstyles and makeup, no to mention white teeth.
Yes Phil, “on the mobile phone WUWT page, titles of articles appear to disappear after the first click”.
Similarly names of commenters, printed in blue disappear when clicked mistakingly.
____________________________________________
You can make both readable by clicking any one word of the text as for copy.
Next click the option ‘copy all’ so every text of the article gets marked and thus readable.
kreiz
Nice idea – I’ll give it a try.
On the WUWT page titles of articles are indeed links to the very same artikle;
when following the link that same link get coloured white to mark the link ‘followed’;
and before the white background you can’t read that title anymore.
Fallen Angels by Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven is a book that you might enjoy. I have not read it yet, but the basic plot is that environmentalists and anti-technology fanatics trigger an ice age by trying to stop global warming. I expect the science will be pretty accurate and believable. Apparently fans at a SF convention help two astronauts save the day (earth). Plan to start reading it next week.
It’s a kick, but Fallen Angels assumes the reader is a SF fan, otherwise the references will be totally obscure.
I will put my fandom to the test. As noted elsewhere, I have been reading SF since I was in the 4th grade, about 60 years.
I forgot Pournelle & Niven in my list, I liked most of their books.
And authors who never got any of their works made as movies. It is interesting to speculate on what criteria Hollywood uses to pick which authors’ works to adapt. Philip Dick did not do particularly well on novel sales, but had several works done as movies.
Never understood why Niven collaborated with Pournelle; Niven won Hugos and Nebulas long before he joined up with him. I heard a rumor that Niven did it because he couldn’t write about military very convincingly, and that’s pretty much what Pournelle was known for.
Fallen Angels by Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven
by Jerry Pournelle, Larry Niven, and… ??
and Steven Barnes. The group also did the Heorot series.
“…and Steven Barnes.”
Buzz. Wrong.
Go, go, google! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallen_Angels_(science_fiction_novel)
I did not list all of the authors, just the first two to assist readers to find out more about it or locate a copy. I have a used paperback copy. I have long been a fan of Pournelle and Niven. They have collaborated with other authors, too. I think they are working with Barnes on a project now.
I subscribed to Byte magazine just to read Pournelle’s Chaos Manor column, which is now available online. He is not in good health, but struggles on.
The notion behind Fallen Angels was that we were already overdue for a new ice age — it had started with the Maunder Minimum — and global warming (thanks to the wood smoke and coal smoke even before internal combustion) was the only thing holding back the glaciers. (See, e.g. George W. Harper, “A Little More Pollution, Please!” (Analog Oct 1986)) So when the greenhouse gasses were removed, the ice age recommences. Larry had great fun putting ice a mile thick over the home town of Sen. Proxmire, then the leading Luddite in Congress. We were thinking in terms of the failure to find solar neutrinos as a sign that the sun had “gone out.”
Naturally, the folks in charge groundside blame the ice age on the folks living on the space stations Mir (Peace) and Freedom “stealing nitrogen” from the atmosphere. (Nitrogen is the only essential element you can’t get from moon rocks or asteroids; so they use ram jets to scoop and compress air and take off the N2.) To the scientifically illiterate this sounds plausible.
BTW, often overlooked, close reading will reveal that there are pro-science counterparts for each of the anti-science factions. E.g., there are environmentalists in the story who are pro-space, pro-technology.
It was also AFAIK the first novel written coast to coast by computer. With some difficulty setting up the modems, because Larry and Jerry ran DOS boxes in CA while I had a Mac in NJ. We wound up running everything through Jim Baen’s office in NY and he did the translations. We never even met all three at once face to face until after the book was out. (Although I had met with Larry on two occasions to talk plot, and had emailed with Jerry.)
As this directly relates to my field, what specifically was your problem? FTP was a protocol in place at the time, and transcended operating systems. All one needed to do was run an FTP server on any computer, and any computer could read and write files to it.
That was years since. I remember a lot of wooling over X-modem and Y-modem, and stuff I sent came over as gibberish. For all I know, that was how Jom Baen resolved the problem.
I have seen 2 other B grade SF movies with similar themes recently. “The Colony” and “Snowpiercer”
Dystopia: Logan’s Run
BTW, Heinlein’s brother, Raymond, was a professor of Chemistry at
Kent State for a number of years.
What of 1973’s “Westworld?” Set in a futuristic resort, one of the robotic staff goes on a rampage and begins trying to kill the guests.
By Michael Crichton. Same plot as Jurassic Park.
The new Westworld series goes way beyond the original.
Never watched a James Bond movie the whole length. That drivel.
Because contrary to anglo-saxons believe ” all the Bond movies ever made,”
are of ITALIAN origin –
Like all Spaghetti-Western.
Never did any good.
https://www.google.at/search?q=Italian+JamesBond+movies&oq=Italian+JamesBond+movies+&aqs=chrome.
You mean you never watched “Diamonds are Forever” ??? You missed Jill St. John’s magnificent cleavage, which deserved it’s own billing as the star of the show!
It is entertainment you know. I don’t think a plodding documentary style discourse on the steady progress of society supported by science would gain much viewership , apart from the Dalek collectors of course.
I’d site the good Spike Jonze movie ‘Her’ as portraying a positive image of the future and technology, and even the technological protagonist (in this case an AI) is painted as something society is struggling to get to grips with rather than something damaging.
Dystopia is more scary and exciting though, offers up hurdles and challanges which motivate characters and move a story along. I don’t think there’s necessarily a bias towards pessimism, it’s just a format that sells more tickets – just as (in the view of media owners) environmental catastrophism sells more newspapers.
Since the list mentions “Star Trek”, I felt compelled to share this quote from Jeff Patterson regarding the franchise (provided via the Atomic Rockets website):
“I am once again stunned at the insistence that Star Trek has to be allegorically relevant, but if it must, I’d prefer it take on more scientific/ethical issues, like a justification for banning genetic enhancement. or how a society with FTL, molecular replication, and teleportation has managed to sidestep a technological singularity.
Star Trek is considered by many to be the public face of SF, it’s flagship.
I hold by my belief that to retain that title it needs to take it up a level: travel out into some heretofore unexplored quadrant and find that it is heavily populated by Type II Kardashev cultures, Lovecraftian ancients, Kirby-esque star gods, Matrioshka brain AIs trying to tap reality’s source-code, post-singularity societies like Banks Culture, Wright’s Oecumene, or Hamilton’s Edenists, etc.
In short, Trek needs to catch up with the rest of science fiction”
I don’t care, Nichelle Nichols was enough for me, though at the time I didn’t know why!
In Trek’s defense, they did have the Organians, Trelane’s parents’ culture (The Squire of Gothos), Q, and others I’m probably forgetting. These were all races/species whose natural abilities were so far above the Federation’s that they appeared omnipotent. As some one else said, it’s not very interesting watching the Terminex man spray the termites, and so we didn’t get much expansion regarding those species, with the exception of Q.
There is a large body of excellent literature in the SF genre, much of it full of accurate science. So why is
the Hollywood interpretation so almost invariably AWFUL?
Perhaps Hollywood itself is really anti-science. 🙂
Being a tad more serious, we must demand SF of higher quality from Hollywood if we want it.
Otherwise, to them it is just a business that they will use to cater to the mass populace that swallows anything the MSM tries to pass as real science.
Protest!!!
Dr Strangelove is so great a movie that it should not be routinely classed as SciFi and put in a box with a heap of mundane movies for comparison, when it is incomparable.
The script is superb, one of those rare cases that yields a previously-hidden hidden jewel, time and again almost every time you revisit it.
The acting is patchy, with Peter Sellers being overdone, Slim Pickens and George C Scott brilliant at times. But all memorable.
The movie is not even selling the same messages as claimed for the others. It is just taking the Mickey out of those who were afraid of technology, on the vehicle of nuclear warfare.
It is a stand alone epic.
Geoff
One of the best things about Strangelove that modern audiences might miss (that audiences in the early 60’s would have known instantly) is that many of the characters are hilariously done parodies of famous real life people. Strangelove himself, of course is a parody of Werner von Braun, and yes, it was always shameful that we in America took the man responsible for the rocket bombing of London and made him some kind of national hero. (Hence the darkness of the Strangelove character)
Milquetoast President Merkel was a spoof on Adlai Stevenson, who was *almost* President twice, in the 50’s.
Gen’t Buck Turgidson was a vicious parody of Gen’l Curtis Le May, of the SAC.
The Russian Ambassador was a play on Andrei Gromyko, who’d been in charge of the Russian side of negotiations during the Cuban missile crisis.
Also, I disagree with you about Peter Sellers being overdone – Peter Sellers does 3 different parts so well that on first viewing, you have to be told its Peter Sellers doing all 3 parts. And the appearance of his over-the-top Strangelove, towards the end, is the climax of the entire film, and cements the idea that everything going on here is unbelievably horrible and yet strangely hilarious at the same time.
I’ll defer to your knowledge and passion about this film since I haven’t watched it yet. I included it because quotes from and references to it are often used – no doubt misused – to support leftist and anti-military narratives.
I agree it’s one of the best movies ever made. It’s not just anti-war, but against just about everything.
Also has a high ratio of memorable lines.
Yeah – I’d have to call it the best piece of pure political satire ever written. EVERYBODY takes a hit in this one! And one odd thing I’ve always felt shows just how good a filmmaker Kubrick was – everybody is trying to take down the rogue B-52 that is going to drop its bombs and trigger the end of the world, and the audience should be, too – but the cockpit and crew scenes inside that B-52 are done so well, so accurately, that by the end we, the audience, are cheering for them to pull through, just like Gen’l Buck Turgidson is.
And if you haven’t seen it, Ptolemy – there are so many great performances here. Peter Sellers in clearly the best dramatic roll he ever played, even though he infuses it with his own brand of comedy; George C. Scott going totally over the top, chewing up the scenery in every scene he’s in; Slim Pickens as the iconic American cold war cowboy, yee-hawing the world to nuclear destruction; and if you listen carefully you’ll notice a very young and uncredited James Earl Jones in the cockpit of that B-52.
And that haunting ending makes it the most quintessential cold-war film by far.
One of those rare movies I feel compelled to rewatch every time its on!
sick and tired of milking the Marvel comics cash cow
Also Star Wars was based on a (japanese) comic strip
I like comics strips btw.
Hollywood is to movie what CocaCola is to drinking..a Coke once in a while is okay but you dont drink coke all day, for breakfast, before sleeping etc. There is wine, water, tea, coffee isnt there..Hollyweird just brings us politicqlly correct agenda driven pseudo scifi..froth , basically.
Okay, I really have to dive into this one…
First off, Never Let Me Go and Brazil. *Not* Science-Bad. Politics-Bad. Both include strictly 20th-century technology (Brazil even begins with the tagline “Somewhere in the Twentieth Century”!), used for bad ends by a sort of Stalinist super-state.
Interstellar; climate change, oddly enough, is not mentioned in the movie. I know because I was looking out for it. I got the strong impression that someone wanted to make an anti-warmist mainstream movie, but didn’t quite dare. In fact, we are never told where “the blight” comes from, or even whether or not it is of human origin.
As for Tomorrowland, i would say that you’ve got the basic premise of the film quite wrong – if I could just work out what that premise was. Pro-science, anti-science? All I can say is that if I’d seen the film that I thought I was going to see, it would have been a sci-fi classic.
The science fiction genre is one of my favorites, too. Some have touched on the plot error of “Children of Men.” Women are not able to bear children, and the world is facing final human extinction for unknown reasons. But then one woman becomes pregnant and various government interests try to grab her and control her, basically turning her into the world’s only science experiment that matters. The cohesion of a totalitarian state in the face of hopelessness and ultimate extinction has made it difficult to control all the levers of power, and she escapes with the help of a group of allies who want her to be free and to have her child in peace and freedom. And the movie ends with a hopeful feel that perhaps something has changed and that human life will go on. She is the new Eve.
Of course, on a related theme is the resurgent “A Handmaid’s Tale” that’s being talked about by anti-Trump forces. In a post-war apocalyptic America, a new “Christian” theocracy rules over fragmented areas with brutal totalitarianism. The war polluted the world, most women are infertile, and all fertile women become the property of the state, to be loaned out to good party members who want children. They develop a bizarre ritual of copulation between the man and the handmaid, with the wife in the bed in the missionary position, but with the handmaid between her and her husband. This makes her feel like she’s a part of the procreation of “her” child. And of course, the child of this union will belong to the married party members, while the handmaid is then loaned out to the next couple. Hypocrisy is rampant. Story told from the point of view of one such handmaid. I consider this story as mostly an anti-religious screed. It badly misrepresents Christianity and even fanatical fundamentalist Christians, IMO.
I don’t consider Dr. Strangelove (one of my very favorite movies) to be science fiction. It is a nuclear anxiety movie, along other stories and movies with similar themes, like Fail Safe, On the Beach, etc. With adequate mine shaft space, we will prevail, through the purity and essence of our natural fluids. I tell people that this movie is a movie about men’s sexual anxieties, as much as it is about global thermo-nuclear war.
Brazil, another personal favorite, captures the awesome totalitarian malaise of large bureaucracies and also of society and popular culture as a form of mass hypnosis (via a plot device wherein the protagonist’s mother continually seeks to find perpetual youth through cosmetic surgery). In the end, though, the bureaucracy wins and the cosmetic surgery fails to live up to its promise. It is very dark. Hopelessness wins.
Another science fiction movie is Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” which was told in three parts. The story has the obvious dystopian, anti-Socialism, anti-bureaucratic, pro-Freedom political aspects. But it also has Reardon metal, John Galt’s free power, scalable free electricity from static imbalances in the atmosphere. Rand was politically naive, IMO, and in Atlas Shrugged, she opines near the end a belief in the notion that one more Amendment in the Bill of Rights protecting the means of production could have preempted the march of Progressivism. Nothing stops the march of Collectivists except eternal vigilance. Because they think they’re correct, and that “we” CAN build a Utopian society. Of course, it would be nice if they first defined all the aspects of same.
I’m not a big fan of Gene Roddenberry’s leftist Utopianism. Star Trek politics are so unrealistic. So let me get this straight, the Klingons and the Romulans can have cloaking devices, and they’ve used them to good effect to attack us, but WE CAN’T have cloaking devices? No polity in the universe would ever agree to such madness. And as a quasi-military command, Star Fleet is out of its mind. How many times has Enterprise been commandeered by normal (non-Q) humanoids who were allowed free access to the bridge, to engineering? Star Fleet needs a few good Courts Marshall, and to bust some Captains and executive officers and throw them in prison. Kirk, you let some intergalactic hippies take the Enterprise. Picard, I’m looking at you, too.
Thanks for these reviews and comments. A few of the films in the article are ones I have not seen and I relied on plot summaries. Now I’ll go and watch some of them.
If you change the religion of the believers in “A Handmaid’s tale” from Christianity to Islam, then it becomes not speculative fiction, but a documentary. Pointing that out is a good way to annoy someone who thinks it is really, really deep.
At least in the Star Trek shows (until the horrible Enterprise series), there were often negative consequences to the leftist utopianism. I also learned that computers are evil and will kill us the first chance they get! 🙂
I remember a scene in DS9 where Benjamin Sisko (the “Captain” of the series) goes into a big private rant over how politically short-sighted his superiors have been, and places much of the blame on the environment they live in.
“You know what the problem is? It’s Earth. It’s paradise. They’ve lived in paradise for so long that they can’t envision it ever being lost.” [paraphrased summary]
And what about When Worlds Collide? A couple of scientists discover the impending doom, no one believes them, so they construct their own escape vehicle. And it works…
Thought this was apropos:
In this opening paragraph of “The Call of Cthulhu,” first published in the pulp fiction magazine Weird Tales in 1928, H.P. Lovecraft set out a view of things that animates pretty well everything he wrote thereafter: The human mind is an accident in the universe, which is indifferent to the welfare of the species. We can have no view of the scheme of things or our place in it, because there may be no such scheme. The final result of scientific inquiry could well be that the universe is a lawless chaos. Sometimes called “weird realism,” it is a disturbing vision with which Lovecraft would struggle throughout his life.
https://newrepublic.com/article/119996/hp-lovecrafts-philosophy-horror
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Fandom.
Good fiction,science fiction included, is a fun house mirror.
Reality as you know it, tweaked just a fraction leading to conclusions you may have never yet imagined.
The best Sci-Fi takes me to places I have not forseen.
The collapse of the depicted society is dramatic effect.A good way of getting ones attention.
Movies, based on SciFi, however have been mostly boring, in my opinion, as they have been unable to provide the same detail of plot that the book author provides.
Flash and dash versus substance.
Not to mention the time factor, the book I can put down,reread at my leisure, a movie , not so much.
As for the ratio of hope to doom?
If it bleeds… It leads.
What about “Planet of the Apes ?? (or is that considered a comedy) ?
No, that was an eerily prescient description of the coming Climate Change fight!
“It’s a madhouse! A MADHOUSE!!!”
I don’t know if this is considered sci-fi, exactly, but a 1968 movie ‘Panic In the City’ with Howard Duff trying to track down a Soviet spy who has hired a nuclear engineer to build a nuke in his basement in Los Angeles, so as to set it off and destroy the city. While destroying LA would be no loss, the movie is loaded with tension, and well worth your time.
But real sci-fi is ‘Have Spacesuit – Will Travel’, a YA novel Heinlein wrote and published in 1958. A villain that is nastier than a horde of fire ants, spies, a local cop, a couple of teens who save the world, and also tell the ‘Moderator’ at the end ‘We can build our own sun’. It’s got everything, including Pluto quakes.
“But real sci-fi is ‘Have Spacesuit – Will Travel’, a YA novel Heinlein wrote and published in 1958.”
I loved that story. One of the first science fiction stories I read as a kid.
The first science fiction story I ever read was “The Wonderful Planet”, about a hidden civilization on the Moon. I was so enthralled with the contents that I couldn’t put it down, and I couldn’t read it fast enough, and when I finished it, I immediately started reading it again from the beginning. I couldn’t get enough! And then I went looking for more books like that, and found them in abundance. Thank you science fiction authors!
Back in 1960 I was in 4th grade (10 years old), the town had a great library. I discovered SF. Read most of Heinlein and Vonnegut by hiding the books under the school room desk. The teacher knew what I was doing, but let me get away with it. Still remember Starship Troopers, Cat’s Cradle and the Mother Thing.
I’m amazed that you read Vonnegut in 1960. His novels and short stories before Cat’s Cradle fell largely on deaf ears. Or blind eyes.
I had a great town library, too, and some very nice, observant librarians. After I started focusing on reading science fiction, I quickly read through all the available books, but I guess the librarians noticed, because after a short drought, all of a sudden, new science fiction books would appear on the shelves and did so on a regular basis after that, and kept me going for a long time.
I eventually graduated to reading the science fiction magazines and novels that I found at the local drug store/cafeteria, where I was allowed to read the books for free as long as I bought something in the cafeteria. I would eat myself a hamburger, and get lost in a good story.
I had a lot of help from some very generous people in my efforts to read science fiction. I can’t thank them enough. 🙂
I don’t endorse any list of the best sci-fi movies, but here are a few. Many I don’t even consider sci-fi:
https://www.timeout.com/london/film/the-100-best-sci-fi-movies#tab_panel_10 (“2001: A Space Odyssey” ranked #1.)
http://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/movies/g97/the-100-best-sci-fi-movies-of-all-time/? (From this year. Takes a while to load. Also ranks “2001” Numero Uno.)
http://www.imdb.com/search/title?genres=sci_fi&title_type=feature&num_votes=1000,&sort=user_rating,desc (“Inception” #1, based upon ratings.)
http://www.ign.com/articles/top-25-sci-fi-movies-of-all-time (“Blade Runner” #1)
http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/lists/the-top-20-sci-fi-films-of-the-21st-century-20140515/inception-2010-19691231 (Ranks “Children of Men” Number One.)
Rotten Tomatoes includes fantasy, which IMO is justified because that’s what many so-called sci-fi movies really are. Or Westerns set in space: Ranks “Wizard of Oz” #1.
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/top/bestofrt/top_100_science_fiction__fantasy_movies/
“Blade Runner” reminds me to consider a more recent Ridley Scott sci-fi flick, “The Martian”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martian_(film)
Don’t like its star, but thought it was pretty good, despite its glaring scientific faults. At least it isn’t neo-dystopian-noir like “BR:.
The author crowd-sourced his novel for technical detail checks.
Most glaring error is the wind storm. Mars’ atmosphere isn’t dense enough to have so much strength.
Has someone mentioned Cocoon. Advanced aliens make old folks young again and grant them eternal life.
Also the first and second Ghostbusters …. private businessmen abandon academia and end up saving NYC and the world from supernatural evil beings.
“aliens make old folks young again and grant them eternal life.”…= The liberal Elite Dream, but ONLY for them !! (Dream or fantasy, your chose)….
Food for thought…
“If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America; which didn’t turn out well for the Native Americans.”
-Steven Hawking
Two films not yet mentioned: A Clockwork Orange, Idiocracy, and (briefly noted) John Carpenter’s The Thing. All superb, all with significant SF elements if not strictly SF, and all dystopian without any anti-technology / anti-science bias.
..I agree…Contacting “Aliens” from other worlds, searching for new resources, may not be in our best interest !
Sorry, that was for SNT….D’OH !!…NEED……..MORE ….COFFEE !! LOL