Science Fiction: The Movie 24/06/2005 Now that the fuss over Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith has died down, it is probably safe for me to venture a few thoughts on the matter. Let me point out right away that I have not seen the movie so this will not be a review. My impressions stem from the hundreds of reviews in the blogs, the kindest and most thoughtful of which may be Gary of Both World's article Destiny and Darth Vader.I am no great fan of the Star Wars movies, considering them to be little more than cowboys and indians in space with a few special effects thrown in to impress. This is caused by the fact that, to my mind, the best space movie of all time was 2001: A Space Odyssey; I am still waiting for something to beat that for realism, story line and visual awe.Yes, we can laugh now at the so-sixties psychedelia of the entry into Jupiter's atmosphere; we can complain about the introductory nonsense of Kubrick's version of Planet of the Apes; and there is an element of fudging the ending in the scenes from Jupiter itself (yet I still think they are wonderful to behold). But nothing has approached the movie's vision of the realities of space, no-one else has so elegantly combined classical music with the ponderous dance of spacecraft, no other science fiction movie has such depth in its consideration of humanity's first encounter with alien intelligence.There is a short scene early on in the movie that brings home to us one of the ruling factors in space travel: weightlessness. A stewardess on the shuttle to the moon enters a tubular tunnel from the side, clomps up the wall in her magnetic shoes and disappears through a doorway at the top of the tunnel, her whole perspective of what is "down" now radically altered. In the spacecraft sent to Jupiter later in the movie this is not forgotten. The ship rotates about a central axis to create its own gravity and so we have the scene where a crew member takes his exercise by running along a passage that loops around to form a circle. How much more intelligent this is than the way Star Wars characters can wander around their spacecraft on a floor that is always "down".I think 2001 was also the first movie to include a computer with character. And what a character! HAL steals the show with his soft-spoken menace. How ironic that he should be the forebear to the cutesy R2D2 and the irritating predictability of C3PO.Of course, 2001 does avoid the difficult problem of the appearance of aliens; we are shown an artifact (the famous black monolith) but never the creators. There may be wisdom in this since our imagination is so much more effective in creating mystery than the actual physical appearance of an alien. The wide variety of alien life depicted in the Star Wars series says much for the inventiveness of its designers but does little to heighten our awareness of just how alien another life form might be. A step beyond little green men maybe, but still generally bipedal in form and usually with two arms. And I suppose this has to be better than Star Trek's assumption that alien-ness is entirely a matter of different foreheads and ears.Star Wars also gives the impression that humans are by far the most numerous species in the universe. Wherever you go, you bump into them and the thousands of starship troopers all seem to be humans in fancy suits of armor. Most of the rebels are human too. Compare this to the tiny number of aliens around - wookies, for instance. I happen to like wookies; they may not be great conversationalists but their sheer size and strength would have given them some advantages in populating the universe, one would think. Yet, to my knowledge (which is not extensive - I mentioned that I am not a fan), Chewbacca seems to have been the only one in all the movies. I guess most aliens must be stay-at-home types.There have been movies that considered various aspects of the realities of space travel in a similar way to 2001. Although a spoof of space movies, the little known Dark Star dealt with the boredom inherent in the ultra-long journeys required by the immensity of space. It also had one of the cheapest and most original of all aliens: a beachball that began as quite cute but became seriously threatening when it tried to dislodge one of the characters from the side of a bottomless elevator shaft.Silent Running was a movie that looked at the possibility of preserving and transporting earth's plant life to another planet. Again, boredom proved a major factor in the movie's consideration of the problems of space travel. The makers were at least thinking about how we might meet such challenges.In contrast, Star Wars is hardly a series about space at all. It does not give any serious consideration to any of the realities of traveling through space and merely sets a fairly standard "good guys/bad guys" plot in a universe where going from one planet to another is just a matter of jumping into your spaceship and hitting the accelerator. By all accounts, the latest in the series is more of the same. It might be fun in a sort of action movie sense but nothing more than that.In the fantasy genre, Lord of the Rings remains the giant that inspired hundreds of imitators and Tolkien is still the man every fantasy writer has to aim at. But when it comes to space movies and science fiction, 2001 is the one to beat.
Clive
Mad .o0(I wonder if I should tell him we see the planet of the Wookies in episode three and a LOT of wookies?) Date Added: 24/06/2005
Gone Away .oO(So I was right - all aliens stay home...) Date Added: 24/06/2005
Ned I think the appeal of Star Wars originally was the special effects and the feeling that space was more of a community than previously portrayed as being. It also was the first time we had seen space and the future as being dusty and dirty, we saw barren places and disheveled characters, bums, bounty hunters, etc... The first appeal would be action and the simple plot of good vs. evil. All the other things you say are true, humans are ubiquitous and the other aliens have few friends who look like them. But a kid can easily spot Darth Vadar as being the bad guy, he looks like a bad guy and wheezes a lot. They have to then decide which good guy they are, the dashing and unpredictable Han Solo, or the good as gold Luke Skywalker. I have to sheepishly admit to having seen "2001" only once, on TV, and I don't remember much about it. But I admire your bravery in taking a stance that goes against the common popularity of a film to look at the true worth of it. I am barred from discussing the film "Steel Magnolias" in any group of women, as it is the darling of women everywhere and is, in my opinion, one of the worst films ever made. *instinctively ducks"*" Date Added: 25/06/2005
Gone Away You have pointed at the one thing about the Star Wars that I do think they got right - that machinery looks "used". For me, that adds far more to the believability of the movies than any of the special effects (which are anyway not as convincing as those in 2001, a film made over ten years before the first of the Star Wars series). Otherwise the series is typical of the cowboys and indians genre with the good guys in white and the bad guy (who still has to wheeze so you know he's bad) in black. Even my courage does not stretch to saying anything about Steel Magnolias however... Date Added: 25/06/2005
Ned I will admit to having seen Star Wars many times in the theatre, it captured our imaginations at the time, but I was young. I just bought the trilogy for the Boy (whose new identity is Darth Vadar, not Batman - I always had faith in his capacity for evil) and I looked forward to reliving the initial excitement of it all. Alas, I think I am too old for Star Wars now, the whole thing seems silly and the dialogue somewhat stilted. You really can't go home again. Date Added: 25/06/2005
Gone Away And I was already too old for it. But the ones I really can't understand are the Trekkies. I knew one once and I determined to borrow the videos one at a time from him so that I could say I'd watched them all. I gave up very quickly, however. Those movies are truly awful... Date Added: 25/06/2005
josh I love 2001, it is my favorite scifi movie of all time too. Whenever I think of that movie with the obvious benefit of hindsight, I relish the cleverness Mr. Clarke. The fact that HAL 9000 was a slant reference to IBM, then widely considered the elephant in the technological room, and the de facto target of the seemingly perennial, paranoiac, and love/hate relationship that exists between man and machine. Microsoft stock anyone? That and the room full of clear, fluorescing "optical chips" that Dave had to enter to kill HAL. That ruled. Date Added: 25/06/2005
Gone Away That has to be one of the most memorable scenes of all time I think, Josh. The claustrophobia, the glowing light from the chips and the descent into idiocy for HAL. "Daisy, Daisy, give me your ... answer ... do, I'm ... half crazy ... all ... for ..." It's a hard film to beat. But I do recommend Dark Star if you haven't seen it. It was made on a budget but is impressive in its handling of life in space and very funny too. There are memorable scenes just as in 2001: one of the guys has gone "space crazy" and sits in the astrodome staring into space all the time. We never see him in the movie but, when the camera pans back for an external shot of the ship, we can see the little bubble on top that is the astrodome. And, inside it, the guy's tiny head, gazing at the stars... Date Added: 25/06/2005
Way I do believe that I can do this without once mentioning either name of the two movies I swore would never escape the confines of my crumb-infested keyboard... I saw 2K and One the first week it came out. I had to, after hearing a co-worker recount several scenes, the best of which was the apes and the discovery of the power of bones. Yes, bones. Weapons. "Wow, I can kick your flea-infested ass! Come back here, you mangy cowards!" Other than that, the movie went off the deep end, colored by LSDish optics and unfathomable meanings which, if for nothing but Kubrick's great sleight-of-hand, left me wondering if I was an idiot for not getting all of it. I related to Hal's popular demise in a sense -- I was ready to go myself by the end. But I walked away satisfied that I had indeed seen something entertaining and unlike anything else around. I also made the recent mistake of enduring it again on TV. ...which makes me wonder who'd ever want to go home again. Date Added: 25/06/2005
Way Oh, that guy in the bubble has to be me. Date Added: 25/06/2005
Gone Away A lot of people wondered what the heck it all meant, Way, so you are not alone. My point is really that the movie demonstrated how space travel would really be - the apparently slow progress of huge spacecraft in those incredible distances, the weightlessness, the sharp delineation between light and shadow. And, even if the ending is not clear, the storyline itself is deep enough to ponder, unlike the standard storyline of a Star Wars movie. Despite its flaws, it still has to be the best space movie, in my humble opinion. The guy in the bubble could well have been you, however; we never get to see his face... Date Added: 25/06/2005
Scott I'm a fan of the Star Wars films, but even so, I think your essay is right on the mark. I think my affection for SW is more about nostalgia than because they're good films. Date Added: 25/06/2005
Gone Away I think you're right, Scott. As I mentioned above, I was too old to take the Star Wars movies as just the action movies that they are. But it's the generation that grew up with them that provides their lasting support. And I don't blame them for that at all - there are things about the sixties that I can see now were pretty awful but they still have that extra meaning for me because they were a part of my youth. This article was just a way of saying "Let us not forget..." Date Added: 25/06/2005
John Wood I think the latest generation of space films and other scene-o-rama films such as Titanic, Gladiator or Troy are somewhat overpowered by the director's desire to show us the wonders of CGI. These, to some extent, permit the WOW factor that used to come from attention to detail. Date Added: 25/06/2005
Gone Away Certainly there's a lot of truth in that, John. And I admit that I have watched the progress of computer graphics and been fascinated by the possibilities - there is almost nothing that cannot be created in the movies these days. Bit I think, in the end, we will realise that there's no substitute for a good story, no matter how impressive the visual spectacle. Date Added: 25/06/2005
Wayne I really, really like 2001 too. I wish I could get my wife to watch it all the way through with me. :) Date Added: 26/06/2005
keeefer 2001 is a great film. Star wars....well the first three (or the last three depending on how old you are) were great family films....the last three were hollywood movies (ie lacking substance and designed for merchandising purposes). Blade runner, now theres a damn good sci fi movie and dare i say total recall....yes the govenor of cally fawn eye eh actually made a good film along the way (well a good script was given too him and he managed not to ruin the film). And you really really really shouldnt be allowed to even mention the sci-fi genre without applauding Brazil. If you havent seen it then shame on you, you need to stay in more and watch old movies. Then of course theres Alien......but the film, the greatest film, the ultimate sci fi film to end all sci fi films is definately plan 9 from outer space....be afraid....be very afraid (at what the film industry did before audiences became demanding). Date Added: 26/06/2005
Gone Away An interesting point, Wayne - I can't think of any women I know who like 2001. Perhaps it's one of those guy things... Date Added: 26/06/2005
Gone Away I think Arnie is great in Total Recall, Keef, and also in Terminator 2. They were excellent movies but do not seriously threaten 2001 for top spot. Blade Runner and Brazil were both very dark and, to my mind, were not the complete vision of the future that 2001 is. Alien disqualifies itself by spawning halfway decent sequels (the eventual follow-up to 2001 is awful), thereby showing that the original couldn't have been so good that a sequel was impossible. And Plan 9 I haven't seen. While we're at it, it occurs to me that The Matrix must be a serious contender. It even has the distinction of extremely disappointing sequels. Perhaps I will award it the title of greatest sci-fi movie while 2001 can remain as the best space movie. Date Added: 26/06/2005
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