Science Fiction: The Movie

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.