Most films that are sold as science fiction are actually action-adventure with fantasy elements that are coded as scientistic. Actual SFâŚ
Most films that are sold as science fiction are actually action-adventure with fantasy elements that are coded as scientistic. Actual SF presents an internally-coherent future world where the differences from our world affect the environment in deep but non-obvious ways that impact the plot.
Most movies that try to pass as near-future SF play it on easy mode by making whatever tech theyâre about not yet fully integrated into society, which is ultimately less interesting than something that studies how a society would realistically be changed by the speculative element. Jurrassic Park & Contact fall into this.
Thatâs still better than most far-future âSFâ, where lots of alien tech exists but social arrangements are built on ancient or medieval models.
For all my problems with Black Mirror, it is actually pretty consistently science fiction â something that Star Trek fails at across the board.
Sense of wonder â the primary export of visual media that proclaim to be science fiction or speculative fiction â is a waste of time. If you know why an idea is interesting, and youâre a competent enough stylist to express that to a reader, then you donât need it. If you donât really know why an idea attracts you, or youâre unwilling to embrace that, or you canât explain it â well, sense of wonder is just going to highlight that and make the whole thing feel cheap. Nothing ages worse than fake awe. SF is a literature of ideas, so the draw ought to be subject to analysis
This isnât the same thing as claiming that science fiction should not have style, or that it should wear its ideas on its sleeve. Interesting ideas can be encoded in stylistic flourishes (as Gibson does). But, they need to exist, and they need to be expressed in such a way that a critical reader can, with effort, identify them. Otherwise youâre just transcribing a weird dream you had â and thatâs not going to be interesting without the context to decode it.
Basically, having your Big Dumb Object be Really Big and Really Dumb doesnât do anything by itself. What makes science fiction interesting is when itâs Really Alien in a way that has interesting knock-on effects for characters â either by showing familiar things from a perspective that reminds you how strange they are, or taking recognizable tendencies to unexpected extremes. If youâre just making the BDO big, itâs not SF but romantic art. I mean, it ainât SF if thereâs no speculation. Looking at a big thing and saying âwowâ with an orchestral score isnât speculation.
By John Ohno on November 16, 2018.
[Canonical link](https://medium.com/@enkiv2/science-fiction-movies-are- extremely-rare-59ec91c90ea3)
Exported from Medium on September 18, 2020.