A Renaissance in Science Fiction Cinema & Television

Where's this Golden Age of Science Fiction cinema we keep hearing about?  Oh, certainly most of the ingredients are here!  Never before have so many studios, cable channels, download services and amateurs been creating so much content, and SF is almost as pervasive as cop dramas.

Effects keep getting better, along with production values. It's now possible to storyboard a project -- from beginning to end -- with such detail -- that the storyboard itself ought to be a high art form, with millions of followers.  Indeed, the animated storyboard, complete with audible dialogue and music, would be a spectacular way to generate writer-centered and story-centered content, requiring only a small team of half a dozen to create a full, 90 minute dramatic experience every bit as compelling as a full-featured film... but that's a topic for another day.

Elsewhere I have spoken of the Hollywood Idiot Plot, in which cinema has been lobotomized -- channeled into endless remakes and red-dos and sequels... but also into relentlessly repeating the same dullard plot cliches of "chosen ones" and utter hopelessness of there ever being anything like "civilization." Sure, you have to keep a couple of heroes in pulse pounding jeopardy for 90 minutes!  That's a given. What is not necessary is to poison all our confidence by creating that jeopardy in the laziest way possible.  See the article, if you haven't already.  It will open your eyes.

(Oh, how I wish James Cameron would. He came SO close to achieving what he wanted to achieve, with Avatar... only to create a gorgeous mythology that poisons the very heart of our confidence that we can become better people.  So sad.)

Still, there are glimmers of light.  I have written elsewhere that I much admire Interstellar, by Christopher Nolan. (Though I'd deeply love to insert three sentences, near the end, that would have fixed an ambiguously unsatisfying ending.)  Cuaron's GRAVITY was artful and enthralling.  

Charlie Brooker's British television anthology BLACK MIRROR is bold and imaginative and provocative... a modern update on the Twilight Zone, each episode a rather dark reflection on the future of technology and society, often with disturbing twists...though most stories would do fine in forty minutes, not sixty.

We enjoyed the Halle Berry TV series Extant, far more than we expected to. There's some mystical chosen-one mumbo.  But for the most part it is real science fiction with some class. It was unafraid to break cliches and show an actual human institution being heroic and helpful and just -- a refeshing change from the modern-hackneyed reflex.  And the notion of making AI by raising it as a human child is Something I've written about many times, especially in Existence.  It's the only method that has ever worked, in the past.  Here, it was even rather moving.

Elsewhere, I described my mixed (largely positive) feelings about a TV project I helped to advise... SyFy's "Ascension." While the sex stuff got a bit tedious, there were no betrayals of the root scifi concept, which - if nothing else - was damned original! Perhaps the focus will be better, if it's renewed... and if they heed good advice.  Certainly have a look!

Aw heck... I'll go ahead and append, below, more about "Ascension" and "Interstellar"!

But first, let's finish the good news roundup. For example, see this cool preview to SyFy's new series THE EXPANSE,  based on the "James Corey" series of rollicking space operas - starting with Leviathan Wakes and Caliban's War.

Why don't I mention Predestination, the movie based on Robert Heinlein's utter-classic short story "All You Zombies"? My hopes are high! Looking forward to seeing it.

Just released: A pilot based upon Philip K. Dick's "The Man in the High Castle"?  Coming: (wow) a dramatized series based on Asimov's Foundation universe? (Do it!  All the way to my own culminating novel!) Plus a miniseries of Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End?

Oh, let it be so.  Ending what has mostly been a wasteland of sheap fantasies, cheaper teen-sploitation dystopias and remakes and tedious sequels.

 Let it finally be so.

== Sci Fi and Film ==

Take a look at The Derelict: A 12 minute indie sci fi item on YouTube, with quite worthy effects.

“Plug” is  a pretty good recent bit of indie sci fi… post apocalyptic and clearly meant to be the first part of a series.  We may be in for a new era of creativity.

Children of the Machine is an upcoming web series led by Igby Goes Down producer Marco Weber that is set in a near-future dystopia where androids have taken over. Scheduled for a Fall 2015 release, the show will be BitTorrent‘s first-ever original series. 

Interesting and moving - this is a tour-review of Star Trek's philosophy of humanism. There are those among us who will find these messages objectionable, and that's sad. The core notion of Trek is that we can become better than we are - and that ambition has always been within us. (It's even deeply rooted in scripture.) All we need is the confident ambition to make it so.

Why James Cameron's Aliens is the best movie about technology: An interesting ode to a very good film.  Too bad Cameron's excellent "Aliens" was followed by the stunningly wretched betrayal Aliens III -- probably the very worst betrayal-of-faith with the audience in the history of cinema. But that was an era, lasting 25+ years, when every sci fi franchise followed the same pattern.  

Movie number two in any series was spectacularly good... followed by a third work that reversed every moral point,  stabbing the viewer with a spew of illogic and noxious messages and reversals of every single moral point. It happened in Star Trek and Star Wars and Terminator and so on... but the betrayal in the Aliens series was the most deliberately dreadful, ever.  So much so that I am convinced the whole thing is what Ripley dreamt! While asleep on her way home to live a long and happy life. With Newt.

 == Storytelling in Hollywood ==

Okay, let me come back and offer those quibbles on Christoper Nolan's film, INTERSTELLAR!

 Alas, it seems that today’s generation cannot even grasp the notion of working together toward an optimistic ambition.  Only Star Trek (pre-J.J. Abrams) and Spiderman ever show average citizens being sensible. So viewers always identify with the small group that defies the mob. In this case, the mob is willing to roll over and die, while a small group wants to strive ahead. I critique this tendency in modern storytelling in my article: Our Favorite Cliche: A World Filled with Idiots.

Though pause... Nolan in this case wants us all to join the camp of the strivers and the dreamers.  So the "typical cliche" in this case has its heart in the right place.

Some of you sneered at the “love in 5 dimensions" theme in INTERSTELLAR.  Come on guys, will you please learn to chill out enough to enjoy a great flick!  Ponder that “love in 5 dimensions" is NOT a physical causative in this film! If you thought that, you weren’t paying attention, guys.  The “love” thing is self-motivating for the characters. They use it as a focus-incantation and it wholly fits, at that level. It keeps the astronaut going.

 But the “reach” magical intervention is not  “love in 5 dimensions."  It is reverse causation by future beings and the sci-blather in the flick was solid enough for this physicist to just shrug and grin and keep enjoying the show.

Far worse, none of you pointed out that the planet that is NEAR the black hole has years-to-hours time dilation, yet he plunges into the Black Hole later, and experiences almost none.  Also… WTF is this solar system?  The planets orbit a star and a black hole?  Aw heck.  I set all that aside and didn't let it bug me.  (Learn to do that!)

Anyway, my friend, the epic and epochal physicist Kip Thorne, wrote The Science of Interstellar.  I look forward to reading it, when I come up for air!

My biggest -- in fact only real complaint -- comes in the morally ambiguous situation at the very end. Did Murph's breakthrough save most of humanity? I also wanted to hear that the evacuation would (they think) give Earth herself a chance to (with tender care) recover.  How to telegraph that, with just maybe four sentences of dialogue and a couple of panoramas?

How about glimpsing thousands of those cylinder colonies! While being told some volunteers would stay to take care of and heal the Earth. They were successfully saving Earth’s population ... but no one yet had the guts yet to go through the wormhole.

"Guts," says our hero. "I may be obsolete... but guts I got."

And he goes. 

== Reprise on… ASCENSION! ==

After serving as a science consultant during some planning phases, I came away from watching the three-night miniseries ASCENSION mostly impressed. We had a viewing party here at our place with Sheldon Brown and Richard Dreyfuss and his wife Svetlana.

Everyone saw the main plot twist coming. But the two extra-twists at the end were real surprises and tasty.

Sure, one can see why the “stewardess” thing got inflated in order to have a sexy ambiance to attract audience numbers for renewal.  Must have helped sell it to executives as “Mad Men in Space.”  Another sore point? It did disappoint me how much the people aboard seemed more like ocean liner passengers than crew. (I recommended the “upper-lower-decks” problem be more nuanced; maybe they can do that in the second season.)

In the final crisis scene, a well-drilled crew should have all rushed to emergency stations. The fact that they weren't well-drilled suggests this Captain may not be right for the job, after all.

But the overall look and feel were terrific and the notion of science fiction in the background was tempting.  One can easily imagine such things getting greater emphasis, as a real series develops.  I hope that if the show is renewed,, some of its potential for real sci fi can be developed. A little more EUREKA and a bit less MAD MEN or FIRESTARTER... though those aspects were fun! 

In this clip, I talk about the series... Author David Brin Explains The Real Science Behind the new show Ascension.

Now... anyone care to develop that animated storyboard thing?  Oh the stories we could tell!