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Look! It Moves! The White Bread of Science Fiction

Adi Tantimedh writes for Bleeding Cool. Find him at NYCC this week;

Watched a load of Science Fiction movies and TV last week as part of my ongoing research on the genre and how it's going.

LOOPER has been one of the most hyped Science Fiction movies for years. It is a good movie, filled with smarts and elegance in both story and cinematic technique, not to mention visual homages and references to gangster movies, film noir, classic SF movies like LA JETÉE, its US remake 12 MONKEYS, and of course THE TERMINATOR.

I then watched two other new Science Fiction series: FORWARD UNTO DAWN, the new webseries tie-in to the upcoming HALO 4 videogame, and NUCLEAR FAMILY, a post-apocalyptic webseries produced by SyFy and an exclusive premiere on Xbox Live.

At the end of watching them, I realised I had seen the gamut of current Science Fiction clichés in movies and TV. While I enjoyed LOOPER, I wasn't surprised by any of the plot twists, since they followed all the established conventions of the Time Travel subgenre by now. Maybe I'm jaded, being older than most of the people raving about the movie, having seen loads of Time Travel movies since childhood. It got me to thinking: Time Travel has become the White Bread of Science Fiction.

It seems every other Science Fiction movie or TV show has to do Time Travel these days. There's also DOCTOR WHO, which might be not only the harbinger of the current trend but also the pinnacle of the Time Travel genre. I always had the feeling that the fairly entertaining ITV show PRIMEVAL was greenlit mainly because DOCTOR WHO has been a success. The STAR TREK reboot movie was basically a Time Travel story. FRINGE has pretty much hinged on both Time Travel and parallel worlds. The new Canadian show CONTINUUM is a Time Travel series about a fascist policewoman from the future who's chased pro-democracy terrorists back to the present. Just about every Science Fiction show has to do time travel episodes every now and then.

I get the appeal of Time Travel: the fantasy of travelling back in time to change history or failing to change history, the morality of whether or not to change history, of whether or not to kill someone before they become an evil figure who inflicts mass murder on the world and so on. However, I'm starting to feel a bit tired of Time Travel from the overexposure. The limited range of plot outcomes becomes predictable once you work out the set number of possible outcomes each plot offers. But when there are so many Time Travel shows and movies that Time Travel has become way too common for my taste when it should be mind-blowing.

FORWARD UNTO DAWN is a five-part webseries that's going to add up to a feature-length story that serves several purposes: a promotion for the upcoming game HALO 4, an experiment by franchise owner Microsoft to see how all this movie-making lark will work after their attempts to work with the studios to make a HALO movie came a cropper, and part of their continuing business model of expanding a franchise across several mediums for maximum profitability. The plot appears simple enough: an officer recalls his meeting with the Master Chief when he was a reckless army cadet and the alien invasion occurred. The production values are slick enough, but it seems to be taking its cues from the recent BATTLESTAR GALACTICA and indulging in emo drama in a dull grey colour palette as future war erupted. This is now the other cliché of Science Fiction TV: gritty future warfare that's hardly any different from warfare as we've seen from World War II movies. It's not quite space opera since there's very outer space combat as the majority of the fighting is still convention ground warfare with guns. The gritty future war genre seems to be a post-911 reflection of the state of perpetual war that America is going through now, and at worst doesn't really offer any new ideas, just actors playing soldiers. While the HALO games are fun and offer interesting ideas in terms of weapons, technology and alien races, something like this webseries doesn't offer those things and settles just for the running and the shooting, and watching it passively is a lot less fun than playing the Master Chief and doing the shooting and blowing up yourself in a game.

I seem to be talking about these shows in the descending order of quality. NUCLEAR FAMILY looks like a very cheaply-made pilot in the increasingly tiresome subgenre of Post-Apocalypse Distopia. A couple and their kid have to survive in the wilds of America after a nuclear war has wiped out society and civilisation as we know it. They encounter a power-hungry sociopath running a band of mean bastards who like to kill each other in mini-arena fights. So far, so cliché in a subgenre that began in the 1970s when the post-Vietnam mood of disillusionment, a bad economy, rising oil prices, the Cold War and The Bomb were on everyone's minds and you got movies like MAD MAX. The post-apocalypse subgenre was recently given a boost when Cormac McCarthy's THE ROAD pushed it tnto mainstream literary acceptance, even though the movie was less successful than it should have been, the subgenre has been given new legs partly from the popularity of the zombie apocalypse subgenre, which grow out of it. NUCLEAR FAMILY looks like a fairly cheap production where the cast and crew could just go into the hills of Los Angeles to shoot parts that look like a post-crash wilderness without any real need for sets or special effects. What gets me is that Hollywood's most recent stabs at the Post-Apocalypse genre has been so half-arsed, like the dreadful and silly REVOLUTION, whose characters are all idiots, the science that caused the world's electricity to disappear makes no sense and despite being a world that's collapsed into medieval feudalism, everyone still manages to have good make-up, great hair and a wardrobe from The Gap. It feels more like a bunch of California yuppies LARPing a lame post-apocalypse story on their weekends where they're too cool to want to wear home-made medieval armour made from Styrofoam rather than a plausible future world.

I suppose what I miss is not necessarily a sense of optimism so much as a sense of wonder. What's the point of doing Science Fiction if it's all just miserable all the time when we can get that in real life? I'm getting tired of cardboard characters reacting emotionally to bad situations rather than intelligently – it seems to save screenwriters the trouble of actually having to write characters who actually use their brains. It's always easier to write characters getting angry and then shouting a lot, but ultimately really boring. Science Fiction is a medium that's usually used to reflect what's going on in the present, but good Science Fiction does more than just showing reflections of How Bad Things are, but might also offer something new and surprising, and it feels like too much TV SciFi and movies just concentrate on the clichés of Things Falling Apart and Everyone's a Bastard. Even LOOPER, a good movie, was about how Things are Fucked. I suppose it's easier to write drama out of a Things are Fucked premise, but does everything need to be a dystopia? Is it because this is all producers, studios and screenwriters have been able to get their heads around in the path of least resistance? Don't we deserve something more than that?

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Look! It Moves! © Adisakdi Tantimedh

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