How did we go from “smart” space films like Apollo 13, Alien, Contact, Sunshine to movies like…
Gravity, Alien: Covenant, Life, Europa Report… where the entire premise is “fancy spaceship, dumb humans, something eats them”? Why are the astronauts getting dumber and dumber, to be mindlessly killed off like teenagers in a horror movie?
It’s fine when they die well (Rogue One, The Martian, Interstellar maybe), but more often, they just fall to a series of stupid mistakes and emotional instability that any space agency would’ve screened for.
Has this always been a thing in movies, or did it start recently? Have we started to commoditize astronauts so much that they’re all expendable now, like Trek redshirts?
I’m reminded of something Chris Hadfield said, in the middle of describing a minor personal crisis aboard the ISS:
“There’s no problem so bad, you can’t make it worse.”
The problem in this case was him being on a spacewalk to set up some gear, when a droplet containing a chemical he suspected was from the anti-glare coating on the inside of his helmet wandered into his eye and blinded him. Panic, or indeed any reaction beyond complete calm, was most assuredly counter-productive.
Hadfield would think of a way to space the xenomorph.
As space flight (or anything, really) becomes more and more routine/refined, you no longer need the brightest of the bright with the right stuff to make it work.
A really bilious part of me is inclined to say that movie characters, in general, have just been acting stupider and less professional over the years, but that more movies happen to be set in outer space.
It’s a lot easier to write movies where stupid people make dumb mistakes and get into predictable trouble than to write movies with intelligent characters making wise choices in dealing with unpredictable and difficult problems.
Annoyingly, it seems easier still to have intelligent characters, but put them against superintelligent antagonists who are obsessed with the characters. I get that it must have been difficult for the writers of CSI to come up with a crime that has some angle to it that the forensics guys can uncover, so instead they just invent some psychopath who leaves no evidence at all except for the clues he compulsively sends to Grissom because the psychopath wants to play “a game”.
I’ve lately binge-watched the first nine episodes of Sherlock…
…and the amount of what I’ll call “Moriarting” is borderline intolerable. It’s not like there’s a shortage of material to draw on, but I guess it’s just easier to set up some bizarrely elaborate cat-and-mouse game. The third series cliffhanger ends with a recorded message announcing that Moriarty is back, despite the character having shot himself in the mouth. I rather dread the “I elaborately faked my death” (already used for Sherlock himself) or “I am Moriarty’s just-as-brilliant-just-as-twisted protegé compelled to carry on my late master’s work, including creating puzzles for Sherlock Holmes” twist to come.
You’ll no doubt be glad to know that Moriarty is really, truly dead and not faking it, and the video did not come from a protegee, quite the opposite in fact.
How did NASA go from sending people to the Moon and back, and saving Apollo 13 to losing the Challenger because they decided to launch when it was too cold, and losing Columbia when the same problem had been seen in four previous launches but never fixed?
Smart people in science fiction movies are a vanishingly small breed and always have been. The 50s were full of astronauts were who stupid, mostly because everybody in every sci-fi movie was stupid. That was also true in the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s, and 10s. There is no Golden Age. You’re cherrypicking a couple of movies out of hundreds.
There was a lot of handling the idiot ball in the original Alien, most involving the characters putting their lives, and the lives of their colleagues, in jeopardy for the sake of a cat.
Because people have to act in stupid ways in horror movies or TV shows, because people acting intelligently would not be killed off like that.
Land on a planet, find alien ship, people start getting killed? We’re taking off RIGHT NOW. Fuck your mission, it is over.
Geez, zombies would never wipe out the world in the first place, because people would figure out the whole ‘head shot’ thing long before that happened. The minute they knew being bitten was 100% fatal, most people wouldn’t hide it and go with their family and friends into the secure refuge.
Off with the friends to an old campground and one of your friends gets killed by some psycho? Instant 911 calls and high-tailing it out of there. No one sane just keeps hanging around.
Bad scary town full of weird people? How close is the highway? Because that’s where I’m going at 90mph and not stopping until I’m in the next state. Yeah, fuck that cop chasing me if we’re still in the same county.
The girlfriend and I recently watched You’re Next from 2013 and though the twists were pretty predictable throughout, it did have the refreshing theme of the main character being resourceful, intelligent and aggressive.
I see there was some minor thought given to making a sequel. I shall certainly consider checking it out, if it happens.
For a real laugh, look at some of the astronauts in the old Twilight Zones. They were essentially truck drivers from the Bronx in space.
But the real impetus for “dumb people in space” is that it’s hard to identify with astronauts. They are super-smart, very disciplined, and very painstaking. So a movie with actual astronauts would be probably very tedious.
Astronaut: “Ah, Mission Control, we appear to have a xenomorph loose in the cargo module.”
Houston: “Roger. We’ll discuss the situation with Earth’s best biologists and get back to you with a solution. In the meantime, under no circumstances are you to wander individually through constricted ventilation shafts with makeshift weapons.”
Astronaut: “Thank you Mission Control. Will comply.”