Not exactly the seventies; I’m talking the decade between 1968 (2001: A Space Odyssey) and 1977 (Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind). Look at some of the science fiction movies made in that short period: The Andromeda Strain, A Boy and His Dog, A Clockwork Orange, Dark Star, Demon Seed, Logan’s Run, The Man Who Fell to Earth, The Omega Man, Planet of the Apes (and its four sequels), Silent Running, Sleeper, Soylent Green, The Stepford Wives, The Terminal Man, THX 1138, Westworld (and Futureworld), Zardoz. Some good, some bad. But compare them to science fiction movies that came before 1968 - most science fiction movies back then were about men fighting giant insects or something similar.
But, even more significantly, compare these movies to the science fiction movies that cam after 1977. Star Wars was a pulp serial in a SF setting, Blade Runner was a film noir in a SF setting, Alien was a haunted house movie in a SF setting, Outland was a western in a SF setting, The Matrix was a sorcery movie in a SF setting - most science fiction movies made after 1977 were really part of another genre with some robots and space ships thrown in for color. The science fiction films of the seventies, on the other hand, mined the genre for ideas not just backgrounds.
Comments? Opinions? Does anyone else agree with me?
One thing I do see in your division is that the later time period was getting far more sophisticated means for doing special effects. My own observations are kinda in the realm of the seventies movies going for the thought-provoking (sometimes! sometimes just the usual crap–like Giant Spider Invasion), but the later movies were more oriented towards knock-your-socks-off visuals.
Who can deny that the Star Wars effects were pretty spectacular, enough that a lot of us didn’t care too much about the impossibilities of sound in space and so on, it all contributed to the effect!
Not to say there weren’t good SF movies in the later period, but your post did make me think of a kind of link between the first period and the last one: cheezy giant insects replaced by glorious special effects. Story? What story? Look! It’s a giant arachnoid crushing houses! Look! What a cool jump into hyperspace!
I just wish we could get a few more quality SF movies made. There are some out there that wouldn’t require the budget of a small country. But nobody is making them. Frankly, I don’t know if they’d make a profit if someone did. You’d be asking people to think, after all…
I’m not sure about this not true SF thing, where we define things as a cowboy movie in an SF setting, or whatever. Seems to me that once we start doing that, then nothing can be true SF, because we’ll always find some similarities with other genres.
Or maybe I’m wrong, but I can’t think of any movie that I could confidently say would qualify as ‘pure SF’ under such a scheme.
Science Fiction itself is about ideas. Like, “If monkeys could fly, then what consequences would this have on the world…”
The 70’s were the big time for movie makers to buck the mold and reinvent movie making due to the death of the Code and the popularisation of color. So it was easier for a director to make a movie that was more about the idea than the story. (Of course, in the end this seems to have largely ended up in a bunch of films that are full of slow pans of scenery and a rather minimal plot.) And since that’s pretty much all there was at the time, except for cheesy blaxploitation and Bruce Lee films, people were fine with it. These days, people wouldn’t sit through 2001 if it wasn’t a classic, except geeks and art house types (witness Gattaca and Solaris)–most people would think it was boring and pointless.
And also, simply, it’s easier to come up with a story than it is to come up with a novel idea. In the 70’s most of Sci Fi that was in novels hadn’t yet been done–as you say, opting for cheeseball MST3K stuff–so that left room for movies on cloning, artificial intelligence, societal collapse, etc. Now that that’s all been done, it’s easier to just steal it (e.g. The Island, The Time Machine, etc.) and since remakes tend to suck, in movie-producer-think it looks like movies like that just aren’t popular so it’s a bad idea to try making them.
It used to be said that science fiction movies were usually a couple of decades behind the literature in terms of subject matter and maturity of presentation. (Though I’d say Forbidden Planet was an exception, being only about a decade behind.) So science fiction movies in the 1970’s were gaining maturity as written stories had been doing in the 1950’s. (I’d add the Russian Solaris to the list of significant '70’s movies in the OP.) Just a generalization, of course.
What I love about those movies, especially, say, 1968-1973, is that they have this pervading undertone of sadness and loss that I find irresistible. Hard to explain.
So, are the movies of today reflecting written science fiction of the 1980’s? I have no idea, because I almost stopped reading cutting-edge stuff about a quarter century ago. I’m not sure why; just one day I was in a book store, and it occurred to me that I hadn’t picked up any new sf in a long time; I wandered over to the racks (noting that they were apparently no longer separating “science fiction” from “fantasy”) and after a few minutes realized that I didn’t know half the names there. And now, more and more of my favorite writers are turning up slightly dead, which seems to really slow down their output.
Sure, but in that case, it’s really easy just to say that Star Wars is about the consequences of cheap, easy interstellar flight and interspecies interaction - so it’s proper SF. Arbitrary in/exclusions are too easy.
Meh. Star Wars may have futuristic/alternate universe stuff in it, but it doesn’t explore the ramifications of any of those in any significant fashion. (Except “The Force”, perhaps.)
Gattaca without designer babies is impossible to make. Star Wars could just as easily be Ancient Rome Wars with minimal fuss.
Actually, I’d argue that many 50s SF movies were at least as sophisticated and interesting as any from the 79s. Even Them and Tarantula had a scientific grounding and attempted to do more than just fight giant insects. Jack Arnold in particular directed very sophisticated SF themes – see his It Came From Outer Space for a particularly good example.
I think you overstate things, but you are on to something. Star Wars – and I think it’s a great movie – moved science fiction from the intellectual to the “thrill ride.” Prior to it, you had at least an attempt to be “scientific,” but its success meant that the thrill ride SF film was king.
There were a few exceptions. 12 Monkeys is thoughtful SF at its best. Gattaca tried to be. It failed utterly but it does tend to confirm your thesis: people were so used to the thrill ride that an attempt at thoughtful SF was overpraised simply because it made the attempt.
No he didn’t but it’s a good example of a movie that’s about an idea. The idea doesn’t make a lot of sense, but it’s dealt with in a serious way. (And as far as I know, that was the first movie to have spaceships that look like industrial plants in space; the Valley Forge was built out of hundreds of model tank kits.)
You can take pretty much any movie and boil it down to one of a handful of genres.
Post '77 there are also the Arnold movies - the Terminator series and Total Recall, Tron, The Black Hole, Contact, Deep Impact, Last Night, Brazil, Brother From Another Planet, The Quiet Earth, Liquid Sky, Buckaroo Bonzai, Hackers, Strange Days, Vanilla Sky, AI, Minority Report, The Back to the Future series, not to mention a bunch of classic Anime. As above, not all good, but I don’t think the genre has turned the corner as much as the OP sets forth.
I don’t see the devision you do. They’re all true science fiction, presented with what technology they could use when made. They all reflect the attitude of the time in who is The Man sticking it to the regular folk. The earlier ones mentioned tended to make suspense horror more of the movie, because of technical limitations of the monsters. The later have more gore horror because of the technology available. A progression of rubber suit to animotronics to CGI generated monsters to CGI that can manipulate actors realistically where needed to do inhuman feats. There is the difference in scifi movies.
I agree with RealityChuck. Star Wars (1977), Close Encounters (1977) and Jaws (1978) ushered in the age of the blockbuster. Movies after that point attempted to be BIG, LOUD and EXCITING!!! And I dare say Jurrassic Park (1993) with it’s groundbreaking use of photo-realistic (for it’s time) CGI ushered in the age of the MEGA-BLOCKBUSTER. Interesting SF stories and thought experiements have been more or less overshadowed by on screen spectacles and fantasy worlds and creatures that can be created.
Another problem is that much of what was considered Sci Fi in the 70s is in actually or close to reality - the internet, cell phones, GPS, video iPods, HDTV, email, advanced prothetics, genetic engineering, smart weaponry, energy weapons, robotics, cloning.
That’s still dealing with a topic and examining its result rather than a plot. Flying through outerspace is irrelevant to Star Wars. Deciding your babies is not a “plot” in and of itself and yet is what Gattaca is about.
That review seems like reading the War of the Worlds and then going “Nuh uhhhhh. Aliens would be too smart for <spoiler>”
So long as things are internally consistent, I wouldn’t say that something is bad Sci Fi. Certainly Gattaca gives a worst case scenario, but the worst case scenario is still a reasonable scenario to assume if its interesting.
Science Fiction is typically thinly disguised social commentary, so as the times change, so do the nature of the moives. I think the new technology available from 68-77 also had a lot to do with the kind of movie that was made.
Speaking of 12 Monkeys, it’s based on “La Jetee” which is from 1962(!) and is completely unlike other films at the time.