The Vow (Editorial, NYRSF 316)

Around 2001, at the conclusion of a Lunacon panel about sf film, I made my first statement of what I have come to call “The Vow”: “I will not see a science fiction film unless I’ve been assured by someone who understands science fiction that it is not stupid.”

The turn of the century was a watershed period in sf film, the first time when there might be more interesting sf films than a person might reasonably see in a single year. I point to 1999 as the precise turning point; the clearest marker of this was that the Hugo Award for Dramatic Presentation nominations for that year did not include the new Star Wars film. Even two or three years earlier, it would have been unthinkable that an sf film of such high profile wouldn’t be nominated, even if it was a juvenile piece of claptrap, simply from lack of competition. SF in film had finally reached a point of saturation, or of escape: the films were going to succeed or fail without an sf-reading audience, and it was now, I felt, incumbent on people who actually cared about science fiction to refuse to participate in its stupidificaiton.

I’ve seen people excuse the stupidity of blockbuster films on the grounds that stories have to be kept simple to appeal to a broad audience—this was one widespread defense of James Cameron’s Avatar. (There are people who think that Avatar had very clever things going on underneath its surface story, but even so, there is no reason why the surface story had to reiterate such overplayed and offensive topoi.) While I understand that even a stupid film can provide certain joys, I also believe there is no fundamental conflict between a story being smart and satisfying. The contrast between the relatively smart giant monster movie Pacific Rim and the relatively dumb 2014 version of Godzilla is illustrative; both films were tremendous financial successes worldwide—Pacific Rim grossed an estimated $400 million, 80% of the gross of Godzilla, without the benefits of 60 years of name recognition and saturation promotion in the United States. But one can actually have an intelligent conversation about parts of Pacific Rim that don’t have giant monsters on screen, and the smarter film didn’t drag excellent actors like Ken Watanabe and Bryon Cranston down with it.

It is no more expensive to make a smart movie than a stupid one, even a blockbuster film; in fact, smart films can theoretically be made less expensively because they can fill the times between explosions with satisfying human drama. As Peter David said years ago, Jurassic Park showed that Yul Brenner could be scarier with a string vest (in Westworld) than Steven Spielberg could be with $70 million in CGI dinosaurs. Similarly, the most astonishing, sense-of-wonder-filled thing about the reasonably clever Men in Black III was Michael Stuhlbarg in a knit cap and contact lenses.

Many processes of Hollywood are arrayed against a film being smart; this is especially true of blockbuster films, where every decision, narrative or otherwise, is being triple-guessed by a long series of people whose profession is completely divorced from any concerns of “smart” or “dumb” or even of “good” or “bad.” But there are people who are trying to make smart films despite this—in 2014, the film adaptions of Philip K. Dick’s Radio Free Albemuth and Joe Hill’s Horns were both smart and satisfying, and time and money we devote to watching stupid movies is better saved for films like these.

If every science fiction reader had boycotted Godzilla, it would still have grossed over $500 million. But we would at least not have taken an active role in our own endumbification, and that’s a worthwhile endeavor in itself.

—Kevin J. Maroney and the editors

Comments

[Eugene R.]

So, you are saying that if we stop endumbnifying ourselves with stupid media, we can, instead, embiggen more worthy genre offerings? How wonderfully cromulent of you!