One of the earliest science fiction films ever to be produced, according to Susan Hayward in her book “Cinema Studies: the Key Concepts,” was George Méliès’ “Le Voyage Dans La Lune” (“A Trip to the Moon”) back in 1902. This film, along with others in a series of film fantastiques that played with optical illusions with the camera, is a great example of the earliest usage of special effects in movies.
Loosely based on the works of Jules Verne, Méliès’ depiction of man’s visit to the moon and its interactions with the alien species that inhabit Earth’s satellite is treated comically and with a lighthearted touch.
But not all of science fiction takes a benign look at the future and the possibilities. In fact, critics and film scholars have put science fiction as a subgenre of horror since 1990. The number of science fiction movies produced rose dramatically after the Sept. 11, 2001 attack, and Hayward categorizes many of the films that followed as those concerning dystopian narratives and the monster or alien invasions or contagion narratives.
According to Hayward, the genre is a way for writers and filmmakers to “make visible what is invisible” and use the genre to metaphorize what people are really frightened about in today’s society.
That said, the best works of science fiction are ultimately a critical assessment of our world today.
READ: Science fiction books that make you feel small in this vast universe
Same science fiction genre, different executions
Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s “Project Hail Mary,” which was written by Drew Goddard and is based on a novel by Andy Weir, is a very successful example of the genre done optimistically. Its reported box office is over $600 million on a budget of roughly $250 million, and it’s still going strong. There are still some cinemas in the Philippines that are showing it, way beyond its early March release date.
It is unarguably a well-made film. The pacing is good. The special effects are clean. Ryan Gosling is a wonderfully relatable actor who sells the idea of a middle school science teacher out in space, saving the world—plausible, even enjoyable. The interactions with the alien Rocky (portrayed through puppetry and voice-acting by James Ortiz) are pure cinematic gold.
There’s so much working in “Project Hail Mary’s” favor that helped it become a huge success and a well-loved film. I almost always hear people praising it when they talk about it.
But it is that optimism that makes me resist this film. I didn’t write it down, so I can’t make a proper attribution, but I read a post on Threads before I saw a movie that just jumped out at me after I saw “Project Hail Mary.” The post said something like “After watching Project Hail Mary, I was quicker to believe in the alien than I was in the idea that the whole world worked together to save the planet. That was just unbelievable.”
I’m paraphrasing, of course, but it made so much sense to me.
I was watching this movie, and I couldn’t believe the ride on the film’s overly positive point of view. Have I become cynical and jaded? Everything about what I see on the news has led me to this, and I was hoping that portrayals of the world, of the Earth, and our society in it could be a little more truthful.
The film shows one good man working hand-in-rock with an alien life form, creating an imagery of intergalactic cooperation—something that this world is currently lacking in such a great deal. The fact that Gosling’s character, Ryland Grace, made it up to space through the hell of the combined efforts of the world just seems so incredibly false.
The film can still be positive and optimistic without having to be inauthentic and untrue. The book was published in 2021, but the production had started in 2020, with Goddard—who had written the screenplay for Weir’s book “The Martian”—having access to it.
Maybe it was less chaotic back then, less dark, less foreboding. But at some point, between then and the film’s release, they could have looked at the world and said, “Maybe we need to change some things.”
And that’s what I love about “Disclosure Day.”
Steven Spielberg’s greatest hits
“Disclosure Day,” which opened on June 10, is best described as “Steven Spielberg’s Greatest Hits,” according to Mel Lozano, a producer and pop culture host of the podcast Endslate.
And I agree with her wholeheartedly. “Disclosure Day” has elements of some of Spielberg’s filmography—like the mystery and dread of Jaws, the excitement and the action sequences of an Indiana Jones film, the wonder and awe of Jurassic Park, and very close narrative elements with “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and “ET.”
Written by David Koepp and based on a story by Spielberg, the movie is a different kind of alien movie. Much like “Project Hail Mary,” this is a hopeful one—an optimistic one—but what I really appreciated about it is that it does not hide away from our own failings as a society and as the human race.
Throughout the film, the two lead characters—played by a wonderfully mercurial Emily Blunt and a solid Josh O’Connor—must try to understand what is going on with them while they are being hunted by a secret organization. And we all know this involves aliens, one way or another.
Spielberg and Koepp play with the narrative structure, presenting us with a mystery that is solved slowly, piece by piece, as the film unfolds. It’s a wonderful play on storytelling—a showcase of what Spielberg does well: how to tell a story in a dynamic and interesting way. The film gets a little untethered near the end, when the film’s structure needs some tidying up because it’s growing faster than the story can unfurl, but it’s a small cost for a wonderful, engaging movie.
And this is the kind of science fiction that I really appreciate. It’s a blatant commentary on how we are as a people at this moment in time. We are destroying this world, and the movie’s metaphor, its underlying message, is a hopeful one. There’s so much darkness (and a lot of levity, too) in the way the film operates, but it is also unafraid to believe in people.
The significance of genre films
There’s always a hierarchy in film scholarship and in award shows that favor straight-up drama over genre films.
As proven in the past four years, post-pandemic, horror films and sci-fi/fantasy films have done extremely well at the box office, making them rather healthy bets for producers. Maybe not sci-fi as a whole, with their expensive budgets making it harder for them to see a profit, but “Obsession,” raking in close to $200 million USD worldwide on a $750,000 USD budget, is a good example of such.
Many horror films are cost-efficient and will always find an audience.
Some of the best performances are also found in genre films—Toni Collette was nominated for “The Sixth Sense” and should have been nominated for Hereditary; Amy Adams gave a nuanced, layered performance in “Arrival” and wasn’t nominated; and Demi Moore could have won the Oscar for “The Substance,” but there’s still that prejudice against it.
To isolate film’s capacity to capture real life as the benchmark of the medium limits its ability to amplify truth as it leans into its more fictional modes. As improbable or even impossible as the events unfold in “Disclosure Day,” it is riveting because it shows us a world that is so familiar and an underlying message that is hopeful and still rings true.
Breaking away from conventions of drama: genre films
Films like horror, science fiction, and fantasy always fall under genre films. Noir and detective movies are also genre films. A western is a genre film, but if it’s popular enough, they sometimes lump it into a drama, as, they did for “Dances with Wolves.”
Only four genre films have won Best Picture in the Academy Awards:
- “Silence of the Lambs” (horror)
- “Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King” (fantasy)
- “The Shape of Water” (sci-fi/fantasy)
- “Everything Everywhere All At Once” (sci-fi)
