This started as a simple review of Alfonso Cuarón’s new movie Gravity. As usual with my posts, it morphed into something else. In this case, a study of three very different sci-fi films, and only one that lived up to its potential.
First: Gravity. The commercials had to be dumbed-down for a general audience, I’m afraid. The commercials made the movie look like Open Water or some other downer-ending disaster flick. No, it’s not.
Spoilers!
There’s sadness and grief here, but it’s the clean kind, the kind of pain that comes with lancing an infected wound. The dead died doing what they wanted to do. And in one case, in a luminous, well-planned act of self-sacrifice.
This movie is not only about the triumph of the human spirit, but – more importantly – the triumph of human intellect. Sandra Bullock’s character may pray haphazardly during the darkest moments of her orbital ordeal, but she thinks her way out of it. In spite of her self-doubts. She comes out of the adventure a better person, a whole person. You get the sense she is going to live a vivid and important life from now on.
I noticed flaws, many of which are pointed out by folks with a far better grasp of orbital physics than myself. But they loved the movie. I loved the movie. It’s easily the most thought-provoking movie I’ve seen in a decade. I started this review by thinking Gravity is science fiction for adults, but that’s not completely true. One, it is discourteous to the children and teens who will be inspired by it. Two, it will probably go completely over the heads of many adults.
Yep. I’m going to snobsville, sorry. Gravity is a movie for intelligent people. People who know there is no sound in space. That space is one of the most inimical environments known to us. That even a paint chip moving at 22,000 miles an hour is a catastrophic weapon, let alone the debris field of a massive satellite cascade event. That the results of a Gravity-style event would knock every major civilization on Earth back to pre-1950 technology at best, and we’d probably not fully recover for a century or two. That the Earth is a closed system billions of years old, and what we do during our tenure as its residents matters to the whole, impossibly delicate web of life on its surface.
Elysium, on the other hand, was not a smart movie. Matt Damon’s character could not have survived his injuries and radiation poisoning; the exoskeleton could not have made him into a superman. If the wealthy, aloof elites on the station were at fault for hoarding advanced technology, the ground-based population was equally at fault for fouling its own nest.
Elysium played to broad, feel-good, semi-religious, semi-New Age stereotypes without addressing the real issues behind the divide between the poverty-stricken overpopulated planet and the wealthy, tech-rich orbital environment hanging like a mirage in the greasy sky. The ending moments of Elysium did not rescue the planet-bound population. They were merely the overtures of a more-violent upheaval. Possibly the beginning of the end for that variation of humanity.
Which leads me to another Matt Damon vehicle, 2000’s animated feature Titan AE. This is the movie that broke Don Bluth’s Fox Animation Studios. Critically well received and gorgeously animated, Titan AE wallowed and disappeared at the box office – a casualty of American audiences who couldn’t figure out whether the film was a childhood adventure or a dark and angsty adult sci-fi tale. Not even Joss Whedon’s involvement could help the film’s central mistake: it didn’t take the story to its rational, morally ambiguous conclusion.
In Titan’s universe, Earth was destroyed by an evil alien race of energy beings called the Drej. Humanity scattered across the galaxy as pariah refugees, and only one scientist’s son can find the human spaceship/Genesis machine called Titan. The ship is able to build a new planet for humanity, but has been rendered inoperable. The scientist’s son is able to configure the ship to use Drej energy instead.
The big problem here is the unanswered question: why did the Drej attack Earth in the first place? I always had a feeling that the initial Titan project may have been intended to function on Drej energy all along. By that logic, the Drej were possibly right to fear being enslaved and drained by humans. We humans have a long history of exploitation, after all. (Interestingly enough, I had the same idea a decade before seeing Titan AE, for what would become my Sonta empire.)
And here’s where Titan AE failed. Framing humans as the initial aggressors may not have endeared the movie to major audiences, but it would have made a far more nuanced story. JMS was not afraid to pull similar plot twists in the backstory for Babylon 5. So have other writers. We should be grown-ups. We should be able to handle a good hard look at our past, present, and possible future mistakes – because our species is not going to stop making them.
So I’d count this as a reminder to myself: don’t be afraid to tell the hard stories. Not everyone will understand them, and a good portion of the ones who do may be infuriated. But at least I will have been true to the story’s best possible evolution.