With the risk of over-generalizing firmly in mind, I would like to confidently proclaim that all science fiction is dumb.
It’s literally all the exact same thing, over and over again.
You know how there’s this real world issue right? Say it’s the nuclear threat, or information control, or water shortages.
Okay, hear me out: Let’s say we draw a parallel to it and allude to in ham fisted metaphors while people act glum while wearing strange clothing.
Would that be original?
Too original for this movie studio, I’ll tell ‘ya that.
Okay, I can guarantee you there are a lot of prolonged silences and taciturn people staring at each other.
Well, you’ve nearly sold me, but, can you just make sure and have an opening scene panning over a desolate landscape illustrating that some type of Armageddon took place, whether or not it’s relevant to the story?
Sure.
Oh, and can you make sure and have one guy with dreadlocks?
Yeah, I can do that.
One last thing, we need a woman with huge boobs bossing around a bunch of inept ratty looking guys who look like they’re roadies for Soul Asylum.
Well, yeah, I was already planning on that.
Congratulations, you’re hired.
It’s just so stupid.
A few things:
There is always a food shortage in these films, so how does the lead actor maintain a physique requiring at least five-thousand calories a day? Was he 5’10” and seven hundred pounds prior to society being obliterated? Was he a body-builder of some kind? Even an amateur one?
When are they shaving?
If your nuclear family, friends, neighbors, teachers, co-workers, favorite athletes and actors, and even people you hate have all recently had their brains melted, you aren’t even going to be walking around. You will be suffering from severe PTSD and sitting in a corner bobbing your head up and down. If you did occasionally venture outdoors you will have invented your own language and be suffering from severe clinical psychosis. Given that you have no access to psychiatric drugs or counseling, the expected time before you die of sun exposure while seeing a mirage of Jerry Lewis massaging a camel is three days, but the survival rate for this is zero percent. People can hardly even handle a month in combat before cracking, and those are trained soldiers with plenty of water.
Why is there never a conversation between a human and an alien that goes like this: “Hey, don’t you think it’s weird that you’re from another planet, one without oxygen or carbon, and yet biologically you look exactly like me, except with pointy ears? What are the odds of that? By the way, what does your penis or vagina look like, and may I please see it? I mean, seriously, why are we wasting time?”
There’s never a guy named Dave? What are the odds of that?
I get that you have a post-industrial bunker with a ton of computer monitors and exposed wiring, but would it kill you hang one picture on the wall? Okay, I get that you have a slightly tinged picture of your dead child wedged into one of your many computer monitors at a slightly askew angle, of course you do, that’s mandatory, this movie would have never been greenlit if you didin’t. So, you are clearly pretty handy, I mean, you’ve made this air traffic control center out of salvaged hardware and burnt out 1980s era television sets, do you think you cold construct a fucking picture frame, Keyrock?
You know that required scene where they invariably walk into an abandoned country house and everything is eerily neat and tidy? The beds are made and all that? Have you been to a house on a prairie in the middle of nowhere? They aren’t well kept, there are posters of Alex Jones and Dallas Cowboys cheerleader calendars and crinkled Hardee’s wrappers and cracked bathtubs on the front lawn.
Look, I understand that not all science fiction is created equal. Sometimes the suspense and drama is successfully pulled off.
Why not just write a suspense or drama film then?
Here’s what I mean: There are two “worlds” in which movies set on earth, in the real world, starring humans, meaning not science fiction, exist:
Movies set in a realistic world, with the police. Meaning, if you get into an hour long gunfight in public, the police will show up, and you will be arrested, like in real life.
The same type of movie, but in a world where the police don’t exist. Meaning, you can get into street races with Lamborghinis all day, and nobody will try and arrest you.
Both of these types of movies are equally good, in my opinion. But what you cannot have is a crossing over of these two worlds, where you get into a gunfight in your Lamborghini for the first hour, and then later you get pulled over for having a busted taillight.
This does sometimes happen, and this means it is a horrible movie.
But with science fiction, this happens constantly. There’s always an escape hatch to suddenly change realities.
Here’s what I mean: I would say ninety percent of science fiction movies feature a plot device where some guy is in a “control room” while he’s strapped to a bunch of machines and sweating a lot and is inhabiting an avatar of himself in a separate reality. Usually there isn’t enough battery power so he has limited time to do whatever he has to do.
Why is it that when this guy gets into trouble, he’s always allowed to just change realities?
Simulation theory? I get it. There are infinite scenarios.
But you’ve set up this entire movie on the premise that there are one or two or three or whatever, so this is cheating. It’s like the cops showing up in a movie where cops don’t exist.
What I’m getting at is, in a good movie, meaning not a science fiction movie, you’re allowed to say, “Well that would never happen.”
You cannot say that when watching a science fiction movie, because you don’t know what the rules are on Planet Xenu, and so that gives the writers free reign to waste your goddamn time.
I could go on, but I’m just saying, all science fiction is really, truly, dumb.