The Future of Film:
Sci-Fi Is Back Big Time
Words: David Geffner
J.G. Ballard, the British author of Crash and Empire of the Sun, once said that even the worst science fiction is better than the best conventional fiction. "The future," Ballard said, "is a better key to the present than the past." Many of today's most talented visual stylists must agree. From Hong Kong romance director Wong Kar-Wai (currently working on 2046, an epic meditation on the future of his home city) to Pi visionary Darren Aronofsky, who first imagined his long-in-the works sci-fi flick (tentatively titled Last Man) while an undergrad student at Harvard, to Chris Cunningham's adaptation of William Gibson's seminal novel Neuromancer, to Steven Soderbergh, whose upcoming film Solaris (produced by James Cameron's Lightstorm Entertainment) was first adapted by Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky in 1972, the genre has clearly seduced the 21st century's best and brightest cinematic talents.
Not that this is news for film history buffs. Sci-fi meditations on the future have propelled more indie filmmakers than waves of Jedi fighters. Famous examples include George Lucas's barren police state in THX-1138, Stanley Kubrick's mind-bending minimalism in 2001: A Space Odyssey, Fritz Lang's 1926 masterpiece of German expressionism, Metropolis, or Ridley Scott's vastly influential Blade Runner, which continues to inform virtually every sci-fi film made since its 1982 release. More recent additions are Andy and Larry Wachowski's 1999 hit The Matrix that created the template for the new school of digital effects-based sci-fi and will spawn at least two sequels (Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revelations). Even low-budget first-time indies have embraced the genre: Richard Kelly's cult hit Donnie Darko was the first sci-fi film to screen in competition at Sundance and was nominated for three IFP Spirit awards. In this post 9/11 landscape, where the gap between science and fiction was closed in a single day, filmmakers see the genre as a way to visually grapple with so much personal and social disorder.
"I was in Manhattan at the New York Independent Film Festival on 9/11," observes Columbus, Ohio-based filmmaker Peter John Ross, "and it did have an effect on my film." Ross' 28-minute DV sci-fi film, New World, which he calls a "demo-pilot," recently screened at the San Diego Comic-Con International, the largest convention of sci-fi/fantasy fans in the nation. "The best science fiction is always a metaphor," Ross adds. "New World [which visualizes a feudal future where humans have lost the Earth to insect-like invaders and must wage guerilla war] is about terrorism. I'm using sci-fi to pose the question: should we take a pacifist stance or fight back? Fighting back always has consequences."
In a recent Filmmaker interview with critic Amy Taubin, Steven Soderbergh talked about his reasons for tackling the Stanislaw Lem sci-fi novel Solaris. "Out of the billions of things that exist on this planet," Soderbergh said, "we're the only ones who have knowledge of yesterday. It's weird and terrifying, and at the same time, being conscious of ourselves everyday, being able to establish connections with other people, that's a gift. To have the luxury of asking questions like, 'Is this it?' I think that's pretty good."
Soderbergh called his version of Solaris "20 percent the book, 20 percent the movie [Tarkovsky's version]" and the remainder his own personal preoccupations. While it's tempting to postulate that the rush of upcoming sci-fi projects may arrive laden with political and cultural messages, as they did in the 1950s, watchers of the genre offer a more complex scenario.
