A Science Fiction Lament

Sci-Fi Lament

            When the snow started falling, I was excited. When the call came in that school was cancelled, I was elated. When flicking through channels and stumbling on – by perhaps the same luck that brought all that snow – Oblivion, the 2013 sci-fi movie starring Tom Cruise that critics seemed to laugh at more than write about, I was ecstatic. And then when the girlfriend agreed to rent Elysium on the second snow day! Oooh booooy. If you don’t get ecstatic at watching a new sci-fi movie, then it’s probably best to stop reading. This just isn’t for you.

The owners of all those cars are inside watching sci-fi movies.

Because yes, I get downright child-like excited when a new sci-fi movie comes out. I am selective and adulterous when it comes to sticking with one genre, but I carry the perpetual hope that a new Alien or Terminator (2?) (or add or replace with whatever movie first pops into your head) will come down the pike, that beautiful mix of excessive Hollywood visuals with a setting and story that pulls you in, makes you believe that other world exists because the characters who live in it exist, and just enough cheese on the top to make it palatable.

And yes, I even get excited to watch movies like Oblivion, which every review I read panned with some even arguing so fiercely against the movie and its silly storyline that it seemed a line had been crossed, that this was such a stinker that it blasphemed science fiction. Which still made me want to see it; maybe even more so.

So the point of this post, the sentiment that I just can’t hold in anymore, and must before I explode post it to my small, rarely-visited corner of the universal web:

Oblivion and Elysium really sucked. I mean, just awful, terrible, horrific movies. So bad that yeah I think I’m angry about it. I’m angry because the premises of each movie are great ideas! But besides drug use or mental illness, I can think of no other reason how such great premises could turn into such horrific stinkers. Maybe it’s just that the writers and directors and everyone else involved with these movies, even the gaffes, suck. At life.

Here’s a quick summary and condemnation of each movie:

Oblivion

 

Tom Cruise and some fairly good looking actress are stationed on a really cool and really high in the sky apartment, which they can reach only via their futuristic helicopter. They are on Earth, which has been mostly destroyed by the use of our own nuclear bombs in repelling an invasion by “Scavs”, who destroyed the Moon or provided a new kind of lunar phenomenon, depending on how you see it. Earth people won the war, but lost the planet, so they all moved to Titan, one of Jupiter’s moons. Tom Cruise is on Earth as a repairman for the drones that protect the huge water-harvesting machines that bring the precious liquid to needy humans on Titan. A ship crash-lands on Earth, and Mr. Cruise brings back a survivor to his apartment in the heavens.

Apartment for rent with killer view of destroyed moon.

There’s a surprise ending, and I won’t give it away here because I want you to watch this movie and be awed at the visuals of the sky apartment and the post-apocalypse scenes of the Empire State Building and the New York Public Library and a football stadium that is maybe Giants Stadium or MetLIfe Stadium or who cares because if it was destroyed that means the Giants were destroyed and that’s a good thing for everybody, and be drawn into the story with some burning questions in your mind that keep you glued to the screen and propel the story until BAM! You hit the wall that is the surprise and you’re like, “WHAT!!!???” with all the rage and confusion you can muster on a snowy Tuesday night.

I have more to say about this sci-fi abomination, but it ties into the Elysium so I’ll switch anger tracks and come back to Crap. I mean, Oblivion.

 

Elysium

Matt Damon lives in a barrio with a bunch of rough-and-tumble Latinos who inexplicably care about the only white dude there. Everything sucks for Matt Damon, including the world, the government, the robot police, his robot police record, his jerk boss, and just one too-big heavy dose of the Man keeping the little guy aka Matt Damon down. Oh, and Matt Damon gets a too-big heavy dose of radiation and now his life really sucks.

Elysium is a city in the sky, beautifully rendered as a circular space station with Beverley Hills landscapes and mansions on the interior of the circle. Imagine a tire in space. A huge tire that didn’t look as cheap and dirty as a tire. But a tire with its circular shape and space inside the tire that is usually filled with air…well where that air is in a normal tire, in Elysium there’s mansions and rich people. Which is the point of Elysium. Earth sucks so they left and set up a paradise in space. And they don’t want no stinkin’ poor people coming to ruin their party in the heavens.

So Matt Damon, who’s bald even before the radiation accident, goes to see this gang leader. Gang leaders in the future are different than our current ones. In the future, gang leaders will have massive hideouts filled with supercomputers. And they’ll charter illegal flights to nirvanas in the sky. Ok, maybe they will do that, but the huge computers in the barrio thing was weird. You can afford a wall of computer screens linked up to spaceships and you’re not going to flash a little green? Or whatever color the money will be then.

Matt Damon and the minimalist gang leader make a deal – Matt Damon can have a ticket on the next illegal spaceship to Elysium so he can use these machines they have that instantly heal people which of course technology the greedy Elysians won’t share if he helps steal/download files from and important tycoon’s brain. Which Matt Damon can’t do because he only has five days to live and he can’t walk or move that much. But the gang leader has the answer to that. He’s got this metal spider looking thing that his homies bolt to Matt Damon’s spine and program with their computers so that he can move about easily. I get how this thing could make him move, but it like cured him until the end of the movie when suspense was needed and it then could no longer keep him standing up and not looking like radiation does really bad things to a human body.

And I just realized my summary is four paragraphs long, so I’m ending it here. Matt Damon goes to Boston or something, meets up with Ben Affleck, hoodwink Hollywood, and make mostly forgettable movies for the rest of their lives. The End.

 

Now here’s the condemnation you were all waiting for. Why these movies sucked so bad despite having amazing visual effects and promising premises. Why Hollywood needs to get its act together and make a good sci-fi movie. Why I hope I’m not correct when I fearfully think that maybe Hollywood can’t make a good sci-fi movie anymore (and I’m leaning more here to the big massive blockbusters) because all the creativity and the ambition and the blind wonder that is encapsulated in so much good (and bad, but still good) science fiction has been zapped up in how quickly we’ve gotten used to touch screens and mini this and able to do everything!-software that. Why perhaps we don’t believe anymore.

SPOILER ALERT. SPOILER BELOW. SORRY, I CAN’T HELP IT.

                Oblivion sucked because the Scavs are really humans, not some invading army. And the thing – government, army, horde of pissed-off writers who actually write good sci-fi movies??? – that perpetuates this lie is…………..a big computer triangle in the sky. Yes, that’s it. If you don’t understand what exactly I’m talking about, then good. Perfect. That’s how I felt when the movie ended.

These questions are never answered:

–          Who are the Scavs? How did they become who they are, basically guerilla fighters with amazing technology?

–          What is the big triangle in space? Why is it there? Who controls it? Who or what is the voice that talks to Tom Cruise? How? What? Why? When? Who? Huh??

–          How did the big computer-voiced triangle in the sky cause everything to be like this? If everything is a lie, how did the lie start? How did it keep going? And most importantly, why did it keep going?? Because a very liberal guess of how many people are on Earth based on how many people are shown in the movie (not including the Tom Cruise replicas) is maybe 2000. So all this machinery and time consumption for 2000 guerilla fighters? Why can’t they just wipe them out?? Oh the questions keep coming and coming and this movie seems worse and worse as I think about it.

 

Elysium sucked for some of the same reasons. But here’s some unique sucky attributes of this movie:

–          Matt Damon is not a leading man actor. He is good in certain films. But he is not a well-rounded actor who can take on any role. Especially when he’s bald. Make movies about Boston and cast Matt Damon.

–          A story requires multidimensional characters. Especially a science fiction story because the premises are so hokey and outrageous that the audience needs something to hold on to while they’re being sold on the ridiculous idea that in 60 years Earth will be a wasteland watched over by low-level engineers who have apartments miles in the air. Or that Matt Damon was a good casting choice.

–          Science fiction is a commentary on our current society. Science fiction can hold up our practices to ridicule because it sets itself in the future, giving it a boundary, a false idea that is believable that we’re not judging ourselves. It can get preachy and radical, but it’s still just a story. But as any preacher knows – or should know before they become one – if your message isn’t relevant, then no one will want to listen. So Oblivion, I learned nothing from you. If I wanted to squeeze a lesson out of you like water out of a rock, it’d be that maybe one day my wife will appear in a spaceship and the woman I’m living with and think is my wife really isn’t and there’s one more of her so if she gets killed I don’ t have to feel sad. And Elysium, ok I get it. People who want to close off their borders to outsiders are evil and bigots and just terrible devil people who deserve everything that happens to them. B-o-r-i-n-g. As Ezra Pound said about something nowhere near as important as science fiction (he said it about poetry), “Make it new.” So even if you’re idea isn’t new, say it in a new way. That’s just Storytelling 101.