I enjoy Science Fiction as much as anyone, particularly the movies and TV shows with lots of amazing special effects.
Sometimes, I even read Science Fiction. I was still in primary school when I first encountered Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, the pioneers of the genre.
I’m not always impressed with it. Take Rendezvous At Rama, a novella by Arthur C. Clarke. The idea is great, but I found the prose to be rather poor. Nor did I enjoy the writing style of Isaac Asimov (and the Foundation TV series is awful fan fiction).
Ray Bradbury, in my mind, had the best prose of any Sci Fi writer, as well as some of the most provocative ideas.
What makes Science Fiction great? And what makes it inadequate?
I suppose that Big Ideas are what we expect from Science Fiction.
Four years ago, I shared some of my thoughts about Star Wars, and how it fits into the hard wiring of our culture, going back to the Trojan War and the Homeric Epics which initiate our intellectual traditions:
I read some reviews of the latest Star Wars film last week, The Mandalorian and Grogu, and despite their lukewarm nature, I decided to go to the cinema on Sunday and see the film on the big screen.
I must say that I was very disappointed, despite being forewarned by the reviews.
But what is wrong with the latest Star Wars movie?
I feel that it comes down to not delivering what we expect from Science Fiction, that is, the Big Idea.
Where Star Wars has seized our imaginations for the past half century is that it is all about one Big Idea: Saving The Galaxy. Much of Science Fiction is about that sort of Big Idea – saving the Galaxy, the Universe, or, in smaller times, the World.
That is what H.G. Wells was about, in his most well known novel, War Of The Worlds, right at the birth of Science Fiction.
The Illiad, some three thousand years earlier, was about another big idea – waging what was (at least to the illiterate people of the dark age which followed and who recited the story orally until writing was rediscovered) the first global war. The Odyssey was about another big idea – a hero coming home despite the wrath of a God placing every obstacle in his way.
Early cinematic Science Fiction was all about saving the world. The serials of Flash Gordon featured the hero fighting Ming the Merciless, the evil ruler of the universe, to save the world. So too were the Buck Rogers serials (fun fact – Buster Crabbe starred as both Flash and Buck). This is where the concept of Space Opera came from.
[As an aside, I have read the original 1920s era stories on which Buck Rogers is based. His nickname ‘Buck’ does not appear, and the story is set in a post apocalyptic North America, not in space.]
Sometimes, the Big Idea is not about saving the world, or overcoming external obstacles. It can be more cerebral, or existential, about confronting some of the dilemmas about being human.
In The Invisible Man, H.G. Wells gives us someone who obtains a great power, but becomes the most lonely man on Earth. In 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, Jules Verne introduces us to the mysterious Captain Nemo, a vengeful submariner who has, for reasons not made clear to us, cut himself off from the surface world, only appearing to wreck havoc on shipping. [Verne does give us the back story to Nemo eventually in the last pages of The Mysterious Island, but this latter novel is the most inadequate of his works and the chronology he sets out for Nemo is incoherent.]
Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis from a century ago gave us a chance to question what it means to be human.
More recently, we have movies like 2001, Close Encounters, and Gattaca. Two are about our place in the universe, and the latter is about whether the human spirit can overcome predestination.
These are all big ideas.
You can get away, when you do TV shows, with smaller ideas and stories. Star Trek struggled in its initial jump from TV series to movies because of that connection to smaller ideas. My favourite Space Western, Firefly, was able to successfully jump into a movie adaptation, Serenity, due to having the underpinning theme of saving Humanity from an evil technocratic political system – a typical Big Idea.
The Mandalorian worked as a TV show on Disney+ because it focused on being a Space Western, with a likeable hero and a loveable sidekick. The small screen is a good place for small ideas – but the Big Screen is about Big Ideas.
In converting The Mandalorian into a movie, the executives at Disney forgot all the rules about making Space Opera, particularly about Star Wars. Mando and his sidekick Grogu are great characters for a TV series, but what are they actually doing in a movie? Namely, it could and should have been a two part episode of the TV series, rather than a cinema release.
They are not saving the galaxy from evil, but merely busy pursuing bounties on bad guys, and then saving themselves from a bounty gone wrong. Nor is there any existential questioning of their place in the universe.
Basically, there is no Big Idea. Without a big idea, a Science Fiction movie is going to fail, and that is what has happened in this case. This is like An Ewok Adventure for the 21st Century.
Lost For Words! 