Science Fiction

Science fiction has proven to be one of the most durable of film genres. Its history virtually parallels that of cinema itself, from the many early short films made in Europe and the United States about automation and the manipulation of time, to the special effects blockbusters of recent years. Several of French film pioneer Georges Méliès's one-reelers can be categorized as science fiction, most notably Trip to the Moon (1902), which was loosely based on both Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon and H.G. Wells's First Men in the Moon. Notable science fiction achievements of the 1920s and 1930s include Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1926) and William Cameron Menzies's Things to Come (1936). The genre, now full of Cold War political overtones, first began drawing big audiences in the 1950s with the release of features such as Robert Wise's The Day the Earth Stood Still (1953), and Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), which was remade in 1978 and again in 194 as Body Snatchers.. This popularity continued into the 1960s, when filmmakers expanded the stylistic and thematic limits of the genre, especially Jean-Luc Godard in Alphaville (1965), and François Truffaut in Fahrenheit 451 (1967). Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) set new stantards for the genre with its special effects, its ironic vision of the future, and its meditation on himan nature.

Two leading directors of the 1970s and 1980s both began their careers with successful low-budget science fiction outings. John Carpenter scored a cult hit with Dark Star (1974), black comedy version of 2001, and George Lucas received critical acclaim for his stylish dystopian study THX-1138 (1971), before going on to direct the first and produce the last two of the hugely successful "Star Wars" trilogy and its recent prequel The Phantom Menace (1999). Other notable figures of recent decades include Steven Spielberg, who brought his vision of middle America to science fiction Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and E.T. (1982); Ridley Scott painted bleak futures in Alien (1979) and Blade Runner (1982), the latter adapted from science fiction writer Philip K. Dick's classic Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?;

Fans of written science fiction have traditionally scorned the genre's film incarnations, citing film's rejection of speculative ideas in favor of action and special effects. Certainly the movies that made the genre popular during the Cold War of the 1950s and early 1960s would seem to support this view; most of them revolve around uninspired invasion scenarios featuring that staple of the form, the BEM (bug-eyed monster). Critics often cite Christian Nyby's The Thing (1951), a film based on John Campbell, Jr.'s novella Who Goes There?, as an example of this syndrome. The novella revolves around the complex scientific logic needed to combat an intelligent, continuously transmuting alien, while the film boasts a showdown between heroic American soldiers drawn from World War II movies and a giant, blood-sucking carrot.

Science fiction films' preference for action over ideas relates directly to the nature of cinema. Three traditional concerns of science fiction—space, time, and the machine—possess natural affinities to the medium. Any event being filmed and any apparatus used to record that event moves through space and time; and filmmakers since the days of Méliès have been led to exploit that relationship for dramatic effect. Susan Sontag noted in a pioneering 1965 essay, "Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster … the aesthetics of destruction, with the peculiar beauties to be found in wreaking havoc, making a mess."