If you’re like me, you watched Star Wars as a child and got way too obsessed with it. I even made my parents go with me to the midnight premiere of Revenge of the Sith (sorry Mom, sorry Dad) because I was so stoked to see a new Star Wars movie.
Over the years, I’ve maintained a slightly-more-than-casual interest in sci-fi movies and shows. I’m no superfan by any stretch of the imagination, but I watched iRobot, like, 30 times in a summer because I thought it was that good. Ah, to be young and naïve again.
Anyway, if you’re even a casual science fiction fan, you’ve probably noticed that we’re living in a golden age for sci-fi movies, whether it’s adaptations, reboots or completely new material.
You can’t beat some of the classics, but computers have gotten so frickin’ crazy that today’s sci-fi movies are on the cutting edge of film.
Just take Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar for example. Even if you can’t appreciate the stellar (ha, get it?) soundtrack or the heart-warming plot, you’ve got to admit that the visuals in that movie are incredible. Like, it was everything the acid-trip part of 2001: A Space Odyssey wanted to be and more. As a testament to the attention to detail in that movie, the methods the visual effects team used to represent the black hole resulted in their publishing a paper on gravitational lensing.
Though they have certainly grown more visually stunning, sci-fi movies have maintained their status as emotionally and philosophically stimulating. You can’t just dress up a threadbare plot with a hefty CGI budget and call it a day (I’m looking at you, Fant4stic). No, there’s gotta be more to it.
Besides just being cool movies about space, today’s sci-fi movies are good, intriguing movies in their own right. Prior to 2009, only five sci-fi movies had ever been nominated for an Oscar. However, in just the past seven years, seven more films have carved out their place on that list.
Moreover, it feels like the face of the genre is changing. Rather than chronicling the adventures of renegade smugglers in a galaxy far, far away, a lot of contemporary science-fiction media sets itself in the near-future, right here on Earth. And many sci-fi media tap more into the human element of the story than the alien.
Take, for instance, Denis Villeneuve’s recently released Arrival. In the film, 12 alien spaceships appear on Earth, and Louise Banks, a linguist, must learn their language to figure out if they’ve come to help or harm humanity. A large part of the film is devoted to figuring out what the heck is up with the aliens, yes, but at the center of the story is Louise’s relationship with her child.
Moreover, a main driving force of the plot is human socio-political conflict. Indeed, like Her, Inception, Ex Machina, The Martian and even Black Mirror, Villeneuve’s film uses something unfamiliar to get closer to reality.
Contemporary sci-fi films are just as comfortable philosophizing as they are blowing up Death Stars. I think that’s something worth celebrating. It means we’ll keep getting movies that are as spectacular as they are sentimental, movies that are willing to tell the truth but, as Dickinson would say, tell it slant.
Daniel Sweat, a Features Editor for the Voice, can be reached for comment at DSweat19@wooster.edu.