Angry Robot

Elysium: What Went Wrong?

Argues that most sci-fi movies are “anti-sci-fi” because technology is the antagonist in them. Interesting idea, but I think it’s slightly misguided. There are a couple things going on:

1. Sci-fi has been appropriated as the window dressing of choice for Hollywood summer tentpole films, but the real genre of these films is action. They are only sci-fi because it can be flashy, gives the writers more leeway and a lot of the content the films are based on is sci-fi.

  <p>2. If sci-fi is a story in which fictional technology appears, and stories tend to have conflict, odds are the tech will wind up having some negative aspects to it. It’s a gross simplification to call 2001 dystopian just because it contains a killer robot. It also contains a space hotel and benevolent aliens guiding human evolution! The story itself doesn’t have to love all technology in order to qualify as sci-fi.
• August 14, 2013, 5:17 pm |