Tag Archives: SF

The Two Most Influential Science-Fiction Films of the 1940s

So here’s the next and in many ways the toughest essay in this darned series. Why is this one so bloody tough? Because there really are no notable SF films, from around the freaking world, that was produced during the 1940s.

For most of these essays my task has been to chose, from a number of influential SF movies, just two and name these as the most influential of their decade. Certainly the next decade up, the 1950s, will prove a challenge. What a treasure of rich, interesting, and diverse films to selection from, but the 1940s? There isn’t anything here, sister.

I am not going to leave this entry empty handed. I am going to find at least one genre movie that had a lasting impact on films far beyond the scope of the picture or its box-office.

My selection is 1949’s Might Joe Young. It has been called, and rightly so in my opinion, a King Kong knock-off. It is the story of a young woman and her pet 12 foot tall gorilla. They are brought out of the wilds of Africa to the wilds of Hollywood as entertainment for a nightclub. The ape goes mad, there is destruction and terror in the streets of Los Angeles. All in all not a terribly original story line, it features one of the stars of the original King Kong, a truly influential film, and the special effects were headed up by Willis O’Brien, the technical wizard who did the effects for Kong.

None of this makes this film particularly important or memorable, the O’Brien supervised the effects work, which were primarily performed by Ray Harryhousen .

Harryhousen’s influence on special effects and film reverberates to this day. In the Final Episode of season 4 for Game of Thrones, when the skeletal wraiths attack from the ice, that scene is pure Harryhousen. Brendan Fraiser fighting the mummies in 1999’s The Mummy is a direct homage to Harryhousen work in the Sinbad movies. Clash of the Titans, 2010, is a remake of Harryhousen’s Clash of the Titans 1981. It is nearly impossible to over state the impact on film and special-effect that this one man had, and his first big break was on this fairly forgettable film, Mighty Joe Young.

Sunday Night Movie: Logan’s Run

So last night I settled in for something a little meaty and without a lot of the fast paced editing, pointless explosions, and gratuitous action that so plagues genres films today, Logan’s Run.

Logan’s Run is a 1976 Science-Fiction film made before that great behemoth Star Wars derailed Science-Fiction films for a generation. The film, based on a novel of the same name written by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson, is set in a utopian 23^rd century. Crime, disease, hunger, war, and pollution, are all problems of a literally forgotten past. The story is set in an unnamed city, protected from the war-torn hell that scars the Earth by massive domes, where the citizens lead lives dedicated to frivolity and hedonistic pleasures. Families no longer exist, and people are raised in crèches without ever knowing their parents. All their needs are met, the city is government by a benevolent computer system called the Network, and it all works seamlessly.

Of course if it all worked seamlessly there would be no conflict, no plot, and no story. Logan 6, the main character, is a Sandman. He is a Blade Runner long before that term ever came into existence, except he doesn’t hunt down wayward androids with dreams of electric sheep, he hunts down people who refuse to willing die on their ‘last day.’ You see this perfectly machined society works in total balance because everyone dies at thirty. The crystal in your hand flashes and it’s time for you to ride the carousel, where in theory you have a chance or resetting your clock, but in reality it’s where you die. If you don’t ride the Carousel you run, and then the Sandmen chase you down and kill you.

The system isn’t as perfect as everyone accepts and Logan is soon charged with finding the hiding place of over a thousand runners who have successfully evaded the Sandmen and vanished from the Network’s omniscient eye. To do this He’ll have to play the part of a runner, that most dangerous of assignments for any cop, undercover with the enemy.

The movie stars Michael York as Logan 6, Jenny Agutter as Jessica 5 a woman who knows something of the hidden runner (and I saw her in a feature film just this year, can you name it?), and Richard Jordan as Francis 7, Logan’s best friend and fellow Sandman. While many of the effect are truly dated, this is a film that has something interesting to say. It is a film made during that time when SF was growing up in Hollywood and many of the plots stopped being for children or teenagers and turned to truly adult themes. Sadly that period ended under the crushing weight of Star Wars’ box office take.

The Two Most Influential Science-Fiction Films of the 1930’s

So here’s the next in my continuing essay series. Before I dig into the two films and my arguments for selecting theme, let me talk for a couple of moments about definitions.

Science-Fiction is the genre of literature in which a development, advance, or change in scientific knowledge is critical to the plot, and that the removal of that elements renders the plot impossible.

Influential I touched on lightly in the first essay, but I want to expand here by detailing who and what is influenced. I am not speaking about the general public at large, thought that will nearly always be true as well, but that these films I have selected had an outsize impact on future filmmakers, often for generations.

So let’s get into the next decade, the 1930s.

My first selection is a well-known film, a classic know by huge numbers of people around the world;
Frankenstein – 1931 – James Whale

Certainly this tale has been around a hell of a lot longer than this 1931 film from Universal Studios. The novel by Mary Shelley was published in 1818 and has been adapted to stage and screen many times. In fact the 1931 production was not the first. Thomas Edison made a short based upon the novel (And knowing the man I’m willing to bet no royalties were paid,) that featured a creation scene done with a paper-mache monster burned to ash and run in reverse.

However it was James Whale and Universal’s Frankenstein that set the tone and standard for so many films to follow. It is unquestionably a science-fiction film because Dr. Frankenstein explains about visible rays, X-rays, and his discovery of a ray that generates all life. It is harnessing this ray, not sheer electrical power that revitalizes the monster’s corpse-like construction. This film is the granddaddy of all mad scientist movies. The lone inventor/scientist, working in some ruined, desolate, and gothic locale, that’s this Frankenstein and through this film German Expressionism. This is a film that continues to be referenced years and decades later, inspiring filmmakers to this day.

Things to Come – 1936 – William Cameron Menzies

This is a film that is not very well known outside of genre fans, but it is a critical film in the history of science-fiction movies, Based up the works of and with screenplay by H.G. Wells, this movie was a serious attempt to peer ahead and not only see what may be possible but also explain how we move from the present day to that fictionalized future. These days that is old hat in Science-Fiction films, but with this movie it was fairly revolutionary. Metropolis never explains where the city is, how it came to be, but merely waves it into existence and sets the story in motion. H.G. Wells, always the historian, loved plotting about the connecting dots between his times and his imagined futures; in effect he created the concept of the future history. Movies ever since Things To Come, if they were set in the future, have felt a pressure to explain how that future arrived. Things to Come was also the first post-apocalyptic movie and many to the tropes and plot devices of that genre were first established here. Two final aspects that influenced film making for decades, Things to Come gave us the clean art-deco city of the future that lasted all the up to Logan’s Run, and it gave the idea that people in the future would wear terribly silly fashions.

The Two Most Influential Science-Fiction Films of the Silent Era

This will be the first in hopefully a lengthy series of essays as I yammer away about which two SF films of each period I consider to be the most influential. Naturally ‘influential’ is a quite subjective measurement and you are welcome to comment, argue and suggest films that you think had a greater impact than the ones I suggest.

I will start with the silent period, covering basic 1890-1930, but after that I intend to tackle the question decade by decade.

A trip to the Moon (Le voyage dans la lune) – 1902 – George Melies

I consider this one of the most important SF films from the silent era because this is really the movie that kicked off SF as spectacle. The science was ludicrous and no one making did so under the illusion that this was a reality based adventure. This was about the wondrous and magical effect that the motion picture camera afforded the filmmakers. This is a short film, just 13 minutes long, but it cast a long shadow across the landscape of cinema. This film is the birth of special effect and special effect from this moment onward would remain at the heart and soul of SF cinema.

Metropolis – 1927 – Fritz Lang

Director Fritz Lang is a towering figure in film. The visionary man behind such classics as ‘M’, the film that made Peter Lore an international star, Lang always had a deep and sincere love for Science-Fiction. (In fact it was Lang who convinced Robert A. Heinlein to start writing Young adult novels.) I would argue that Lang’s better SF movie was 1929’s Woman in the Moon (Frau in Mond.) Woman in the Moon is less didactic and pays a closer attention to scientific details while delivering a better story and adventure. (This film was also a favorite of Werner Von Braun who saw it as a teenager and right up through Apollo copied the paint schemes for rockets from this movie.) However, Woman in the Moon simply has not impacted to trajectory of SF films in the manner that Metropolis did.

Metropolis, a sprawling massive production set in a future city divided between the exploited poor and the extravagantly wealthy, set design and social models that were to be copied for decades, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner look and feel can be trace directly back to Metropolis. The sprawling, towering city of the future was born here in this film.

The original print was lost for decades until 2010 gave us a restored version that is close to the original running time, but not quite. 1984 gave us a version where musical Giorgio Moroder revived the film with a soundtrack that included Queen’s Freddie Mercury, Adam Ant, Pat Benatar and many others.

Your thoughts?

Original Series Klingons, Commies or NAZIs?

As the title informs you I will only be speaking about the Klingons as they appeared in the original Star Trek series, not he later retconed aliens that were introduced in the Motion Picture and later elements of the franchise.

Star Trek arrived during an interesting period in entertainment history, by being produced in the later 60’s the series was influenced by and could be seen as a metaphor for both World War II and The Cold War. The writers, directors and producers of the series Kor,_2266 counted among their number several World War II veterans while the Cold War, now well under way, underpinned everyday life and provided an atmosphere of dread under the treat of global nuclear war. It is natural for people to look on the Klingons of the original series as a metaphor for either the NAZIs or the Communists, but which is a better fit?

Now first I am not putting forth a proposition as to what was in the creators heads when they crafted Star Trek’s original bad guys, but rather just an exercise about which brutal ideology best matches what we know of the Klingons.

There are of course a number of areas of overlap between the deadly forces of Communism and National Socialism. Both were brutal dictatorships, both murdered on a Kang vast scale, both were ruthlessly expansionistic, both were extremely militaristic, both engaged in suppression of dissidents, both crushed the individual under the power of the state.

All of these elements would seem to apply to the Klingon Empire, both this complicates the issues. However it is important to recognize that National Socialism and Communism however similar in many area are not the same thing, so perhaps by finding key differences between the two and apply them to what we know or can extrapolate from the Klingons we can determine the best match.

Communism did not recognize the right to own property. All property belonged to the state, while Nazism recognized private property in a fairly recognizable state, corporations, Kahless and the like. From the original series we have no data about the Klingon economic models and systems, so we can’t use this as a point of differentiation.

Communism believed in an inevitable march of history; that peoples and cultures inexorably moved through certain developmental stages, in the same sequence, and that the end results would be the stateless commune. Nazism believed in the survival of the fittest on both a racial and a cultural, which were really one and the same for them, stage. They thought that it was the natural order for the strongest culture to dominate and subjugate the ‘weaker.’

Ah here we have a bit of a match with the original series Klingons. They clearly believed that if they were stronger is was natural and right for they to rule. They did not argue their dominance from destiny, but from ability.

Communism was a very delusion and distorted view of mass teamwork. That everyone person, if given an equal share would pull equally hard for the greater good and that want and greed would die away. It was group oriented, but in a fanciful belief that people would become happy and prosperous in a share and share-alike fantasy. Nazism saw the individual as only a cog in a machine to support the state, and the race which defined the state. Every man and woman had a duty to the state and that duty overrode all individual consideration. There was no utopian fantasy of universal brotherhood, only the importance of the state over the individual. This matches up quite nicely with Commander Kor’s speech to Kirk in ‘Mission of Mercy’ just before his men burst in to, once again, arrest the Captain.

The final point of divergence is the spread of ideology.

The communists could be though of a evangelicals. It was not enough to conquer territory, to claim resources, to amass power, they also had a burning need to convert. They desires that not only did subjugate peoples bend knees to their power, but adopted their view and Koloth vision of the future. Like the Inquisition before them the Communists could brook no heretics. The Nazis weren’t interested in that at all. Because of the racial components of their belief system, they saw the world as a conflict between themselves and everyone else. They never expressed an argument that their system was better for everyone, they never tried to convince Kirk or the Organians that they should convert, but rather brute force to take was enough and all they required was subservience.

To me this makes it clear, for the Original Series Star Trek, the Klingons were much more like Nazis than communists.

The State of My Writing

Well even though I have ignored my blog way too much last year, things are looking up for 2014.

The great desert produced by my sudden lack of a day job became lush when I was employed again, and even working 50 hours or more a week I am producing a lot of words for my novel-in-progress.

The Latest version of this military SF adventure story is now north of 96 thousand words and it’s looking to land in the area of 115 to 120. Then there will be revision, edits, and the beta read. the last two books have not survived their beat readers, we will see about this one.

After that I plan two novels as self-publishing experiments.

First up will be Vulcan’s Forge, a science-fiction noir in the tradition of The Maltese Falcon and Double Indemnity. It’s destined for self publishing because I expect it to be quite small as books go, around 50 to 60 thousand words. Unless you are an established star, publishers are generally not interested in such slim volumes.

Then will be my ‘screw you I writing it anyway book,’ currently titled The Illusion. It will be my foray into dystopic fiction. I looking at self-pub on this one because it will be, by far, my bleakest story. It would make an excellent French film from the 70s. It is unlikely to go to beat read as I am very sure that many of my usual beta readers would hate the book on political grounds. This will be a political book, but that doesn’t mean you should read too much of my personal views from the text. I can tell you this though it will never ever win a Prometheus award.

Movie review: Gravity

Sunday morning a friend and I caught a 3D showing of the new film Gravity. I normally steer clear of 3D showings as I feel to often the effect is used as a gimmick and a way to needlessly boost the ticket prices. However with a few directors, men of vision, I will often give them a short if they can sell me that the 3D is a part of their vision and not just a revenue device. Alfonso is one such director.

Gravity is a film set in orbit high above the Earth. Two astronauts, Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) and Mat Kowalski I George Clooney) a part of a shuttle team making repairs to the Hubble Space telescope. A disaster occurs stranding Ryan and Kowalski alone and shuttles in orbit. This is a story of survival against extreme odds, and that has been a genre that has always fascinated. The film follows closely and with a hard edge of forgivingness as the two struggled to find some way out of their dire situation. It very much has a feel like the classic SF short story ‘The Cold Equations,’ but is sadly not as rigorous in the application of know physics.

That is NOT to say that this film just makes stuff up like most SF films do. No, compared to what we are generally fed from studios this is an amazing movie with a high degree of fidelity to science. It warms my heart that this film is doing great box office and it has the best use of silence in space since Kubrick’s 2001 A Space Odyssey.

What did the filmmaker’s get wrong? Mostly they imagine orbital space to be one area, not understanding or ignoring that orbital has inclinations and altitudes. The trip as seen in the film is simply not possible. However some of this I can live with. I ignore the words Hubble and simply imagine that the crew is working on a different space telescope, one that lies in the right orbit for the plot.

They also did understand surface tension in space. Tears do not float off a person eyeballs in weightlessness, but rather t stay there, making vision impossible until manually cleared. There is also a bit with momentum that when you think about just is plain wrong – I can’t go into details it would be spoiler material – but it’s a rather larger error in my book.

That said, I was blown away by this movie. The errors do not detract from my enjoyment any more than the multiple errors in Jaws. This is a movie after all and not real life.

This film also has the best zero-gee effects, besting Apollo 13 who used real zero-gee.

What the filmmakers have given us is a vision of space that is unmatched in cinema. Curaon use of 3D is masterful, the best 3D I have ever seen. Not only that his use of the camera of lenses or movement and framing combine to make an experience that is simply beyond words. I was breathless as I watched this movie. Even when I knew something was wrong I was still deeply engaged in the characters and their drama. I gasped out loud several times and that I rarely do. This film is phenomenal.

Do not wait for video.

Do not wait for cable.

Do not see it in 2D.

If you have to drive 60 miles, do it, this film is worth it.v

Movie review: Europa Report

It is summertime at the movies and that means it is time for an endless parade of big budget spectacles with an average IQ inversely related to their swollen budgets. Hollywood’s idea of science-fiction is lots of running, explosions, and the barest framework to hang a plot upon. The movies of summer generally do not fare well upon close inspection, pull on a story thread and the entire plot is subject to unraveling.

This is not the case with the low budget independent film Europa Report. The cast doesn’t have anyone who was paid fifty million dollars to be in the production, the special effects are special in the manner that they don’t look extraordinary. Rather they do what special effects are supposed to do, make a fantastic setting feel real. If you saw the previews you might have the impression that Europa Report is some sort of alien horror film. That is not the case. Continue reading →

For Sale: Two(2) memberships to LoneStarCon3 The World Science-Fiction Convention of 2013

Due that sudden unemployment of mine, my wife and I have two membership for this years WorldCon that we are not going to be able opt use.
We are willing to sell them for the price we paid for them $180 each. (Currently these memberships are priced at $240 per membership at the convention website.)

Leave me a reply or drop me an email if you are interested.

The Future of Human Sexuality

The most important concept we need to embrace going forward is very simple; innate does not equate with immutable.

Many things about sexuality, human and otherwise, are innate to the individual. A person doesn’t choose their orientation; it is an aspect of their sexuality that is beyond choice and beyond conditioning. Most people think of this as being genetic, but that is a gross simplification and in my opinion erroneous. Continue reading →

Robert Mitchell Evans

Literary Saboteur