Galaxy's Edge Magazine: Issue 4: September 2013 (2 page)

Even the good science fiction movies assume that their audiences are so dumb that logic means nothing to them, as long as you dazzle them with action and zap guns and aliens and the like.

Take
The Road Warrior
(a/k/a
Mad Max 2
), which is truly a fine movie: well-acted, well-conceived, well-directed. And yet…

In
The Road Warrior’
s post-nuclear-war future, the rarest and most valuable commodity in the world is refined oil (i.e., gasoline), because the distances in Australia, where it takes place, are immense, and you can’t get around without a car or a motorcycle. The conflict takes place between the Good Guys, who have built a primitive fortress around a refining plant, and the Bad Guys, a bunch of futuristic bikers, who want to get their hands on that gasoline, which is so rare that it’s probably worth more per drop than water in the desert.

So what do the bad guys who desperately need this petrol do? They power up their cars and bikes and race around the refinery for hours on end, day in and day out. If they would have the brains to conserve a little of that wasted energy, they wouldn’t have to risk their lives trying to replace it. (And, while I’m thinking of it, where do they get the fuel to power their dozens of constantly-running vehicles?)

Then there were Spielberg’s mega-grossing dinosaur movies,
Jurassic Park
and
The Lost World
. The former hypothesizes that if you stand perfectly still six inches from a hungry Tyrannosaur he won’t be able to tell you’re there. I would like to see the screenwriter try that stunt with any hungry carnivore—mammal or reptile—that has ever lived on this planet. The latter film shows you in graphic detail (and with questionable intelligence) that a T. Rex can outrun an elevated train, but cannot catch a bunch of panicky Japanese tourists who are running away, on foot, in a straight line.

Although these two films are the prime offenders, simply because Spielberg has the resources to know better, I am deathly tired of the superhuman (uh…make that supercarnosaur) feats with which Hollywood endows T. Rex, who seemed to be the only terrifying dinosaur of which it was aware until someone told Spielberg about velociraptors. (Give them another decade or two and they might actually discover allosaurs and Utahraptors.)

T. Rex weighed about seven tons. By comparison, a large African bull elephant weighs about six tons, and could probably give old T. Rex one hell of a battle. But no one suggests that a six-ton elephant can throw trucks and trains around, break down concrete walls, or do any of the other patently ridiculous things T. Rex can do on screen.

And the list—and the intellectually offended muttering— goes on and on. In
Alien
they all go off by themselves in different directions to search for the creature; haven’t they learned
anything
from five centuries of dumb horror movies? At the end of
Total Recall
, the Governator is outside for maybe six minutes while Mars is being miraculously terraformed. Just how long do you think
you
could survive on the surface of Mars in 100-below-zero weather with absolutely no oxygen to breathe?

Some “major” films are simply beneath contempt. I persist in thinking that
Starship Troopers
was misnamed; it should have been
Ken and Barbie Go To War
. And if that wasn’t a bad enough trick to pull on Robert A. Heinlein after he was dead, they also made
The Puppet Masters
, which was handled exactly like a 4th remake of
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
.

Then there was
Armageddon
, which seemed to make the case that it’s easier to teach hard-drinking functionally-illiterate wildcatters how to be astronauts in a constricted time period than to teach highly-intelligent physically-fit astronauts how to drill for oil. And ghod help us, it was Disney’s highest-grossing live-action film until
Pirates of the Caribbean
came along.

And when I was sure it couldn’t get any worse, along came the stupidest big-budget film of all time—
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

Consider:

1. Alan Quatermain can hit a moving target at 900 yards in the year 1899 A.D. With a rifle of that era.

2. Bruce Banner—excuse me: Dr. Jekyll—changes into the Hulk—oops: make that Mr. Hyde—and suddenly he’s 15 feet tall and even his muscles have muscles. He’s a bad guy—except when, at the end, the plot requires him to be a good guy and rescue all the other good guys at enormous personal cost, which he does for no rational reason that I could discern.

3. Mina Harker is a vampire. She’s Jonathan Harker’s wife, and Jonathan, as you’ll remember, is the guy who visits Dracula and sells him an English estate. (I always felt Dracula shouldn’t have stopped terrifying realtors with just one, but let it pass.) Well, Mina is a Good Guy, and certainly, given her physical features, a more Extraordinary Gentleman than any of the others. She can fly (Dracula couldn’t), she can cross over water (movie vampires can’t), and she can command a combat team (honest) of half a million bats. She also drinks blood, but only of Bad Guys.

4. The Invisible Man joins the team. Well, no one reads H. G. Wells any more, so they announced that the original Invisible Man was dead and this Cockney guy has replaced him. He spends most of his time being invisible in sub-zero weather, occasionally mentioning that it’s chilly without his clothes on, but he never gets dressed or goes inside.

5. Dorian Gray. Well, he’s got this picture, see? Oh, and he can’t be harmed. Cut him, shoot him, and two seconds later he’s whole, unharmed and unmarked. But if he should ever
see
his picture, he turns immediately and gruesomely and eternally to dust. Funniest action scene in the picture is a fight to the death (honest!) between Dorian Gray, who literally cannot be harmed or killed, and Mina Harker, who is
already
dead.

6. Captain Nemo is a bearded Indian who is a master of karate.

7. The only Victorian figure missing is Sherlock Holmes, so of course the youngish villain turns out to be Moriarty (who Sherlock killed when he was an aging professor a few years before 1899).

8. And, oh yeah, there’s an American secret agent named Tom Sawyer, who’s about 22 years old—a really neat trick since he was a teenager before the Civil War.

I think it’s nice that they brought back all these Victorian and pre-Victorian characters. It would have been even nicer if anyone connected with the film had ever read a single book in which they appeared.

How do they travel? In a half-mile-long 20-foot-wide version of the Nautilus. (And as this 2500-foot-long ship is going through the canals of Venice, even Carol couldn’t help wondering how it turned the corners.)

There is a convertible car. (After all, this is 1899. They hadn’t invented hardtops yet.) Alan Quatermain and two other Extraordinary Gentlemen have to drive down the broad paved boulevards (broad paved boulevards???) of Venice. There are 200 Bad Guys on the roofs on both sides of the street, all armed with automatic weapons. They fire 18,342 shots at the car—and miss. Alan Quatermain and his ancient rifle don’t miss a target for the entire and seemingly endless duration of the film.

What are the Extraordinary Gentlemen doing? They’re stopping Moriarty from getting rich by selling weapons to rival European nations. And where is he getting these weapons? Easy. He has built a two-mile-square fortified brick city/fortress in the middle of an ice-covered Asian mountain range, and filled it with thousands of machines capable of creating really nasty weapons. I figure the cost of creating the city, shipping in the tons of iron he has to melt to make weapons, and importing the thousands of machines required to create the weapons, set him back about $17 trillion. But he’s going to make $200 million or so selling weapons, so he’s in profit. Isn’t he???

Every single aspect of the film is on this level. Nairobi consisted of two—count them: two—tin-roofed shacks in 1899, but in the movie it’s a city. And it’s a city in clear sight of Kilimanjaro—which is passing strange, because every time I’ve been to Nairobi it’s a 2-hour drive just to see Kilimanjaro in the distance. Quatermain lives in a place which I suppose is meant to be the Norfolk Hotel, but looks exactly like an Antebellum Southern mansion, complete with liveried black servants who speak better English than Sean Connery (who played Quatermain and has never lived it down).

It’s mentioned a few times that Alan Quatermain can’t die, that a witch doctor has promised him eternal life. In the end he
does
die, and despite his having repeated this story about the witch doctor
ad nauseum
, the remaining Extraordinary Gentlefolk take his body—unembalmed, I presume—all the way from the Himalayas to East Africa and bury him there, place his rifle on the grave, and walk away. Then the witch doctor shows up, does a little buck-and-wing and a little scat-singing, and the rifle starts shaking as if something’s trying to get out of the grave. End of film. My only thought was: “It’s the writer, and they didn’t bury him deep enough.”

OK, I’ve really got to calm down. I’m starting to hyperventilate as I write this.

(Pause. Take a deep breath. Think of flowers swaying in a gentle breeze. Pretend they are not about to be trampled by a 45-ton Tyrannosaur that has just eaten a
homo erectus
that looks exactly like Raquel Welch, make-up and Wonderbra included. Return to keyboard.)

So are they getting any better?

I stayed away from science fiction movies for a decade after shaking my head in sorrow and disbelief over the Extraordinary Gentlemen, but then came a blockbuster by James Cameron that was bidding well to become the highest-grossing movie of all time, so I went to
Avatar
. I mean, surely they had to be getting a
little
less insulting to the intelligence after all this time, right?

*Sigh* We learn one minute into it that although we’ve circumvented the limitations in Einstein’s theories and have achieved faster-than-light speed and are colonizing planets in other star systems, we have forgotten how to create a self-propelled wheelchair.

Later, a bunch of relatively primitive inhabitants armed with spears and bows and arrows (or the equivalent) go to war with a fully-equipped spacegoing military—and win. Seriously now, how do you think those same primitives with those same weapons would do this weekend against the 101st Airborne Division? Hell, how do you think they’d have done against Patton or MacArthur in 1944?

The strange thing is that I prefer science fiction to fantasy both as a writer and a reader. I write both, but I prefer the art of the possible to the impossible, the story that obeys the rules of the universe (as we currently know them, anyway) to the story that purposely breaks them all.

And yet…and yet, for some reason that eludes me, Hollywood, which seems unable to make a good science fiction movie to save its soul (always assuming it has one, an assumption based on absolutely no empirical evidence), has made a number of wonderful fantasy movies that are not intellectually offensive and do not cheat on their internal logic:
Field of Dreams, Harvey, The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit, Portrait of Jennie
, even
The Wizard of Oz
and the Harry Potter films (well, the first one, anyway).

No, this is not blanket praise for all fantasy films. As I was walking out of
The Two Towers
I complained to Carol that I’d just wasted three hours watching what amounted to spring training for the
real
war in the next film. And a couple of hours into
The Return of the King
, as I was watching the 20th or 25th generic battle between faceless armies that I didn’t care about, I had this almost-unbearable urge to turn to an usher and say, “Let my people go!”

But for the most part, I find that fantasy movies don’t raise my bile the way science fiction movies do. How can big-budget science fiction films be so ambitious and so dumb at the same time, so filled with errors that no editor I’ve ever encountered (and that’s a lot of editors, including some incredibly lax ones) would let me get away with?

Uh…Carol just stopped by the desk. She said she heard me muttering and cursing and wondered what the problem was. I invited her to read a bit of this editorial over my shoulder.

*Sigh* Now she says she won’t sit in the same room with me when I’m writing about science fiction movies.

********************************************