The sophistication of science-fiction movies

[mmcirvin]

Gary Farber compares the Matrix series to forties Astounding in intellectual sophistication, and therefore figures there's about a sixty- or seventy-year lag involved here. I don't think it's a monotonic progression, though. The Day The Earth Stood Still was loosely based on a classic Harry Bates story from 1940, and was about as intelligent, though its emphasis was different. Forbidden Planet would have made a really good Thirties print story, maybe from Astounding around 1938 or so. But most of the B-crap put out in the Fifties was about on the level of 19th-century penny dreadfuls.

The concurrent novel of 2001: A Space Odyssey would have been cutting-edge a decade earlier. Some of those lugubrious socially-relevant SF movies of the late Sixties and early Seventies were trying to mirror what was going on in print at the time, with varying results; the original Planet of the Apes wasn't as smart as it pretended to be, but the original Rollerball did pretty well, and George Lucas's THX 1138 kinda reminds me of Brunner, in a way. But Star Wars was an intentional throwback to the Thirties or even earlier (or, more accurately, to the Buster Crabbe movie serials that that stuff inspired), and the blockbuster science-fiction action movies of the 1980s and 1990s mostly followed suit.

There were exceptions; for my money Terminator 2 had about an early-1950s level of sophistication (this is where Harlan Ellison would start screaming that he wuz robbed) and was a smarter movie than The Matrix. Spielberg's science fiction was pretty intellectually primitive, regardless of source material, until the surprisingly solid Minority Report, which was based on a fifties Phil Dick story but reminded me more of the good stuff from Alfred Bester.

To see stuff that was really hip to what was going on in print science fiction of the same era (or even a few years earlier), believe it or not, you're better off looking at the history of TV, which has always been more of a writer's medium. The original Outer Limits (on a good week), The Prisoner, and Max Headroom are three examples I can think of off the top of my head. The space-opera shows always had more of a lag; the best Star Trek and Babylon 5 stories would have been at home in a good magazine of the Forties or Fifties, and that's not really a bad thing to say about them.

By the way: The recent restoration makes clear that in many ways, Metropolis was actually way ahead of the (Anglo-American) print genre of its time. I haven't read Thea von Harbou's novel, but I've heard that it's no great shakes.

Comments

[chicken-cem.livejournal.com]

You are right about Metropolis. That is a rare film indeed.

The dig you aimed at Harlan made me laugh. He's just SO full of himself. Don't get me wrong, I used to own pretty much everything he ever wrote, and liked it, but DUDE. He is way egotistical.

It is a pity that great stuff by authors like Ursula K. LeGuin don't get made into films. Then again, some stuff just turns out horrible in films and is better left in books alone.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

The Lathe of Heaven was made into a TV movie twice. But I haven't seen either version.

There's a strange celebrity effect that happens with science fiction authors' adaptations. Philip K. Dick wasn't much known except to science-fiction fans and a few other weirdos, until Blade Runner came out (which, unfortunately, was shortly after he died). Since then, there have been two other giant Hollywood productions based on his stories, two smaller ones that I can think of offhand (and probably more), and there's another one currently in production. Is it because Philip K. Dick was the best or most filmable author out there? No; he was really good, but terribly erratic, and most of the movies are based on minor works (Blade Runner itself being the great exception) and bear little relation to the source material anyway. It's because Blade Runner got his name out there, and turned him into an SF writer that movie people like. There are only a few whose names are even known to people who are not literary SF fans.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

And all this talk reminds me that, man, I would surely love to see a good movie adaptation of Bester, either The Stars My Destination or The Demolished Man. They would make hella good movies if treated respectfully. You could pitch the idea by claiming they were by Phil Dick, and nobody would be the wiser.

Bester

[darkphonics.livejournal.com]

Dude, I'm gonna have to agree with you whole-heartedly on this one. I just re-read 'The Stars My Destination' the other day and I think it could make one helluva movie in the right hands. One thing I worry about: Bester sucks ass at writing any sort of believable romantic relationships and should have left them out entirely. I can only imagine the horror that would result if some Hollywood dumdum attempted to actually make the romance a more significant part of the story, as they almost invariably do. You know what else I'd like to see? An epic television miniseries of 'A Fire Upon the Deep'. No single movie could handle it, but I love that book so very much, would be awesome to see a good adaptation of it.

Re: Bester

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

I agree with both of you that _TS,MD_ would kick ass as a movie-- his race across the derelict ship for a few more days of air could really grab an audience if directed well-- but they just made "The Count of Monte Cristo" within the last year, and _TS,MD_ borrows pretty heavily from it, much more than if _Count_ is merely an archetype for revenge stories like Bester's. In the movie, when Dantes arrived by balloon, all I could think of "Hey, which one's the radioactive guy?"

Another problem is that I suspect that if a movie audience found out how Gully Foyle really got onto the derelict ship, they might not believe it; it might not be a sufficiently sophisticated solution.

However, I may have figured out something; next post.

Re: Bester

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

Years ago, I read David Brin's _Glory Season_ and Neal Stephenson's _The Diamond Age_ pretty much one after the other, and I was struck by the similarity of two scenes: in each book, a young female protagonist ended up in a prison cell, and they could communicate with another person in the prison using a novel code and method. In _Glory Season_, the character communicated using a gameboard that plays "Life" (alife) (and it is her introduction IIRC to another protagonist), and in _The Diamond Age_, the young woman is using the primer, which has a character imprisoned and she can communicate with someone far above her, using switches inside a long chain that gets lowered into her cell. In both cases, the women become brilliant at life/binary coding. Then they use their skills to defeat the Man (or in _Glory Season_, the Woman), etc.

I asked around, and the fact that two contemporary books would come up with such similar scenes unless one read the other (which was possible from what I worked out using publication dates, though now I can't remember who could've read whom) or more likely because both authors had picked up the concept from history or classic fiction. I figured if that was true, then simply asking lots of people would eventually produce a lead. But it didn't, so I dropped it.

It occurred to me recently that Bester did this too, though I don't recall there being as much educating going on, when Foyle was in the underground prison. That book, of course, goes back to Hugo's Monte Cristo prison, which used a much more direct method of putting two prisoners, the teacher and student, together. So now I'm thinking that unless Hugo had a predecessor, perhaps he was the source of all three. (Or maybe Brin or Stephenson cribbed off of Bester a little.) Q.E. more-or-less D.

[chicken-cem.livejournal.com]

I recall there being one or more Philip K. Dick stories in Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions anthologies. For that reason, I tend to think of him as a short story writer, not a novelist. Skewed, I know.

And I also didn't know that Blade Runner was his. Maybe not a good test case, though, since I read every SF book I could get my hands on from the age of 11 through about 19.

I guess I wouldn't think Lathe of Heaven ought to be the first work anyone thinks of using to make a movie, out of all LeGuin's works. I would consider books like The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed, and The Word for World is Forest as better works overall.

Marion Zimmer Bradley is similar. I like then Darkover universe better than Mists of Avalon. Not that I especially minded the adaption of Mists.