Science fiction in film form

My dear supergee has wittily distilled his dissatisfaction with science fiction films over on his journal. Go read that and then come back for my comment.

While I think that there have been films which are not merely good science fiction films but good science fiction in film form, I will admit that I am partial to the observation that Ian Watson danced around in his memoir of working with Stanley Kubrick on the film which eventually became A.I.:

Making good science fiction in film form requires a degree of attention which is exhausting to all of those involved in the film. It requires a director and writer who will both wonder, "How do these toilets work in zero G?", and will do so while staying in each others' company for long periods of intense collaboration which will lead them to want to kill each other.

Now, some types of science fiction are easier to film than others, and I don't think it's a coincidence that the "alien among moderns" subgenre has produced several brilliant films--Brother from Another Planet, Man Facing Southeast, The Man Who Fell to Earth, The Day the Earth Stood Still--while film attempts at far-future space adventure tend to suck moose doots as science fiction. The less that the filmmaker has to do to establish the science-fictional mise-en-scene, the easier the film is going to be to make.

But that's not all there is to it. One of the things that supergee will readily admit is that he does not tend to think visually. A couple of years ago, Brooks Landon presented a speech at the ICFA which elaborated, very interestingly, on Annette Michelson's essay on 2001, "Bodies in Space". One of the themes of both critical works is that the visuals of a science fiction film can, and often do, encode science fictional invention in themselves--not just in the flashing lights and meaningless products on the shelves, but in the extrapolative visuals of the movements of bodies in zero-g. Actually, my favorite example of this in recent years was the computer screens in Minority Report: while there were parts of the computer function that made little literal sf sense, such as the super-diskettes, the gesture-based interface was inventive, alien, and actually communicated things about the characters using the computers. (The Tom Cruise character manipulates the files more boldly and more comfortably than his replacement does, which is not just a reflection of the fact that Cruise's character is The Hero.)

Joe Sutliff Sanders did a very good paper a couple of years back--I'm not sure if it was ever published--about how criticisms of the plot of The Matrix as "degenerating into mindless action sequences" were missing a crucial point: The action sequences which form the climax of the film are carefully constructed in a classic "rising line of action", revealing, one after another, deeper secrets about the characters and their role in the fictional world of the film--in short, that the action sequences themselves were science-fictional extrapolations of the situation, and that people who were approaching the film with the conception that when words stopped, so did the science fiction, were cheating themselves of a significant portion of the work.

Science fiction is hard to make, and good science fiction isn't just fiction with science stuff in it. Film is hard to make, and good film isn't just a prose story read out loud by people in appropriate costume. It's not surprising that the skills needed to make good science fiction and to make good film don't overlap as often as they should, but it's also not fair to science fiction film to look past its distinctive virtues and judge it by how well it reproduces the effects of prose science fiction.