20
votes
Space horror: Is it dead?
Prometheus (2012), Alien: Covenant (2017), Life (2017), The Cloverfield Paradox (2018), you name it. Why is everyone in the team is a complete incompetent buffoon? Why is the science behind the films so bad? Why do the protagonists do stupid crap? The crew from Alien IV looks like geniuses compared to these people.
Am I the only one who is seriously disturbed by this trend?
Blame Hollywood. They'll reduce any trend to the most derivative, boring, mass-market drivel so they can churn it out on an assembly line without any thought or effort going into it. Any groundbreaking film will generate a long tail of shitty clones that get dumber and dumber every year until they finally fizzle out.
We're in the middle of the superhero-craze right now and that's largely replaced science fiction cinema. The latest star trek films make for fine popcorn-munching action movies, but calling them 'science fiction' is an insult to the genre. Star Wars has never been science fiction, it's fantasy with lasers, space ships, ghosts, and glowing swords. It's sad that the fucking Orville has better science fiction elements in it than we've seen in most media lately.
I have Altered Carbon and The Expanse sitting on my server waiting to watch and I'm hoping they can restore a little of my faith in the genre. They'll lose points right out of the gate for grisly dystopias, though. Seems like everyone making scifi is just too terrified to look up over the horizon and see the future. All they want to do is stare at their feet and contemplate the end times. I think we've overdosed on the dystopian bullshit - the real story of science is the antithesis of that mentality, but you'd never know it from our media.
The last horror-element scifi films I remember seeing and enjoying were Solaris and Event Horizon (which was really just an over-the-top Hellraiser homage). Moon was pretty good too. Sunshine was mildly interesting with the left-field genre changeover during the last third. Cabin in the Woods gets a plus just for daring to subvert the tropes and stay original. Nothing has ever topped Alien, to this day it's the finest example of the genre. Can't say the same for the endlessly shitter chain of sequels it spawned.
Black Mirror has a handful of good, old-school Twilight Zone styled horror episodes that are better than any scifi horror film lately. Edge of Tomorrow was pretty good if you can stand Cruise movies. Interstellar was alright, though they were stretching the science pretty thin towards the end. The Martian remains the best modern proper science fiction film I've seen.
Everything has become tropes now. No one reads any science, all they know when they start writing is the same bullshit tropes that have been hammered into us by television and film since the 80s - and almost without exception, they are total unscientific bullshit. If that's all you've got in your head, sorry, you aren't mentally capable of creating proper science fiction.
The worst part is the second you accept anti-science like faster than light travel and anti-gravity, you're losing the vital limits that technology can place on the plot. It makes everything too easy. I've turned into quite the grumpy old man on this topic. :P
But faster-than-light travel is a necessary device for a lot of science fiction. You can't have aliens without some way of getting from one star to another to meet them - and cold-sleep or generation ships just won't cut it (although generation ships do open up other story-telling possibilities). How do you form interstellar treaties or start interstellar trade if the government that put you on a ship has been replaced by the time you wake up at your destination? FTL is necessary for (most) aliens.
However, it looks like you're probably in the hard sci-fi camp, possibly even the mundane sci-fi camp, which means that of course faster-than-light travel isn't acceptable. I can see the logic of that sort of thinking, but I like aliens in my science fiction, so I'll accept breaking science in this way.
I'm planning to go for the wormhole / multi-dimensional angle but make it hard to do. That angle seems woefully underused and it is largely unexplored in scifi. My favorite examples are the jumpgates/hyperspace in B5, and also Farscape had a lot of fun with it. I've been thinking all you really need to take the gloves off and have some real fun is wormholes that work just well enough for communication and maybe a little matter transfer (nothing a ship or complex structure or life form could survive). That's all you really need to beat nature's distance hurdle and shrink the distances between the stars to trivialities. It keeps interesting limits in place too. Von Neumann probes get the rest done if they can carry those endpoints outward. Clarke did this the best imo with his Monoliths.
Scifi is a bit too liberal in the number of aliens and limiting in their scope for my tastes. I like the universe more like a desert, with vast distances between instances of long-term successful intelligence. Lots more dead worlds and failed civilizations along the road between them littered around the cosmos like warning signs. I really liked the aliens in The Arrival, that was a refreshingly cool take on what might be waiting out there.
I also like the idea of exploring alternate 'dimensions' of various forms and treating each like a new frontier. Dark matter and energy being effects of gravity from matter in those other dimensions bleeding into our own and with gravity providing the super-structure of the universe across dimensions. The tricky part of this is, how exactly do you cross over from one physics paradigm to another and survive the trip? Been pondering that for a while. :)
I definitely favor the hard scifi camp for the basics and the limits. Once that basis is in place I'm much more open to clever ways around nature's little challenges, and there's plenty in modern physics to draw from on how those things might be possible. FTL is one I have a hard time with since that's as solid as science gets. It keeps things real, keeps them slow, keeps the charm of distance intact.
My co-mod @kraetos can explain this better than me, but what you're suggesting is just as science-breaking as warp drive. To quote something he posted just yesterday: "Given two different inertial frames of reference, if you can send information from one to the other faster than light, then you can send information back in time. If you can send information back in time then you circumvent causality, and if you can do that, everything falls apart."
If you're happy to send information instantaneously from one point in space to another, I don't see why travelling there at less-than-instantaneous speeds is such a hard pill to swallow.
No. That just means we could communicate with other species in real-time. It doesn't let us travel anywhere. This interaction you & I are having is about the same as we'd get through your hypothetical wormhole-telephone. Is this all you want your science-fiction to be: interstellar pen-pals sending messages to each other?
I have always found this hyper-literalist idea that science fiction isn't allowed to be fictional very boring and restrictive. I mean, sure, I liked 'The Martian', but it also felt very much like an engineering textbook at times. Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy was great. But they're the exception rather than the rule. I want my science fiction to have a larger canvas than just reality. I want fiction. Otherwise, I'd just re-read Stephen Hawking's 'A Brief History of Time'.
Even the first modern science-fiction book broke the laws of physics by using electrical current to animate a body made of parts of corpses. Science fiction is about breaking the rules of science (albeit some types do it more plausibly than others).
I don't find distance charming. If you can't go places and meet people, what's the point? I want to meet different cultures and experience different places - and you can't do that via a virtual telephone line strung through a wormhole.
I'm not. Making a tunnel barely suitable for a laser communication pulse that's miles of 'actual' distance long, yet folds space across thousands of light years is not instantaneous, so causality is flawlessly preserved. This is what I mean about keeping it real - turns out reality isn't all that limiting. That's why learning some actual science matters and makes it better. The energy requirements for this kind of tech are rather daunting, but the tech itself provides the solution to that problem - and another tasty source of resource depletion to frustrate advanced civilization with later on down the line. I love solutions that replace old problems with new problems. ;)
You're lacking imagination. :) If you can send information, then you can send anything and that's a fact. It's just a matter of scale, energy requirements, computational complexity handling, and engineering cleverness. I've always wondered why Star Trek bothered with ships at all when transporters make that form of space travel redundant, expensive, and inefficient as hell by comparison. It also makes all of their medical tech just as pointless and redundant, since you could just recreate the body parts from the last transporter scan. I kinda laughed when trans-warp beaming showed up in JJ's first movie, thinking 'it's about time someone noticed.'
My post-singularity humans look and act a lot more like ancient greek wizards than post-techno gods. Once you've made reality into your bitch with femtotech, are using attotech color-quark computation, and tapping the cores of stars with space folding for your energy source, the stars are no further away than Wal-mart, and FTL is unnecessary. Plus you get a bonus of an expanding lightspeed-probe discovery horizon bringing in new places every day at a geometrically increasing rate.
Straight to the end of the universe and into the next one, visiting every planet within an expansion-restricted light-cone is hardly limiting - it's nearly infinite. You just have to wait a long time for the probes to reach new places and build the highway that opens them up and links them back to the network - and all without a single scrap of FTL bullshit. That time delay in discovery is so deliciously vital to the story.
I've already mapped out concepts for a couple of alien civs, but they come much, much later once humanity is finished cleaning up its own bullshit at home and has switched into explorer mode. None will have anything at all in common with humans (because I find that boring as fuck and done to death, frankly). My favorite one I can't wait to get started on is the post-grey-goo scenario. A tech-savvy species faced with extinction (thanks to climate destabilization of their own making) that unleashes a nanotech simple cell life form equivalent because at least that is something alive they can leave behind. Then run that life form through a couple million years of natural selection and see what comes out the other side. That'd be in the second series of novels, well post-singularity. Can't really start there. I do think that'll be the first one my explorers discover - or perhaps it'll discover them.
I kinda like the idea of using the alien civs as my little experiments in dystopias. That's where my warnings about the future will be. Humans make it, and then learn just how rare, lucky, and vital they are when they see how many didn't, or how many lost the best of themselves. There's a lot of work out there for humans to do. It's a big damn garden and it needs caretakers. ;)
I think we like very different things in our science fiction. :)
That's very likely. I like the usual stuff too, but it's become guilty-pleasure material for me as of late, like the CW's DC-superhero shows.
Doesn’t need to be instantaneous to run afoul of causality. Just needs to be faster than light. An observer moving near light speed parallel to the path of your wormhole might see the sender get a reply from the recipient before the sender sends the intial message.
As to things not being grounded in science not being worthwhile, how much do you stand behind that? It's pretty bold to say something like that which writes off everything from Frankenstein to Star Trek to, like, Ghost in the Shell.
Why can't science fiction be a genre that largely asks "if science gets us here, what does that mean?" without concerning itself with if that's possible with what we know now? What's wrong with just using science as an excuse for setting up a moral or ethical question you want to tackle?
Nothing wrong with only liking hard science fiction, but suggesting that anyone who breaks away from that isn't smart enough for their work to be "true" seems unnecessary. Still, I'm curious where that hardcore of a preference comes from.
I don't consider it worthless, but I do consider it less-than, since it's putting incorrect notions about science in people's heads and that to me seems like it's stunting our collective imaginations at the expense of selling popcorn. I can hardly fault the classics like Frankenstein since they came from a time when we knew so much less and science itself was a much broader, more wondrous canvas for the imagination. We know far more now, though, and the scifi I'm most attracted to makes an attempt at putting more true things on display. Nature is vastly more interesting and challenging than the caricatures of her we present in our media. I have some measure of faith that reality will always top anything we can dream up - the truth will be stranger and better than the fictions.
When everyone whips out laser blasters and the producers cross their fingers hoping we don't notice we're watching a cheesy western or 50s war serial, I can't help but be a bit disappointed. I enjoyed that stuff as much as anyone when I was a kid, but I want more now - a lot more. I'd like scifi to start getting us to dream big and dream well about the future again, instead of browbeating us with hopeless futures and dramatic lens flares shining on silly space battles between tin cans in space. Someone has to dare to be optimistic again. Star Trek held that mantle once but they've lost the thread and I think that lessens us.
I get what you mean with the lack of ambition and how sci fi is always looking backwards, but it feels like you're setting up this dichotomy where not following scientific fact = making silly children's Star Warsy stuff, which seems a bit off.
Why shove it into stories and ideas where it provides nothing, or would distract from the point? When Star Trek is busy talking about race and gender and leveraging the future to force viewers to think big picture about those issues...does being hand-wavey about how the different species present in an episode got there necessarily matter? I don't think any extra scientific fact changes what is being said in Frankenstein, nor does it rely on the possibility of its plot being true in a literal sense.
I know that you're also saying that this is what matters to you which is still totally fine, but it seems like it's at least partially coming from some assumptions about what art has to be to be good. Or at least about what non-hard sci fi is. I think sci fi can say a lot of great things that are just as valuable as any other kind of art or literature, and that goes far beyond only the things concrete and grounded sci fi accomplishes. I realize I'm basically just telling you why you should like different things than you do at this point, so I'll stop.
A side note: As much as I appreciate cyberpunk in particular because the future we're already well into is horrifying and we can't let up on pointing that out, I do find myself missing any sort of optimistic sci-fi that deals with the terrible things we have in the present through showing us a world that already has solved them. Both have their place, but god we are lacking on the positive stuff. I don't blame anyone either, it's hard to be positive.
In my opinion, it looks like you want less. You don't want E.E. Smith's intergalactic space operas. You don't want Isaac Asimov's Galactic Empire. You don't want Gene Roddenberry's United Federation of Planets. You don't want anything large or imaginative. You want the scale reduced to humans only, doing only the things we're able to do today, and going only to places we can reach by slower-than-light rocket. That seems like a very small limited canvas on which to draw science fiction.
I totally agree.
But optimistic science fiction is not limited to mundane science fiction, and nor is mundane sci-fi inherently optimistic. Kim Stanley Robinson's 'Aurora', about a sub-light generation ship, is absolutely depressing. Give me a successful FTL colony ship any day!
I'm planning on going well beyond anything they ever dreamed up, and since it's going to be far harder to get there, and exist in a much less forgiving universe, it's going to mean so very much more. Star Trek was handicapped by being a television show and having a budget. Too many human aliens that were just rehashes of historical human factions. Thankfully novels don't have such creative constraints.
Alien had both of those though. There's not a limited amount of media that can be produced. There's enough room for hard and soft sci-fi. Even though you may lose some limits by having fantastic technology in a story, you also open up new possibilities.
My favorite sci fi series is The Culture series by Iain Banks. It involves a society of hedonistic carefree humans and artificial hyper-intelligences with sarcastic senses of humor piloting hundreds of kilometer long ships full of hundreds of millions of people that can get to other galaxies in a matter of years with hulls made of invisible force fields. Is the technology realistic? Maybe, but probably not. It enables great stories though. That's what the objective is, after all.
It has been a while since I watched 'Alien' that one and only time, but I'm pretty sure it did not have faster-than-light travel. One of the plot points was that the crew of the spaceship were in cold sleep for the duration of their trip - and cold sleep is a fictional technology sci-fi writers use to keep their characters alive when they're travelling for many years at slower than light-speed.
If you're travelling at sub-light speeds to the Alpha Centauri system, for example, then the minimum travel time is about 4 years, and the actual travel time is probably much longer. One way of dealing with this is to put the crew into suspended animation or cold sleep for the years it takes to travel between stars at sub-light speeds.
If that ship had an FTL drive, there would have been no need for the crew to be in cold-sleep at the start of the movie.
Time dilation also helps. You can travel hundreds of light years and only experience a couple subjective years of time on the ship itself. Physics requires you to trade off time for speed, so the closer to light speed you get, the less time passes for you. Photons themselves do not experience time - for them, any trip of any distance is truly instantaneous. Light/time is a continuum and a tradeoff, and I'd like to see that more strongly represented in scifi. Interstellar did a great job with it.
The cryosleep is beyond modern technology, but still within the realm of possibility providing nanotech and biotech is developed that can prevent and repair the damage caused. Nature has left us 4 billion years of clever hacks sitting around out there to learn from, so we're not starting from scratch - we're only just learning how to read the code now. That frontier is going to get crazy fun. We're looking at curing aging, cancer, all forms of natural disease and near total immunity to radiation damage with that kind of tech. I view that sort of medical advancement as a requirement for becoming a spacefaring race. Our biology needs upgrades to cope with the rigors of the journey.
That's not true. It would be useful to have cold sleep for any long duration trip. It doesn't have to be sub-lightspeed. It would be pretty difficult to maintain an interstellar colonial civilization as depicted in the alien universe without FTL travel. By the time you got word that there was an issue and sent marines to the closest star systems, most people would have forgotten who the marines even were. Plus, they mention they're traveling at lightspeed in the script for the movie.
I can tell you right now that The Expanse is a top-notch science fiction show. It's got some dystopian elements, though.
"Realistically smart" people in horror movies would mostly stay clear of troubles and the movie would end in 10 minutes.
Also these movies are often made to be very entertaining, suitable for many audiences including teens who like action, and simple enough to enjoy mindlessly.
And thanks for movies to check out. I watched only the first two. They still were good enough, better than some kind of AVP Requiem or numerous horror B movies from the 80s about giant <animal_species>.
I would say people in Alien and Alien³ were realistically smart, and those films were good. Pitch Black (aka That First Riddick Movie) is another example. I don't remember Event Horizon that well, but I don't think it had that much stupidity. So please allow me to disagree here.
As for recommendations, if you want a good space thriller, do watch Gravity. I think it's the best space film of the XXI century so far.
Yes those were serious. Very atmospheric. Aliens though was a great blockbuster and it's the most iconic out of these for me. Maybe also due to memories of watching it as a kid on VHS with a friend and being blown away.
I was typing Gravity recommendation for you but then thought it wasn't horror enough. A decent movie, dramatic, but it still had its noticeable load of characters and physics "nonsense".
It's amazing how tastes can be different, and I hope not too many people in this topic will spit out their breakfasts if I say let's say that's Star Trek Into Darkness.
I can always watch Alien. I loved the fact that they get into "Ripley's next in command when the Captain is off the ship," and the fact that the android is the one who lets the infected person back onto the ship, against her orders. That's the kind of realism I like to see, although the medical quarters seem a bit of a joke looking back now, and the sheer size of the ship seems silly when you think about conservation of materials and getting all that into space—although that can be forgiven if we assume space-based installations mining asteroids and similar.
I was 12 when that movie was released, fresh off the Star Wars high, and let me tell you, that movie was a damn shock to the audience. I saw it at least three times in the theater, knowing damn well my mother would have had a fit if she'd known the content.
I'm not eating, but my jaw literally dropped when I read this. 'Into Darkness' is not even the best movie in the rebooted 'Star Trek' franchise, let alone the best science fiction movie of the past 20 years. Far from it - it's the worst movie ever in the whole Trek franchise (even including 'Final Frontier' and 'Nemesis' from last century).
I know this is such a controversial opinion. Back in 2013 I picked an unknown space movie with shady name, and very surprisingly I was somehow deeply touched. The movie not only looked great but it had something more noble and human than many others scifi movies, the characters were instantly likeable, and it had the lessons of becoming better, the message. And it ended up opening a magnificent new world of Star Trek for me. Since then I watched everything else with the original crew + many other Treks, all movies and even the fan made Star Trek Continues, and there were some older movies and episodes greater than Into Darkness for sure, but those were all in the 20th century (the first 4 of them were as good or better). The other Trek movies of the 21st century, especially the Next Generation ones, felt less meaningful than Into Darkness.
Into Darkness is hard to like because it's a shitty inversion of a vastly superior film - Wrath of Khan. That's where the trekkie hate comes from and I get it. The first film was one massive nonsensical abortion of a plot. I liked Beyond the best, at least that one tried to put a bit of the trek philosophy back into the film.
If you really want to have your eyes opened to what's possible using scifi to tell human stories and explore the human condition, I'd urge you to watch Babylon 5. That's more 'trek' in spirit than 'trek' itself has ever been, and while not a dystopia, it's a far less kind and more mysterious universe than Trek presents. There's plenty of cheese, it's far from perfect especially during the first season, but some of those episodes hit home like sledgehammers. Seasons 2.5-4 are like the gold standard for me in getting that human element right. I also prefer the epic 5-year story to Trek's more episodic nature. Most B5 eps don't work at all out of order. If you decide to check it out, use this guide to get the order right. 'In The Beginning' is all you need to watch to know if you'll be able to get into it - if nothing in that grabs you, the series likely won't either. ;)
That movie is probably more "right" than Into Darkness, but it suffered from the feel of a B movie and from being a spiritual step back after The Motion Picture. The latter is the pure Star Trek in its best, with very cerebral plot, extraordinary soundtrack and rich visuals for its time, and then it's followed with a visually poorly aged villain war movie with red uniforms... Yeah it still had good things, and so did Into Darkness which is a remake, worse in some parts and better in other ones.
Thanks. I had started watching it a while ago but maybe it's not on my frequency. It's just... even the very first Star Trek episode made in 1964 captivated with its signature Trek charm, but Babylon 5 felt like a "common" TV show, the story, pacing, the characters and visuals didn't "click" so far. I'll still keep the movie from the guide in watchlist.
If I'm being charitable... I suppose I can see how a total newcomer to Star Trek might find some redeeming features about 'Into Darkness'. But if you've seen 'The Wrath of Khan', then 'Into Darkness' is nothing but a perverted abomination of a much worthier original.