hey, scifi-space-dramas!
Jun. 23rd, 2009 08:34 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
intertribalWhy must you be all the same?
Too many times have I seen the following:
Don't let the picture fool you. This space movie has nothing to do with space.
I mean, even their psychological issues are all the same. Both Solaris and Event Horizon featured dead wives, Virtuality apparently features "a personal tragedy" endured by the captain and his wife, which I'm guessing means a dead child (there was one of those on Solaris too). And I refuse to believe that everyone in the world, when shot out into space, would have the same issues.
But the bigger problem is that this type of story runs into the danger of not using the canvas of space. Event Horizon kind of does it, although the whole movie could be taking place on Earth and be about the gates from hell as far as I can tell. Solaris manages to do it - barely - by saying, oh, it's the planet doing it. But that's really not much different from Sphere - another orb from space causing psychological distress - and Sphere took place at the bottom of the ocean. Yes, yes, the isolation is the same, but isn't space more than just the isolation? That seems like such a frightened, conservative perspective to take on space travel. I'm not saying every space movie has to be Star Trek, but space isn't a void - if it was, why would the astronauts be there at all? - and I wouldn't mind more space-dramas that actually dealt with space instead of using it as a mirror for their protagonists. You know, Contact suffers from this too (and I love Contact). She goes into space and it's all about her dead father! Come on!
Like the producer of Virtuality says, "this isn't about outer space so much as it's about inner space, and that's an infinitely more terrifying place to travel." But I want to watch a movie about space, man! Why did you put it in space? Why didn't you just lock them in a room with a virtual reality chamber? Besides, there's something to be said about the limitations of examining ones' inner space, alone, as a plot. Sunshine was great partly because it had a plot, and in context of the plot, the characters' issues (no dead wives or dead children to haunt them, the issues were much more, ahem, complex than that) actually feel real and powerful. But I've never been big on "watch people go crazy" as a plot in and of itself.
Too many times have I seen the following:
- the crew members start hallucinating
- about their dead relatives back home
- and their marital issues
- and learn that they cannot run away from their problems even in space
Don't let the picture fool you. This space movie has nothing to do with space.
I mean, even their psychological issues are all the same. Both Solaris and Event Horizon featured dead wives, Virtuality apparently features "a personal tragedy" endured by the captain and his wife, which I'm guessing means a dead child (there was one of those on Solaris too). And I refuse to believe that everyone in the world, when shot out into space, would have the same issues.
But the bigger problem is that this type of story runs into the danger of not using the canvas of space. Event Horizon kind of does it, although the whole movie could be taking place on Earth and be about the gates from hell as far as I can tell. Solaris manages to do it - barely - by saying, oh, it's the planet doing it. But that's really not much different from Sphere - another orb from space causing psychological distress - and Sphere took place at the bottom of the ocean. Yes, yes, the isolation is the same, but isn't space more than just the isolation? That seems like such a frightened, conservative perspective to take on space travel. I'm not saying every space movie has to be Star Trek, but space isn't a void - if it was, why would the astronauts be there at all? - and I wouldn't mind more space-dramas that actually dealt with space instead of using it as a mirror for their protagonists. You know, Contact suffers from this too (and I love Contact). She goes into space and it's all about her dead father! Come on!
Like the producer of Virtuality says, "this isn't about outer space so much as it's about inner space, and that's an infinitely more terrifying place to travel." But I want to watch a movie about space, man! Why did you put it in space? Why didn't you just lock them in a room with a virtual reality chamber? Besides, there's something to be said about the limitations of examining ones' inner space, alone, as a plot. Sunshine was great partly because it had a plot, and in context of the plot, the characters' issues (no dead wives or dead children to haunt them, the issues were much more, ahem, complex than that) actually feel real and powerful. But I've never been big on "watch people go crazy" as a plot in and of itself.
