Science fiction on the big screen is in a strange place these days. For the past couple of years, there have been several strains of cinematic sci-fi that have attempted to attract viewers with varying degrees of success: first, the action-oriented spectacles and visual effects extravaganzas that pay lip service to sci-fi ideas yet quickly shove them aside in favor of battling robots or futuristic chases; second, the movies that often employ many of the same techniques, but in favor of truly heady or at least thoughtful concepts; and last, the smaller independent features that are idea-heavy and use their limited resources to get those themes across in simpler terms.
Each of these threads has its pros and cons, but we have to admit we prefer our science fiction cinema to come equipped with something to tickle our brain and not just our eyes and ears. We’ve usually been disappointed the most when a movie sells itself as idea-based yet discards all that halfway through in favor of explosions and zooming ships. Too often, the major Hollywood studios sell sci-fi short, believing that fans don’t want anything more than a barrage of special effects – yet the success of certain films keeps proving them wrong.
Of course, we’ll always have stuff like the Transformers franchise, which uses genre templates in service of some of the most idiotic, shallow storytelling ever committed to the screen. But our expectations are already low for those films. When it came to genre film in 2013, there was a lot of hope associated with a handful of films that were going to marry spectacle with the kind of thought-provoking concepts usually only found in science fiction literature. Did that work out? Not exactly, but we still got some good genre films this year. They are:
1. Her: Writer/director Spike Jonze has always dabbled in the fantastic with his previous films, but he goes full science fiction here with poignant, awe-inspiring results, Joaquin Phoenix plays Theodore, a lonely, heartbroken writer in a future Los Angeles who is not over the end of his marriage when he purchases a new operating system named Samantha (voiced by Scarlett Johansson). Samantha is sentient and the two soon fall in love, raising questions about the nature of life, romance, relationships and ultimately existence itself. It’s beautiful, character-driven storytelling that also creates a complete world and expresses ideas about technology and humanity. It’s the best science fiction film of the year, and one of the best of the decade.
2. Gravity: Director Alfonso Cuaron created one of the great sci-fi films of the 2000s with Children of Men, and we held high hopes for this long-overdue epic as well. It’s as visually and viscerally stunning as the advance hype had hinted – about as close to feeling like we’re in space as moviegoers are likely to get – but falls short of greatness because its script and characters are so simple, so on the nose, that it never feels as transcendent or emotionally engaging as it could be. Still, it’s beautiful, at times haunting, and truly captures the majesty of the cosmos.
3. Oblivion: We know a lot of people did not like Oblivion, but we found it to be a satisfying and entertaining pulp experience and a much better effort that director Joseph Kosinski’s leaden debut, Tron: Legacy. We’re also aware that Oblivion is a mash-up of a lot of ideas taken from various other post-apocalyptic sci-fi stories, but somehow it works, thanks to Kosinski’s undeniably dazzling knack for striking visuals and the usual fully engaged performance from Tom Cruise. Kosinski has called the film his love letter to ‘70s sci-fi, and it may one day get the same kind of re-appreciation many of those movies did.
4. Iron Man Three: We thought we were getting a little tired of Robert Downey Jr.’s shtick as Tony Stark, but guess what? We were wrong. Coming just a year after The Avengers, Shane Black’s take on old Shellhead is smart, funny and strangely more intimate (even with toppling mountaintop mansions and so forth) than its predecessors, while still connected to them. Basically the story of one man battling PTSD – albeit brought on by an alien invasion – Iron Man Three also comments on media manipulation and corporate greed, while also being a fiercely feminist film and featuring the year’s single most jaw-dropping twist.
5. Upstream Color: Writer/director/star Shane Carruth’s long-awaited follow-up to his micro-budget time travel riddle, Primer, is even more cryptic, unsettling and multi-layered, playing tricks with perception, point of view, memory and chronology. In simple terms, the film is about two lost souls whose minds have been controlled and devastated through a bizarre experiment. But in the larger view, it’s about love, loss and identity, told in intelligent, surreal and even moving fashion.
6. The Hunger Games: Catching Fire: The second entry in the blockbuster series based on Suzanne Collins’ novels may not be quite as compelling as the first – it plays like a quasi-remake for much of its first two-thirds – but it’s still just as intelligent, emotionally intense (thanks especially to yet another tremendous performance by Jennifer Lawrence) and even more committed to the full exploration of its socially and politically ruinous dystopia. It really feels like a sci-fi film from a different era at times, which we offer as a compliment.
Films that were okay – reasonably entertaining but falling short or flawed in some areas – included Thor: The Dark World, After Earth, The Purge, The World’s End, Riddick, Europa Report and Man of Steel. Our biggest letdown of the year? That’s a three-way tie between Elysium, Pacific Rim and World War Z. Elysium left its potentially fascinating and relevant ideas behind in service of nonstop, mind-numbing, camera-shaking action, while Pacific Rim’s homage to kaiju films was hampered by a cliché-ridden script, a lack of impressive monsters and an uninspiring cast. We hate to say it, but it’s Guillermo Del Toro’s least effective film since Mimic. As for World War Z, we were just sad to see so little of the book we enjoyed so much make it to the screen.
The worst sci-fi film of 2013? That would be Star Trek Into Darkness, director J.J. Abrams’ attempt to destroy the old Star Trek in favor of his new, imbecilic version, one that featured youngsters named after the classic characters behaving like expats from a CW series, the wholesale dismissal of technological concepts inherent to the Trek universe (for instance, that you cannot beam across the galaxy or submerge a starship), the pointless revision of a classic villain, and the lifting of scenes from a classic Trek movie, only this time rendered dramatically meaningless. Surely this beloved franchise deserved better.
Finally, 2014 has its own slew of potential sci-fi greats in store for us, but the one we’re most excited about is Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar. The director of The Dark Knight and Inception doing hard sci-fi about the first voyage through a wormhole? We are there. And we’re also looking forward to the new Godzilla (the trailer gives us chills), Transcendence, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, X-Men: Days of Future Past, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Guardians of the Galaxy, Edge of Tomorrow and the Wachowskis’ Jupiter Ascending. 2014 could be a banner year for sci-fi on film – but we’ve said that before.