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Why Carol Won't Sit Next To Me At Science Fiction Movies

Written by Mike Resnick

Carol has a high threshold for embarrassment. You can't be married to me for 45 years and not have one. But recently she has announced that she will no longer sit next to me at science fiction movies, that indeed she will sit on the far side of the theater and do her very best to pretend that she doesn't know me.

She's right. I'm just not much fun to be around at science fiction movies. I don't know quite how this came about. I used to love them when I was growing up. I forgave them their lack of special effects and their B-movie casts and budgets. Okay, so Them paid no attention to the square-cube law; except for that, it was as well-handled as one could possibly want. And maybe The Thing wasn't quite what John Campbell had in mind when he wrote "Who Goes There?", but it was treated like science fiction rather than horror (the same cannot be said for the big-budget remake), and the overall ambience was rational. As for Forbidden Planet, nothing I've seen in the last 50 years has stirred my sense of wonder quite as much as Walter Pidgeon's guided tour of the wonders of the Krell. A decade and a half later Stanley Kubrick made a trio of wildly differing but excellent science fiction movies—Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and A Clockwork Orange—each of which treated the field with respect.

Then, just about the time I stopped dabbling at it and became a full-time science fiction writer, Hollywood started turning out one intellectually insulting science fiction movie after another. I mean, these things were almost dumber than network television shows. And I started muttering—louder and louder with each movie, Carol assures me—things like "No editor paying 3 cents a word for the most debased science fiction magazine in the world would let me get away with that!" Before long audiences would pay more attention to my rantings than to the movies.

I keep hearing that science fiction movies are getting better, that now that George Lucas has shown what could be done on the big screen we no longer have anything to be ashamed of when comparing ourselves to other genres.

That makes me mutter even louder.

So let me get it off my chest, which is a figure of speech, because actually the stupidity of science fiction movies is much more likely to eat a hole in my stomach lining.

And let me add a pair of stipulations:

First, I'm only interested in movies that aspired to be arch-bishop, which is to say, movies with major budgets and major talent, efforts that really and truly meant to be good movies. I will not consider such epics as Space Sluts in the Slammer (yes, it really exists), as it seems not unreasonable to assume it was never meant to be a contender for the year-end awards.

Second, when I speak of stupidities, I'm not talking about the nit-picking that goes on in outraged letter columns or esoteric fanzines. If the math or science are wrong only in areas that scientists, mathematicians, or obsessive science fiction fans would find fault with, I'll ignore it. If George Lucas doesn't know what a parsec is, or Gene Roddenberry and his successors think you can hear a ship whiz by in space, I'm willing to forgive and forget.

So what's left?

Well, let's start with Star Wars. First, has no one except me noticed that it's not pro-democracy but pro-royalty? I mean, all this fighting to depose the Emperor isn't done to give the man on the street (or the planet) a vote; it's to put Princess Leia on the throne and let her rule the galaxy instead of him, which is an improvement only in matter of degree. And it drives me crazy that in 1991 we could put a smart bomb down a chimney, and that in 2002 we could hit a target at 450 miles, but that computerized handguns and other weaponry can't hit a Skywalker or a Solo at 25 paces.

Return of the Jedi? Doesn't it bother anyone else that Adolf Hitler—excuse me; Darth Vader—the slaughterer of a couple of hundred million innocent men and women, becomes a Good Guy solely because he's Luke's father? (Or maybe I should say, solely because we know he’s Luke’s father. After all, he was Luke’s father in the first two films, but we didn’t know it and hence he was a villain.)

And what could be sillier than that final scene, where Luke looks up and sees Yoda and the shades of Darth Vader and Obi-Wan Kenobi smiling at him. That was too much even for Carol, whose first comment on leaving the theater was, "Poor Luke! Wherever he goes from now on, he's a table for four."

Then along came E.T., which, for a few years at least, was the highest-grossing film of all time, until replaced by an even dumber one.

You think it wasn't that intellectually insulting? Let's consider the plot of that billion-dollar grosser, shall we?

1. If E.T. can fly/teleport, why doesn't he do so at the beginning of the film, when he's about to be left behind? (Answer: because this is what James Blish used to call an idiot plot, which is to say if everyone doesn't act like an idiot you've got no story.)

2. Remember the scene where E. T. gets drunk? Sure you do. Now think of the next scene. What mother of teenaged children walks through a kitchen littered with empty beer cans and doesn't notice them? (Answer: in all the world, probably only this one.) This is the blunder that started me muttering loud enough to disturb other moviegoers for the first time.

3. While we're on the subject of the mother and the kitchen, what is a woman with an unexceptional day job doing living in an $900,000 house in one of the posher parts of the Los Angeles area? (Even I don't have an answer to that.)

4. Why does E.T. die? (Answer: so he can come back to life.)

5. Why does E.T. un-die? (Still awaiting an answer, even a silly one, for this.)

6. When E.T. finally calls home, the lights in the room don't even flicker. I'm no scientist, but I'd have figured the power required to reach a ship traveling away from us at light speeds would have shorted out the whole city.

Cheap shots, Resnick (I hear you say); you're purposely avoiding the films that were aimed at an adult audience, films like Blade Runner and Signs, for example.

All right. Let's take Blade Runner (which borrowed its title from an old Alan E. Nourse novel and has neither a blade nor a runner in the whole damned movie). Great future Los Angeles; it really put you there. Nice enough acting jobs, even if Harrison Ford was a little wooden. Wonderful sets, costumes, effects.

But the premise is dumber than dirt. We are told up front that the androids are going to expire in two weeks—so why in the world is Harrison Ford risking his life to hunt them down when he could just go fishing for 14 days and then pick up their lifeless bodies?

But that premise looks positively brilliant compared to the critically-acclaimed Mel Gibson movie Signs, which grossed about half a billion dollars worldwide a few short years ago.

Consider: would you travel 50 trillion miles or so for a little snack? That's what the aliens did. If they're here for any other reason except to eat people, the film never says so.

Okay, let's leave aside how much they're paying in terms of time and energy to come all this way just to eat us for lunch. What is the one thing we know will kill them? Water (which also killed the Wicked Witch of the West, a comparison that was not lost on some perceptive viewers). And what are human beings composed of? More than 90% water.

So the aliens come all this way to poison themselves (and then forget to die until someone hits them with a baseball bat, which Hollywood thinks is almost as devastating a weapon against aliens of indeterminate physical abilities as a glowing sword.)

By now I didn't just mutter in the theater, I yelled at the screenwriters (who, being 3,000 miles away, probably didn't hear me.) But I figured my vocalizing would soon come to an end. After all, we all knew that the sequel to The Matrix would show the world what real science fiction was like; it was the most awaited movie since Lucas' all-but-unwatchable sequels to the original Star Wars trilogy.

So along comes The Matrix Retarded . . . uh, sorry, make that Reloaded. You've got this hero, Neo, with godlike powers. He can fly as fast and far as Superman. He can stop a hail of bullets or even bombs in mid-flight just by holding up his hand. He's really quite remarkable, even if he never changes expression.

So does he fly out of harm's way when a hundred Agent Smiths attack him? Of course not. Does he hold up his hand and freeze them in mid-charge? Of course not. Can Neo be hurt? No. Can Agent Smith be hurt? No. So why do they constantly indulge in all these easily avoidable, redundant, and incredibly stupid fights?

Later the creator of the Matrix explains that the first Matrix was perfect. It only had three or four flaws, which is why he built five more versions of it. Uh . . . excuse me, but that's not that way my dictionary defines "perfect."

You want more foolishness? The whole world runs on computers, which means the whole world is powered by electricity to a far greater extent than America is at this moment. So why is the underground city lit only by burning torches?

I hit J above high C explaining to the screen what the least competent science fiction editor in the world would say to the writer who tried to pawn The Matrix Reloaded off on him.

Now, you'd figure Stephen Spielberg could make a good science fiction movie, wouldn't you? I mean, he's the most powerful director in Hollywood's history. Surely if he wanted to spend a few million dollars correcting flaws in the film before releasing it to the public, no one would dare say him nay.

So he makes Minority Report, and to insure the box office receipts he gets Tom Cruise to star in it and announces that it's based on a Philip K. Dick story. (Dick is currently Hollywood's favorite flavor of "sci-fi" writer, this in spite of the fact that nothing adapted from his work bears more than a passing resemblance to it.)

And what do we get for all this clout?

Well, for starters, we get a future less than half a century from now in which the Supreme Court has no objection to throwing people in jail for planning crimes.

We get a scene where Tom Cruise escapes from the authorities by climbing into a car that's coming off an assembly line and driving away in it. That one really got me muttering at a hundred-decibel level. Has anyone ever seen a car come off an assembly line with a full tank of gas?

We are told that the three seers/mutants/whatever-they-are can only foresee capital crimes. Even bank robberies slip beneath their psychic radar. But in a crucial scene, one of them predicts or foresees a necessary rainstorm. (I hit 120 decibels on that one.)

It's also explained that their powers have physical limits. If they're in Washington, D.C., they can't foresee a crime in, say, Wilmington, Delaware. But the villain of the piece, who knows their abilities and limitations better than anyone, plans to use them to control the entire nation, which the last time I looked at a map extends even beyond Delaware. (140 decibels that time.)

Okay, I'm too serious. These are just entertainments. I should go see one made from a comic book—Hollywood's Intellectual Source Material Of Choice these days—and just sit back and enjoy it.

Good advice. So we went to see Hulk. You all know the story; it's swiped from enough science fictional sources. I didn't mind the poor animation. I didn't mind the idiot plot that had Bruce Banner's father responsible for his affliction. I didn't mind this; I didn't mind that. Then we came to Thunderbolt Ross, the 5-star general—and suddenly I was muttering again.

I was willing