I’ve been teasing this for a while, and it’s finally here: a new section at Flick Filosopher examining science fiction films of the 21st century, now that we’re, you know, living in science-fictional times.
Well, if you’re of a certain age, these feel like science-fictional times. There are people are alive today — almost grown-up people! — who have no memory of life before entertainment on demand, free international video calls, and a planet on fire. But I was born in 1969, and came of age in the 1980s. I remember my family’s first color TV, in the late 70s. I remember my first home computer and our first VCR, in the early-mid 80s. I remember my first cell phone, and my first web site, in the late 90s… when I was almost 30 years old. Much that we take for granted today feels like science fiction for people my age. And much that, back then, we were promised was on the horizon — jet packs, Moon and Mars bases, robot servants — has failed to come to pass. The future, if you’re around my age, was gonna be golden, all hoverboards and 90 minutes from New York to Paris. Instead, we got a pandemic and rising fascism, which is, at best, some retro-futurist bullshit.
The science-fiction movies of these early decades of the 21st century have been made, for the most part, by people like me, who’ve been disillusioned by the promises of our childhoods that have failed to come true and horrified by the very preventable nightmares looming before us. So I wanna try to make some big-picture sense of the genre as it is playing out today. Because, of course, science fiction has never been about the future but has always been about now, about our hopes and fears, about our evolving notions of what it means to be human.
I’ve already begun picking out, on my new 21st-Century Science Fiction page, some common themes — AI, cloning, and revolution, for instance — and movies that fall under them. (Some films will fall under more than one theme.) Just recognizing how many movies cluster around certain motifs already says something about our cultural concerns at the moment, but I will also be writing some roundup essays looking at those themes in depth.
That 21st-Century Science Fiction page is very much a work in progress, with many more films to be added and more themes to be discovered. Feel free to make recommendations.
I’m excited to be diving deeper into my favorite genre. I hope you’ll enjoy it!
Looks great so far! Would the Pacific Rims qualify as “Monster” movies?
For sure!
It’s interesting to me, a fellow X-er, that your sf was hopeful and full of promise. As someone from the very tail end of Gen X, we did have Back to the Future II, sure, but sf for me was a lot of cyberpunk–Blade Runner, Robocop, Marvel’s 2099 comics, and especially Shadowrun–and well, that vision of the future is looking pretty accurate right now: out-of-control corporate greed, corporations replacing governments as the real power in the world, “hi-tech, low life”, widening inequality that fully incorporates advancing tech (everybody’s got a smartphone but who has job security?), massive environmental degradation, the rich living physically separated from the poor (hello gated communities!), the disappearance of privacy, the privatization of even the most basic of services, the militarization of police…
Maybe I’m just a pessimist, but the sf I remember growing up with seems like it more or less predicted the world we have. Even Total Recall had us going to Mars….to exploit it as just another colony, to be squeezed with our iron fist.
I have this feeling, not sure where it’s coming from, that all the grim SF you mention was seen then as very explicitly not the future that was (supposedly) coming. Maybe almost like those dystopian fantasies were somehow going to help prevent such darkness actually coming to pass.
As you say, though, they turned out to be pretty accurate.