There has been a certain amount of muted hoopla this week because it marks the 40th anniversary of the original Star Wars. One thing which I haven't seen anywhere else is a discussion of how different Star Wars was from most science fiction films up to that year. Quite simply, Star Wars turned SF cinema into part of the Action/Adventure genre; before that it was under Drama. This turned out to be massively important.
If you look at the big-budget, high-profile science fiction films of the decade before 1977, what do you see? The Man Who Fell to Earth, The Stepford Wives, Phase IV, The Terminal Man, Zardoz, The Day of the Dolphin, Soylent Green, Solaris, Westworld, Logan's Run, The Andromeda Strain, A Clockwork Orange, Planet of the Apes (and sequels), THX 1138 (by some guy named Lucas), Colossus: The Forbin Project, 2001, and Charly.
And what do these movies have in common? They're all VERY SERIOUS. Nearly half the list are post-apocalyptic stories; half are Dreadful Warnings about technology out of control. Only four deal with space exploration at all, and in all of those contact with extraterrestrial life is shown as either dangerous, incomprehensible, or both. In short, the future — and the Universe — are simply no fun.
Oh, sure, there were some science fiction adventure films — but interestingly, most of them were not tales of futuristic derring-do, but period pieces based on Edgar Rice Burroughs and Jules Verne novels, with what we would now call "steampunk" explorers finding weird cultures in out-of-the-way places on Earth. And then the volcano erupts. It's almost as if the only way moviemakers could imagine fantastic adventure and exploration was to look to the past. (Interestingly, contemporary written SF seems to have gone through a similar phase in the first decade of this century.)
Of course there were monster movies, including the peak years of Godzilla. And the golden age of disaster movies, which are kind of science fiction. And, yes, there were low-budget pictures which have since become cult classics, like Death Race 2000. But in the big new theaters at the shopping mall, the science fiction movies were grim stuff.
Then Star Wars, and huzzah, science fiction is fun again. And by the way it made more money than studio executives could even imagine up to that point. Which meant that all subsequent SF cinema (for a good decade or more, anyway) had to be like Star Wars. Even movies that weren't at all like Star Wars (like Blade Runner) got marketed as future ADVENTURE! Science fiction, as a cinematic category, moved from Drama to Action/Adventure (one can argue that it was occupying the niche left vacant by the disappearance of the Western genre).
And this may ultimately have saved it. As movies have gone more global, it's harder to do a straight-up drama. How do you market a sensitive story about growing up gay in rural New Jersey in the 1940s to an audience in Thailand or Dubai? More importantly, how do you market a grim story about the loss of personal autonomy to computers in a totalitarian future to an audience in Shanghai or London who are coming to the theater to escape pretty much that exact thing in their real lives?
But a story about a cyborg superman fighting alien invaders crosses all cultural boundaries. You don't even need subtitles. Turning science fiction cinema from Drama into Action/Adventure may have saved it from following the Western into obscurity. The very fact that SF movies made gobs of money helped make all of what we now call "geek culture" shed its old pocket-protector stigma and enter the mainstream. Without Star Wars in 1977 you would not see The Expanse on TV in 2017.
I only hope we can square the circle. We've had the thesis of Campbellian cerebral SF movies, the antithesis of Star Wars and its imitators — can we create a synthesis which combines the virtues of both?
For SF stories which combine action and drama, buy my new ebook Outlaws and Aliens!
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