Apocalypse Soon: Science Fiction films today and their Lack of Hope in The Future.

I am a huge fan of science fiction films, as their core value is to take our minds from our every day world. They take us to far away worlds in far away galaxies, or to the far off future. They introduce us to alien races from other worlds. They threaten us with highly intelligent robots. Their special effects and their predictions on how our world can turn out, if events beyond our comprehension occur, are fascinating to me. Classic science fiction movies, and TV series of the 1960s, such as Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey”, and the original Star Trek series, offered us visions of how the future should be for humanity and how society could evolve. In “2001: A Space Odyssey”, Pan Am shuttles are used for space travel, and in Star Trek, we could see Captain Kirk wielding a cell phone to call The Enterprise from any planet he exploring with his team. Evil aliens and murderous robots would stand in the way of our heroes’ contributions to improving humanity’s connections to the universe. Even the original “Planet of the Apes”, whose premise was darker than the themes of Star Trek, was a cautionary tale about the disruption the nuclear holocaust would cause to the fabric of time and space and our evolution as a race. Most Science fiction films and TV Series of the 1970s and 1980s such as “Logan’s Run”,” The Soylent Green”, “Battle Star Galactica” all seemed concerned with the preservation of our evolution of our society. Then after the late 1990s, the focus of most science fiction films (with the exception of the Star Wars prequels and the Star Trek saga), took a turn. Movies such as the “T2” and “T3” and the Matrix trilogy showed humanity decimated by our own technology.

Most recently I saw the trailer for the upcoming 2012, directed by Roland Emmerich. Soon I remembered that “2012” will have the same theme as this year’s “Knowing”: The end of the world. In contrast to the sci fi movies of previous decades, screen writers, producers and film directors of the 1990s and today seem to be less interested in the technical, societal and economic development of the human race and becoming one with the universe, than the death, mayhem and destruction of our world. Soon more of these types of movies will follow. The new Transformers Sequel coming next week, will most likely deal with the destruction of our world by the bad robots. The update of “When Worlds Collide” is coming perhaps by next year. The prequel to “I am Legend”, is being produced. The prequel will show how vampires ravage the world and how only a handful of people including Will Smith’s character survive. Producers opted for this approach rather than continue the story with a sequel, which could show the efforts of soldiers and scientists in curing humanity of the virus that makes them vampires.

Does tragedy, mayhem and destruction really sell and draw audiences so strongly to make most science fiction films with so much gloom and doom? Part of the aim may not be towards box office profitability. In my opinion, science fiction movies have always reflected our society’s hopes and fears for the future to come. Back in the 1960s, as Americans were enjoying prosperity, the futuristic visions of society were pretty nice. Back then it was thought that by our time, we would be mining the moon for clean resources, having robots take care of our house, and even driving flying cars. Fast forward 50 years later. Necessary and unnecessary wars, rise of oppressive regimes, the slow elimination of the middle classes around the world, the rise of amoral corporate behavior and its effects on our daily lives and very lack of technological advances aimed to improve our life, are recent historical factors that have taken a big chunk of hope we, as humans, had of our own societal evolution. This lack of hope, gives me the impression that many people, specially artists and intellectual creative writers (such as many screenwriters) secretly enjoy seeing the world burn in mayhem along with the human race.

Although, I really liked “Knowing”, apocalyptic films like “The Day after Tomorrow”, the “Matrix” trilogy, and even the new Star Trek reboot mostly deal with the end of the world, by either the hands of machines, aliens or mother nature herself. Although in such movies, the preservation of the human race is their commonly goal, their apocalyptic tones do nothing good for the audience, who is in turn ultimately reminded of our bleak future ahead of us. I think we need science fiction movies more like the Star Wars saga, or Star Trek, where we are taken to far away worlds, where there is psychological human drama in the scope of dealing with alien beings and or alien worlds…where technology is not killing us left and right…and where heroes achieve something good for humanity and not only for their alienated kids. We need movies that make us forget for 2 hours about the reality of our day to day world. We need, now more than ever, movies that give us hope that we can make a better world, rather than movies that show us that our world must burn, so we can become better humans.

You can check out the “2012” trailer on Yahoo.com.