Tomorrow the results of the Fantasy Matters "Best Science Fiction Movie Ever Week!" will be announced, and my choice will not win. It will not even place; the movie I would have voted for was not on the ballot. Neither was my second choice. Nor my third. The Best Science Fiction Movie Ever ballot has almost no overlap with the list I would create if asked to name the best science fiction movies ever. There is only one movie (maybe two if I am feeling especially generous) on the ballot that I think even belongs in the conversation.1 I expressed my disappointment with the list on Twitter, and management has kindly given me the opportunity to discuss which movie I would like to have voted for, and more generally why this list is so divergent from my own. [Note from management: In case you haven't voted in the poll, head over here to let your voice be heard--either by voting, or by telling us in the comments how wrong we are.]The ballot, for anyone who has not looked yet, is The Fifth Element, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, The Empire Strikes Back, Back to the Future Part II, The Matrix, and Blade Runner: The Final Cut. Three sequels, four franchise films, five movies that made $100,000,000 or more. It would be tough to come up with a more mainstream list of SF films. The reasons given for each film's selection reveal some interesting similarities. Here's a summary:
- The Fifth Element: chosen because, in addition to a "fine" story and "adequate" effects, has a unique color scheme and soundtrack.
- Back to the Future Part II: chosen because it is a "gold standard in time travel literature"2 and depicts a believable-looking near-future.
- The Empire Strikes Back: chosen because it is a Star Wars movie with "believable" characters.
- The Wrath of Khan: chosen because, while it is "lacking any philosophical depth," it is "the greatest pulp adventure movie ever made."
- The Matrix: chosen because of an influential visual style and because it "changed the way we think about reality."
- Blade Runner: The Final Cut: chosen because of an influential visual style and explorations of the nature of humanity.
The curve is evident in the nomination posts. I am going to pick on S. Miller's post, because he chose a Star Wars movie and spent the most time discussing character issues. While I agree with him that the characters in Empire Strikes Back are believable (due to it being the only Star Wars movie not written by George Lucas), celebrating a movie for having characters that fail to be ludicrous is a low bar. Every greater claim in the post is hyperbolic. Lando Calrissian does at one point have to choose between his friends and his city, yes. But after making his questionable decision he reverses it a few scenes later, with seemingly no consequences for the city he was attempting to protect. It is not exactly Sophie's choice that moves Mr. Miller to say "Sci-fi characters are rarely placed in such convincing moral dilemmas." And Darth Vader, we are told, is the "best character in all of sci-fi" by virtue of not being a chaotic, unpredictable psychopath; he is a remorseless super powered killer, but he is often calm about it. Is this all it takes to earn the crown of "best character in all of sci-fi?" And do we really suspect the title would be so freely granted if he were not also a seven-foot-tall sleek-looking cyborg with a black cape and a laser sword?My intent is not to call anyone out as having poor taste. I like all six of these movies. But I want to point out the grade curve. When we say that these films have good characters, there is an an unspoken but understood addendum: this movie has well rounded characters for a science fiction movie. What we are really saying is, "this is a movie where everything takes a back seat to spectacle, and yet characterization was not completely ignored!" Damien Walter admits to this in his nomination post for Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan. He says that it is not a science fiction movie he would consider art, but is the most fun SF movie he knows. All of the movies on the ballot are clearly motivated, explicitly or not, in whole or in part, by this impulse. Blade Runner gave a visual aesthetic to then-nascent cyberpunk. The Matrix gave one to the CGI era. Back to the Future Part II is distinguished from its siblings by having a lit-up and hosed-down suburban version of the Blade Runner look. The Fifth Element is a beautiful empty box. Empire Strikes Back is Star Wars.
It is an excellent list, if you interpret "Best Science Fiction Movie Ever" to mean the movie that best encapsulates SF movie culture, with its history of pulpy power fantasies and glorious sprawling set pieces. But I would like to interpret it to mean the best movie that happens to be science fiction. I do not want to grade on a curve. When choosing whether to more highly value story and character or spectacle and cinematography, I choose the former. As such, this list looks nothing like my own.
The best example of the kind of movie I am advocating for is Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the movie gets my imaginary vote on my fantasy ideal ballot. For those who have not seen it, it is a 2004 movie written by Charlie Kaufman3 and directed by Michel Gondry about a man (Joel) who discovers that, after a fight, his longtime girlfriend (Clementine) has had her memories of him erased. He retaliates by having his own memory sanitized of her, but has second thoughts halfway through the procedure. Much of the story is delivered in a sort of meta-flashback as characters run through Joel's memories like lucid dreams. In the process we see a fully realized romantic relationship, with frivolity and mistrust and intimacy and insecurity born of childhood trauma. Han and Leia are tiresomely juvenile by comparison. The movie's complex humanity is not reserved for the main characters; every character, no matter how ancillary, is treated with the same nuance. In Eternal Sunshine we get, in three lines of dialog, a more rounded view of Joel's mother than we get in several minutes of The Fifth Element from the stereotype that apparently birthed Corbin Dallas. This is a movie that has characters engage with moral dilemmas that are actually complicated: is performing cosmetic alteration to a person's brain ethical, even if it is requested? Do friends and coworkers have an obligation to be complicit in one's efforts to censor life experiences?More importantly, the moral weight of the story does not matter only to the characters, it matters to me. I have never felt anything remotely like Adam's claim that The Matrix "changed the way we think about reality" (I was already a guy who sits in front of his computer all night suspecting he is the most important person in the world, hey-o!). But Joel and Clementine's struggle toward an awareness that one must be accepting of one's own fallibility before it is possible to meaningfully connect with another resonates with my actual efforts towards maturity, the ones I wrestle with outside the theater. This is science fiction as it is best employed: not as set dressing, but as a lens for exploring true human experience.
As it happens, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is also a visually beautiful movie, brilliantly edited to be the most effective nonlinear storytelling I have seen in a film since Memento. But that is not why I love it, and while that might play a role in my placing Eternal Sunshine at the top of my fantasy ballot, it has nothing to do with why I want it nominated. I enjoy spectacle, but letting it be a determining factor when we decided what the "best" science fiction movies are is to diminish what science fiction is capable of. Yes, science fiction can present us with thrilling images we will never really encounter, but it can also be a tool for understanding things that we will. Just like any kind of storytelling. There is no reason to hold science fiction movies to a lower standard. There is room enough for truth between the spaceships.
1 Blade Runner. Some days I feel sentimental enough about The Matrix that I might let it slip in without complaint.
2 This is an aside, but Nathan Ilten's claim that the Back to the Future movies depict time travel in a manner nearly free from contradictions is unsupportable. Every moment of the film where a change has been made to the past that has not yet "caught up" to the protagonists constitutes a contradiction. Coherent time travel narrative is only logically possible within a deterministic framework, and the Back to the Future movies are aggressively libertarian (in the philosophical sense, not the political sense). For an actually coherent time travel narrative, try 12 Monkeys or, for certain values of "coherent," Primer.
3 I would not argue that awards are necessarily indicative of quality, but it is worth noting that Kaufman won an Oscar for this script. It is the only time the award for Best Original Screenplay has gone to a work of science fiction.
