Quote from: pete on September 01, 2011, 08:03:15 AM
my prediction for the next cycle -
indie films using scifi as poetic device will take over mumblecore
This post popped into my head the other day, and I was wondering if you would mind expanding upon it a little bit? Can you cite any recent movies that do this? I have a few in my head but they're sort of obscure.
The original comment which triggered this thread has been something I've had caught on my mind for the past few weeks too. Probably because almost all of the screenplay ideas I've been working on sort of fit that description (a film about UFOs which is really about religion; a film about ghosts which is really about mortality, etc). I attribute a large part of this to the fact that I was obsessed with The X-Files throughout my teenage years. (An unpopular example might be the most recent XF movie: it's about a psychic in need of redemption, but is rally about the nature of faith.) It could well be that those filmmakers who are making these films now also came of age during the time that show was truly a huge part of the cultural zeitgeist.
But as JG points out, this is by no means a new trend. SciFi has always been a covert way of addressing these very personal and psychological issues. Invasion of The Body Snatchers is perhaps the most widely-cited example as it's really all about the red scare and the fear of your next door neighbor secretly being a communist. Even Alien is about female empowerment.
But I guess I do understand the point you're trying to make: that we're talking about quieter, more indie-style movies (my own ideas included) as opposed to the more bombastic mainstream event movies I've cited in my examples. To be honest, the movies which fit this description so far have not really appealed to me, but I do look forward to this trend taking off and seeing what other writers and directors do in the future.
At the risk of stating the obvious, Melancholia for sure. And it does it so well.
For the record, THE FUTURE does not do this.
I was kinda just guessing from what I've heard about it. Oh well, I'll take it down...
I'm in Taiwan. Can't talk. have to shoot a cookbook in four minutes.
But thanks for taking the idea seriously - I really wanna see this subgenre takeoff. I really like scifi in its original form, before it's been co-opted by other genres such as fantasy or political dystopia. Just saw In Time last night and it was so bad. If a character runs too much in a scifi movie then it's probably a bad movie.
I haven't seen The Future either and thought that it, too, was a scifi poem. Sorry everyone. The Moon and 'Nother Planet, that's it so far.
and this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-d8aoaJxIHE
Rubber displays a bit of this...
I think that sci-fi is getting confused with magical realism a bit, which is what THE FUTURE and RUBBER feature. There is no science in any of those movies, or even the vague implication that there is a scientific foundation for what's happening. It's just magic.
So fantasy mumblecore? Fumblecore?
Magical realism has been found in scifi before. I took done fun class in college and read a bunch of essays on the parallels of cyberpunk and magical realism. Rabbit hole has some magical scifi aspirations too.
I've always considered films like these to be contemporary sci-fi. Films that are set in a realistic world, but have sci-fi elements. I think there's so many sub-genres for these types of films. It's really exciting to explore.
There are films like Robocop, Children of Men and A.I., which are definite science fiction films, but they are set in a realistic world even if they have unrealistic plot devices. And in the case of A.I, it's more of a dramatic film than an action packed sci-fi film. Even something like Being John Malkovich could qualify.
Then you have more surreal stuff like a lot of Jan Svankmajers work. You could even make a case that maybe Little Otik could define one of these sub-genres. And then you have the more science fiction stuff like Fantastic Planet. That's a very poetic film.
You could probably break these genres down into any way you wanted and wouldn't be wrong since it's so subjective.
This sort of sci-fi is certainly my favorite, not just genre of sci-fi, but genre of any film style. It's awesome.