When I looked at the theater lineup for March I realized two things:
Summer Blockbuster season starts early this year. The month of March is screening quite a few sci-fi movies. That got the ball rolling and before I knew it March became my dedicated Sci-Fi month.
Before I get into it here’s my watching (and reading) for the month of March:
- March 1 Metropolis Restored
- March 2 The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, Atlanta Robbin’ Season (1)
- March 4 Annihilation (2018)
- March 5 Thoroughbreds, Lord of the Rings: Return of the King
- March 7 Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (1)
- March 8 Jessica Jones: Season 2 (1)
- March 11 The Room
- March 12 Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (1)
- March 14 Jessica Jones: Season 2(1)
- March 15 Back to the Future, Forbidden Planet (1956), The Conjuring
- March 17 Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby
- March 18 Escape From New York, The Matrix
- March 19 Atlanta Robbin’ Season (1), Unsane (so good!)
- March 20 Last Week Tonight with John Oliver
- March 21 Serenity
- March 22 Pacific Rim
- March 23 Pacific Rim: Uprising
- March 24 Atlanta Robbin’ Season (1), Parks and Rec (1), Adventure Time (2)
- March 25 Jessica Jones Ssn 2 (2), Silicon Valley (1)
- March 26 Isle of Dogs
- March 27 Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (1)
- March 28 Ready Player One
- March 29 Jessica Jones: Season 2 (1), Moon
- March 30 Jessica Jones: Season 2 (1), Ready Player One
- March 31 Atlanta Robbin’ Season (1), Adventure Time (2)
- March 3 Batman Dark Victory – Jeph Loeb & Tim Sale
- March 4 Moon Knight: From the Dead – Warren Ellis, Declan Shalvey
- March 9 Persepolis Rising – James S.A. Corey
- March 16 Ready Player One – Ernest Clive
- March 30 The Collected Stories of Frank Herbert – Frank Herbert
Now you may notice some absolute classics not listed here: 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Wars, Ex Machina, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Fifth Element, La Jetee, Enemy Mine, Terminator, Star Trek, and on and on. Well, fret not friends because I have seen almost all of these movies. Before you critique the list understand: I have seen a good portion of the American Sci-Fi classics.
On the reading side, I mixed it up a little bit. Ignore the comic books and hone in on two books: James S.A. Corey’s Persepolis Rising, and Frank Herbert’s Short stories. One is the new paragon of Science Fiction authorship and the other is the OG Sci-Fi writer who gifted the world with his forever-classic Dune. Same thing goes for the reading section. I know people might ask: Where’s your Isaac Asimov? Where’s your Fahrenheit 451? Where’s blah-blah-blah?
Listen, my dad’s a sci-fi nerd and while I haven’t made my way through the Foundation Trilogy I’d say I had a healthy diet of Science Fiction spoon fed to me from an early age. So there ya go! That’s my bona fides!
The Science in Science Fiction
Now, as a genre, the science part helps make or break a good sci-fi movie. The fidelity to actual science tends to vary from one film to the next. My dad told me a story about how he and his friends used to watch Gene Roddenberry’s original Star Trek and they couldn’t fathom a handheld device used to communicate across large distances without any wires whatsoever. Then the cellphone was invented. 
One of the very first films ever made (George Lumiere’s Fly Me to the Moon) involves space travel and that was 50 years before we even came close to actually landing on the moon. Our science fiction now provides cautionary tales about the technology we’re developing today: gene editing, artificial intelligence, drone piloting, and so much more. It’s a genre that is defined by its cutting-edge scientific involvements, whether those are not-too-distant robots or lightyears away laser swords.
One of the things I think we oversell on the genre is exactly how much “science” goes into Science Fiction. If you look across the spectrum of movies we have everything from The Fifth Element to Primer. That’s everything from Cross-dressing-alien-Chris-Rock to two dudes in frumpy business suits. There’s no concrete marker for how much science makes it a true science fiction piece. I struggled to pin the concept down as I invented my list. Is Gojira a Sci-Fi movie? Wouldn’t Guardians of the Galaxy or Thor Ragnarok be considered sci-fi since it’s in space with aliens and weird spaceships? What pigeonholes a work into the Sci-Fi niche?
Lost in the Sauce
Naturally, genre mashups happen. I think there’s a philosophical theory that really says there are no more genres cause it’s all kind of blended together. You can pick apart what constitutes a Sci-Fi movie for years and never get the perfect answer. So there’s never a clear definition. That’s true across all media: literature, video games, movies, tv shows. Black Mirror is as much Sci-Fi as it is horror and even Pacific Rim is a monster movie mashup that thrives on science fiction conceits. Suffice to say: it’s easy to get lost in the mire of defining the genre as a whole.
Instead what I think we can pin down more accurately is the definition of good Sci-Fi. Arguably, good fiction.
Universality
You see, the one thing I noticed as I watched more and more of these movies was how universal the themes are. Whether you’re fighting against aliens from another planet, monsters from another dimension, or artificially intelligent robots you’re mounting a last-ditch effort to save the Human Race. What about the feeling that your world isn’t real? Who is the architect of your universe? (An idea about how much control a person really has in their lives.) Whether it’s thirty years in the future, three thousand years in the future, or thirty years in the past (a la Back to the Future) some ideas never change. Sure we change the settings, the conflict, the characters but we universally end up talking about one thing when it comes to science fiction: human interaction.
Duncan Jones’ new movie Mute, is about a mute Amish man searching for the love of his life in a sci-fi world. The movie’s about love, and cultural interchange. Serenity may have the trappings of a Western-set-in-space but ultimately it’s about a family and how the trauma of one person affects an entire family. These are themes just as easily explored in romcoms or some Seth Rogen stoner flick.Science Fiction provides a context we are not familiar with (generally) to explore ideas in new ways. What if you could erase heartbreak from your life by erasing your memories (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind)? What if you could travel in time and make your life better (Back to the Future and like any other time travel movie)? So many what if’s. Human interaction lives at the center of this proposed web, but there’s one debate I feel like every sci-fi contributor has.
Will the advancement of science change the way we interact?
James S.A. Corey doesn’t think so. In his Expanse series (also a tv show on SyFy) entire planets bicker, feud, and even battle in ways eerily reminiscent of our current Geopolitics. The whole point of Serenity and Firefly is that it’s the American Civil War set in space a few hundred years in the future. We will always feel destined for something greater than ourselves. Lots of plot devices in Sci-Fi started as manifestations of imaginary ‘what if’s authors thought up when they experience conflict in their lives. Look at Herbert’s stories.
Science Fiction can easily lose itself to the science part. Black Mirror does that on and off. Half of what makes The Fifth Element so exciting is its ingenuity in costuming. Arguably lots of science fiction falls on the pyre of good taste when it trades valuable drama for adept design work. Duncan Jones’ Mute trades in elaborate production designs for a mind-bending drama with literally one actor for nine-tenths of the movie. Hell both Blade Runner’s are masterpieces in pure visual literacy alone (forget the plots.) But every writer dabbling in the science fiction vein asks: Will we feel something new as we invent and grow and change?
Americanism
I could talk about Sci-Fi all day and I’m sure I’m telling you things you don’t already know. One thing I do want to talk about is the Image of your typical Sci-Fi movie. It’s easy to say 99% of the movies I watched featured white males as their protagonists (shoutout to Annihilation for being the only one on this list.) Even more specifically White, Straight, American Males. I don’t want to get lost in the semantics argument of but-that’s-just-what-the-movies-were-like-when-they-were-made.
The one thing I always find frustrating is that most of the Sci-Fi movies we list as instant classics revolve around American culture. Independence Day, Pacific Rim, and more feature Americans as the staging grounds for the rebellion against vicious aliens. When the world needs saving America saves them. It’s actually one of the ironic things about Pacific Rim: the Russians, Chinese, and Americans team up to defeat giant aliens. Three nations constantly at odds with each other put aside their differences to fight for the world. Ask yourself: why these three? Why doesn’t France have a mech? Or the UK? Where is South America in this? There are plenty of South American nations along the Pacific Rim. What about Japan or Southeast Asia?
In the case of Pacific Rim, the Russian and Chinese mechs exist partially to draw in international audiences. Notice how both of the Russian and Chinese mechs go down in the first major fight! It’s a simple audiovisual way of asserting American dominance in an international coalition. As impressive as Guillermo Del Toro’s vision for the movie is, it still feels a bit like a propaganda piece.
Now part of this issue is simply that Americans consume American media. I did not watch a single foreign sci-fi film except for Metropolis (so OG it transcends the idea of ‘German’ Cinema and exists in the Classics shelf.) In Japanese Sci-Fi anime (Akira and Ghost in the Shell chief among them for westerners) the events take place in Japan. So maybe it isn’t so much the movie as it is the context you’re watching in. That doesn’t excuse the overwhelming whiteness of so many of these flicks. Too many white straight dudes save the day in futuristic worlds. One of the greatest complaints about Serenity is that the future world is some hybrid between Chinese and English-speaking cultures. The entire crew of this spaceship are white people who speak bad Mandarin. Where’s the Chinese representation?
We didn’t live in a world that asked more from their movies than your standard white-guy-saves-the-world plot. Now we are asking ourselves: Why not a woman? Why not a transgendered person? Why not someone of African descent? Stories could just as easily happen to new shades of human beings with just as much impact because of the universality of human interaction.
Finality
It’s tough to pin down Science Fiction other than to say it’s fictional stories either peripherally or centrally through the lens of science. Big pieces like computer hacking, virtual reality video games, artificially intelligent robots, or some good ol’ fashioned alien battles don’t necessarily make for better storytelling, but do offer room for more unique design work. Good sci-fi can be as simple as a single man on the moon.
I often liken Sci-Fi to what I call a Mode. It’s a lens that almost any story can be told through. Romance, suspense, monster battles, coming of age, you name it they have it in Sci-Fi trappings. The best pieces express universal ideas of human interaction through science-specific settings.
I thoroughly enjoyed the Sci-Fi month but I’m asking more of the content producers and creators to include better representation. By the virtue of having universally common themes, new skin colors/sexual orientations/national affiliations are not the kinds of obstacles they should be. We should be asking more from our sci-fi because Sci-Fi, at it’s best, illuminates our lives with insight into human behavior as well as scientific development, and at its worst, provides international cannon fodder for masses to consume. Can we please consume something new and empathetic?
