Ridley
Scott’s TV documentary series Prophets
Of Science Fiction (2011-2) starts with Mary Shelley and shows how medical science has advanced since her era.
Mary Shelley was haunted by spectres of death and yet such progressive
morbidity fed into her classic novel, a book arguably best made into a movie as
Kenneth Branagh’s epic Frankenstein
(1994). Shelley’s impact on morality and SF literature, and global culture in
general, is explained by scientists (such as Michio Kaku), genre authors
(including Kim Stanley Robinson), and Shelley biographers who provide meaty
insights linked by presenter Scott’s own philosophical musings. With its
frequent use of dramatic reconstructions, plus animated visuals with narration,
this recalls classic TV programmes like Carl Sagan’s Cosmos (1980). Many authoritative interview clips ensure that a
variety of viewpoints are presented, alongside promotional material from today’s
innovators.
Second episode H.G. Wells charts
wholesale creativity with iconic titles including The War Of The Worlds (filmed 1953, remade 2005), and The Time Machine (filmed in 1960, and
curiously remade, by Simon Wells, in 2002). There’s also The Invisible Man, and The
Island Of Dr Moreau, with details here showing how new tech follows the
notions lifted from Wells’ work. Dutch filmmaker Paul Verhoeven and American author
David Brin are most notable as commentators. The truly prophetic imagery for
Wells’ movie Things To Come (1936)
gave dramatic optimism to social criticism but Wells’ predictive legacy is
often ignored when politics meddles with possibilities of scientific progress. Time
for a pause... during this TV show’s six episodes, I re-watched Wells’ Time Machine remake, and found it quite
reasonably entertaining with enough quality special effects and generic
tensions to reverse my previous thinking that, at best, it was mediocre sci-fi
or wholly derivative escapism partly inspired by some bleak Darwinian
futurism.
Stanley Kubrick’s co-creator of supreme movie 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), author Arthur C. Clarke, obviously deserves his own episode here, and this
chapter brings together his practical invention of telecom satellites and
theoretical space elevators in his book The
Fountains Of Paradise (1979). Another of Clarke’s co-writers, Gentry Lee, offers
enthusiastic insider commentary. Few other SF writers can possibly match Clarke’s
importance to modern literary and media fields of genre speculation. And so
this potted biography and focus on the maturation of hard-SF themes throughout
the 1960s and 1970s. After this episode, I re-watched Christopher Nolan’s
Interstellar (2014), deciding to try harder to like it more this time. And so I
did, because it makes better sense today, especially for its glowing optimism, that ends (well, sort
of..?) where Clarke’s hugely under-rated book, 3001: The Final Odyssey (1997) starts, with a cleverly witty
tribute to pulp sci-fi’s own time-warped hero, Buck Rogers.
George Lucas seems
a decidedly odd choice for this TV series, but his creation of sci-fi adventure
franchise Star Wars (1977), exploded
SF from cult novels and niche cinema, into mainstream popularity. His genius
was to make intellectual imagination into big-screen fun. Amusingly, this
episode mostly explores how cutting-edge tech is inspired by hardware in Star Wars media - as if Lucas was the
first to imagine cyborgs, robots, levitation, and mental super-powers; despite
acknowledging its exactly what everyone wants for Xmas.
For a genre timeline accuracy, Jules Verne should really have been
the subject of this TV series’ second episode, but as its fifth this does gain
a fittingly ‘retro’ feel, and slippage from optimistic adventure novels to
gloomy themes in its study of Verne’s later dark works of dystopian worlds.
Literary scholar George Slusser and comics writer Matt Fraction provide interesting
comments. Verne’s best loved, and perhaps most influential’ novel 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea (1870) was
adapted several times for the screen, and its versions include these four...
Stuart Paton’s epic silent movie 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea (1916) is the first submarine
spectacular, partly using Verne’s sequel novel The Mysterious Island (1874) as its source material. This is a tale
about maritime disasters, pirates, shipwrecks, and castaways, with underwater
photography, and some rather eerie scenes of divers hunting sharks on the
seabed. Rendered in full scale, the super-sub Nautilus is wholly convincing but
Captain Nemo, a former prince of India, is costumed rather like Santa Claus
with a bandana.
With big
advantages of sound and colour, Disney’s engagingly cinematic 1954 production
has escapades to spare, with Kirk Douglas as harpooner Ned Land facing down
James Mason’s memorable Nemo aboard his Nautilus - here an engineering
masterpiece of steam-punk designs, three decades before the cyberpunk movement
was itself quite fashionable enough for easy recognition as a distinctive
sub-genre. A giant squid provides the monster action. Although brooding Nemo’s
organ-music suits the movie’s darker theme of vengeance, I always felt that
director Richard Fleischer’s ocean adventure would have worked far better
without its awful songs.
Hallmark’s
TV movie, briskly directed by Michael Anderson, stars Richard Crenna as
Aronnax, Ben Cross as stern Nemo, and Paul Gross (from TV cop show Due South) as Ned. Whereas Disney’s
adaptation lacked a strong female lead, this version casts Julie Cox as
professor’s daughter Sophie, a scientist in her own right, when she’s not an
obvious romantic interest for class conflict and cultural rivals Ned and Nemo.
Sleek, powerful, and modernist, but with stylish interiors, set designs for
this Nautilus compare well to Disney’s with better special effects in some
sequences, except for the computer animation of a deep-sea monster that only
works as surrealism of dragon-slaying, not convincing sci-fi.
Also released in 1997, director Rod Hardy’s two-part TV serial
benefits from casting of Bryan Brown as Ned Land, but its real star is Michael
Caine as Captain Nemo, while Mia Sara plays his daughter Mara. When a warship
hunts a mysterious behemoth, the young heroes are lost at sea. Soon
taken as POWs aboard the Nautilus, French marine biologist Arronax (Patrick Dempsey),
with Ned, and black companion Cabe (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), explore the
baroque submarine, before they join a sea- hunting party. They manage to adjust
to captivity, without hope of escape, especially from cut-priced undercooked
visual effects of seabed volcanoes. An ordeal of survival, trapped beneath
Arctic ice, develops a new solidarity with Nemo’s agenda, despite legal,
ethical, and moral, differences. Verne is written into this narrative as a
famous author inspired by others’ adventures. Arronax is haunted by nightmares
of drowning, and contends with losing a hand, but Dempsey makes for a rather
bland hero, whether in pursuit of knowledge, or freedom.
Also inspired by Verne, British movie Captain Nemo And The Underwater City (1969) begins with a
disaster when passengers from a sinking ship are rescued by frogmen from the
Nautilus. Senator Fraser (Chuck Connors) meets Nemo (Robert Ryan) who takes
them to safety in the domed city Templemer. James Hill directs this family
adventure with an eye for spectacle, including golden sets, and a scuba-diving
tour with shark-attack action, but there is rather too much slapstick from
comic-relief characters. A Theremin recital adds to other-worldly charms. One
meddling escapee risks destruction but only the saboteur dies. Oceanic drama
continues when a giant mutant manta-ray menaces the Nautilus. Ryan’s
grandfatherly Nemo breaks clear from Verne’s traditional dark genius, but it’s
quite expected in this colourful fantastique, with Nanette Newman as a
Victorian single-mother bringing up her only son to respect peaceful authority,
as she considers the possibilities of staying to live in a utopian realm.
The Amazing Captain Nemo (aka: The Return Of Captain Nemo, 1978),
updates Verne for a present-day TV revival when US navy divers find the sunken
Nautilus to awaken greybeard Nemo (Jose Ferrer), soon recruited to combat the
super-terrorist (Burgess Meredith), blackmailing America for a billion bullion
ransom in a world where Verne’s biography of Nemo was clearly mistaken for
fiction. Only three episodes of this failed series were made, and later edited
into this 102-minute movie, now released onto DVD, from Warner’s archive. After
he saves Washington, DC. from a doomsday rocket, superhero Nemo accepts another
mission for atomic-powered Nautilus, but with nuclear advisor Kate (Lynda
Day George), and a saboteur (Mel Ferrer, no relation to Jose), aboard. In their
final adventure, Nemo discovers lost Atlantis.
Alan Moore’s millennial graphic novel and following comic-book
series The League of Extraordinary
Gentlemen was adapted for sci-fi cinema as Stephen Norrington’s blockbuster
LXG (2003), about steampunk
superheroes assembled to save the British Empire and stop WW1. The team
includes Allan Quatermain, an invisible man, vampire Mina Harker, immortal
Dorian Gray, and Indian pirate Captain Nemo. His ‘Sword of the Ocean’, Nautilus,
gets the heroes across the English Channel to Paris, to recruit hulking brute
Mr Hyde, and then Nemo’s super-submarine sails into Venice, continuing its
mission, despite being damaged by enemy bombs, all the way to a finale in
Mongolia.
Ex-military and politically-minded, Robert Heinlein wrote SF that, intentional or not, courted
controversy, particularly with books like Starship
Troopers (1959), winningly filmed by Paul Verhoeven in 1997. But then Heinlein
created Stranger In A Strange Land,
to become a play-book for hippies in counter-culture America. So, whereas
previous big-time SF authors covered in this TV series actually formed the
nascent genre, Heinlein helped to shape basic tropes into explosive or
exploitative new material of competent heroes. Stories in an existing
frame-work of ideas, like The Moon Is A
Harsh Mistress (1966), about the rebellion of a Lunar colony, prompt
discussion about humans in space. Harlan Ellison appears, yet only briefly.
A cult writer whose fiction created an extraordinary density of
intellectual meanings and emotional interpretation, Philip K. Dick was influenced by his own paranoia and use of drugs.
And so his predictive novels and idea-driven short-stories would be readily
adapted to modern cinema where virtual reality, alternative worlds, and
unreliability of memory form intriguing narratives of Orwellian surveillance
and precognition that undermine lifestyles and fracture societies. Mankind
crumbles into its own imaginary plots, sinister culture, and questions of truth
between science and human experience. This episode is probably the most
fascinating in the whole series, and ends when Ridley Scott ponders: “Aren’t
most prophets troubled souls?”
Isaac Asimov
formalised robot stories with a new complexity of relationships between machines
and their human creators, as far more sophisticated than rampaging monsters in
pulp-SF. His work suggests that progress from industrial robots - used on
assembly lines in factories, to developing advanced tools - for spinal and
cranial surgery, is totally inevitable. Later, Asimov became the world’s
greatest SF author of non-fiction about science.
