What the F is Going On!?! Part Two: Science Fiction

What the F is Going on!?! Part Two: Science Fiction

Science fiction can be used as a genre to predict the future, H.G. Welles sprinkled his writings with predictions, some that greatly missed the mark, but in other instances he was not that far off predicting World War II and the Cold War, both are touched on in Things to Come. It’s also a way to teach the lessons from the past or present in a package that is more accessible to the masses, Star Wars uses a lot of World War II imagery and terminology, but it was also originally an allegory for the Vietnam War. And sometimes it can be a bit of therapy to play make believe with historical events, either in a satirical sense or through the heroes’ journey. Personally, when Trump won the 2016 election, my way to laugh through the pain was to piece together the events of the day in a comedic telling of the Trump administration of an empire in a space opera. I never posted it anywhere, but it gave me a bit of a chuckle to highlight the absurdity of current events at the time. As I was compiling movies to watch that have been giving us warning of what was to come in a second Trump administration, I knew I needed help from science fiction filmmakers. Not all of the science fiction movies from my list are in this grouping, but these are four of the most otherworldly selections.

The most recent film from this grouping is Mickey 17 from the great South Korean director Bong Joon Ho. Director Bong’s previous film Parasite roared through the Academy Awards for its great filmmaking and social commentary. He doesn’t shy away from it here, as Mickey 17 is considered the first authoritarian satire of this likely authoritarian regime. This is the story of a group of space travelers looking for a habitable planet to colonize under the leadership of their bumbling and bizarre leader, played by Mark Ruffalo, who preaches cult-like purity and rigid fundamentalism despite a lack of adherence for himself. We follow Mickey, a rather distracted young man who signs up to be cloned over and over again in order to be the parakeet in the coal mine, often dying in the process of things going wrong. This is a comedic look at the cult philosophy that is used to control the population of the space colonists and the ways this shapes the colony toward far less favorable results than they would have faced otherwise. 

One of the older movies in this collection is Starship Troopers. Originally written by Robert Heinlein as a fantasy of militaristic dominance in space, the original work was seen are more pro-military or conservative than his early progressive political beliefs may have indicated. The book was released in 1959, Heinlein grew up in the Mid-West and served in the Navy. When Dutch director Paul Verhoeven adapted his book to film in 1997 Heinlein had been dead for almost a decade. Verhoeven had already established himself as a very edgy director in Europe making films with anti-fascist themes and films addressing LGBT issues before coming to the US and making RoboCop, Total Recall, Basic Instinct and coughShowGirlscough. Looking back at his filmography, Verhoeven sports two of probably the four most misinterpreted movies of the ‘80’s and ‘90’s, RoboCop and Starship Troopers, Fight Club and The Matrix being the other two. Verhoeven grew up in Nazi occupied Netherlands and lived through the aftermath of the war, having his own strong feelings about propaganda and fascism. He took the source material, made a pretty fun, ultra-violent and ultra sexualized action movie about space marines, but put it through the lens of a series of multimedia encyclopedia entries on the war with the bugs where an unseen viewer decides which direction to take the history. In the ‘90’s there were these CD-Rom encyclopedias available where you could learn about history or science through infographics, pictures and audio, it’s the one futuristic aspect of this movie that didn’t make it a single minute into the future. We are watching an incredibly jingoistic narration of historical events of the future and the great question to consider is who the viewer that is pushing the buttons of the story is, and how forward into the future of these events are they. This could be a retelling of history from 50 years into the future to explain a very different future that requires justification of continuing or additional conflicts. I have always had a pause when they explain that the meteorite that hit Rio De Janeiro was manipulated and aimed at Earth by the bugs from a very long distance. What if it wasn’t the bugs who attacked, and what if we were the invading force of a defensive species. They are aliens that still live in tunnels, seemingly without any technology. I chose this movie not just because it is a story of a fascist, militaristic society of the future, but as an example of propaganda, or even the concept of “fake news” as it could be used for political purposes. 

Another film where the writer of the source material and the filmmaker probably have different politics in a lot of different ways, Ender’s Game is a movie that I originally watched on the recommendation of a friend, I watched uncomfortably for much of the runtime only to cheer as the characters in the film realized that they too had been taken advantage by rush of the action, comradery of the main characters and the awe of the special effects. Orson Scott Card’s books of a futuristic space adventurer are considered thought provoking, exciting and philosophical epics, but in his personal life he has donated a lot of money toward discriminatory causes. The 2013 film adaptation is directed by South African Gavin Hood who has noted that the reason he took this movie on was because in his youth under Apartheid rule, he was forced to be a child soldier for a regime that he did not agree with. In the world of Ender’s Game, Ender is a military prodigy, rising through the ranks of a futuristic space military despite an abusive older brother and bullying classmates. He runs into issues advancing through the ranks and disciplinary problems before taking on a role, unknowingly leading a real-life attack on enemy aliens in what thought to be a simulation. They win what they thought was just a game by destroying the home planet and most of the adversarial species. On my first viewing I gasped and thought “oh no, that’s genocide, this glorifies genocide as a strategy in war,” and as the characters come to the realization that it is something actually happened, they have a similar reaction. This takes a sudden turn from dramatic science fiction adventure into horror movie.

Finally, I felt I needed to add one more science fiction movie to this grouping, and the final installment is another favorite of mine, although it is more Earth-based, and a dystopian film. Dredd, from 2012, is not a remake of the Stallone movie Judge Dredd from the ‘90’s, but a more faithful adaptation of the long running Judge Dredd comics out of the UK. They are self-aware comics of a fascist figure that enforces the law and the entire judicial system in an overpopulated, futuristic United States, where law enforcement hides behind ultra-patriotic (and oddly Nazi looking) symbolism that mask their faces from the public. They aren’t accountable to the public and they aren’t bound by much internal oversight. This movie is absolutely stunning to look at, the story is a great mix of mystery, thriller and action and it doesn’t shy away from showing the bad side of a police state on either the people, due process or the police themselves. It is that kind of poor policing that seems to have put this futuristic society in the state that it is in. 

These are four movies that give a science fiction perspective of authoritarianism, fascism, and police states. They look at the roles of propaganda and the power to change history to shape the present, hell, to wire young people into going along with common sense or macho ideas. The problem with common sense or trying to fit a world view into a macho perspective is that it ignores complexity, well beyond “the common” and a macho perspective ignores actual needs of a majority of the population. These are four movies that the current administration could learn something from but won’t because they ring a bit too true. MAGA has its own cult-like ideology that justifies anything from the leader, like Mickey 17. The Administration has sued and pressured mainstream news to give a friendly perspective on the news, turbocharging the concept of “fake news” and glorifying aggression like Starship Troopers. Trump liked the glowing coverage of Israel's strikes on Iran that he joined in to bomb possible nuclear sites, he sent troops into Los Angeles and Washington DC when he wanted to send a show of force. Like Dredd, there have been direct orders from Stephen Miller to reach quotas of detainments and deportations to the extent that ICE agents have been wearing masks, aggressively taking people without confirming status or identity, confining people for days, weeks and months without due process, even sending them to unrelated countries where they might face additional brutality. Like Ender’s Game, young men have been targets of this agenda through podcasts, merchandise, a message of strength and machismo, whipping them up to not be able to understand that “the other” isn’t someone that needs to be destroyed.