Unabashed

In a conversation today about science fiction movies, a person I was talking with challenged me on the “realism” in scifi movies. And of course I kind of had to shake my head. To me, scifi is realistic. It’s the modern action movie that’s traipsed over into the category of I-can-no-longer-suspend-my-disbelief-to-believe-this-is-possible.

SciFi movies are futuristic, meaning they take place in the future, meaning that a lot of the things that happen in them might actually be possible one day. But now let’s look at some modern-day action movies. You can pretty much name the lame at this point: XXX, The Fast and the Furious, or, here’s a good example: Charlie’s Angels. Are you telling me that’s a realistic representation of what three female cops look like, and that they can leap twenty feet into the air while dodging bullets, spinning, and then jettison themselves out a window and take out six armed, burly, lethal guards before ever touching the ground? It seems to me that futuristic SciFi is much more realistic than that. Case in point: Pitch Black. A space ship crash lands on an alien planet full of a particularly horrible breed of life that, given the planet’s situation, it makes perfect sense for them to have evolved into. Their ship requires fuel, their people rely on guns and sharp objects for self defense, they are easily cleaved by claws and seemingly delectable by the local dominant species. To me, I guess that all just makes perfect sense, given the fact that we can’t prove it wrong. Unfortunately, we can prove all too easily that Cameron Diaz cannot leap tall buildings in a single bound. Granted, she does look awfully cute dancing around in her panties, but…I’m losing focus here. You tell me, are SciFi movies more realistic than action movies?

written by Matt Mitchell \\ tags: action, charlie's angels, Movies, pitch black, science fiction, scifi, scific, vs