John C Wright on Sci Fi Flicks
I have not written a review for this space of Alex Proyas’ DARK CITY (1998) despite that it is one of my favorite films. However, I was once asked in an interview about my opinions of science fiction films, and my take on this film, and several others, can be found at Mostly Fiction Book Reviews:
I reprint an excerpt here as a courtesy to my readers. The interviewer’s questions are italicized.
My one and only encounter with Hollywood was both profitable and illuminating. A friend of mine who works in the business there, Kurt Inderbitzin of Abandon Television, called and asked me, since I was a science fiction writer, if I could come up with an idea for a time-travel story? I boasted I could come up with an idea for twenty time-travel stories in twenty-four hours, which I proceeded to do. I was not hired to write the script, merely to come up with the treatment, for which I was generously paid. It was a made-for-TV movie called TIMESHIFTERS, and it starred Casper Van Dien (of STARSHIP TROOPERS fame).
The movie (in my humble opinion) was swell; good-looking special effects; lots of action; and my friend’s script had the perfect ending to tie up my beginning. The premise for the script was this: a reporter is doing research into famous disasters; the Hindenburg crash, the sinking of the Titanic. He notices a man in the background of the photographs, the same man. How can the same man be present at events widely spaced in time? The reporter is on a jumbo jet that is flying in stormy weather, when he looks across the aisle and sees this same man sitting next to him, a strange little expectant smile on his face…
What was illuminating about the encounter is that, my friend turned down nineteen out of twenty of the time-travel story ideas on the grounds that he did not want to make a science fiction movie. A time travel story that is not science fiction? Sounds like an oxymoron, doesn’t it?
But what my friend meant was clear enough: fiction based on exploring ideas does not lend itself well to the visual medium. On the other hand, a romance, or an action story, or a fairytale set in a science fiction background, if the science fiction is merely there for background, does lend itself to the visual medium. The time machine is a common enough stereotype of the science fiction genre that it can be understood without explanation even by a muggle (excuse me, a non-science fiction reader).
Another example might make this clear. In the TV show ROSWELL, the premise was that four angst-ridden teens from New Mexico (whose looks ranged from and drop-dead gorgeous through stunning to merely jaw-droppingly handsome) were actually the children of space aliens. The aliens were the bug-eyed gray-skinned flying saucer people of popular myth and new age spiritualism. Hence, the show was about aliens but it was not a science fiction show. Had the aliens in the show had a particular character, such as, had they been Vulcans or Klingons, Shadows or Vorlons, Daleks or Ewoks, then it would have been a science fiction show, not merely a soap opera with a science fiction background. The difference is that the generic aliens of the flying saucer story is a common enough stereotype to be understood without explanation by the muggles, whereas the particular aliens of Star Trek, Babylon Five, Dr. Who or Star Wars are not.
Likewise, Ray Walston’s Uncle Martin from MY FAVORITE MARTIAN was not a science fiction character: nothing particular about Mars is ever mentioned in the show to make the character anything but the standard, commonly-understood, Martian of popular conception. The Martians from Well’s WAR OF THE WORLDS, on the other hand, or Lewis’ Sorn of Malacandra, or Burrough’s Red Men of Barsoom, are science fiction characters.
Hollywood is adroit at filming stories with science fiction backgrounds and elements; with a few, cherished exceptions, Hollywood is clumsy at making honest-to-goodness science fiction films.
(My cherished exceptions, if you’d like to know, are THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL, starring Michael Rennie & Patricia Neal; DARK CITY starring Rufus Sewell and Jennifer Connelly; and MINORITY REPORT, starring Tom Cruise. STAR WARS is a nostalgic homage to science fiction serials of the FLASH GORDON days, but it is not really a thinking man’s SF; 2001 A SPACE ODYSSEY was a thinking man’s SF, and beautifully-done but marred by a weak ending.)
Interviewer:
I can’t quite put my finger on why, but I’m surprised to see MINORITY REPORT listed. Also, missing from the list was the adaptation of Carl Sagan’s CONTACT. Does this not qualify as thinking man’s SF in your view? I’m also curious to learn your reaction to the MATRIX movies. (By the way, I’m glad to see DARK CITY on your list. A woefully obscure and underrated movie in my opinion.)
John C. Wright:
Well, MINORITY REPORT enjoyed good-looking special effects, it had an honest-to-goodness science fiction premise (what if one could detect crime before it were committed?), and it wove a murder mystery without cheating the premise, with several clever plot twists. A certain degree of human sorrow and compassion was not absent from the film.
And it had a chase scene on jetpacks!
The moral quandary in the film reminded me of the short story by Ursula K. LeGuin: ‘Those Who Walk Away From Omelas’: if you could create a city free from murder, merely by forcing one innocent soul to suffer a lifetime of cruel imprisonment, would you condemn the one to save the many?
On the other hand, CONTACT had errors in the plot logic that spoiled my enjoyment of the film. Alien signals allow the earth to construct two massive teleportation assemblies. The mechanisms clearly involve superhuman technology. And yet, it is proposed as a serious theory at the end of the film that one eccentric millionaire faked the alien broadcasts, which were detected by several ground based stations originating from Tau Ceti. Oh, come now. Did the eccentric millionaire invent the plans for the machines in his spare time? Imagine Andrew Carnegie designing the Saturn Five rocket in 1903 and keeping it secret.
CONTACT also had a theme running through it seeking to equate science and religion, a conceit equally offensive to honest scientists as to faithful believers. I doubt Carl Sagan, famous atheist, would approve. Can science and religion be reconciled merely by having scientists and ministers fornicate? This will be surprising news to all involved, as well as agreeable to whoever is paired with the girl-scientist that looks like Jody Foster.
The ending was contrived and annoying. The government pointlessly seeks to suppress the scientific information, in order to have the main character’s testimony be a matter of faith. Hooey. If you doubt what the trained observer observed, build another machine and send another observer. When the handsome preacher at the end of the film waved to the crowd and shouts: “But I believer her!” my reaction was: so what? You are the man, in the film, who represents the idea of believing in what cannot be seen. You have no skepticism to be overcome. What does your testimony matter?
DARK CITY is my favorite film. You can see many of the same themes in it as appear in several of my own works. I like the hats. I like the sinister aliens, who seemed to have emotions not quite like human emotions. I like Kiefer Sutherland doing his impersonation of Igor. I get twitterpated at the sight of Jennifer Connelly, whose beauty has no peer. This film reminded me of every science fiction book I loved as a child: the mind-bending plot of an A.E. van Vogt tale, but with the main character from a Keith Laumer novel. The only thing I did not like in the film is voice-over in the first minute: pointless, irksome, heavy-handed and misleading.
My enjoyment of MATRIX was diminished by a friend of mine, who said that this film did right everything DARK CITY did wrong. Hence, I walked into the theater ready to find fault with any fault that could be found. And faults I did find.
Why is there a precognitive oracle, a fantasy story element, in the midst of a science fiction story? Why does the oracle lie to the hero? An oracle can mislead, but if she lies, she becomes a pointless plot-element, and the trust of the viewer has been betrayed.
Why do the AI’s have emotions, express frustration? They are machines.
Why, inside the Matrix, do the agents of the machines need to go through the motions of implanting a bugging device inside the hero? They control the electronic reality around them; they should be able to put a command-line invisible to him in the code running his simulation a TRON command that will track his “movements”. The machines surely must know where his physical body is, at least, at the beginning of the film: can’t they plant a bug on the lines running into and out of his head, and cut the feed if he starts doing something they don’t like?
A science fiction story must establish what the character can and cannot do, good guy and bad. Why are the agents able to remove Neo’s mouth from his face, but not able to do this a second time, or remove the gun from his hand? How is our hero able to come back from the dead, not in the simulation, but in reality?
In the sequel, it turns out that the Oracle was lying after all, and the faith of Morpheus was a trap. This is an admirable twist, and it solved the problem of the lying Oracle. But, then, if the Oracle lied, where and how did Neo get his real Messianic powers, that work both in the simulation and in real life?
The plot says the humans are being kept alive to be used as batteries. Um, batteries? If you needed to live off of the heat and electrical current produced by human bodies, human bodies you need to feed some sort of nutrient fluid, nutrients you need to grow or create in some sort of ecology, the inefficiency of the operation becomes astonishing. A gas-powered motor could not be fed more cheaply and produce more current than raising a human baby in a sensory deprivation tank? If the baby does not produce enough voltage to run the sensory deprivation tank and its surrounding medical appliances, as well as the lights, robotic farming tools and implements on the farm or hydroponics beds used to produce the gruel used to feed the baby, then using the baby as a fuel source is not an economically viable proposition. They could not put a power satellite in orbit, or construct a nuclear power plant and dig up uranium, for less money that it takes to build a continent-sized automated nursery? The film-makers could have said the machines need human brains to help run the computer operations of their network, or something.
In all fairness, let me mention that the point of the “human battery” idea was to drive home into the gut of the viewer the awful inhumanity of the illusion holding man captive: all human arts and accomplishments, all the science of our mighty civilization, reduced to the most humiliating imaginable of lies: mankind is only needed for its meat content. No wonder the rebels risk death to fight this: it is a mockery of all human aspiration. As an artistic image, the conceit is brilliant: as a science fiction premise, dull.
It would have been far more interesting if the “human battery” tale told by Morpheus turned out to be a lie, and that the machines were not killing the human beings because their Asimov-style programming prevented them. Anyone shot or killed who is attached to the matrix simply wakes up again in another simulation. But the rebels, because they hack into the system, are not protected by the machine’s fail-safe, and when they die, their belief in death kills them. Now there is an interesting science fiction premises, worthy of Jack Williamson. The machines are programmed to protect men, but the protection is dehumanizing. Are the rebels willing to die and suffer death in order to save humanity from the tyranny of a benevolent illusion? The most interesting line in the film was where Agent Smith revealed that The AI’s continue to attempt to produce utopias, but human nature keeps defeating them. Who programmed the machines to create the illusion of perfection? Again, something could have been done with this.
But if the humans die whenever their simulated illusion dies, and the AI’s control the illusion, the illusion would not permit any human to die, lest the machines lose their battery power. Instead of the modern world, the illusion would consist only of every man as a patient in a mental hospital, with padded walls and no sharp edges, or, better yet, buried up to his neck in concrete with a gag to prevent him from biting his tongue. If all you need from mankind is the battery power in their brains, why make the simulation interesting and dangerous enough to imperil your charges?
Compare the artificiality of having Neo spring back to life for no particular reason at the climax of MATRIX, with the somewhat cleverer plot twist in DARK CITY of having the treacherous Dr. Schreber, who is an expert in the art of concocting artificial memories, implant concocted memories in John Murdoch, so that Murdoch receives, in one moment, a lifetime’s worth of training in his new found psychic powers. Brilliant.
Contemplate the sorrow and power of the image we see the moment a blood-soaked Dr. Schreber, needle held in his own hand to his own head, erased his own memories in order to be allowed to live as the slave of the Strangers.
Compare that to the shallow hep-cat slickness of all the leather-clad characters in MATRIX. None of them seem to have any depth, any past. Only the powerful performance of Laurence Fishburne saves the rebellion from being composed entirely of unsympathetic and inert characters. (Save for his character, my inclination was to root for the agents, well-groomed in suit and tie. Maybe it is just me, but when I see guys dressed like Elliott Ness battling guys dressed like Hells’ Angels leather Goths, my sympathies are with Ness. )
Compare the depth of the theme. In DARK CITY, the human spirit triumphs, because there is something in the human spirit that the aliens cannot analyze: they are perishing from their inability to understand the soul. In MATRIX, the bland and not-particularly-upright chosen Messiah triumphs for no particular reason I could see. After shooting a bunch of perfectly innocent guards, and getting shot himself, he pops back to life. Just cuz.
Compare the love story. In DARK CITY, Mrs. Murdoch loves her husband because she remembers their romance and marriage; Mr. Murdoch responds with tenderness, even though he knows her memories of him are false. At the close of the tale, we see the two of them beginning to fall in love again, because love is not stopped by forgetfulness. In MATRIX, Trinity falls for Neo because, um, the script calls for it. And there is that prophecy.
Now, I don’t remember a scene where Neo puts a ring on her finger, though I do recall a rather lengthy and unappealing honeymoon scene in the sequel. Or maybe it was just recreational copulation rather than a honeymoon. Maybe the rebels in Zion are just too cool hep-cats to bother with marriage. I wonder what they do with bastard babies. Put them in tanks, and hook them up to run their power stations?
Compare the luminous beauty of Jennifer Connelly with the rather drab looks of Carrie-Anne Moss. Well, this would be less than flattering to Miss Moss, so let us draw a kindly veil over that line of inquiry.
Now, having said all that, was MATRIX a good action movie? It certainly was. It set the look and tone for a generation of movies. I would recommend it to my friends. The movie was cool in some places, spectacular in others. The scene of the machines marching across a blasted and sunless landscape among the endless coffins of sleeping humanity was nightmarish. Seeing Laurence Fishburne win a wire-fu sparring match by flicking his fingers into the Adam’s apple of Keanu Reeves was worth the price of admission.
Was it a good science fiction movie? No: the “human battery” premise was ludicrous. The script simply cheats in certain places. The writers did not draw out the implications of the world they established. The ending was goofy and pointless. If I were the demiurge running the world-illusion, I would simply shut down the “flight” module whenever one of the characters started to fly. Shut down the “bend the spoon” subroutine while you’re at it. What? The machines cannot debug their own system?
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
