Ten Great Science Fiction Films (continued)
Continuing the list of ten great science fiction films. (See Parts I & II of this series on mythology in media if you haven’t yet.)
#5) Interstellar
Love is the one thing that we’re capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space. Maybe we should trust that, even if we can’t understand it.
Interstellar is another example of how great science fiction films can modernize motifs from ancient mythology. Two motifs really stand out in this movie: the hero’s journey and transcendent love.
Heroic journeys through space-time
As agriculture dries up and civilization literally turns to dust, former NASA pilot Cooper and his daughter Murphy discover a binary code from alien intelligence. This code, which communicates by manipulating gravitational waves, directs them to a resurrected NASA program (aptly named the “Lazarus missions”). NASA recruits Cooper to pilot a spaceship through a wormhole to explore remote planets, where humanity has a chance to reboot civilization.
While Cooper travels through space, Murphy becomes a NASA scientist. Her job is to figure out a unique equation that would let NASA launch space stations from earth, thereby saving humanity through mass egress. Accordingly, Cooper and Murphy resemble legendary heroes, like Aeneas founding a new civilization and Moses leading an exodus.
At the film’s climax, Cooper flies into the singularity of a black hole (infinite space-time curvature beyond the event horizon, or point of no return). Surprisingly, he finds himself inside a four-dimensional hypercube, or tesseract (built by people from the future), which saves his life.
Inside the tesseract, Cooper can collect data that will solve the equation Murphy is working on back on earth. He’s also able to see Murphy’s entire life as a timeline on a spatial dimension. To send the data to Murphy, Cooper figures out how to communicate with her by manipulating gravitational waves on her timeline. Thus, he sends a binary code to her past and present self.
Of course, this binary code was the intelligence that communicated with Cooper and Murphy at the beginning of the movie, resulting in a paradoxical time loop that completes their heroic journeys.
Love transcending space-time
Time loop paradoxes aside, what’s up with the tesseract? You may recall one in the Marvel films, though it’s an archetype artists have used before. My favorite example is Salvador Dali’s painting Corpus Hupercubus, in which a hypercube unfolds into a hyper-dimensional cross. Like the hypercube in Dali’s mystical art, the tesseract in Interstellar symbolizes a higher dimension of consciousness.
On this hyper-dimension, love can travel across different times and places, thereby uniting individuals that appear separate within their limited three-dimensional perspectives.
Now, on one hand, Interstellar implies that civilization on earth either has gone wrong or will go to heck, especially in relation to environmental disasters. (Given the politics of climate science, I can’t blame the film’s pessimism.)
On the other hand, the movie expresses faith in space colonization, particularly if people reboot civilization by embracing a higher dimension of consciousness (namely, one based on love). So, in Interstellar, space colonization is not just about rebooting civilization—it’s about rebooting human consciousness too.
#6) District 9
Forget about the weapons there mate, it doesn’t matter. Forget about the weapons!
I really do think District 9 should be recognized as one of the great science fiction films. If I could praise it for one thing, it’d be for originality. When aliens unexpectedly land as refugees in Johannesburg, an inept government quarantines them in “District 9.” (Clearly, District 9 is partly an allegory about immigration and social segregation, perhaps xenophobia and racism reminiscent of apartheid.)
The fate of these illegal aliens is then outsourced to a private military firm, whose vested interest lies in understanding their extraterrestrial weapons. However, these technologies only work when activated by alien hands, which leads the firm to perform inhumane experiments on the aliens.
https://youtu.be/VGqjv_CkCXo
It’s hard not to sympathize with the poor aliens. It’s also hard not to fear that their destructive technologies will get into the wrong hands—ironically, human (not alien) hands. In this way, District 9 warns about what happens when ineffectual governments outsource responsibilities to unaccountable third-parties. In such cases, powerful technologies only aggravate the moral hazard.
#7) Planet of the Apes (1968)
Beware of the beast Man, for he is the Devil’s pawn. Alone among God’s primates, he kills for sport or lust or greed. Yeah, he will murder his brother to possess his brother’s land. Let him not breed in great numbers, for he will make a desert of his home and yours. Shun him; drive him back into his jungle lair, for he is the harbinger of death.
The plot is simple: civilization destroys itself, and apes take over the world. Nevertheless, Planet of the Apes has profound scientific and allegorical themes built into this story.
The scientific themes include elements of biology (evolution of primates) and physics (time travel via relativity). The allegorical themes tackle a wide range of social issues. For instance, there’s religious dogmatism (discussing evolution is heresy in ape society) and social stratification (chimps are the brains, gorillas the brawn, orangutans the bureaucrats, and humans the slaves).
The central theme is both scientific and allegorical: the nuclear annihilation of human civilization. Few movie endings are as unforgettable as the scene where Charlton Heston’s character Taylor drops to his knees before destroyed remains of the Statue of Liberty and curses all of humanity.
Although Taylor’s cursing ends the movie, it raises thought-provoking questions. Humans survived by building technologically advanced societies, but will they destroy themselves by the same means? Will humankind survive by inventing more advanced technologies, or will innovation create runaway technologies that destroy everything?
In short, do technologically advanced civilizations inevitably self-destruct? Planet of the Apes doesn’t give an answer. That answer, after all, is up to us.
This list of ten great science fiction films will conclude in Part IV of this series on mythology in media.