I spend my days cutting film. Literally cutting strips of film, with scissors. Doing this shit for over twenty years has given me some insight. I know things. And things I know? Big budget science fiction has fucked itself.
I spent last week sitting in my bay cutting stock footage for another corporate video that’ll be forgotten six months from release. But it had me thinking about Avatar: The Way of Water. Three hours of watching whales swim by. Sure, the tech is pretty damn incredible. But do you know how fucking boring whales are? Watching Avatar: The Way of Water felt like someone handing me the keys to the most expensive screensaver in history.
Now I’m a fan of fancy visuals as much as the next thrill-seeking cinephile. Christ, I used to spend hours rewinding VHS tapes just to see how Rob Bottin did that shit in The Thing again. I get it, movie effects are cool! But there’s irresponsible flashing of cash and there’s actually telling a story with your effects. Hollywood these days can’t seem to remember the difference.
Let’s use Avatar as our jumping off point since the big dummy upped there money on more of those babies. Visually, Pandora is a masterpiece. Gorgeous. Sure. But under all that bush magic, it’s just a story about colonialism told by robots who apparently only read the wikipeida page on imperialism for class. Yeah, Cameron of all people gave us Alien. Lean, razor-focused science fiction where every single effect enhanced the scares. Now he’s content to make Nature documentaries starring a bunch of giant elves.
I watched 2001 on the big screen for the first time ten years ago at the Paramount right here in Austin. Yes, Kubrick filmed those sequences with miniatures and lit them like God himself. But the point wasn’t how dazzling he could make colored lights look. It was what those sights meant. His effects worked to examine larger concepts about evolution, spirituality, AI. Every shot was meticulously framed to challenge you mentally as well as visually. The goal of most big budget flicks nowadays seems to be the opposite. Suffocate your brain with darkness so you stop paying too much attention.
I remember when I first saw The Matrix and understood what they were doing. The reason those bullet time scenes were so amazing wasn’t just because they looked incredible (they did that part too), but because M Night actually had them fight inside of the film’s constructed reality. When Neo is ducking those bullets, you are literally seeing the theme of the movie unfold in front of you. Do the same activity with Rise of Skywalker and you have filmed moving footage of bullshit. Spotting green screens and shit stock CGI dayjobbing it through another superhero origin story. Trust me. I cut enough corporate training videos to know when people are using flashy visuals to hide the lack of content.
Being on the backend of movie production you kind of get an eye for whats practical and whats computer generated. There’s a heft to <a href=”https: //dystopianlens.co.uk/practical-effects-vs-cgi-why-the-charm-of-old-school-special-effects-still-captivates-audiences/”>practical effects</a> that computer generated still can’t replicate, no matter how far we push the technology. When that Alien bursts out of Kane’s chest, thats a puppet putting real fear and disgust into those actors faces. You know that, they know that. That matters. Hell, movies can do and create anything these days. The problem is nothing feels like it has stakes. Everything is too perfect.
This isn’t to say I’m against CGI. Christopher Nolan used computer generated imagery masterfully in Interstellar. But even then he was grounded his story in real science and human emotion. Sure he blew our minds with that black hole sequence, but it existed to serve the story of a father and his daughter. A story that could have worked with zero dollars of effects.
Some of my favorite modern sci-fi has come from smaller budget films that don’t have the luxury of blowing us away with shiny colours. Ex Machina was probably greenlit for like fifteen million dollars and managed to create more tension and intrigue than most blockbusters spend their budgets on explosives. Alex Garland understood that sometimes the scariest monsters are the ones we can’t see. He knew his actors were good enough and his sets were creepy enough that all the fancy CG stuff could stay in the background and let them do the heavy lifting.
Hell, even Annihilation was more interested in subverting expectations than buying someone with aJarhead perm a teleportation gun. That movie had some wild imagery but it existed to push the story about self-destruction and unknowable cosmic terror. Alex Garland trusts his audience. He doesn’t feel the need to overexplain himself or spell everything out. A lot of big budget science fiction spoon feeds its audience then distracts them with pixels and stupid animals flying through space.
Which is such a damn shame because movies like Blade Runner 2049 proved you can have big budget sci-fi without being a dumbass. Old man Villeneuve gave us the goods visually, but paired that with enough thematic storytelling that it didn’t just feel like a cash grab. Instead it honored the film it was inspired by while taking things into new territory. Movie went mostly ignored by the public which I’m sure scared the shit out of every studio CEO on the planet. Scared enough to not take those risks again.
I’ve been thinking about all this bullshit as I’ve spent my week cutting. This current gig I’m working on is stupid easy. Just takes stock footage of people and cuts them together while they explain the nuances of technology to tenth graders. Bland af. But sitting there for hours on end listening to white dudes drone on about changing the world made me think about how empty that shit sounds. Anyone can throw that shit on a buzzword bingo card these days. Shoot enough lasers, throw in adragon or two, and voila! Oscar bait!
But what are you actually saying? These mega budget science fiction spectaculars love to throw around “the future” but none of them give a shit about actually exploring it. They’ll spend all that money putting you on other planets but can’t be bothered to reflect on what that might do to us as people. Which was what all the science fiction films I grew up loved did the best.
They weren’t afraid to be political. They used the future as a direct reflection of what we were doing now. Extrapolating the problems we are dealing with in the modern world and running them up until them sane, logical conclusion. Alien was corporate horror at its finest. The thing breathed life into a conversation about worker safety standards and exploitation. Modern big budget films are afraid to have those conversations. Hell, they’re afraid to challenge you. Audiences want popcorn, Disney assures us. Give them explosions and stupid aliens, don’t make ’em think!
We’ve lost that human connection to technology. Hollywood’s obsession with bigger doesn’t allow for nuance. Character arcs are simplified and streamlined so they don’t interfere with the hero throwing cars into volcanoes. Your average summer blockbuster scares itself with big concepts like AI and genetic modification, but would rather you pay no attention to the philosophical implications of that and just cheer when the movie magical elf shoots it with a laser gun.
Maybe this is what happens when science fiction goes from specialty films into blockbusters. When I grew up, most of my favorite sci-fi movies were obsessive directors given unlimited reigns on projects they spent decades crafting. When your movie can be green screened onto a shark, do you bother wondering if you should be making that movie? What you are trying to say with that movie? Who cares if it’s about anything as long as some idiot can’t stop thinking about how shiny the fish is?
I know filmmaking will never return to those days. We live in an age of limitless possibility when it comes to tech and special effects. My hope is someone, someday uses that tech for something more than blowin up Stormtroopers. We live in a world with filmmakers that can dream up those things and actually afford to make them a reality. All we’re missing is the desire to say something about it.
Dylan grew up rewinding VHS tapes to study practical effects and never really stopped. Now based in Austin, he writes about sci-fi cinema with the eye of a filmmaker and the heart of a fan—celebrating the craft, the weirdness, and the magic of futures built by hand, not computers.