I don’t know about you guys but I’ve spent forty years designing thrusters for satellites and forty years watching Hollywood massacre science fiction movies with ever increasing vigor. So allow me to get right on this:
Indie science fiction films are saving science fiction.
Look, hop on Reddit or whatever and read some threads about the latest big budget sci-fi blockbuster. You’ll find people that enjoyed it. Hell, I enjoyed most of them. These movies are escapism. Loud, shiny, gut buckets designed specifically to allow you to turn your brain off for two hours. My problem is that there is nothing left to these films. Last year I saw the newest Star Wars (long story: made by wife, I needed away from wife) and I could barely find anything science-fictiony about it. Okay aside rant: why does acceptable science fiction dialogue sound like corporate memo buzzwords? But I watched that movie and every new Star Wars after about episode two (please let CGI Chewie die already) and I realised these films forgot what we watched science fiction for in the first place.
Until indie films.
See I thought it too. That science fiction film as a whole had given up. Then I saw movies like Coherence.
Movies like Coherence.
Hands down (and quite literally) some of the coolest science used in a science fiction film today was in Coherence. Directed by James Ward Byrkit, Coherence was shot with an estimated budget of $50,000. All of it. The whole movie takes place at a dinner party in someone’s home, probably has never more than eight characters on screen at a time, and it has awesome FX. Don’t get me wrong, seriously awesome practical FX. But it’s not CGI. There are no lasers and spaceship battles. Most of what “happens” in the film is characters sitting around a dinner table while a comet passes through the Earth’s orbit causing all kinds of quantum decoherence trickery.
The science here isn’t perfect (
BYRKIT UNDERSTAND PHYSICS WELL ENOUGH TO MAKE IT SEEM POSSIBLE.
Alright that’s enough all caps. What I’m trying to say is that James Ward Byrkit watched some YouTube lectures and learned enough physics to make you believe, within the realm of the movie, that what they were doing could work. But more than that:
HE USED IT TO EXPLORE SOMETHING MORE THAN SPECIAL EFFECTS.
Throughout the movie Byrkit took that basic understanding of quantum physics and used it to ask interesting questions about identity and personhood. Twice. I watched this film twice just to make sure I caught everything. Three hours of footage and I’m still sitting here wondering what the hell happened at the end. See science fiction? That.
Know what else did that? Primer.
You remember Primer right? Yeah that physics boss boy Shane Carruth basically invented time travel how movies should use science. Written, directed, filmed, edited, and scored by Shane Carruth, Primer had a grand total budget of $7k. And that scientists the absolute best and most realistic portrayal of time travel I’ve ever seen in a film. Not CGI time travel. Real engineer physics time travel. Dude was an engineer! You know it. Hell everyone that works in the film talks like engineers. Every line of dialogue sounds like nerds geeking out about their jobs but leaving out the every “here’s how a flux capacitor works” for the audience. It’s clever because most of us don’t understand any of it and that’s okay! If you really discovered some ground breaking technology you’d have no idea how the hell it worked either.
I’ve lost count how many times I’ve seen Primer but it’s safe to say I could watch it at least ten times and still not understand cause and effect of some scenes. Watched it recently with my neighbour Bob (early retirement, avionics engineer) and we spent hours after the credits just diagramming lines of timelines on my kitchen whiteboard.
Contrast that to say… The last big budget studio “science” fiction movie you watched. Eh. Don’t get me wrong I know they have value, don’t get me wrong. And yes the visual effects in big movies are incredible if that’s what you like. But science fiction? Hell no fantasy. Doesn’t matter how much you tack quantum or time travel or parallel universe onto anything if every piece of that science is used to turn the machines on and off and cart everyone around for set dressing you’re not doing science fiction.
Real science is stranger than fiction. Quantum mechanics is INSANE and weird. So instead of trying to make up the next impossible physics Hollywood can’t science we get to explore all the crazy science we already know. It takes effort. You have to understand how these things actually work then extrapolate enough to have fun with it. Seems like too much work though? How about we just make up science that sounds real enough that people won’t question it?
Enter Indie science films.
Stuff like Ex Machina (okay that one was $15 million but $15 million of it was on actors most folks didn’t care about), Moon, Under the Skin. Films that care enough about science to use it as more than just flashy movie tricks. Films that use real science to ask big questions.
What is consciousness? What happens to humans when we isolate them? What does it mean to be human when we build computers that can lie to us about whether they care?
Made for five million dollars Moon is about as scientifically possible as studio films come these days. Case in point the factory. Grey. Very industrial people worked here kind of grey. Please for the love of tv god stop making space look sterile and white in every damn studio film. To how Sam Rockwell’s character completely exhibits the proper psychological reactions we see in astronauts when we isolate them from society for too long. It was everything scientifically imaginable about that film just worked.
I read a lot of science fiction growing up. Asimov and Clarke and so many others were masters of building worlds from scientific seeds then asking “what if?” That’s all Indie film makers are doing. They’re starting with cool science and pushing it to its limits. Sometimes those limits break the story you wanted to tell. Sometimes it ends up creating plot holes that big studio films don’t want to deal with.
Like The Vast of Night, a film I recently watched. Reminded me a lot of old school ’50s sci-fi. You got these kids. They live in this small desert town. Strange radio signal comes one night and pretty much all of them movie is these kids trying to uncover what’s going on. Half of this movie is dialogue or noises heard from a radio. Had Abrams or Roland Emmerich behind the helm I’m sure we would’ve gotten Independence Day but with less Israelis. Actually it’s Russian surveillance drones. But in The Vast of Night we were treated to this small chilling masterpiece about pushing the bounds of human knowledge.
So where do Indie science fiction films go from here? I don’t know. So long as they continue to push the boundaries of science, ask questions, and most of all just have fun telling stories I’ll continue to watch them. Sure I’ll stumble across garbage. Plenty of shit, barely watchable low budget sci-fi films in my day with awful science and laughable acting. But I’ll find movies like Moon and Coherence and that, my friends, far outways the misses.
It reminds me of science fiction’s Golden age. Companies like famed publisher John W. Campbell Jr encouraged writers to push science and tell stories that had never been told before. Indie film is doing the same thing with pixels. There’s some amazing stories being told on micro budgets we’d never see otherwise.
The wife thinks I hate big budget science fiction. She wants me to sit back and stop trying to judge CGI animals as if they were real. Part of her is right. I am boring and enjoy ruining things for myself.
But it makes me angry that we have films like Coherence, Primer, and Moon and studios with larger budgets than most countries GDP want to make ridiculousness.
Science fiction isn’t going to be saved by Disney or Pixar or Marvel Studios. But it don’t need to be saved. There are people out there that care about science and “what if” just waiting to make their film. They’ll keep science fiction alive with little known movies at film festivals you’ve probably skipped every year. Until Hollywood starts caring about more than market analysis and focus groups we nerds will be hiding in indie film camping out for the next gem.
John spent forty years designing real spacecraft before turning his attention to fictional ones. Writing from Oregon, he brings a scientist’s curiosity to sci-fi—separating good speculation from bad physics while keeping his sense of wonder firmly intact.