CINEMA

   The basis on which films and film-makers have been selected for inclusion in this volume is discussed in the Introduction.From the outset, the cinema specialized in illusion to a degree that had been impossible on the stage. Sf itself takes as its subject matter that which does not exist, now, in the real world (though it might one day), so it has a natural affinity with the cinema: the illusory qualities of film are ideal for presenting fictions about things that are not yet real. The first sf film-maker of any consequence - indeed, one of the very first film-makers - was Georges MELIES, who used trick photography to take his viewers to the Moon in Le VOYAGE DANS LA LUNE (1902; vt A Trip to the Moon). What they saw there - chorus girls and lobster-clawed Selenites - was not exactly high art, but it was, for the time, wonderful. The ability of sf cinema to evoke wonders, for which it is often criticized as being a modern equivalent of a carnival freak show, is also its strength. Wonders themselves may pall, or be dismissed as childish, but nevertheless they are at the heart of sf; sf, no matter how sophisticated, by definition must feature something new, some alteration from the world as we know it (though of course newness can easily become mere novelty). Film, from this viewpoint, is sf's ideal medium.But from another point of view film is far from the ideal medium. Sf as literature is analytic and deals with ideas; film is the opposite of analytic, and has trouble with ideas. The way film deals with ideas is to give them visual shape, as images which may carry a metaphoric charge, but metaphors are tricky things, and, while the ideas of sf cinema may be potent, they are seldom precise. Also, film is a popular artform which, its producers often believe, is unlikely to lose money by underestimating the intelligence of the public. So, on its surface, sf cinema has often been simplistic, even though complex currents may trouble the depths where its subtexts glide.In fact, sf cinema in the silent period did become surprisingly sophisticated, though to the modern eye, which prefers the illusion of photographic realism, the theatrical Expressionism of much early sf cinema - especially in Russia and Germany - is as strange a convention as having people talk in blank verse. Two important early sf films came from those countries and that convention, AELITA (1924) from Russia and METROPOLIS (1926) from Germany. Nonetheless, Metropolis - the first indubitable classic of sf cinema - is, for all the apparent triteness of its story, striking even today, with its towering city of the future, its cowed lines of shuffling workers, its chillingly lovely female ROBOT. Fritz LANG, who made it, also made one of the first space movies, Die FRAU IM MOND (1929; vt The Woman in the Moon). The debut film of Rene Clair (1898-1981), one day to be a very famous director, was also sf: PARIS QUI DORT (1923; vt The Crazy Ray), but this was an altogether lighter piece, a charming story of Parisians frozen in time.Many people remember the sf-movie booms of the 1950s and the late 1970s, but the first sf boom, that of the 1930s, is often forgotten. Though some sf films were made in Europe at this time, it was in the USA that the most influential were produced: JUST IMAGINE (1930), FRANKENSTEIN (1931), ISLAND OF LOST SOULS (1932), DR JEKYLL AND MR HYDE (1932), KING KONG (1933), DELUGE (1933), The INVISIBLE MAN (1933), The BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1935), Mad Love (1935; ORLACS HANDE) and LOST HORIZON (1936). Just Imagine is a forgotten futuristic musical, and Deluge is a DISASTER movie which, like the earlier French La FIN DU MONDE (1931; vt The End of the World), is primarily interested in the effect of apocalypse on human morals. King Kong is of course an early and classic monster movie, with a sympathetic monster. Similarly, Lost Horizon is the most famous LOST-WORLD film, though the theme has never been very important in sf movies.It is interesting that the remainder - all six of them good films, and mostly well remembered - have in common the over-reaching scientist destroyed by his own creation. This theme, which could be called the Promethean theme (after the hero who stole fire from the Gods - a literal parallel in the case of the Frankenstein films, where scientists steal lightning to create new life), remains a central theme in sf cinema today; it is a familiar paradox that much sf cinema is anti-science, even anti-intellectual (ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM IN SF), and (especially in the 1930s) cast in the GOTHIC mode, which typically sees the limitation of science as being its reliance on Reason in a world of mysteries not susceptible to rational analysis - indeed, most of the SCIENTISTS who appear in the above films are seen as literally mad. This is true also of several European films of the time, including the archetypally Gothic German film ALRAUNE (1930; vt Daughter of Evil). It is, of course, a CLICHE of early sf generally and of sf in the cinema especially that scientists are mad, so much so that we seldom pause to analyse the oddness of this. It is as if these films were telling us that the brain, the seat of reason, is so delicate an instrument that its overuse leads to the very opposite, unreason. Although all these films are undeniably sf, they are generally and rightly categorized as HORROR. Also archetypal of the sf cinema is their clear Luddite subtext: the results of science are terrifying. This pessimistic view gave way to OPTIMISM later in the 1930s, but returned with new vigour when the real-world results of scientific advance - the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki-proved to be so terrifying. The Bomb was the image that was to loom behind the MONSTER MOVIES of the 1950s, especially - not surprisingly - those made in JAPAN.In the later 1930s few sf films were made, the most obvious new theme being SPACE OPERA, though this was mainly confined to cheerful juvenile serials such as FLASH GORDON (1936, with sequels in 1938 and 1940) and BUCK ROGERS IN THE 25TH CENTURY (1939). The one adult film made about the conquest of space, the hifalutin', rhetorical and romantic THINGS TO COME (1936), was from the UK; although it flopped, with hindsight we can see it as a milestone of sf film-making. While ultimately optimistic, its vision of the future has many dark aspects, and in this respect the movie is the inheritor of the DYSTOPIAN theme of Metropolis.The 1940s, by contrast, were empty years for sf cinema, though they started well with the sinister DR CYCLOPS (1940), whose villain shrank people. Medical sf/horror was well represented by The LADY AND THE MONSTER (1944), about a sinister excised brain kept alive by science. More typical was comic sf, mostly weak, as in the ever more slapstick sequels to the Frankenstein and Invisible Man movies, both unnatural beings winding up as co-stars, in 1948 and 1951 respectively, with Bud Abbott and Lou Costello. The PERFECT WOMAN (1949) is a UK comedy interesting in its exploitation of sf to sexist ends: its underclothes fetishism would have been unthinkable had its robot heroine, played by a real woman, been a real woman. Prehistoric fantasy, which continues as a minor genre today, had a good start with ONE MILLION B.C. (1940). There was not much else.The sf-movie boom of the 1950s, which figures largely in our cultural nostalgia today - even among viewers too young to have seen the originals when they first came out - was largely made up of MONSTER MOVIES (which see for details), but the theme of space exploration hit the screens even earlier and was also popular. (There were few monster movies before 1954, the first being The THING in 1951.) The first 1950s space film to be released was ROCKETSHIP X-M, which was rushed out in 1950 to capitalize on the pre-publicity for DESTINATION MOON; it was the latter, however, that was successful. It was followed by such spacecraft-oriented films as The DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL (1951), WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE (1951), INVADERS FROM MARS (1953), IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE (1953), WAR OF THE WORLDS (1953), RIDERS TO THE STARS (1954), The CONQUEST OF SPACE (1955), THIS ISLAND EARTH (1955), The QUATERMASS XPERIMENT (1955), FORBIDDEN PLANET (1956), and EARTH VS. THE FLYING SAUCERS (1956). In six of these, probably more for budgetary than for ideological reasons, the spacecraft bring ALIENS to Earth; all are monstrous except for the Christlike alien in The Day the Earth Stood Still, who dies and rises again before (in a manner more appropriate to the Old Testament than the New) threatening Earth with destruction if it does not repent its sins. In the remainder the urge for the conquest of space is apparent (as it was coming to be in the real world, with the first orbital satellite, Sputnik 1, launched in 1957), although the religious subtext of much 1950s sf cinema is found also in When Worlds Collide (a Noah's space-ark is used to save a remnant of humanity from God's wrath made manifest as cataclysm) and The Conquest of Space (the captain of a spacecraft goes mad because he believes space travel is an intrusion into the sphere of God). The only full-blooded space operas of the period appeared moderately late on, with This Island Earth and Forbidden Planet, but even in these tales the central image is of the destruction that can be wrought by science.One of the most memorable sf films of the 1950s boom is at first glance not sf at all: the Mickey Spillane film noir KISS ME DEADLY (1955), dir Robert Aldrich (1918-1983), in which the central object is a box which, when opened, emits a fiery light and unleashes destruction on the world. The film effortlessly and pessimistically links by metaphor the petty spites and bestialities that disfigure individuals with the greater capacity for destruction symbolized by the Pandora's Box which, in this case, appears to unbind, like the Bomb, a cleansing radioactivity to greet the fallen world.The monster movie, of course, is even more obviously fearful of science: its text is "science breeds monsters". Political PARANOIA, a quite different theme (and one to be developed further in the 1960s) also found a niche in much 1950s sf, especially in those films in which creatures that look just like us on the outside turn out on the inside to be monsters or alien puppets (often identifiable as metaphoric stand-ins for such other secret worms in the apple of Western society as communist agents). Invaders from Mars (1953), one of the earliest and best of these (MONSTER MOVIES and PARANOIA for other films on this theme), added a touch of Freudian fear to the paranoid brew by making Mummy and Daddy among the first humans to be rendered monstrous and emotionless by alien control. The most famous example is INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (1956), in which, as in most of its kind, the slightly diagrammatic fear of communism is surely secondary to the fear of the loss of affect: the monstrous quasi-humans have no emotions; they are like cogs in a remorseless machine. It is interesting that, although with hindsight we see the Eisenhower years precisely as years of conformity, it was fear of that very conformity that played so prominent a role in the US popular culture of those years.Where in the 1940s only a handful of sf films were made, in the 1950s there were 150 to 200, their numbers increasing in inverse proportion to their quality: although the years 1957-9 had more sf movies than the years 1950-56, they were mostly B-movies from "Poverty Row", which, despite the fact that they include such old favourites as ATTACK OF THE CRAB MONSTERS, The INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN , QUATERMASS II and The MONOLITH MONSTERS (all 1957) and The FLY , The BLOB and I MARRIED A MONSTER FROM OUTER SPACE (all 1958), leave an overall impression of sf cinema as both sensationalist and tacky. The year 1959, however, while producing genre movies that were mostly forgettable exploitation material, also produced three films which, while obviously intended for a mainstream audience, had an sf theme: JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH, The WORLD, THE FLESH AND THE DEVIL and ON THE BEACH. At last some sf themes (LOST WORLDS, the HOLOCAUST AND AFTER and the END OF THE WORLD), it seemed, were sufficiently familiar to general audiences to risk the involvement of big-name stars: James Mason, Harry Belafonte and Gregory Peck. None of these films was especially good, but as sociological signposts each has some importance.Another phenomenon of the 1950s was the rise of Japanese sf cinema, built largely on the success of GOJIRA (1954; vt Godzilla), a monster movie. Many further monster movies followed, nearly all from Toho studios, which began working in the space-opera and alien-invasion genres later, as with CHIKYU BOIEGUN (1957; vt The Mysterians).By the later 1950s the major studios were abandoning genre sf, and most memorable productions of the period were made by such low-budget independent producers as Roger CORMAN; the earlier 1950s, by contrast, had been dominated by studios like Universal, Warner Bros. and Paramount, which had sometimes used specialist producers like George PAL or even, in the case of Universal, developed their own specialist sf director, Jack ARNOLD. For the decades since then it has been arguable that much of the inventive energy of sf cinema has continued to bubble up from the marshes of "Poverty Row".Sf films were quite numerous through most of the 1960s, without many clear lines of evolution being visible, although individual films sometimes showed real creativity (but see below for developments in the cinema of paranoia, and for the new wave of DYSTOPIAN films). Hollywood remained fairly uneventful so far as sf was concerned through the years 1960-67, with silly, colourful films like The TIME MACHINE (1960), The ABSENT-MINDED PROFESSOR (1961) and FANTASTIC VOYAGE (1966). Jerry Lewis made a surprisingly effective sf campus comedy out of the Jekyll and Hyde theme, The NUTTY PROFESSOR (1963). Roger Corman's low-budget, independent sf features became less common, but one of the last was one of the best: X - THE MAN WITH THE X-RAY EYES (1963). By far the best commercial movie in the genre belonged to it only marginally: Alfred Hitchcock's The BIRDS (1963). A revenge-of-Nature film which began a whole trend, this is a particularly surreal monster movie whose paranoid element - intimate sharers of our own world becoming the monsters - showed that the paranoia theme was continuing strongly in sf cinema, as it has ever since, but with a shift in emphasis. In the 1950s the monster movie had been comparatively innocent, and - not surprisingly with the Cold War being at its height and Hollywood itself about to become subject to investigations designed to weed out left-wingers - regularly featured monsters from outside normal experience; foreigners, so to speak. These films often opened with scenes of tranquillity - children playing, farmers hoeing, lovers strolling. The subsequent violence was almost a metaphor for the irrational forces which peaceful US citizens feared might enter their lives, forces beyond their control, such as (in real life) the Bomb or invasion. By contrast, the subtext of The Birds can, with hindsight, be seen as changing the focus of unease away from the alien monster towards the domestic monster. In the 1960s, elements of decay and division in Western society, especially US society, were becoming more obvious, and 1960s sf reflected this. Working like Hitchcock on the margins of sf cinema, John FRANKENHEIMER was perhaps the most distinguished Hollywood director of 1960s politically paranoid sf, with The MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (1962), Seven Days in May (1964) and SECONDS (1966). Conspiracy-theory paranoia of the most extreme kind is the occasion for black comedy in Theodore Flicker's The PRESIDENT'S ANALYST (1967), in which the Telephone Company is out to rule the world. Even George Pal, of all people, had a very effective exercise in paranoia with The POWER (1967), a story of amoral superhumans disguised as ordinary people. Stanley KUBRICK, working outside the Hollywood system, made his memorably black and funny sf debut with DR STRANGELOVE OR: HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB (1964), and Hollywood exile Joseph Losey made his nightmare of alienation and radioactivity, The DAMNED (1961), in the UK. In all of these, it is our own society that is frightening, not some alien import.The 1960s were, famously, a decade of radicalism and social change, but the English-speaking cinema was slow to reflect this, being more interested in the miniskirt than in, say, the growing power of young people as a political force. Movies of youth revolution like PRIVILEGE [1967], WILD IN THE STREETS [1968] and GAS-S-S-S [1970] came only at the end of the decade, in a perhaps cynical attempt to cash in on the flower-power phenomenon, and there were never many of them. Spy movies were immensely popular - a phenomenon perhaps reflecting the idea of a society riddled with secrets and conspiracies - but there is nothing remotely radical or even modern about the James Bond series of films inaugurated with DR NO (1962) and going on to include many other borderline-sf films like YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE (1967); indeed, their central image of mad SCIENTISTS out to rule the world derives from the pulp sf of the 1920s and 1930s (see also CRIME AND PUNISHMENT). In Europe, however, especially in France, the so-called New Wave cinema was indeed revolutionizing the medium with lasting effect. Many New Wave directors made marginal sf films, typically incorporating sf tropes into a supposedly future but apparently contemporary setting. These included Chris Marker with La JETEE (1963), Jean-Luc Godard with ALPHAVILLE (1965) and WEEKEND (1968), François Truffaut with FAHRENHEIT 451 (1966) and Alain Resnais with JE T'AIME, JE T'AIME (1967), all eccentric and interesting; Truffaut was perhaps the odd man out, as the director least comfortable with future scenarios. The exploitation cinema in Italy had no critical agenda of reform like the New Wave in France, but it had plenty of intelligence and inventiveness, though the results were often extremely uneven; much of the Italian work was HORROR, but this often overlapped with sf, as in Mario Bava's TERRORE NELLO SPAZIO (1965; vt Planet of the Vampires). Further east, both RUSSIA and Czechoslovakia (CZECH AND SLOVAK SF) made quite a few sf films, including Russia's PLANETA BUR (1962; vt Planet of Storms) and Czechoslovakia's IKARIE XB-1 (1963). The sf business in the UK was normally a matter of low-budget B-movies, but some respectable films emerged - e.g., The DAY THE EARTH CAUGHT FIRE (1961), CHILDREN OF THE DAMNED (1963), QUATERMASS AND THE PIT (1967) and Peter WATKINS's The WAR GAME (1965). This last was made for tv but banned from tv for giving too realistic a picture of nuclear HOLOCAUST; even today it comes across at least as powerfully as The DAY AFTER (1983), made for US tv two decades later.The single most important year in the history of sf cinema is 1968. Before then sf was not taken very seriously either artistically or commercially; since then it has remained, much of the time, one of the most popular film genres, and has produced many more good films. Simply to list the main sf films of 1968 gives some idea of the year's significance: BARBARELLA, CHARLY, NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, PLANET OF THE APES and 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. (Less important were COUNTDOWN, The ILLUSTRATED MAN , The LOST CONTINENT and The MONITORS .) George A. ROMERO's Night of the Living Dead is the exception here in being a low-budget, independent production, but, while it was seen by some contemporaries as being merely another milestone in making the cinema of horror more luridly graphic and disgusting - a key moment in the evolution of the SPLATTER MOVIE - its image of humans reduced to deranged, cannibalistic zombies has an undeniable metaphoric power and even a dark poetry, and it was revolutionary in its discomforting refusal to offer any solace throughout, nor any happy ending. The other four films were commercially reputable products, and interesting for different reasons. Barbarella is second-generation, spoof sf, the sort of film that can be made only when genre materials have already been thoroughly absorbed into the cultural fabric. Charly won its financier and star, Cliff Robertson, the first Oscar for Best Actor given to a performance in an sf movie, a good measure of sf's increasing respectability; the film was based on Daniel KEYES's FLOWERS FOR ALGERNON (1959 FSF; exp 1966). Planet of the Apes and 2001: A Space Odyssey are good films - the latter arguably one of the great classics of the genre - both notable for their commercial success and for their use of nonpatronizing screenplays that demanded thought from the audience. Though there were plenty of bad films still to come, sf cinema now had to be taken seriously, definitely by the money-men and to a degree by the critics.To jump ahead for a moment, it would be another decade before the commercial potential of sf cinema was thoroughly confirmed, partly in response to the technical developments in special effects that took place during that period. In 1977 STAR WARS, a smash hit, inaugurated a new boom in space-opera movies, and in the same year CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND also did very well with its blend of sentiment and UFO mysticism, inaugurating the friendly- ALIEN theme which the film's director, Steven SPIELBERG, was to exploit with even greater effect in E.T.: THE EXTRATERRESTRIAL (1982). Another money-maker that began a trend was SUPERMAN (1978), which led to a succession of ever-more-disappointing SUPERHERO movies. These films remain among the most financially successful ever made. In 1971 the cinema of the fantastic (sf, horror, fantasy, surrealism) accounted for about 5 per cent of US box-office takings; by 1982 this figure had risen amazingly to approach 50 per cent, and it remained as high as about 30 per cent in 1990.Though special effects were to usher in a period of sf cinema whose spectacle was more overwhelming than its intelligence, in the late 1960s no vast teenage audience had as yet accumulated to drag down the genre with the commercial demand that it should remain always suitable for kids. A majority of the sf films of 1969-79 were downbeat and even gloomy, and even in the adventure films their heroes were hard pressed just to survive, let alone survive cheerfully. The three main themes were the dystopian, the Luddite and the post- HOLOCAUST.Luddite films included practically everything made or written by Michael CRICHTON, notably WESTWORLD (1973), The TERMINAL MAN (1974) and COMA (1978). He has a gift for cinematic narrative, but his tireless replaying of the theme made him seem something of a one-note director. (John BADHAM, in the 1980s, would be another director to make a career out of Luddite sf movies, with WARGAMES [1983], BLUE THUNDER [1983] and SHORT CIRCUIT [1986].) Other films about the triumph of technology and the subsequent enslavement of humanity (whether actual or metaphorical) included: COLOSSUS, THE FORBIN PROJECT (1969), computer takes over; SLEEPER (1973), machines run amok; KILLDOZER (1974), a bulldozer goes mad; FUTUREWORLD (1976), robots take over; DEMON SEED (1977), computer as rapist and voyeur; The CHINA SYNDROME (1979), nuclear power station almost blows up; La MORT EN DIRECT (1979), intrusive journalist whose eyes are cameras. In DARK STAR (1974), the feature-film debut of John CARPENTER and one of the wittiest sf films yet made, a computerized bomb undertakes phenomenological arguments with the crew of a starship.Dystopian films ranged from the terrible - SILENT RUNNING (1971), we've destroyed all plant life; ROLLERBALL (1975), sport is the opium of the people; LOGAN'S RUN (1976), everyone over 30 is killed - through the interesting if exaggerated - SOYLENT GREEN (1973), overpopulation; The STEPFORD WIVES (1974), robot wives replace human wives - to the excellent - THX 1138 (1970), the debut of George LUCAS; A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (1971), brainwashing; The MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH (1976), the corrupting influence of human society on an alien; STALKER (1979 Russia), alien leavings turn out to be fairy gold in a trash-heap world.Life after the holocaust had been an occasional theme in sf cinema for some time. Stories of survivors and the detritus they live among were becoming more numerous by the 1970s; the iconography of disaster cinema regularly includes a few rusting or ivy-clad ruins of 20th-century civilization, as in GLEN AND RANDA (1971), Logan's Run (1976) or, with more bravura, A BOY AND HIS DOG (1975). The ULTIMATE WARRIOR (1975) fights in the rubble, and BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES (1970) mutants live in it. In ZARDOZ (1974) the greater part of the population has reverted to superstitious barbarism. We see this reversion taking place in MAD MAX (1979) and its two entertaining designer-barbarism sequels. Other examples from the 1970s include The BED-SITTING ROOM (1969), NO BLADE OF GRASS (1970), The OMEGA MAN (1971) and DAMNATION ALLEY (1977). This is a theme that suits low-budget movies, which nearly all these are, since the real world produces settings of extraordinary dereliction in profusion.In the 1970s the low-budget, independent exploitation-movie end of the film business was quite busy making sf movies of other kinds, too, usually borderline-sf/ HORROR, including SCREAM AND SCREAM AGAIN (1969), DEATH LINE (1972; vt RAW MEAT), George A. Romero's The CRAZIES (1973), BLUE SUNSHINE (1977), PIRANHA (1978) - a witty partnership between screenwriter John SAYLES and director Joe DANTE - and PHANTASM (1979). But the two outstanding independent directors of exploitation sf in the 1970s (and after) were Larry COHEN and David CRONENBERG. The deeply eccentric social satirist Cohen is the inventor of the monster baby, in IT'S ALIVE (1973), where it is played by a doll pulled along by a string, and the Christ-figure, in GOD TOLD ME TO (1976; vt DEMON), who is an alien-fathered hermaphrodite. Cronenberg, whose biological metamorphoses almost constitute a new cinematic genre, has become perhaps the most important director associated with sf cinema; his work of the 1970s consists of chaotic, horrific comedies, including The PARASITE MURDERS (1974; vt They Came from Within; vt Shivers), RABID (1976) and The BROOD (1979).One of the most complex and moving sf films to date is SOLARIS (1972), the first sf film of Andrei TARKOVSKY, with its delicate meshing of images from inner and outer space. Other films of the decade that at least stimulated discussion - none is outstanding-are SLAUGHTERHOUSE 5 (1972), The DAY OF THE DOLPHIN (1973), The ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW (1975), The BOYS FROM BRAZIL (1978) and STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE (1979). More influential than any of these was the very successful and much imitated ALIEN (1979), the first sf feature by Ridley SCOTT, but this was part of the big-budget sf-feature boom of the late 1970s, discussed above, and belongs in spirit more to the 1980s than the 1970s.An interesting film of 1978, INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS, was a successful remake of the classic 1956 film. Along with KING KONG (1976) this introduced a series of sf remakes in the 1980s which, contrary to cliche, contain a good deal of interesting work. The time was ripe for remakes because, in the post Star Wars period, sf was proving such a hot area of Hollywood movie-making. If you've had a success once, what more natural than to try to repeat it? The two best remakes were probably John Carpenter's The THING (1982) and David Cronenberg's The FLY (1986). Also better than expected were The BLOB (1988) and The FLY II (1989). Others, mostly poor, were BUCK ROGERS IN THE 25TH CENTURY (1979), FLASH GORDON (1980), GOJIRA 1985 (1985; vt Godzilla 1985), INVADERS FROM MARS (1986), LORD OF THE FLIES (1990), NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1990) and NOT OF THIS EARTH (1988).A less welcome phenomenon of the 1980s was the number of successful films to which sequels were made almost as a matter of course, almost never as good as their originals, an observation that spans a variety of films including Critters 2: The Main Course, It's Alive III: Island of the Alive, HIGHLANDER II: THE QUICKENING, Bronx Warriors II, 2010, Phantasm II, Re-Animator 2, Robocop 2, Short Circuit 2, Toxic Avenger 2 and Future Cop 2. Indeed, the list includes the most expensive film ever made, TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY (1991), which, though quite good, is less uncompromising than its predecessor. Two sequels better than their originals are MAD MAX 2 (1981; vt The Road Warrior) and PREDATOR 2 (1990). As of 1992 there have been five Planet of the Apes films, six Star Trek films and four Superman films (plus SUPERGIRL, etc.) in the cycle begun by Superman (1978). The Japanese, however, probably have the record with their endless Gojira and Gamera films, two series that began in the 1950s (GOJIRA; DAIKAIJU GAMERA).The disappointment of the 1980s and the early 1990s was that, sf boom or no sf boom, many spectacular productions were the filmic equivalent of fast food, offering no lasting satisfaction. Also, too much US product seemed to more astringent foreign tastes to be suffused with an oversweet sentimentality, especially following the success of Spielberg's E.T. Films tainted in this way, some of them otherwise quite good, included RETURN OF THE JEDI (1983), with its Ewoks, STARMAN (1984), with its Christlike alien, COCOON (1985), with its rejuvenated oldies, EXPLORERS (1985), with its cute alien kids, INNERSPACE (1987), with a wimp finding true manhood with the help of a miniaturized macho astronaut, * BATTERIES NOT INCLUDED (1987), with nauseating baby flying saucers, STAR TREK V: THE FINAL FRONTIER (1989), the nadir of the geriatric-buddy movie, and The ABYSS (1989), whose threatening aliens turn out to be real friendly Tinker Bells.At the very beginning of the 1980s, films of some interest included ALTERED STATES (1980), BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS (1980), especially The EMPIRE STRIKES BACK (1980), ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (1981), OUTLAND (1981) and MEMOIRS OF A SURVIVOR (1981). But by far the most influential sf film was the superbly designed BLADE RUNNER (1982), Ridley Scott's second sf feature, whose shabby, lively, media-saturated city of the near future was an early manifestation of CYBERPUNK; a more knowing Japanese version of the cyberpunk ethos - by then almost an sf CLICHE - would be found years later in the animated film AKIRA (1990). Curiously, not many commercial films between these two partook full-bloodedly of cyberpunk thinking, though several small independent productions (see below), including VIDEODROME (1982) and HARDWARE (1990), did so. However, the cyberpunk theme of VIRTUAL REALITY - the notion of consensual hallucination, or of humans entering CYBERNETIC systems and reading their networks (or being read by them) not just as maps but as the territory itself - became quite popular in cinema. A far from comprehensive list includes the made-for-tv movie The LATHE OF HEAVEN (1980; based on the 1971 novel by Ursula LE GUIN), TRON (1982), BRAINSTORM (1983), DREAMSCAPE (1984) and The LAST STARFIGHTER (1984).There are many other examples of thematic clusters in the 1980s. Hollywood (and other film centres) had seldom been so narcissistically absorbed - often stupidly - by its own previous productions, with each box-office breakthrough spawning multiple imitations. Hundreds of films featured a slow camera track along a giant spaceship (2001, Star Wars) or an alien parasite bursting bloodily from a human body (Alien).A big hit, starting at the beginning of the decade with SATURN 3 (1980), ANDROID (1982) and RUNAWAY (1984), was the killer-robot movie, mostly after the success of ROBOCOP (1987); examples are Hardware (1990), CLASS OF 1999 (1990), ROBOCOP 2 (1990), ROBOT JOX (1990) and EVE OF DESTRUCTION (1991), but the best by far was The TERMINATOR (1984), which in turn spawned Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991).More seriously gruesome, but not without soap-opera elements, was the spate of nuclear-death films beginning with The DAY AFTER , SPECIAL BULLETIN and TESTAMENT (all 1983), the first two made for tv. They were followed by, among others, THREADS (1985), also made for tv, and the cartoon feature WHEN THE WIND BLOWS (1986).A subgenre of the 1980s was a bastard form, the teen-sf movie, of which the three best were probably REAL GENIUS (1985), BILL \& TED'S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE (1988) and EARTH GIRLS ARE EASY (1988), along with the Back to the Future series (see below). Others were DEAD KIDS (1981), CITY LIMITS (1984), NIGHT OF THE COMET (1984), MY SCIENCE PROJECT (1985), WEIRD SCIENCE (1985), FLIGHT OF THE NAVIGATOR (1986), SPACE CAMP (1986), YOUNG EINSTEIN (1988), MY STEPMOTHER IS AN ALIEN (1988), HONEY, I SHRUNK THE KIDS (1989) and SPACED INVADERS (1989). TIME-TRAVEL movies made a big comeback in the 1980s, many of them (Introduction) being not technically sf since their means of time travel was fantastic. Among the genuine sf the best are BACK TO THE FUTURE (1985) and its two sequels, all directed by Robert Zemeckis. Bill \& Ted's Excellent Adventure (1988) and its sequel, Bill \& Ted's Bogus Journey (1991), are both charming. Others are the entertaining The PHILADELPHIA EXPERIMENT (1984) and two disappointments, The FINAL COUNTDOWN (1980) and MILLENNIUM (1989).After the success of CARRIE (1976), based on Stephen KING's 1974 novel about a persecuted schoolgirl with PSI POWERS, films about paranormal abilities, though never becoming overwhelmingly popular, nevertheless remained as a persistent subgenre. The best is probably Cronenberg's remorseless SCANNERS (1980). Others include The FURY (1978), The SENDER (1982), The DEAD ZONE (1983), also directed by Cronenberg, and the dire FIRESTARTER (1984).The oddest subgenre was probably the alien-human buddy movie. ENEMY MINE (1985), one of the earlier ones, is set on another planet, but many examples are set on Earth. Not just two but four of them feature partnerships between alien and Earth police: ALIEN NATION (1988), The HIDDEN (1988), SOMETHING IS OUT THERE (1988; a tv miniseries released on videotape as a feature film) and I COME IN PEACE (1989; vt Dark Angel).Other 1980s and 1990s films of interest but not fitting neatly into any of the above categories were HALLOWEEN III: SEASON OF THE WITCH (1983), STRANGE INVADERS (1983), DUNE (1984), BRAZIL (1985), ALIENS (1986), PREDATOR (1987), MONKEY SHINES (1988), TOTAL RECALL (1990) and The ROCKETEER (1991). Aliens and Brazil are the most distinguished of these, the former directed by James CAMERON, the most important sf director to emerge during the 1980s, the latter a perhaps too lovingly designed dystopia. Monkey Shines, also memorable, showed that George A. Romero was still a director of real power.Once again, however, the lesson of the 1970s was in the main repeated. If you want to see what the commercial cinema will be doing next decade, take a good close look at what the low-budget cinema, even the exploitation cinema, is doing right now. For every film as inventive as Blade Runner produced by companies with access to very large sums of money, there are half a dozen thrown up by the shoestring independents. In the latter category, the 1980s produced Scanners (1980), ALLIGATOR (1981), Android (1982), LIQUID SKY (1982), Videodrome (1982), Der LIFT (1983), The BROTHER FROM ANOTHER PLANET (1984), The Terminator, REPO MAN (1984), TRANCERS (1984), The STUFF (1985), RE-ANIMATOR (1985), FROM BEYOND (1986), MAKING MR RIGHT (1987), THEY LIVE (1988) and SOCIETY (1989). If sf cinema were represented by these films alone it would have to be diagnosed as in vigorous health, though somewhat disreputable and threatening in appearance.But, alas, by the late 1980s the increasingly floundering commercial film industries of the USA and the UK seemed caught in a desperate spiral of attempting to recapture past splendours by dint of colourful (and expensive) violence while giving ideological offence to none. Thus even death and destruction become anodyne. By 1990 the commercial sf cinema-especially in the USA - seemed to have lost not just whatever integrity it had had but also its common sense. As grave financial problems began to spread through Hollywood, it seemed possible to predict that 1991 might prove to have been the last year of insanely inflated film budgets.

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   This indeed proved to be the case. Even the big sf hit of the next few years, Steven Spielberg's entertaining but silly dinosaur theme-park movie, JURASSIC PARK (1993), did not have a stratospheric budget. There were few big sf glamour spectaculars 1992-1994; others included the very watchable STARGATE (1994), and, on a rather smaller scale, several movies about future musclemen, DEMOLITION MAN (1993) with Stallone, TIMECOP (1994) with Van Damme and - a smaller budget again - UNIVERSAL SOLDIER (1992) with Van Damme and Lundgren. Cut-rate spectacle was also the order of the day with Kirk's (William SHATNER's) presumptive last gasp in the STAR TREK movies: STAR TREK: GENERATIONS (1994), and with the once adult Robocop series, now aimed largely at a younger audience on the evidence of ROBOCOP 3 (1993).One continuing paranoiac rivulet of films deals with humans kidnapped by aliens in UFOs; this theme received a shot in the arm back in the 1980s with COMMUNION (1989), based on Whitley STRIEBER's supposedly factual best-seller, and continued with a neat little film called FIRE IN THE SKY (1993), but it was in tv, not movies, that this particular theme had its apotheosis, with the cult success THE X-FILES (1993-).Despite the long history of failure in this sub-genre, producers insisted on making yet more supposedly humorous sf movies, which included the dire ENCINO MAN (1992, vt California Man), equally unfunny CONEHEADS (1994) and the slightly better HONEY, I BLEW UP THE KID (1992); gentler and funnier than any of these was THE METEOR MAN (1993); there was a slight sense of strain about the mixture of comedy and drama in Joe DANTE'S MATINEE (1993), which examines the cultural roots of sf/horror pics in scary real-life events, in this case the Cuban missile crisis. A successful French black comedy set after the HOLOCAUST was DELICATESSAN (1990).It became obvious in the 1990s that films spinning off from successes in other media, notably GAMES, COMICS and TELEVISION - and even including RADIO - was a growing part of the business, in part nostalgia driven, and unlikely to go away. From radio and the PULPS came The Shadow (1994). From the world of games came SUPER MARIO BROS(1993), and Double Dragon, Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat are on the way. Comics - which had already fed into films with movies like Flash Gordon, deeply influenced or begat many more films in the 1990s, most of them fantasy rather than sf, including the two vastly successful Batman movies, Timecop, The Mask (1994), The Crow, (1994), the Japanese TETSUO (1989) and many Japanese anime, with JUDGE DREDD and Tank Girl having film spin-offs in production as of 1995. From television nostalgia came The Beverly Hillbillies(1993) and The Flintstones (1994), among others; and also, of course, the continuing run of Star Trek movies. One problem with most of these genres is that they have narrative conventions (generally) as rigid and stagey as those of a Japanese noh drama, and this static quality runs counter to what sf does best, which is kinesis: opening out, dealing with change and transformation.Although the exploitation-movie end of the market is often highly inventive, there was not much evidence of this in cheap and bloody futuristic thrillers like AMERICAN CYBORG: STEEL WARRIOR (1992), NEMESIS (1993) and MAN'S BEST FRIEND, or two (rather better) future-prison escape movies, FORTRESS (1993) and NO ESCAPE (1994 , vt Penal Colony, vt The Prison Colony, vt Escape from Absalom).In this period remakes and spin-offs from earlier films included the so-so tv movie ATTACK OF THE 50 FT. WOMAN (1993), the rather good but black BODY SNATCHERS (1993), and for intellectuals who like their action both bloody and operatic, the strange but semi-successful Kenneth Branagh film, MARY SHELLEY'S FRANKENSTEIN (1994).Time travel remained a popular theme - several titles belonging to this category having already been mentioned - and while the weepie melodrama FOREVER YOUNG (1992) may have disappointed, there were two small gems in the period. The first was a small-scale but spirited time-paradox film DISASTER IN TIME (1991, vt Grand Tour: Disaster in Time, vt TIMESCAPE), which proved that not everything made for cable tv is awful. The second was a comedy set in a small American town, GROUNDHOG DAY (1993), an almost faultless and very amusing study in predestination vs free will as mediated by a time-loop.

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   Further reading: The following reading list is highly selective. An early but still useful reference work on sf cinema is the 3-vol Reference Guide to Fantastic Films: Science Fiction, Fantasy \& Horror 1 (vol 1 1972, vol 2 1973, vol 3 1974) compiled by Walt LEE. There is much information, with some rather brief and disappointing capsule comments, in Horror and Science Fiction Films: A Checklist (1972), Vol II (1982) and Vol III (1984) by Donald C. Willis. Although it does not cover as many titles as these two, The Aurum Film Encyclopedia: Science Fiction (1984; rev 1991) ; rev vt The Overlook Film Encyclopedia: Science Fiction 1994 US) ed Phil HARDY is far more than a listing with credits; the best 1-vol guide, it is the fullest coverage of sf cinema to contain detailed description and critical analysis (generally very good), and, with upwards of 1400 films described in the revised editions, covers at least twice as many sf movies as any other critical book on the subject. Even more useful to the researcher is a run of the journal Monthly Film Bulletin, published by the British Film Institute, which gives (even after its incorporation during 1991 into its sister journal, Sight and Sound) full credits for all films it covers (all films released in the UK), and normally more complete critical discussion than anything available in book form; its sf critics include Kim NEWMAN, Philip STRICK and Tom Milne. This was the secondary source most consulted for films from the 1960s onwards in the compilation of this encyclopedia; its critical appreciations of sf films from earlier periods are briefer and far more conservative, and it does not cover the silent period (Hardy's book does). One other reference work extraordinarily useful for its period is Keep Watching the Skies! American Science Fiction of the Fifties: Volume I 1950-57 (1982) and Volume II 1958-62 (1986) by Bill WARREN.The quality of most general discussions of sf cinema in books is not high; many are coffee-table books of little value, or are aimed at a juvenile fan market. An early study of some interest (despite irritating factual errors) is the pioneering Science Fiction in the Cinema (1970) by John BAXTER, the first book to attempt some kind of critical sorting of its subject matter. Science Fiction Movies (1976) by Philip Strick is witty, well informed and critically astute, but does not linger long enough on individual films. John BROSNAN's Future Tense: The Cinema of Science Fiction (1978; rev vt The Primal Screen: A History of Science Fiction Film 1991) contains judgments, albeit at greater length, that will already be familiar to readers of the first edition of this volume, for which Brosnan wrote many of the film entries. Peter NICHOLLS's Fantastic Cinema (1984 UK; vt The World of Fantastic Films US) is an illustrated survey, only partially devoted to sf, which attempts to establish a critical canon for fantastic films. Omni's Screen Flights/Screen Fantasies: The Future According to Science Fiction Cinema (anth 1984) ed Danny Peary is probably the best collection of essays and interviews on sf cinema. Harlan Ellison's Watching (coll 1989) by Harlan ELLISON collects most of his film criticism from 1965 on, much of it about sf movies. Academic and theoretical books on sf cinema - there are not many - have generally disappointed, and occasionally been crippled by a technical jargon that is the reverse of precise, as in some of the essays in Alien Zone: Cultural Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema (coll 1990) ed Annette Kuhn; a rather more accessible collection of critical essays is Shadows of the Magic Lamp: Fantasy and Science Fiction in Film (coll 1985) ed George E. SLUSSER and Eric S. RABKIN. But of these academic books the most challenging may be Vivian SOBCHACK's Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film (1986), a radical expansion of her earlier The Limits of Infinity (1980); it is worth persevering with, jargon and all, for the intellectual strength it brings to bear in its attempt to define sf cinema in a POSTMODERNIST context. Finally An Illustrated History of the Horror Film (1967) by Carlos Clarens and Nightmare Movies (1984; rev vt Nightmare Movies: A Critical History of the Horror Film, 1968-88) by Kim Newman are two stimulating books that have a good deal to say, en passant, about sf films.