Waiting for a Sign

Watching “The Fifth Element,” the Bruce Willis movie that kicked off the summer season, can be an OK experience if you’re in the mood for its gaudy visual effects and its goofball violence. It also can be an exasperating experience if you love science fiction and know its great potential as a vehicle for artistry and ideas.

When, for instance, you see the scenes of a 23rd century New York floating high and bright above dark and probably toxic clouds, you’re captivated by the flying cars, zooming their way through the steel-and-concrete canyons. (Love that Chinese takeout truck that pulls up to your window! Beats waiting in line for Sunday dim sum!)

The movie encourages you to turn your frontal lobes off and give in to its yeasty silliness. Probably a good thing, because if your brain were left on, you might wonder why director Luc Besson--or anyone else--couldn’t come up with a story worthy of its beautifully realized landscapes.

Yet, just two weeks ago, seven weeks after its release, it was still among the Top 10 box-office draws nationwide, edging its way toward $60 million. Combined with the showings so far this summer of “The Lost World: Jurassic Park,” “Men in Black” and “Contact,” it’s clear that science fiction has ruled the summer.

And of course there will be others, like “Event Horizon,” an outer-space ghost story starring Laurence Fishburne; “Mimic,” which stars Mira Sorvino as an entomologist who creates a lethal breed of humanoid insects; “Starship Troopers,” an adaptation of Robert A. Heinlein’s classic space opera, and “Alien: Resurrection.”

With all this activity, along with the attendant buzz over George Lucas’ forthcoming production of the first three movies in the “Star Wars” story cycle, it’s tempting to dub this period a new golden age for science-fiction movies.

There’s just one problem--actually, several problems with this premise. A true golden age for any art form has to have a masterpiece or two. If not, there should be, at the very least, some strong evidence of advancement in the form, of bold new means of expression.

The sci-fi genre is awaiting its “Citizen Kane,” its “Godfather,” its “Maltese Falcon,” its “Stagecoach.” It hasn’t happened yet. In the past, excuses like too costly and too obscure have been used by studios and industry pundits, but with improved technology and whole generations weaned on Trek/Wars mythologies, none of these excuses hold water anymore.

It could be that critics, producers, even moviegoers don’t expect much from science fiction except the big sets, the big rockets, the big bangs and the big lizards.

Science-fiction movies seem to have been poised on the brink of a few golden ages, especially in the 40 years since Sputnik was launched.

When, for instance, Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” came out in 1968, many science-fiction fans dared believe that the film’s conceptual boldness and up-to-the-minute authenticity would lead a long parade of bigger, smarter sci-fi movies. Although some of the movies that followed close behind (notably 1971’s “Silent Running,” directed by “2001’s” special-effects expert Douglas Trumbull) showed greater sophistication in depicting space travel than, say, the old Flash Gordon serials of the 1930s, the renaissance heralded by “2001” never came.

Physician-turned-storyteller Michael Crichton emerged in the early 1970s as a clever high-concept sci-fi screenwriter (“The Andromeda Strain,” “Westworld”). But it was the director of the 1970 film “THX 1138” who would give second wind to hopes for a golden age. George Lucas’ “Star Wars” was, arguably, less hard-core science fiction than his “THX 1138,” but it showed Hollywood that there was lots of money to be made from the genre.

So, once again, hopes for a renaissance were stirred. But despite a few films as imaginative as any, sci-fi movies of the last 20 years have settled for simply following patterns set by their predecessors--they have been high on action and short on thought.

Contrast that with the sweeping transformation during the frantic years following World War II; an era celebrated with deadpan humor in Susan Sontag’s famous 1967 essay, “The Imagination of Disaster,” which lists the standard elements of both the invasion-from-outer space and the deadly invasion-from-within scenarios found in films from the era.

(To crudely summarize one scenario: Thing arrives on Earth. Hero finds it, knows the threat. No one believes hero’s fears until disaster strikes. Grave danger hits hero’s loved one. Military and scientific might is summoned. Ultimate weapon is found and used. Bye, bye, Thing . . . for now?)

Sontag maintained that, whether the menace came in the form of man-size seed pods, giant lizards or radioactive clouds, sci-fi movies of the 1950s and 1960s had a form as predictable as a western, made up of elements which, to a practiced eye, are as classic as a saloon brawl, the blond schoolteacher from the East and the gun duel on the deserted main street. And since then, the scenarios have remained the same. For example: The hypothetical plot cited above can be loosely applied to two sci-fi features of a year ago: “Independence Day” and “The Arrival.”

Science-fiction novels are far ahead of their movie counterparts in using the routine elements of the genre to make unusual and challenging variations. Philip K. Dick, whose stories and novels provided the foundation for “Blade Runner” (1982) and “Total Recall” (1990), was especially creative in using such hoary motifs as androids, zap guns, exotic creatures and interplanetary colonies to fashion unsettling inquiries about the nature of reality.

Even television has been far ahead of the movies in stretching science fiction’s possibilities. Compare the 1988 movie “Alien Nation” with the early 1990s TV series that followed and you’ll find greater depth in the theme of outsider cultures trying to fit in with society and far richer characterization.

Is there any hope to be found in the forthcoming crop of sci-fi movies? Actually, yes. Although “Men in Black” is yet another alien-invader movie, it is a leaner, wittier variation that opens up the kind of imaginative possibilities Philip Dick and others found in sci-fi conventions.

“Contact” also raises the stakes in conventional sci-fi movie narrative by presenting a present-day scenario for extraterrestrial encounter so plausible in its details and verisimilitude that it challenges the audience to believe what they see could happen.

The characters, Jodie Foster’s in particular, also are better developed than in similar films. Although as principled and courageous as heroes of other sci-fi movies, Foster also carries some psychological baggage that makes her remote and vulnerable. Issues concerning our own humanity are advanced without the heavy-handed ardor of old-fashioned sci-fi-with-a-message flicks.

This is--or should be--the true measure of a great science-fiction film: Not the dazzle of the effects or the degree of tension, but the depth of humanity.

Still, one shouldn’t draw too much optimism about the genre’s future from these films. What’s just as likely to happen is that “Men in Black” will become part of the 1998-99 fall network TV schedule and that “Contact’s” potential impact will be missed or downgraded by Hollywood. Golden ages, after all, have been sighted before. Maybe they’ve all been optical illusions. Or . . . something else.