Back to the Sci-Fi Future

Science fiction-fantasy is making money for the movies again, as seen in box-office jujitsu administered by “The Matrix,” “The Mummy” and, last and not least, “Star Wars: Episode I The Phantom Menace.” (Saw the movie, read the novelization. Still can’t lock onto who or what is meant by that title.) But no matter how large an impact science fiction makes on the movies, it’ll still be, at best, patronized and, at worst, backhanded by mainstream critical opinion.

Even reviewers who liked “The Matrix” tended to linger on its engineering feats more than its human elements. Conventional wisdom always presumes that flesh-and-blood considerations have little or no place in either making or evaluating science-fiction movies.

This maxim may have found its purest reinforcement in “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968), still the closest thing the genre has to a masterwork. The cosmic (if you will) irony of “2001,” of course, was that the Hal 9000 computer was the closest thing the movie had to a complex, dimensional character.

It doesn’t seem to matter to the movie universe that the best science fiction concerns itself with what it means to be human in the face of technological mysteries and terrors. Even with movies like “Blade Runner” (1983) validating this premise, moviemakers and critics can’t seem to get past the “gee whiz!” of the genre. Pure sensation is all that sci-fi movies are perceived to offer--a situation that may also owe something to “2001’s” legacy, given that too-long light show that follows Hal’s demise.

There’s a lot of “gee whiz” in “The Matrix” and, for those apparent few who haven’t seen it yet, the digital kung-fu and shape-shifting friskiness rocks as hard as you’ve heard. Having finally caught up with the brothers Wachowski’s still-potent moneymaker in the wake of “Phantom Menace’s” noisy arrival, I found that it delivered the visceral excitement of the first “Star Wars” movie--an excitement that George Lucas’ prequel conspicuously lacked.

Here’s why--or partly why: Special effects can give you plenty to look at. But if there’s nothing to see, they don’t amount to much. Whether you were into bombastic “space opera” or not, you had to concede that all the sights and sounds of what’s now called “Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope” (1977) made up a fantastic (in the pure sense of the word) vision that invited you in, unbuttoned your imagination, gave you permission to believe in the silliest or grandest indulgences you entertained at the time.

That’s why all those tickets and toys were sold in the first place. You can’t, in contrast, see very much in “Phantom Menace” through its thickets of digital effects.

In pumping up “The Matrix,” I don’t mean to diminish its problems. As with every other Hollywood-made feature these days, the third act is swollen beyond reason. But pundits on all sides of the multiplex aisles are wrong when they say that the movie’s appeal is based on nothing more than hyperbolic martial-arts sequences and cool fashion statements. OK, that’s a lot of it, but not all of it.

Visions of the future, whether you buy them or not, can be empowering to those who feel out of place in the present. (Kids never feel in sync with the present. Which is why sci-fi has always connected first and foremost with the young.) So, when “The Matrix” presents reality, with all its constraints, as a tangible entity controlled by a sinister grid, it offers the possibility that all one needs to do is bust up that grid and one’s life becomes one’s own.

Mainstream media editors and critics have trouble understanding the need to believe in such possibilities--probably because their lives are pretty much the way they want them.

But not even widespread prosperity can sate the furtive hunger for a future that’s better than now. (It’s what drives the massive tribe that comprises the subject of the sweet, just-released documentary “Trekkies.”) Until those of us who write for those increasingly moribund newspapers and magazines can bring ourselves to remember what it was like to dream, our evaluations of science fiction and fantasy movies should, in turn, be screened for signs of fear--of the future--and loathing--of the genre.