1997: the year Hollywood sci-fi finally grew up
The Barbican’s new exhibition, Into the Unknown: A Journey through Science Fiction, opened earlier this month. Like every show of this kind, it has to repeat the refrain that in the era of Uber and FaceTime, all fiction is science fiction. Some of the arts struggle more with this than others. There have been few convincing pieces of sci-fi opera or theatre, while non-genre novelists remain reluctant to write in a more speculative technological register.
With special effects and a less developed tradition, cinema has an easier time of it. There are plenty of recent examples of sci-fi films with their nose pressed up against the glass. Alex Garland’s Ex Machina was a terrifyingly plausible vision of a tech billionaire’s quest to create an AI, using a search engine as its brain. In Her, Joaquim Phoenix’s lonely greetings card writer falls in love with his operating system, a phenomenon whose echoes will be familiar to anyone who’s got beyond the first two minutes of a Tinder flirtation.
Cinema grew up with the early 20th centuries anxieties about science, and from Metropolis to Blade- Gattaca; StarshipTroopers; runner, great directors have peered at the trends. But for the new kind of sci-fi, which acknowledges the great effects of the contemporary tech on all our lives, it’s possible to identify a single year in which a great leap forward was taken: 1997. Two decades ago, five films were released that set the tone for much of 21st century Hollywood science fiction: Starship Troopers, Men in Black, Gattaca, Contact and the Fifth Element.
Aside from genre, and having aged remarkably well, the films have little in common. Four years before 9/11, Starship Troopers was a vicious satire on interventionist American foreign policy dressed up as a camp shoot-em-up. Insect aliens destroy Buenos Aires, prompting a swift and
bloody retaliation from earth against the “bugs”. In the media’s handy information videos, signs pop up asking the audience if they “want to know more”, a gesture that would become familiar to anyone using Wikipedia.
In Men in Black, Will Smith’s wise-cracking cop joined a secret agency to help manage the aliens living among us. In Luc Besson’s gleeful The Fifth Element, Bruce Willis’ gruff cop helped an orangehaired alien messiah, Mila Jovovich, rescue the world. The supporting crew included Ian Holm as a priest and Christ Tucker as Ruby Rodd, a libidinous Prince-inspired galactic radio presenter.
The under-appreciated Gattaca MeninBlack.
saw Ethan Hawke determined to overcome the genetic impurity preventing him from going into space, with help from Jude Law’s perfect but paralysed swimmer. Finally in Contact — a direct ancestor to last year’s Arrival — Jodie Foster met alien life only to know more about themselves.
Tonally these films could hardly be more varied. The Fifth Element is a comic book-inspired romp, where the face of evil is Gary Oldman clad in Gaultier. Contact is thoughtful, even ponderous, about the implications of alien arrival. All five films, however, share an acknowledgement that whatever technology we encounter, it will endlessly rub up against lust, greed, avarice and any number of other baser human desires.
As William Gibson, the master novelist of the near-future, has said, the street finds its own use for things. Twenty years ago there was a sudden burst of films in which, however sophisticated the tech under the hood, Bruce Willis still grumbles about taxes and eats Chinese for lunch, metropolitan office workers still worry about their position in society, and recruits are sent to slaughter by incompetent generals. All five films are in recognisable versions of the modern world, and commentate directly on society.
Crucially the lead characters are devoid of special powers: a trend that would be reversed in the Noughties by the rebooted Star Wars, the Matrix and Avatar, to say nothing of superhero films. There were exceptions: Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report paid meticulous attention to the texture of its nearfuture — the self-driving cars, drug use, bullying policemen. But on the whole, the Noughties lurched towards the fantastical. Perhaps the first dot-com crash soured the audience’s appetite for believable science-fiction.
It’s unusual to find five sci-fi films of this quality in any year, so why 1997? Partly this is down to luck, of course. But it’s hard not to think there was something in the midNineties water, too. Filmmakers were finally coming to terms with the implications of the internet — or world wide web, as it was still being breathlessly and unironically termed. The millennium was approaching. Amazon had begun. It was clear that although things had a strong technological flavour, this fantastical new world would greet the same sorts of people with the same sorts of problems.
The trend has only grown more acute, but sci-fi has yet to have a year that rose to the challenge in the same way. In 1997, cinema knew that technology was an aid, not a solution in itself. Now it is not so sure.