To ideology and beyond: will China's sci-fi movies plot their own course?
You might think a nation that effectively banned science fiction for much of its history (during the Cultural Revolution, and for other periods) might hesitate before encouraging its filmmakers to get their futuristic thinking caps on. But China’s communist government has apparently been inspired by the huge box office success of homegrown space blockbuster The Wandering Earth to issue guidelines aimed at emboldening directors and screenwriters who might be planning a follow-up.
Variety reports the official document “highlights how the sci-fi genre fits into the ruling Communist party’s broader ideological and technological goals”, which sounds suitably 1984. (Except that George Orwell’s seminal dystopian tome is frowned upon in China, to the extent that authorities at once point last year stopped social media users from being able to type out its title in reference to an abolition of presidential term limits; strangely enough, the book itself is not banned.)
Variety also suggests new Chinese sci-fi films will be encouraged to “highlight Chinese values, inherit Chinese culture and aesthetics, cultivate contemporary Chinese innovation”, “disseminate scientific thought” and “raise the spirit of scientists”. Chinese sci-fi films, the trade paper says, will therefore be asked to portray China “in a positive light as a technologically advanced nation.”
The disappointing thing here isn’t so much that Chinese authorities feel the need to intervene in this way – censors have been cracking down on “unacceptable” elements of Hollywood movies for decades. It’s that any local film-makers with futuristic concepts humming away in their subconscious will be so stymied in their creativity. For if there’s any film genre custom-designed to upset rigid politburo thinking, it’s science fiction.
A quick glance at the history of Hollywood sci-fi – both recent and past – perfectly highlights the issue. Futuristic quadrilogy The Hunger Games was grudgingly allowed to screen in China (Hengqin island, near Macau, even opened a Hunger Games theme park last year). But it’s hard to imagine any Chinese-produced dystopian effort, especially one featuring an oppressive authoritarian government, getting the green light. Looking further back, we can imagine the ending of 1973’s Soylent Green being cleverly altered so that Charlton Heston realises the ubiquitous, suspiciously meaty foodstuff that keeps Earth’s growing population constantly sated is in fact a tasty vegan treat (rather than … you know), had the film been made in China.
Might China attempt its own Star Wars? Such a move would surely be risky given that censors have in the past banned movies in the Pirates of the Caribbean series for featuring swirling spirits; George Lucas’s popular space opera has possibly featured more leading characters returning from the dead as ghosts than any other saga in Hollywood history. How about Back to the Future? Well, China banned Robert Zemeckis’s
sci-fi adventure in 1985 due to its depiction of time travel. It’s thought censors have become less rigid in the intervening years, though movies in which modern-day Chinese citizens travel back to the glorious past were still looked down upon as recently as 2011.
Avatar? Hmmm ... Bully-boy outsiders invade and take over the territory of an indigenous people, downplaying their culture and exploiting the local resources. If Colonel Miles Quaritch and his cronies had been portrayed by Chinese actors in a Chinese production it’s hard to imagine this concept getting past day one. Mad Max? George Miller’s Oscar-winning Fury Road failed to secure a release in China, though local film-makers did manage to put out a blatant rip-off titled Mad Shelia that borrowed most of the plot.
How about kids’ sci-fi? Would Pixar’s Wall-E, in which humans are forced to travel into space because they have polluted the Earth so badly, have been given the go-ahead as a Chinese production? Given the way China has treated its own environmental activists, this one also looks like a no-no. What about Alien? Could a film in which a Chinese team becomes the first human beings ever to come into contact with extra-terrestrial life, only to find itself immediately ripped to shreds by the HR Giger’s “perfect organism” ever find its way into a local studio? Such a storyline doesn’t seem likely to “raise the spirit of scientists” or portray China as a “technologically advanced nation”, though it’s possible Ripley’s mechasuited victory over the Alien queen in 1986’s sequel might have passed muster.
It seems more likely that Chinese sci-fi efforts will mirror the success of The Wandering Earth, about a seemingly Chinese-led (though rendered in the movie as a future “world government”) mission to save mankind by moving the Earth to Alpha Centauri. Not much in the way of controversy there, especially as the planet has apparently fallen into ruin due to an ageing sun, rather than any kind of human-inspired environmental degradation. Because that’s not a hot button topic in any way.
We should certainly expect to see very different movies emerging than Hollywood has traditionally released. And maybe that’s no bad thing – at least if you’re happy to see the complete elimination of almost everything that has made futuristic film-making interesting in western cinema over the past few decades.