GALACTIC DREAMS

Science fiction usually provides cinema with its biggest dreams. One still remembers with exhilaration the spectacle of seeing the spaceship landing of an alien ship at the close of Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the pursuit of Sigourney Weaver by H.R Giger’s creature and the cosmos laid bare before the brave crews of the Enterprise. At the beginning of the cinema, as the Lumière brothers were thrilling audiences with documentary footage of an oncoming train, another Frenchman, Georges Méliès was taking them to the moon. (The case can be made that even L’ Arrivée d’un Train en Gare makes use of science fiction’s obsession with technology to provide its thrills.) No matter the size of the screen the talents of the director were sufficient enough to convey a vision exceeding far beyond its borders.

As borne out by the best examples of the genre, science fiction or SF (the shortened term "sci-fi" is considered a bastardization) isn’t all in outer space. For many, the so-called space exploit with its wooden characters and one-dimensional dialogue has curbed enthusiasm for further explorations. It’s a valid point: it only took less than a decade from its zenith (Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey) to its nadir (George Lucas’ Star Wars). Curious though, the space age itself lasted a little under 15 years.

Much recently the most popular SF takes place on our own planet Earth. The Wachowski brothers took a cue from William Gibson and created The Matrix, a blockbuster that spawned two sequels and a whole cult. Other successes adaptations of comics based on a SF conceit like Sam Raimi’s Spiderman and Bryan Singer’s X-Men. In the tradition of more ‘intimate’ SF like Chris Marker’s La Jetée and Alain Resnais’ L’ Année Dernière à Marienband, Christopher Nolan made Memento, a film noir thriller about a man who suffers from short-term memory amnesia. (He’s now making Batman.) Yet the allures of space are hard to resist.

David Twohy’s The Chronicles of Riddick is the spin-off sequel of Vin Diesel’s character from the writer/director’s own B-movie Pitch Black. Having proven he can spin considerable blarney from the initially unlikely material (he wrote Warlock and its sequel as well the Harrison Ford-Tommy Lee Jones chase flick The Fugitive), he now puts the character in the middle of an intergalactic war.

Hunted by mercenaries eager for the bounty on his head, he finds himself captured by a race called The Necromongers who are basically eating planets in the quest for ultimate domination of the universe. (What else?) They seem unstoppable except for one weakness — the Furians, an almost extinct species. Almost, save for…you guessed it.

Pitch Black was admittedly one of best alien planet adventures — and quite a scary one too — to come out in recent years. Having a very low budget, it played up the dark, making the menace monsters that can only survive in the dark. Riddick wasn’t even the hero of that one; in fact the stranded crew were terrified of them the whole length of the movie. Twohy never made Riddick trustworthy — not even likeable.

Space with its unlimited perspectives and icy beauty is home to heroes, villains and anti-heroes both on and off screen. Science fiction is the only genre that can take us to this cosmic cabaret.

It’s a trip worth taking.