Ben on Film - New space adventures agree: It's deadly out there

Published: Thursday, October 24, 2013 at 2:02 p.m.
Last Modified: Thursday, October 24, 2013 at 2:02 p.m.

After seeming nearly as dead as the Western, the space opera has suddenly rocketed back into orbit.

"Gravity," director Alfonso Cuaron's thrill ride with Sandra Bullock fighting to survive orbital catastrophe, hit No. 1 at the box office for two straight weeks in October, grossing more than $123 million (and more than $190 million worldwide) in what's often a slow cinematic season.

The takeoff of "Gravity" followed a mixed summer for sci-fi. "After Earth" with Will and Jaden Smith basically crash-landed, while "Oblivion" with Tom Cruise went in the black with overseas receipts and "Elysium" with Matt Damon performed respectably.

"Gravity" precedes one of the big, anticipated hits of the year, the long-awaited film version of "Ender's Game," which opens Nov. 1 with Harrison Ford, Ben Kingsley and an army of young actors.

Yet there's a marked difference to the new generation of space movies. They don't like outer space very much.

In "Gravity," Bullock, as an orbiting M.D., and George Clooney as a veteran astronaut, are left cast away. The Russians, it seems, tried to blow up a worn-out spy satellite and the resulting cloud of high-speed space debris destroyed a U.S. space shuttle (or its updated version), the Hubble Space Telescope and the International Space Station. (This debris shrapnel has actually happened a time or two, according to astronomer Phil Plait, although never with the death toll seen in "Gravity." Incidentally, Platt's review of "Gravity" at is one of the best discussions of the science behind the movie I've seen.)

A card at the beginning of "Gravity" states starkly that life in space is impossible. The subtext seems to be, yes, even with a spacesuit.

That's not all that's happening bad Out There. In "Apollo 18" (2011), a sort of "Blair Witch Project" with jet packs, two astronauts on a secret 1970s mission to the moon find the wreckage of a Soviet lander. They find a dead Russian. And they find out what killed him – which, supposedly, explains why there haven't been moon missions for 40 years.

In this summer's "Riddick," pretty much a rehash of the fine little sf film "Pitch Black" (2000), Vin Diesel and director David Twohy again land on a desolate planet infested with all sorts of predators. These creatures fairly quickly make Predator Chow of all the bounty hunters and mercenaries after the fugitive Riddick's head.

In "The Last Days on Mars," scheduled for U.S. release in December, an international expedition (including Liv Schreibr) finds something while collecting samples on the Red Planet. Mars, it seems, has life – but not Little Green Men or Marvin the Martian (who makes a happy cameo appearance in "Gravity"). Whatever it is, it's deadly.

Once upon a time, Capt. James Tiberius Kirk and Jean-Luc Picard boldly went where no one had gone before, well, because it was there. There were risks and a lot of Starfleet personnel got killed, but in the end, it was worth it.

Not any more. The message of the new wave of science fiction is that space is just too dangerous. It's far better to stay home.

In a way, it's all been downhill since "2001: A Space Odyssey" (1968), which director Stanley Kubrick more or less hijacked from screenwriter Arthur C. Clarke.

Kubrick's vision of manned spaceflight was white, sterile, nearly lifeless. The space probe takes off toward Jupiter to the strains of the opening movement of Khachaturian's "Gayaneh" ballet suite, some of the most depressing 20th century music ever composed.

Astronaut Keir Dullea can't even muster an emotional response to a message from his cute, fuddy-duddy parents. The computer is trying to kill everybody. This looks like an emotional dead end.

Our Hero only reaches interstellar depths by cleansing the doors of perception, flying into a sort of wormhole and throbbing through the longest psychedelic light show in screendom. See, the way to the stars is, like, all through your head, Dude. No wonder so many viewers were smoking funny cigarettes the first time I watched "2001" in a theater.

Anyway, NASA's budget has been slashed, and astronauts won't be going much of anywhere for a long while. The message of "Gravity" seems to be, that's a good thing.

Ben Steelman: 343-2208


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