SCIENCE IN SCI-FI by

Godzilla is high on action but it fails to speak to us as great sci-fi should says Malcolm French.

Perhaps the only good thing about watching Gareth Edward's remake of Godzilla is it prompted me to speculate about what really makes sci-fi great. No doubt some ambitious movie executive, hearing of the original Godzilla‘s box office success, saw the 1950s film with its laughably unrealistic monster knocking down and model of Tokyo, and thought, "We could do this better, make it more real, more impressive." Of course, in terms of special effects they have, but with it’s super CGI and explosions that blast your senses for 90 minutes this new Godzilla entirely misses the point.

The original Japanese film, Gojira, was made in 1954 at the time of an accelerating arms race and America testing nuclear weapons over the Pacific Ocean. In the film, Godzilla was a product of these tests – a sea creature mutated by radiation and roused from the deep to attack Japan. Less than 10 years after the devastation wreaked by atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the film reflected the real, deep fears in Japan at the time. Edward's Godzilla refers back to these origins, but the film's message simply doesn’t carry the same weight. Few people these days would place nuclear war high on their list of worries for the world so it all becomes rather meaningless and merely addresses teenagers' apparently infinite desire for noise and violence.

Great sci-fi speaks to the society of the day and for that reason some films are resistant to updates. The Stepford Wives is another case in point. The story tells of a vibrant young professional woman, Joanna, who moves to the small suburban town of Stepford with her husband. The place is full of "perfect-looking" women who do house work and shopping and submit to their husbands' wills. Joanna rebels against this and, with two other recently-arrived friends, sets up a women’s liberation group. As the plot unfolds, we discover that the Stepford wives are in fact robots controlled by the leader of a men’s social club, who threatens to kill Joanna and her feminist friends. When the film came out in the mid-70s, these tensions between the traditional image of a wife, a growing feminist movement and an oppressive male society were very real. Almost 40 years later when it was made, these stereotypes had all but disappeared and so a chilling thriller became a lame comedy.

Still, one story that has stood the test of time is James Cameron‘s Avatar. On its release, the film's incredible 3-D world created much hype, but more importantmy it also resonated with the political situation of the day. The depiction of humans invading a planet to exploit its natural resources had obvious parallels with colonial exploitation and came in the midst of the Iraq war, which many saw as being motivated by a western desire to control oil supplies. However avatar can also be seen as a metaphor for the ongoing struggles for control of the Internet, especially in the light of recent revelations about companies exploiting private data and governments spying. The planet in avatar is a living network that the natives plug into through what appear to be fiber-optic cables. In this metaphor, the violent invaders are the government, intent on disrupting the freedom of Internet users. Cameron clearly presents an unfettered world-wide Web as the ideal: the invaders are sent packing and the main human protagonist fully integrates himself with the Web by becoming his avatar. However, like all the best sci-fi, the film also leaves some questions hanging. How real is the online world? Does the Web really connect and liberate people? Is there no role for external control?

Unfortunately, the only question Godzilla left me with was: "Has anyone got any paracetamol?"

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