The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 22nd Annual Collection (9 page)

It was another weak year in the art book field, after several fairly strong ones earlier in the decade. Once again your best buy was probably
Spectrum 15: The Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art
(Underwood Books), by Cathy Fenner and Arnie Fenner, the latest edition in a Best of the Year-like retrospective of the year in fantastic art. Also worthwhile were
The Other Visions: Ralph McQuarrie
(Titan Books), by Ralph McQuarrie;
The Paintings of J. Allen St. John: Grand Master of Fantasy
(Vanguard), by Stephen A. Korshak; As I See:
The Fantastic World of Boris Artzybashoff
(Titan Books), by Boris Artzybashoff; Virgil Finlay: Future/ Past (Underwood Books), by Virgil Finlay;
A Lovecraft Retrospective: Artists Inspired by H. P. Lovecraft
(Centipede Press), edited by Jerad Walter;
Drawing Down the Moon
:
The Art of Charles Vess
(Dark Horse Books), by Charles Vess; and
Telling Stories
:
The Comic Art of Frank Frazetta
(Underwood Books), edited by Edward Mason.

There were a fair number of genre-related non-fiction books of interest this year. The most central of these was probably
Year Million: Science at
the Far Edge of Knowledge
(Atlas), a collection of futurist articles, many by scientists or SF writers, edited by Damien Broderick. The edges of the possible in science, as we understand them today, is also explored in
Physics of the Impossible
(Doubleday), by physicist Michio Kaku, and in
13 Things That Don’t Make Sense
(Doubleday), by Michael Brooks. Fans may also be interested in an examination of superhero science,
Superheroes!
(I. B. Tauris), by Roz Kaveney, and by more bitching about how we don’t have those flying cars yet (following several similar volumes last year),
You Call This the Future?
(Chicago Review Press), by Nick Sagan, Mark Frary, and Andrew Wacker. There’s no direct genre connection for mentioning
Life in Cold Blood
(Princeton University Press), by David Attenborough, but SF writers looking to score ideas about really alien creatures and lifeways could do a lot worse than look down into the bogs and swamps where the coldblooded creatures described herein dwell.

There were lots of genre movies that did big box-office business this year, although few critical darlings or films thought of as “serious” movies.

According to the Box Office Mojo site (boxofficemojo.com), nine out of ten of the year’s top-earning movies were genre films of one sort or another (counting in stuff like
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
as fantasy/SF – Hell, it’s even got aliens! – rather than “action/adventure”, and including animated movies but excluding the new James Bond movie,
Quantum of Solace
, which is probably stretching the definition of “genre movie” too far); thirteen out of twenty of the year’s top-earning movies were genre films; and at least twenty-seven out of the hundred top-earning movies (depending on where you draw the lines – and for reasons of my own personal prejudices, I’m not counting horror/slasher/thriller movies) – were genre films.

In fact, it’s clear that genre films of one sort or another have come to dominate Hollywood at the box-office, producing most of the year’s really big money-makers, and that’s been true for a while now. During the last decade, each year’s top-grossing film has been a genre film of some sort: superhero movies (three of this year’s top-earners are superhero movies, and 2007’s biggest earner was
Spider Man 3
, a lesson that I doubt has been lost on the movie-makers), or fantasy/adventures such as
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest or The Return of the King
, or SF/adventures such Star Wars: The
Phantom Menace
, or even fantasy movies ostensibly for children such as
Shrek 2
or
The Grinch Who Stole Christmas
. You have to go all the way back to 1998 before you find a non-genre film as the year’s top-earner,
Saving Private Ryan.

Of course, the kicker is, what do you mean by “genre film”?

Of the year’s top ten highest-grossing films, of the nine that can be considered to be genre movies of one sort or another, three are superhero movies (
The Dark Knight, Iron Man, and Hancock, with The Incredible Hulk
finishing in fourteenth place and
Hellboy II: The Golden Army
finishing in thirty-eighth place); one is fantasy/adventure (
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
, with the comparable
The Chronicles of
Narnia: Prince Caspian
finishing in thirteenth place); four are animated films (
Wall-E, Kung Fu Panda, Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa, and Dr Seuss’s Horton Hears a Who
!, with superhero – sort of – animated feature Bolt finishing in nineteenth place, and
The Tale of Despereaux
, released at the end of the year, perhaps destined to climb the charts); and one is a glossy vampire/romance movie (
Twilight
). (For those interested, other than
Quantum of Solace
, the two highest-earning non-genre films were
Sex and the City and Mamma Mia
!, which finished in eleventh and twelfth places respectively – unless you want to make the somewhat arch argument that they’re fantasy films as well.)

Like last year, there were almost no actual
science fiction
films on the list at all, even in the top hundred, let alone the top ten. The closest approach to a real SF film out this year was the animated film
Wall-E
, which did make the top ten list, in fifth place, in fact, and although its science was a bit shaky (you can’t make an ecosystem out of one plant and one cockroach), for the most part it treated its science fiction tropes with respect and intelligence, and what satiric needling there was at the genre was affectionate. In fact, with its humans who have become so pampered and constantly waited on by machines that they’ve lost the ability to walk, it may be the purest expression of 1950s’ Galaxy-era social satire of the Pohl/Kornbluth variety ever put before the general public.
Wall-E
itself got treated with an amazing amount of respect for an animated film ostensibly for children, as
Ratatouille
and
The Incredibles
had been before it, and is probably the one out of the top-grossing genre films that came the closest to being treated as a “serious movie”. At least some animated films are big money-makers these days and are clearly not being watched only by children anymore (if they ever were only watched solely by children in the first place, which I doubt).

The year’s other Great White Hope as far as SF movies were concerned was a glossy $80-million remake of the old fifties’ movie
The Day the Earth Stood Still
, which, in spite of a good opening weekend, made it only to thirty-ninth place. Some fans protested that the movie wasn’t a faithful remake of the original film – but, of course, the original film itself wasn’t faithful to the ostensible source material, Harry Bates’
Astounding
story “Welcome to the Master,” so that’s nothing new. Major plot-logic holes were the real problem here.
Star Wars:
The Clone Wars
, an animated continuation or at least elaboration of the
Star Wars
saga, looking at stuff that happened between the cracks of the major movies, may have gone to the Star Wars well once too often, or perhaps people were thrown by the change in medium from live-action to animated, since it only finished seventy-ninth on the list of year’s top-earners. A remake of the classic Jules Verne novel
Journey to the Center of the Earth
was not even as watchable as the fifties’ version, in spite of having better special effects and the considerable advantage of not having Pat Boone in it. The only other science fiction film I could find (unless you count
Space Chimps
, which I don’t intend to) was
Jumper
, adapted with very little fidelity from a YA SF novel by Steven Gould, although it could with excellent justification be considered to be a superhero movie instead; it was supposed to be the start of a franchise, but since it earned $80 million but cost $85 million to make, that seems dubious – although the foreign revenues were better.

That was it for science fiction films, as far as I can tell. When I say “genre film” from here on down, we’re talking about fantasy films or superhero movies.

The top-grossing film of the year, by a huge margin, was
The Dark Knight
, which also got treated with a good deal of respect by critics for a superhero movie, mostly because of the late Heath Ledger’s riveting turn as the Joker, bringing a scary intensity to the part that surpassed and probably supplanted even Jack Nicholson’s famous interpretation of the role. You have to wonder if Christian Bale, who played Batman, and whose movie this ostensibly was, was bemused at the fact that nearly every review of the film spent all of its time raving about Heath Ledger and often didn’t mention Bale at all. (Still, at least
he
gets to collect his residuals, which may be some consolation.) Ledger’s performance will be long remembered by fans and would alone push
The Dark Knight
into the realm of classic superhero movies such as
Spiderman
and
The X-Men
, although the rest of the movie is pretty good too, dark and creepily elegant, but overlong and perhaps a bit muddled. The sly and frequently amusing
Iron Man
finished in second place in the top-grossing list, mostly because of a snarky performance by Robert Downey, Jr. The Big Green Angry Guy did better in his second outing as a film star,
The Incredible Hulk
, easily outdrawing Ang Lee’s muddled and overly complex previous Hulk movie, although not doing as well as his fellow superhero and Avengers teammate
Iron Man
(you could see them setting up the forthcoming
Avengers
movie throughout both
Iron Man
and
The Incredible Hulk
, by the way). Although it seemed like two movies jammed together, neither of which the filmmakers really knew what to do with, Will Smith delivered enough of a star turn as a degenerate drunken superhero to put
Hancock
into fourth place.
Wanted
was about a guild of super-powered assassins.

(These totals are somewhat misleading, since they’re only talking about domestic grosses. If you add the
foreign grosses
to the domestic grosses, you have to shuffle the rankings around some.
Indiana Jones
(combined total: $786,001,411),
Hancock
($624,386,476), and even
Kung Fu Panda
, which only finished sixth on the domestic-gross list (combined total: $631,465,619), coming in ahead of
Iron Man
($581,804,570). Nothing can come close to unseating
The Dark Knight
, though, whose combined total is $997,012,892! And top-selling computer games such as
World of Warcraft
and other MMORPGs make even more money than the movies do. Little wonder that print science fiction, and even print fantasy, have come to be seen by many as poor cousins, with even print bestsellers not coming even remotely close to earning what SF and fantasy do in other media.)

Sequels or new instalments of established franchises often did only so-so this year.
The Dark Knight and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
did the best of any of them at the box-office (although even fans of the franchise seemed only lukewarm about the new Indiana Jones; Harrison Ford looked tired throughout, and I suspect that the producers would like to carry on the franchise using Shia LaBeouf instead, but he doesn’t show enough charisma here to convince me he could carry the franchise by himself). Below this point, things get dicier.
The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian
placed a respectable thirteenth on the top-ten domestic earners list, but although it earned $141,621,490, it cost $200 million to make, which might have been bad news for the continuation of this franchise, except that foreign revenues bumped its combined total to $419,646,109, which might have saved it, as foreign revenues have saved a couple of movies in the last few years. It was a similar scenario with
The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor
, which cost $145 million to make but earned only $102,277,510, until foreign revenues boosted its combined total to $290,903,563; of course, this franchise has been going steadily downhill since the original movie. Things were even more stark with
Hellboy II: The Golden Army
, in at thirty-eighth place, which cost $85 million to make but earned back only $75,791,785, and even with foreign revenues, could make it “only” to $158,954,785, which might have made it a failure in Hollywood terms. Too bad, as the original movie,
Hellboy
, was one of the most successful films of its year, both commercially and artistically; but the sequel, although it featured absolutely stunning visual effects, lacked the headlong narrative momentum and much of the rough humour of the original movie, and often got bogged down in confusing and perhaps unnecessary subplots.
Star Wars: The Clone
Wars could only make it to seventy-ninth place, in spite of the
Star Wars
name. And the “long-awaited” sequel to the last X-Files movie, this one called
The X-Files: I Want To Believe
, fell out of the top hundred list altogether, only managing to make it to 107th place, not enough people wanted to believe that this was something they really wanted to see, and this may well have been a case of waiting too long, until after interest and enthusiasm had cooled, before trying to do another sequel.

Cloverfield,
a postmodern version of an old-fashioned giant-monstertrampling- through-a-city movie, widely referred to as “the
Blair Witch Project
meets
Godzilla
,” hauled in a combined total of $170,764,026 but
cost
only $25 million to make, rock-bottom cheap by today’s standards, so I’m sure that its producers are happy with its performance. There actually were some scary moments in this, if the constantly swirling and somersaulting camera didn’t make you flee the theatre with nausea or vertigo first. The execrable 10,000 B.C. is what you get when you’re sitting around in a pitch meeting and somebody says, “Hey! Egyptians meet mammoths!” The even more dreadful
Speed Racer
was another misguided attempt to make a live-action version of a campy old animated TV show, not unlike last year’s
Underdog
.
The Happening
was another fundamentally incoherent and not-particularly-scary M. Night Shyamalan movie, and Igor and the prophetically titled
The Pirates Who Don’t Do Anything
were the year’s animated movies that didn’t make lots of money. There was a YA steampunk movie called
City of Ember
released late in the year that I haven’t seen, and a film version of another well known Young Adult fantasy novel,
The Spiderwick Chronicles
, which ditto.