The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (8 page)

As has been true for most of a decade now, genre movies dominated the film industry this year, doing huge box-office business – one of them is now the bestselling movie of all time.

According to Box Office Mojo (www.boxofficemojo.com), eight out of ten of the year’s top-earning movies were genre films of one sort or another (the two exceptions were
The Hangover
, a slob comedy, and
The Blind Side
, a sports drama). By my count, and arbitrarily omitting horror movies, thirty-eight out of the hundred top-earning movies were genre films – if you count
Inglourious Basterds
as an alternate history movie, as some critics have argued, and
Sherlock Holmes
as a steampunk movie (it certainly has some minor fantastic elements), then the total rises to forty out of the top-earning movies being genre movies, as long as your definition of ‘genre’ is wide enough to include fantasy movies and animated films.

That’s not really so different from last year, or the year before that. What makes this year somewhat unusual is that there were several actual SF films, as opposed to fantasy films (last year, there were almost no SF films at all, and none among the top ten), with a couple of them among the top-ten grossers. Also unusual, there were no superhero movies among the top ten; the nearest one was
X-Men Origins: Wolverine
in eleventh place; the much-heralded
Watchmen
finished disappointingly in thirtieth place.

The two-billion-pound gorilla in the room, of course, was
Avatar
, which so far has earned $598,453,037 domestically, plus $1,446,989,293 in foreign grosses, bringing its worldwide total to an incredible $2,045,442,330 (and that doesn’t even count future income from DVD sales, action figures, and the inevitable computer game). All of which makes
Avatar
the highest-grossing film of all time (although it’s worth keeping in mind that it was also the most expensive movie to
make
of all time, with a production bud get rumored to be somewhere in the $500 million range).

As a piece of filmmaking, it’s a breathtaking technical achievement, one of those movies, like
2001
in its day and
Star Wars
in its day, that pushes the edge of the envelope and hugely broadens what is possible to show on the screen. Visually, it’s absolutely stunning. As a
movie
, a piece of storytelling, it’s less impressive, with its bad dialogue, cardboard characters, weak science, heavy-handed New Age polemics, and clichéd plot-elements making it mediocre at best, although director James Cameron does keep it moving along at a brisk action-movie pace throughout.

None of that matters. Nobody really cares. It’s the biggest spectacle you can get on the screen at the moment for the price of a ticket, and (visually at least) a movie experience unlike any other – and that’s what’s bringing them through the door. On that level,
Avatar
totally deserves its success.

Although the most common critical reaction is to compare
Avatar
to Disney’s
Pocahontas
, and snide critics have taken to calling it
‘Dancing with Smurfs,’
as a science fiction story it most resembles a mash-up of Poul Anderson’s ‘Call Me Joe,’ Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Word for World Is Forest,’ and Alan Dean Foster’s
Midworld
, which at least makes it a legitimate science fiction film (it has weak science, of course, rather blatantly signaled by the fact that the wonder mineral they’re searching for is called ‘unobtainium’ – but so do many print SF stories and novels that are accepted by all as a legitimate part of the genre), which makes it by far the most successful SF movie since
Star Wars.
After years of all the top-grossing genre films being fantasy, at least three of the top-ten box-office champs this year were science fiction, and I can’t remember the last time that happened. One or two of them even got some degree of critical respect, although there was no real critical darling among the year’s genre films, critics dividing in opinion on almost all of them.

In at second place, earning a still-staggering $835,274,255 worldwide, is
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
, another SF film
(bad
SF, perhaps junk SF, with science even weaker and more dubious than that in
Avatar
, but still SF, nevertheless – hey, it’s got robots in it, doesn’t it?). SF also shows up in seventh place with
Star Trek
, the movie that not only rebooted the franchise but resurrected it from its grave by delivering $385,494,555 worldwide, and being enough of a success financially (and even, grudgingly, critically to some extent) that a sequel is already in production.
Star Trek
is a fast-paced movie with a high bit rate and lots of jump cuts, as almost all movies that sell successfully to post-MTV generations are, lots of CGI spectacle splashed across the screen, a plot that doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense on most levels, and the requisite dubious technobabble science. It does contain the year’s most audacious film moment, however, when they wipe out fifty years of series history in a stroke, consigning the six previous movies and the five previous TV series to the black hole of things that never happened, leaving themselves a blank slate upon which they can write anything they’d like, the freedom to do whatever they want with subsequent movies, safe to ignore the constraints of the previously existing canon.

The rest of the year’s SF movies didn’t do quite as well financially. Neither
Terminator Salvation
, finishing in twenty-third place, or
Angels & Demons
, finishing in twenty-second, were quite the blowout blockbusters that their producers probably hoped they’d be, both losing money domestically, although making up for it with foreign revenues.
District 9
placed a respectable twenty-seventh on the top-grossing list, pretty good considering that it only cost $30 million to make, cheap by today’s standards, but earned $204,837,324 worldwide. It was also one of the most critically respected genre movies of the year, being nominated along with
Avatar
for the Best Picture Oscar, although a few reviewers complained that it was too much like the old movie
Alien Nation
, or that the way the refugee aliens were treated in the film was too obviously a metaphor for apartheid (unlike any other genre movie I can think of,
District 9
takes place in South Africa). Another critically well-reviewed movie was
Moon
, a psychological drama taking place on a mining station on the Moon, although almost nobody went to see it; it slipped through town almost subliminally, in a limited release, and didn’t place at all on the extended list of the 150 top-earning movies of the year. For what it’s worth, both
District 9
and
Moon
are a lot closer to being valid SF than junk SF with bad science like
Transformers
or
Avatar.

The bleak after-the-holocaust movie
The Road
also got a pretty fair amount of critical respect, but just managed to squeeze onto the top-sellers list in 148th place, which must have been disappointing to the producers considering how massive their advertising/publicity push was. People generally don’t want bleak, hopeless, and depressing during a major recession, although the disaster movie
2012
did pretty well at the box office, placing fifteenth on the list – although it had the advantage of lots of spectacular special-effects shots of skyscrapers collapsing and tsunamis swamping the Himalayas, which
The Road
did not.
The Time-Traveler’s Wife
, finishing at only fifty-fourth place may also have been a disappointment, considering that the novel had been a major bestseller.

Fantasy didn’t do quite as well on the list as it has in years past, but was represented in third place by
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
, in fourth place by romantic vampire soap opera
The Twilight Saga: New Moon
(which I’m arbitrarily consigning to fantasy rather than horror, because it wasn’t particularly scary), and later on down the list by
Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian, Where the Wild Things Are, Race to Witch Mountain, The Lovely Bones
(making a disappointing showing for the new Peter Jackson movie in seventy-sixth place; of course, at the time I’m writing these words, it’s only been in general release for a month or so, so it may do better later on), and Jim Carrey’s latest ill-advised attempt to make a slob comedy out of a beloved literary classic,
A Christmas Carol.
Right at the end of the year, the new Terry Gilliam movie came out,
The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus
, but I haven’t yet had a chance to see it.

Animated films had three finishers in the top ten, the charming (and also well-reviewed)
Up
, at fifth place,
Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel
in at ninth place, and
Monsters vs. Aliens
in tenth place; further down the list were
Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, Coraline, The Princess and the Frog, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Astro Boy
, and the edgy not-really-for-children post-apocalyptic
9
.
Coraline
, taken from a Neil Gaiman novel, probably got the most critical respect of any of the animated films, other than
Up.

It was a weak year for superhero movies, which up until now had dominated for several years. As mentioned,
X-Men Origins: Wolverine
under-performed, making it only to thirteenth place on the top-sellers list. The disappointment of the year, though, may have been
Watchmen;
some critics praised it, and some fans of the
Watchmen
graphic novels were enthusiastic about it, but for the most part, audiences stayed away, and it only made it to thirtieth place on the top-sellers list, earning $185,253,487 but
costing
$130 million to make. It was also bleak and depressing, and opinion was sharply divided on whether or not it was boring, and also on whether or not it was adequately faithful to the original source material.

In some ways, the highest profit margin of the year, proportionately speaking, may have been earned by horror movie
Paranormal Activity
, which pulled in a relatively modest $142,390,115 worldwide, but
cost
only an astonishing $15,000 to make; most big-budget Hollywood movies probably spend more than that buying doughnuts for the crew. I’m sure the film industry is saying, ‘Send us a few more like
that
!’

In spite of worries about the recession keeping people home in 2009, this wasn’t the case. People need cheap entertainment during bleak economic times, and just as happened during the Great Depression, there were
more
people going to the movies, not less.

Next year looks like it’s going to be Sequel Land, with a follow-up to
Star Trek
, probably a sequel to
Avatar
(although that might take a couple of years to make), possibly sequels to
2012
and
Transformers
, a lavish new version of
The Wolfman –
obviously part of an effort to make werewolves the New Vampires, a ‘reimagining’
of Alice in Wonderland
by Tim Burton, and, of course, the new
Harry Potter
movie. On the horizon are possible versions of Joe Haldeman’s
The Forever War
, John Wyndham’s
Chocky
, and Isaac Asimov’s
Foundation.
How many of these will ever actually make it to the screen, remains to be seen.

After the turbulence of 2007–2008, when the Writers Guild of America strike played hob with television programming, causing even many of the highest-rated shows to go on hiatus, 2009 was a relatively quiet year, although in some ways a glum one, during which TV shows fell like wheat before a scythe. Shows that died in 2009 or early 2010 included the once-hot
Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles;
cult favorite
Pushing Daisies; Stargate Atlantis; Defying Gravity;
the American version of
Life on Mars; Kings; Reaper; Eli Stone;
the new version of the old show
Knight Rider; Kyle XY; Eastwick
, the series version
of The Witches of Eastwick;
the BBC’s
Robin Hood; Saving Grace
, the cop-talks-to-an-angel show;
Merlin;
and
Eleventh Hour.
The most keenly felt loss for some fans was probably
Doll house
, the new series by
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
creator Josh Whedon, upon which a lot of hopes had been pinned. As planned,
Battlestar Galactica
, another keenly missed show, ended its run, disappointing many of its fans with its series finale.
Heroes
, once a ratings power house, has been hanging on by its superpowered fingernails for some time now, and may well have been canceled by the time you read these words. New show
FlashForward
, based on an SF novel by Robert J. Sawyer, and
V
, a new version of another old show, seem to be hanging on rather precariously as well, struggling in the ratings, although they both did well enough to survive their freshman seasons.

A ‘reimagining’ of the old show
The Prisoner
as a mini-series doesn’t seem to have particularly impressed anyone, in spite of a distinguished cast. Nor did
Alice
, a ‘reimagining’
of Alice in Wonderland
by the same people who reimagined
The Wizard of Oz
as
Tin Man
, a “darker” and seedier version of the children’s classic, perhaps a preemptive strike on the upcoming Tim Burton movie reimagining of the same material. (I find it interesting that the very first thing that these ‘reimaginings’ do is to change the little girl protagonists to attractive and sexually nubile young women.)