Saturday 12 November 2016

Make Space Opera Relevant Again


What a depressing week, in what a depressing year, this has been. After many years of what had seemed like genuine, positive progress towards fairer treatment for everyone and increased acceptance of people different from ourselves, the Brexit vote and now the election of President Trump have dragged us right back again. Hopefully it’s just a case of two steps forward, one step back, but who knows at this point. We’ve an ugly few years ahead of us, and things are almost certain to get worse before they get better.

But it’s often been said that the best art is produced in times like these, and times like these can reveal new ways of looking at the art we already have. This often especially applies to science fiction; I’ve written before that Dune, a novel that was timely in 1965, seems almost prophetic 50 years later, and two of 2016’s biggest science fiction films, both new properties in venerable franchises  – Star Trek Beyond and the clunkingly named Rogue One: A Star Wars Story -  have been granted a relevance by this year’s turbulent politics that they might not otherwise have had.

Star Trek took me very much by surprise when it came out. Into Darkness was a disappointment, I think we can all agree, that aimed for political commentary in the vein of the classic series but largely bungled it with a needlessly complicated story and a “twist” that didn’t make sense in the context of the rebooted series. Beyond, by contrast, is refreshingly simple and straightforward; just another mission in the life of the Enterprise that plays like an extended episode of the first TV show - and that’s meant as a compliment.

If that were all it had going for it, it would still have been a solid, entertaining space opera movie, but where it shocked me was with its politics. Not that they were in themselves surprising, given Trek’s long, proud history of looking forward to a utopian future where infinite diversity in infinite combinations exists peacefully and in prosperity, but in how it seemed to be commenting on Brexit, which had only occurred a month before release.

Without wishing to spoil, as surprisingly few people actually went to see it, Kirk, Spock, Bones and company find themselves up against a militaristic alien called Kraal, who wants to dismantle the Federation, bring back an idealised past that never really existed, and make competition and conflict, rather than cooperation, the driving forces behind civilisation in the galaxy. Needless to say, the Enterprise crew’s vision of unity wins out and Kraal is ultimately defeated, but it’s very interesting to note how comparable much of Kraal’s rhetoric is to that which has been bandied about so much this year. It’s easy to imagine him calling on his followers to “make the Federation great again”. Beyond is a film calling for friendship between disparate peoples and a world where the strong don’t exploit the weak, and it could hardly have come at a better time.

In an era when hateful, racist demagoguery has dominated so much of the discourse, it’s gratifying to see a film where everyone, regardless of skin colour, sexuality or indeed species, is working together to build a better future rather than drag civilisation back into an imagined past. As screenwriter Simon Pegg said when I interviewed him, much of the appeal of Trek is that it represents a future where humanity makes it, where intelligence and communication is considered valuable, and where angry playground bullies like Donald Trump don’t win.

Rogue One, on the other hand, isn’t quite as hopeful a vision. Granted, Star Wars isn’t SF in the way Trek is, and it’s not trying to predict our future – it is a long time ago, after all. But after Tuesday, a world where evil has won and everything seems hopeless is rather of the moment. It’s hard to believe such a transparently racist, sexist, callous, intolerant excuse for a human being was voted for by millions of Americans, but it certainly makes the election of Palpatine in the prequels much more plausible. At least he was smart enough to pretend he wasn’t evil.

But regardless, a film where a tiny, seemingly insignificant rebellion armed with little more that hope stands up to an autocratic regime against all the odds is perhaps one we need right now. And especially when the tip of the spear consists of Felicity Jones, Donnie Yen, Riz Ahmed, Forest Whitaker and Diego Luna. It’s an admirably diverse cast, long overdue for Star Wars, and in a world where the racist rhetoric of the Right looks to paint everyone different from themselves as an Other to be feared and mistrusted, it’s exactly the tonic we need. As long as the movie’s good, at least – this is all speculation and I could be completely wrong.

Obviously, it’s practically impossible that these direct parallels were intentional. Films like these take a long time to make, which tends to restrict their ability to be topical. But good SF has a tendency to remain relevant far beyond its initial context, and frequently picks up new relevance as history moves on. Genre fiction has a unique ability to look at the world through its own lens, and oddly,  this distancing effect frequently helps it to age better than other fiction.  And so it is that, bizarrely, the horrible events of 2016 have granted these films an ability to speak to us in a way their creators surely couldn’t have intended.

I’m not entirely sure where I’m going with this, if I’m honest, and I’m still slightly in shock from the last week. It’s a bleak period of history we’ve found ourselves in, and it can seem like the constant push for progress in our politics is a futile struggle. But life imitates art, and if we take nothing else from the two biggest, most popular science fiction franchises in the world, it’s that Empires fall, Rebellions win - and Federations endure.


Image: Chris Weitz via Twitter