The Year's Best Science Fiction, Vol. 20

Meanwhile, over at media SF’s other most famous franchise, things weren’t much better; in fact, in some ways, they were worse. The new Star Trek movie, Star Trek: Nemesis, didn’t do a lot better than Attack of the Clones with the critics (it did a little better: usually the reviews were lukewarm rather than scathing), and it did considerably worse at the box-office-not a total bomb, but certainly a disappointment, in terms of what they hoped it would draw, and what it cost to make. Again, even long-term, hardcore Star Trek fans seemed unexcited by it, and the movie generated little or no buzz even among media fans, let alone the general audience. Combined with the tepid performance of the current Star Trek television series, Enterprise, the mediocre performance of Star Trek: Nemesis is a major blow to the franchise, and radically decreases the chance of there ever being another Star Trek theatrical movie, as even the producers are ruefully admitting in public.

Minority Report and Signs, on the other hand, did make a lot of money, although I, finicky bastard that I am, was unimpressed with either. I liked Minority Report better than Signs- a sickly blend of science fiction and horror, freighted with an inspirational message about Faith and Redemption-but found it depressing that stories drawn from Philip K. Dick’s work, as Minority Report is, somehow always seem to come out more about car-chases, action scenes, and big explosions than about the intellectual/philosophical/mystical territory that Dick explored in such intricate and unsettling detail. Men in Black II was a limp sequel that managed to be not even half as much fun as the original, in spite of pumping in more special effects, more silly aliens, and lots more gags (fewer of which were really funny). Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones do their best at being frenetic and charming, but they mostly just look tired, particularly Tommy Lee Jones, who looks throughout like he’s grumpy after being woken up from a long nap on the sofa. Solaris, the remake of the old Russian film version of Stanislaw Lem’s novel of the same name, was too lowbrow for the author, who criticized it sharply, and too highbrow for the viewing audience, who stayed away in droves. Reign of Fire had the last men on Earth earnestly fighting a plague of CGI dragons, rather than just instructing the special effects people to turn them off. And the latest Eddie Murphy vehicle, The Adventures of Pluto Nash, was such an enormous bomb that echoes of it are still washing back-and-forth between the Hollywood Hills, a sci-fi movie so bad that it makes you cry grateful tears to have something as good as Men in Black II to watch. And that was about it for science fiction films this year, live-action ones, anyway.

Two of the most successful films last year were animated features, Monsters, Inc. and (especially) Shrek, but this year’s animated films met with varying fates at the box-office. Disney’s Lilo and Stitch was very successful, both commercially and critically, a slightly edgier film (although, of course, still “warm-hearted” at base) then is usual from Disney, with vigorous and highly stylized-although somewhat crude-animation, lots of slapstick Roadrunner-style action, and a generous sprinkling of genuinely witty lines and incidental bits of business; it reminded me more of The Emperor’s New Groove from a few years back-loose-jointed and jazzy, with a lot of anachronistic, self-referential postmodern chops-than the standard non-Pixar Disney product. On the other hand, Disney’s Treasure Planet, a film with much more traditional Disney aesthetics, storytelling choices, and animation style, was a box-office disaster, especially considering how much it cost to make. The large number of direct-to-video quick-knockoff sequels of Disney classics that the studio cranked out this year- Peter Pan II, The Little Mermaid II, and so forth-didn’t seem to be setting the world on fire either. Coupled with the failure of last year’s traditional Disney animated feature, Atlantis, and the success of films such as Shrek, far ruder and cruder than the Disney average, I wonder if this doesn’t indicate that there’s been a fundamental shift in the taste of the audience. Kids who have grown up watching cartoons on Nickleodeon, stuff like SpongeBob and Dexter’s Laboratory and Rug-Rats and The Powerpuff Girls, may now want something edgier and hipper and zanier in their full-length animated movies than anything that Disney usually gives them. Ice Age also did well at the box-office and shared some of the same kind of self-referential postmodern humor as Lilo and Stitch or The Emperor’s New Groove, but I found it more heavy-handed and not as imaginative or engaging as either of those films. And the Japanese Spirited Away, aimed at an adult rather than a children’s audience, did very well with the critics, but was hard to find anywhere except in art-houses in the very biggest cities.