(Image Property of Paramount Pictures)
Have you ever heard of “Turkish Star Wars?”
Turkish Star Wars is the jovial nickname given to a movie that is officially known as Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam. So why is it called Turkish Star Wars? Is it because this movie did for Turkish science-fiction/fantasy what Star Wars did for the genre everywhere else in the world?
No, nothing as noble as that. It’s because they literally ripped off Star Wars and pulled footage from Star Wars and other sci-fi films to stage their own space battles.
The plot is as incoherent as one might expect, given that they cribbed scenes from at least three other sources, and one translator was noted as having said, “It doesn’t make any more sense in Turkish.”
Unfortunately, for several decades and somewhat even into our present era, movies like Turkish Star Wars better exemplify many people’s opinions of sci-fi movies than the high quality films we’ve been seeing come out lately.
These schlocky B-films care so much about spectacle and pushing the envelope and wowing audiences with sparks that they miss out on what makes great science-fiction truly great: humanity.
The caveat here is that “humanity” doesn’t have to literally come from human beings. You could argue that the apes in the original Planet of the Apes in fact showed a great deal of humanity. We won’t talk about that embarrassment that came out in 2001. Suffice to say that Mark Wahlberg should never be allowed in the same room as a primate ever again.
And certainly not on the same screen.
When we say that great sci-fi needs a hefty dose of humanity to it, I mean that there must be an emotional core to the story. There must be something that draws the audience in and begs them to follow the story. There has to be something more than cool spaceships and astonishing technology.
The prime example of this concept is Avatar. People flocked to see Avatar when it came out, making it the highest-grossing movie of all time, a record it still holds today despite the massive box-office hauls of movies like Jurassic World, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and Avengers: Infinity War. It was a massive hit that pulled people in like it really was showing us a glimpse of some distant planet.
Perhaps people confused James Cameron’s documentary about the bottom of the ocean with Avatar and thought that he’d made one about the plight of those poor, poor blue people on Pandora. I don’t know.
But I already hear the protests from many of you. You’re saying something like, “Wait a second, now. People have pretty widely panned Avatar ever since then, haven’t they?” And you’d be right. Because the reason Avatar is such a great example is because it’s an example of what not to do.
Yes, there is an emotional love story in the movie, but the story is remarkably bland. It hides behind the vibrant colors and the astonishing technology and the bizarre, hair-obsessed culture of the Na’vi.
The story in Avatar is secondary, perhaps even tertiary, and it shows.
There are four key components to quality sci-fi: story, spectacle, innovation, and production value. The most essential of these is story. After that, you can find quality examples to rank the other three however you wish.
“We are sciencing so hard right now.” (Image Copyright ThinkFilm)
In the 2004 micro-budget indie Primer, you have a movie about two guys who accidentally invent time travel. The story is intensely intriguing. The innovation, the new technology, is presented in a way that we had never seen time travel handled before. The spectacle and the production value, on the other hand, are exactly what you would expect from a movie that cost $7,000 to make.
Okay, so the production value is actually remarkably better than $7,000 should merit, but the fact remains that it is clearly a micro-budget film. But who cares? Primer exploded because the story and the innovation were both premium.
I think they made some errors in storytelling that ramped up the confusion more than necessary, but that confusion actually served them well in the opinion of most fans. The story itself is about two friends who ultimately have a falling out over their new discovery. And the roundabout way that its told with time travel is awesome.
Then look at the more recent, and much more well-funded, example of Amy Adams’ Arrival. Sure, a lot of the focus for the movie fell on the otherworldly design of the film’s aliens, the Heptapods, and the unique ships that show up in the film.
Beyond that, much of the focus comes down to the innovative alien language that Adams’ character studies. But if you ask me, what makes this film so special is that it (umm…spoiler ahead) revolves around a woman who sees her bleak future, which is initially presented to us as her bleak past, and she still takes the chance to have a daughter, love her daughter, and ultimately suffer through watching her daughter fade away due to an unspecified disease.
All despite the fact that she sees this future coming.
Seriously. These guys are weird. (Image Property of Paramount Pictures)
The crux of that story is incredibly human. Even if most audiences don’t latch on to that part of the story, it is immensely necessary. To be fair, without that one element of the movie, Arrival is still really good. The production value is exemplary, the fantastic elements are indeed very innovative, the spectacle is awe-inspiring. Three of the four key components are there. What elevates Arrival, though, is the unparalleled humanity of the story. Arrival manages to take a story about giant aliens that look like walking hands with squids for heads and make it a heart-wrenching tale of a woman and the loss of her daughter. That’s the kind of bait-and-switch that only works in sci-fi, and it works beautifully.
I remember reading something recently from writer C. Robert Cargill talking about how someone should write for mainstream audiences. If the story is complex, then the characters should be fairly simple. If the characters are complex, then the story should be fairly simple.
How does a concept like that track with what I said about Avatar? Unfortunately, that movie features both simple characters and a simple story. Yes, there is complexity in Avatar, but it’s all in the spectacle and the show. None of the complexity is reserved for something important. That’s why Avatar made for great viewing, but not so much great absorbing.
Sci-fi needs to be absorbed.
What’s the heart of Inception? A man wants to be with his kids again. What’s the heart of Interstellar? A man wants to save the world for his kids. Whom he will probably never see again.
Then we get to something called Star Wars. What’s the heart of Star Wars?
If we’re talking about the series as a whole, at least in the original trilogy, then we can’t ignore the ever-important (uh…another spoiler if you’ve been living somewhere more isolated than Turkey) father-son relationship between Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader. That’s a powerful human story for sure.
But it’s only one that we have the benefit of seeing in hindsight. The contemporary audience devoured A New Hope without knowing that big, bad Darth Vader was the hero’s daddy. They had no idea.
The heart of A New Hope is the standard hero’s journey. We have a reluctant, hesitant kid in Luke Skywalker who wrestles with his own desire to leave his home, but he’s bound by responsibility to stay. When he gets the chance to leave, he becomes a hero and saves the world. Well…a world. It’s sci-fi, so there are a lot of worlds to save. And he totally fails to save Alderaan. That shouldn’t be forgotten so easily.
So the characters are all pretty simple. The story is pretty simple. Is it really just the spectacle and the innovation that drives us to love the original Star Wars movie?
I don’t think so. Luke’s journey is still one that can draw us in. His growth is the emotional heart of that movie, but so is the growth of a side character like Han Solo, who clearly grows and changes throughout the story.
Of course, Star Wars was innovative in the way that changes the world. That can’t be ignored. They created so many new technologies just to make this one movie, and then the two that followed. And the three that followed that. And the three that followed that…
And maybe don’t make your people blue. Skip the blue people. (Photo property Twentieth Century Fox)
So even with simple stories and simple characters, if you make those simple characters relatable somehow, then audiences can get behind your sci-fi story. If those characters experience something distinctly human in themselves, something that we can see and experience with them, then you’ve already won half the battle.
That’s not to say you can slap some junk together in After Effects and make a great movie. There’s a little more to it than that. But I do believe that your best bet is to get the story right first. If you are telling a great story, and if you can get the rest of those elements bumped up just a little bit, that’s the recipe for great sci-fi.
The best sci-fi tells stories and asks questions and makes us question our own humanity. Think of movies like Blade Runner, where we have to ask ourselves what it even really means to be human. That’s what a great story does for sci-fi. What you need from the spectacle is to just get out of the way. Don’t be a distraction from the story, add to it when you can.