Life Imitates Art

Science Fiction as a Product Roadmap

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But First, A Movie Rant

I feel like a perpetually disappointed nerd. Consistently excited by the newest thing / story / movie, but just... almost always bummed out by the result. The latest disappointment is just the trailer (not even the full movie) of a new sci-fi movie from Netflix called ATLAS.

Who knows what the budget is, but it doesn't look cheap. And yet, in the year of our lord, 2024, we have dialogue from someone criticizing a futuristic robot for having a name because "you're a computer program."

Who keeps putting J-Lo in movies? Also, the director is this guy Brad Peyton who I hadn't really heard of before, but boy, what a filmography. After a strong start with Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore, he's built his career off directing Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson star vehicles, which was a term I wasn't familiar with, but is literally a movie written "for a specific star, either to further their career or simply to profit from their current popularity." Gross.

Journey 2 (a sequel of Journey To The Center of The Earth that was stolen from Brendan Fraser), San Andreas, and Rampage. Weirdly enough, all of them were made for ~$80-120M and all of them made ~$400M at the box office. And all of them are CGI-heavy meh-fests. If you ever meet someone who says their favorite (favorite?) movie is San Andreas? Or Rampage? Call the police cause for sure they're sociopaths.

No, all of those are "star vehicles." Soulless creations crafted for the explicit purpose of capitalizing on The Rock's popularity. And Peyton's newest endeavor is no different, only this time the "star vehicle" he's riding the coattails of is *checks notes* the concept of AI, I guess.

In screenwriting, one of the cardinal sins of dialogue is exposition. You should show motivation, rather than tell. Someone's motivations reveal themselves over time, and often with subtext. (Let me put on my bowler hat and bow tie for a moment). Movies today, they just toss the exposition out and say "so now you believe it, alright? Good. Time for some more explosions."

In the trailer for ATLAS (in the trailer! Not even in the movie!), J-Lo says "I don't need your help. I don't trust any AI." So you can bet that if the trailer is shallow, the movie certainly isn't going to get any deeper. Contrast this with a solid, albeit imperfect, sci-fi film, I, Robot. Will Smith doesn't trust robots because years before, he'd gotten in a car crash and several cars flew into a river. A robot on the scene calculated that he had a 45% chance of survival, vs. a little girl trapped in another car had an 11% chance of survival, so it saved Will Smith. And now his actions and attitude throughout the film is one of contempt for robots. Same concept, dramatically better storytelling.

*nerd takes breath*

Alright, where was I going with this?

Science Fiction as a Product Roadmap

Source: Twitter

Big driver of my thinking this week came from this tweet from Chrisman Frank, the CEO of Synthesis (whose building science fiction in his own right). In the comments on his post, I loved this nugget someone shared from a science museum in Ottawa:

"Science fiction is the art of imagining visions of the future—dark or optimistic. It can influence design, culture and society, changing how we view ordinary objects. And one generation’s science fiction may even become the next generation’s science fact."

For those of you who have been reading my stuff for a while, you'll know that I love this concept of using science fiction as a guide for how we build the future. The main piece where I articulated this idea is in my piece, Historical Futurism.

The thing that really awoke my interest in historical futurism was looking at how people in the past have predicted the future and using that to understand what went wrong, what was over-indexed, and what we far exceeded their expectations. Just one example is this thread of predictions from 1924 about 2024:

Source: Twitter

From electrocuting students for not paying attention to the extinction of horses, breakfast in tablet form, automobiles traveling on speedways through the center of town, our legs withering away from disuse, interplanetary travel as easy as trans-Atlantic travel, and 75 being considered young.

Our visions of the future often shape our actions today in achieving that future. Unfortunately, our visions today of what future lays ahead have gotten a bit too thorny.

We Need Better Stories

Source: Twitter

You'll notice that Chrisman's refrain to build the future came, not from watching sci-fi, but from reading sci-fi. That is, in large part, because, while books can be nuanced and explore a variety of interesting topics, movies have become hits-driven engines that benefit more from pessimism than optimism.

Take, as just one recent example, the new movie that just came out, Civil War. The movie shows an "authoritarian" U.S. government fighting internal insurrections, like the Western Forces of California and Texas (interesting pairing). As an exercise in "dreaming the future," its more of a nightmare.

Source: Twitter

Now... I don't feel as strongly as Beff about this one. I'm not an acceleration maxi. Some of the best sci-fi I've ever seen is not optimistic. Some of my favorites, like Children of Men, Idiocracy, Serenity, or Time Machine, are not exactly optimistic. Stories can be optimistic utopias or cautionary dystopias. As far as making good movies, and telling good stories, you can have compelling character arcs in both types of stories.

But I agree with the sentiment that we don't have enough positive outlooks on the future upon which to draw inspiration. And that's bad. That's bad for the dreamers who want to build a future. The world needs just as many storytellers as it does people to build those stories into reality.

Dream a Dream Worth Dreaming

Some people may think that compelling stories come from drama, and conflict, and that's why we focus so much on dystopia, population collapse, zombies, and battle. But human experience happens everywhere.

Take one example with the movie Her. After going through a divorce, a man falls in love with an AI assistant. Its not dystopian. He doesn't eventually realize the error of his ways. We simply observe a person grow and change against the backdrop of his experience with technology. And in a world where 1 in 4 adults feels lonely, this doesn't feel like a bad story to tell.

Jackson Dahl wrote an essay about Her, which turned me on to a video essay about the movie. In it, the narrator has a great line:

"[Her] is about the human experience and our relationship with technology. Not about what the technology is, or what it does. We're too caught up in how our world will change for the worst, rather than how we will stay the same. Her gives us a glimpse at a lighthearted, more hopeful future where characters are free to resolve their interpersonal conflicts and experience life without being oppressed by those dystopian or apocalyptic or totalitarian environments."

A Simple Idea

That overview of Her reminds me of a great quote from Charlie Munger:

"Take one simple idea, and take it seriously."

The criticism of intellectual bloat that I would level at science fiction is similar to one that I would level at most superhero movies these days. The world can't be ending in every single one of them!

One of the best superhero movies ever is Logan. Now, some people would make the argument that its only so good because its built on a generation of nostalgia. I disagree. I think you could know nothing about X-Men or mutants, and still find the film incredibly compelling. And here's the thing. We don't ever really find out what happened to the X-Men, or the details of this semi-futuristic state. Your focus is on Logan as a person, not on massive and intense detail-oriented world building.

The same is true of the sci-fi we need more of. We need more people who take a simple idea, and take it seriously. What are the core ideas that define our human experience in the future? What would that idea look like as it evolves? Don't get lost in the existential everything. Stay focused on the human element of something.

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