Thursday, August 2, 2007

Eco-spaceship redux

In his July 30 review of "Sunshine," Danny Boyle's new science-fiction movie about a group of astronauts on a mission to jump-start our dying sun, the New Yorker's Anthony Lane has only one positive thing to say. The "oxygen garden" tended by Michelle Yeoh at the heart of the spaceship is, Lane raves,

a lovely invention on the part of Boyle, the screenwriter, Alex Garland, and the production designer, Mark Tildesley. Having last ganged together on "28 Days Later," a brisk resuscitation of the zombie genre, they are obviously hoping to give the solar system the same kind of makeover. "Star Wars" showed us clean and rustless spacecraft, "Alien" muscled in with dank and dripping ones, and now "Sunshine" catches the mood with verdancy....

Now, I realize that it's New Yorker house style for a writer to pretend to know everything about whatever subject he or she has been assigned. And I'm not quarreling with the snarky review -- I haven't seen the movie, and it's probably just as bad as Lane says. But the New Yorker has slipped up badly this time. They should be embarrassed!

For one thing, Boyle and Garland, neither of whom has ever had an original idea (not that this is a bad thing; it's OK to update and improve upon somebody else's original ideas), obviously lifted the garden-in-space from the the 1972 SF thriller "Silent Running," in which Bruce Dern works on a spaceship harboring Earth's last nature reserves. When he's ordered to jettison his beloved forests and return home, Dern mutinies and murders his fellow crew members. Come to think of it, the "Sunshine" garden is probably a Tarantino-esque homage to "Silent Running."*

For another thing, who could possibly equate "Star Wars" with clean and rustless spacecraft? The design of science fiction movies was almost entirely sleek and streamlined until 1977, when the "used universe" of George Lucas's "Star Wars" gave us patched and recycled technologies and spaceships. Now everybody does it. I'm not claiming that Lucas was an original thinker, either. (He's proudly owned up to cobbling together the plot of "Star Wars" from the samurai films of Akira Kurosawa, the "Flash Gordon" serials, and Joseph Campbell's "The Hero with a Thousand Faces," not to mention Laurel and Hardy movies, Howard Hawks's "Red River," Tod Browning's "Freaks," you name it. And I've also heard that the lived-in, broken-down look of "Star Wars" was ripped off from "Valerian," the popular Franco-Belgian science-fiction comic first published in 1967.) But come on, Lane, do your homework!

OTHER STUFF I'VE WRITTEN ABOUT SCIENCE FICTION: "The Slacktivism of Richard Linklater" | "Black Iron Prison" | "Back to Utopia" | "In a Perfect World" | "Journeys to the Center" | "Climate of Fear" | "Pulp Affection"

* UPDATE: OK, it turns out I'm absolutely right, about Boyle's (self-confessed) lack of originality and also the "oxygen garden." I've just Googled "Danny Boyle" and "Silent Running" and came across the following exchange, from a July 16 interview in Sci Fi Weekly:

SFW: In a film like this you sort of almost necessarily find yourself repeating things that have been done before. There's always a mysterious signal, an emergency spacewalk, an explosive decompression. How do you make a movie like this without falling into a cliche?

BOYLE: I would say... you're right. There are a limited amount of things that you can do in these stories, and they do tend to resemble each other a bit.... We have this journey to the sun, which was the original thing which hasn't been done. Astonishingly, to our amazement we couldn't find [a film]. It hasn't really been done. And it seems like the most extraordinary journey you could ever make as a human being, you know, to travel to the source of life, really. And so you hope that that will give you enough to actually maintain the freshness of it, even if some of the ingredients that you come across during it inevitably are familiar. Like what you said, an emergency decompression of the ship.... There are similarities to other films, for sure.

SFW: Was the 1972 Bruce Dern space movie 'Silent Running' one of your influences?

BOYLE: That's another one, yeah. That's obviously a big one, the oxygen garden and everything. That kind of stuff.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Thanks, Boing Boing and Edward Champion, for linking to this post! And thanks, Boing Boing and Edward Champion readers, for alerting me about anything else Lane screwed up in his review, or about other examples of movie gardens-on-spaceships, or other "used universe" precursors.

Posted by Joshua Glenn at 09:28 AM

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