The Year's Best SF 25 # 2007

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  Also not on the box-office champs list was perhaps the best real SF movie of the year, the British film Sunshine, about a space crew on a desperate mission to restart our dying sun, which slipped through town so fast and stealthily that it didn’t even ripple the grass; not that it’s perfect, by any means (far from it, in fact), but at least it’s trying to play the genre game by the rules, and although its science is also technobabble, at least it’s more inventive and interesting technobabble than you get in Transformers or I Am Legend, and they even had a tame physicist who would pop up at press conferences to vouch for its plausibility. Also an earnest attempt to make a real SF movie is The Man from Earth, written by the late SF writer Jerome Bixby (who, in fact, finished the last page of the script on his death bed); it has some intelligent writing and conceptualization, but, produced on a very low budget by a very small company, it’s mostly people talking to each other in rooms with almost nothing in the way of special effects or slick production values, and I don’t know how well that will go over these days—not a problem, as it turns out, since very few people saw it in the first place, even fewer than saw Sunshine.

  And, as far as I can tell, that’s it for science fiction movies this year. Everything else lumped as “genre films” was … something else.

  The number one top-grossing movie of the year, according to the Box Office Mojo site, was Spider-Man 3, which to date has pulled in a $336,530,303 in domestic grosses. There seems to be a Law of Trilogies that affects most of these big franchises, a law of diminishing returns: the first movie is the best, the second movie is okay but not as good as the first, and the third movie is the worst of the three. This year that also applied to the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise and to the Shrek franchise, and in the past it has applied to the X-Men and the Matrix movies. Spider-Man 3 just has too much of everything: too many villains, too much character building, too many climaxes (each one trying to top the one that came before, in a fashion that has become familiar since the ’80s and ’90s, and which I actually find counterproductive), and such a welter of subplots that any narrative drive gets muffled and bogged-down in the confusion. (The fact that this is the top-grossing movie of the year, though, seems to indicate that few other people give a damn about any of this—as long as there’s enough wide-screen spectacle up on the screen, no matter how muddled the story is, they’re happy to buy tickets.) Of the remaining superhero /comic book movies (there weren’t a lot of them this year), the best was probably, Fantastic Four: Return of the Silver Surfer, which seems to be flouting the Law of Trilogies by being better than the original movie in the franchise—it’s still fairly lame, mind you, but not as lame as the first one was. The only other superhero movies I could spot were Ghost Rider, which in spite of a big opening weekend didn’t do as well overall as its producers had been hoping it would, and the execrable Underdog, an expansion of the campy TV cartoon of the ’60s, which probably sunk itself (and sink it did) with its ill-advised decision to make this as a live action movie rather than an animated feature. National Treasure: Book of Secrets is technically not a superhero movie, but partakes of the spirit of one; although it supposedly takes place in the real world, it’s certainly a fantasy of some sort, and I suppose it could be listed there too. I didn’t think it was possible to be sillier than the first National Treasure, but, with its totally absurd premise and plot-turns, National Treasure : Book of Secrets outstrips it with ease. Congratulations, guys!

  As has been true for a couple of years now, fantasy movies was where the most substantial and successful work of the year was done. Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End was the big winner in this area, finishing fourth in the domestic box-office list, and earning $309,420,425 in domestic grosses. You can just write “ditto” under my review of Spider-Man 3 and run it for At World’s End as well. They threw everything into this one, including the kitchen sink and the rest of the kitchen as well, resulting in a broken-backed mess that meanders leisurely to the standard multiple-climax end, and which makes shockingly little sense throughout, even for a Pirates of the Caribbean movie. Johnny Deep is fun to watch as Captain Jack Sparrow, as usual, and whenever he’s off the screen (which he is for substantial amounts of time) you can feel the energy level of the whole picture sag, to such an extent that Geoffrey Rush seems obliged to momentarily morph from a villain into a Good Guy just to hold the screen. Next down on the box-office list, at number five, is Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, which made $290,044,738, up by a couple of million from 2005’s Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, enough to make the overall series the top-grossing movie franchise of all time, beating out even the Star Wars franchise. The Harry Potter films have so far defied the law of diminishing returns, perhaps because they’re not a trilogy—in fact, the third movie, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, is, in my opinion, the best of the series to date, by a good margin, and The Order of the Phoenix is in many ways a better movie than Goblet of Fire: tighter, faster-moving, less cluttered with extraneous sub-plots. The downside is that it’s also a much darker movie, tense and claustrophobic from beginning to end, with little comic relief and almost none of those moments of innocent wonder and magic that you used to get occasionally in the earlier films. And this will probably only get worse in the next two films, as the Potter books themselves darken. Although the franchise is obviously still doing well at the box-office, I wonder if the demographics for the series aren’t shifting—the Harry Potter movies used to be pushed as family films, released at Christmastime, something you’d bring the young kids to; although they may have gained audience among the young twenties crowd, I saw few families with young kids in the theater, and it may be that the movies have now grown too intense and dark to be considered family-friendly fare anymore, at least for the younger children.

  (It’s interesting to note that almost all of these big movies made more money overseas than they did in the domestic market. If you add the foreign grosses to the domestic takes, you find that Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix has earned $938,464,961 worldwide, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End has earned $961,002,663 worldwide, Spider-Man 3 $890,871,626 worldwide, and so on. What gobsmacks me even more than the vast amounts of money these films pull in is the vast amounts of money they cost to make. $300 million for Pirates, $258 million for Spider-Man, $150 million for Harry Potter, and so on. If you add all the budget costs of even the first ten movies on the top-grossing list together, ignoring the other hundred plus or so movies that came out in 2007, you’d get a sum that would probably be greater many times over than all the money that has ever been spent on print SF since the very beginning of SF as a distinct publishing category. Hell, the budget for Pirates alone might be enough.)

  A hopeful attempt to create a new major fantasy franchise is The Golden Compass, based on the bestselling books by Philip Pullman. Whether it succeeded in establishing the franchise or not remains to be seen—The Golden Compass did well worldwide, particularly in Australia and the United Kingdom, but box-office in the U.S. was disappointing. Like almost every other fantasy movie this year, it tried to stuff too many elements into too small a box, to the point where, if you weren’t a fan of the Pullman books, what was happening on the screen didn’t necessarily make much sense to you; whatever plot-problems it had, the movie looked really terrific, and had some of the best CGI on display in awhile, especially the armored polar bears, and a great cast, so I wouldn’t mind seeing the franchise succeed in establishing itself. (The Pope actually took the time to denounce The Golden Compass for its portrait of a thinly-disguised Catholic Church—more disguised in the movie than the book, actually—as the Bad Guys, which I must admit prompted me to wonder if, with all the horrors abroad in the world, he couldn’t have found something a lot more Evil out there to denounce instead.) The other stylish and substantial (if again, muddled) fantasy film of the year was Stardust, based on Neil Gaiman’s novel of the same name. Again, too many subplots, too many things tugging in too many d
irections at once, too much that ought to have been done without, charming as it might be; for instance, one of the most enjoyable bits in the movie was Robert De Niro’s turn as a transvestite pirate—but it ultimately didn’t really have much to do with the plot, and was just one more thing to bog-down the narrative drive. Stardust finished in the sixty-sixth position in the top-grossing list, which probably means there’s not going to be a sequel.

  I suppose we should count Bridge to Terabithia as a fantasy film, since it literalizes the fantasy escape world of the children a lot more than the book did, where there was a good deal more question as to weather it was “real” or not. And where should we put Beowulf? Is it a fantasy (it has monsters), a historical Sword and Sandal epic, or an animated film? I suppose you can come closest to summing it up as a fantasy film set in a real historical setting (sort of like The Thirteenth Warrior, if the raiders had turned out to be real supernatural demons instead of Neanderthals). I find the claim that it’s an animated film to be a bit of a stretch, since it was filmed with real actors and then had stop-motion animation added in later. Like the similar process in last year’s A Scanner Darkly, I found all this rather unnecessary; in my opinion; they should have saved the animation for the monsters, where you’re trying to show something that doesn’t really exist, and filmed the human actors in the regular way … and the monsters might have had more impact if they were motion-capture animated and everything else was not. I fail to see what you gain by using motion-capture animation to show a man drinking a cup of mead when you can just film him drinking it instead; save the animation for things that can’t actually be put before a camera.

  The remaining fantasy films were less successful, critically and economically. The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep tried to be cute and heartwarming and hit embarrassing instead, and I knew that Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium was in trouble when my grandchildren (nine and twelve, respectively) refused to go see it because it looked dull (they wanted to see Enchanted instead); apparently it was dull, and few other people wanted to see it either. You have to wonder why God didn’t forbid the making of Evan Almighty, or at least blast the director with lightning; at least He struck it dead at the Box Office. There was also a cross between a slob comedy and a Christmas fantasy movie, Fred Claus (sadly, not the first, either).

  The highly stylized account of the Battle of Thermopylae, 300, rated number eight on the top-grossing list, making it the most financially successful Sword and Sandal epic since Gladiator (there have been a number of them in the years between the two, and, until now, they’ve always dogged-out). Chances are, you’re either going to love 300 or hate it, and I know people who fall into both camps (I tend to fall into the “hate it” camp, myself). Actually, it reminds me of Beowulf, which itself could probably be categorized as a Sword and Sandal movie, without too much of a stretch: in both, there’s lots of blood spraying, lots of heroic half-naked (or almost entirely naked, in the case of 300) men, lots of bulging pecs and abs glistening with sweat, lots of macho posturing and boasting, lots of warriors hitting each other with swords, lots of rather dramatic liberties taken with the source material—did you know, for instance, that the Persian Empire deployed ferocious War Rhinoceroses in the Battle of Thermopylae? Gosh, before this movie came out, neither did I! Much further down the food-chain, not making it on to the top-grossing list, was Pathfinder: Legend of the Ghost Warrior, which featured Vikings fighting Indians in the forests of the New World.

  Somewhat to my surprise, since I thought it considerably the weakest of the three, and was all ready to make comments about the franchise stretching itself too thin and running out of gas, the animated film Shrek the Third was the number two top-grossing film of the year, hauling in $322,710,944 in domestic grosses. Not bad for a cartoon ogre who was born a decided underdog, created on a relatively small budget by refugees and outcasts from the big studios. (Just so you don’t think me a total curmudgeon, I quite liked the first Shrek. Although, I think the series has been going downhill since then—while obviously everybody else in the world thinks it’s going in the opposite direction. One thing that gave the first Shrek its bite was its surprisingly merciless and mean-spirited satire of Disney movies, and that bite seems to have been considerably blunted since Disney bought Shrek’s parent company.) Another animated film that outgrossed all but a few of the year’s live-action films was Ratatouille, which finished a very respectable ninth on the box-office list—and unlike Shrek the Third, which was disliked by most of the critics, Ratatouille was treated with an amazing amount of critical respect for an animated movie (especially one about a talking rat), which are generally dismissed as “kid stuff.” It deserved the respect, being probably the best Pixar film since The Incredibles (I still like The Incredibles a tad better, but Ratatouille was loads better than last year’s dull and earnest Cars), and is one of the best overall since Toy Story (still my favorite Pixar). The Simpson’s Movie also got lots of critical respect, and finished tenth on the box-office list, making this a pretty impressive money-making year for animated films. Alvin and the Chipmunks finished eleventh, which isn’t chopped liver either, but got no critical respect at all. Bringing up the rear of the animated pack at nineteenth was Bee Movie (the critics were lukewarm about it too), and well down in the pack were Meet the Robinsons, Surf’s Up, and TMNT (which stands for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in case you didn’t realize, making an unsuccessful comeback).

  Another unexpected hit was Disney’s Enchanted, which was a half animated, half live-action film where animated characters from cartoon fairytales come to the real (sort of) New York City and get translated into flesh and blood. Like Shrek the Third, Enchanted is also torn between being a satire of cartoon fairytales and being a cartoon fairytale; since this is a Disney movie, after all, none of its satire gets anywhere near poking the kind of merciless fun at Disney movies that enlivened the original Shrek, but some of it is fairly funny anyway, including the dancing rats, pigeons, and cockroaches that come out as the New York equivalent of all the birds, bunnies, and squirrels that are always helping Cinderella and other Disney characters sew dresses and clean the house up. It’s all amiable and fun to watch, with a good performance by Amy Adams, who plays the wide-eyed, ever-optimistic and chirpy, impossibly innocent cartoon Princess who must somehow survive on the (pretty sanitized) Mean Streets of the Big Bad City. (My grandkids liked it too.) Happily N’ever After covered the same kind of ground, deconstructing cartoon fairy tales with mild satire, but was nowhere near as successful either critically or financially.

  There were horror movies, of course, such as The Mist, 28 Weeks Later, Saw IV, Resident Evil: Extinction, and Halloween (2007), but I didn’t pay much attention to them.

  Martian Child isn’t SF, but it may be of associational interest to some, being drawn from a novel by SF writer David Gerrold about an SF writer struggling to raise an emotionally damaged child—although the movie has changed the book’s gay bachelor to a much more socially acceptable heterosexual widower.

  The new Star Trek movie seems to be generating most of the anticipatory buzz amongst next year’s upcoming movies, as far as I can tell.

  This seems to have been The Year of the Cop in SF and fantasy TV shows, where we’ve had vampire cops, immortal cops, wizard cops, time-traveling cops, cops who live the same day over and over, and cops who talk to angels (and, of course, cops figure or have recently figured in the plotlines of shows such as Heroes and Lost). Can the show about the cop with a chimpanzee for a partner be far behind?

  Of course, the entire season has been overshadowed by the Writers Guild of America strike (stretching far beyond genre boundaries; practically every scripted show on television was affected), which has already closed down some shows, and will probably close down more; it’s quite possible that none of the shows I mention here (with the exception of the British imports) will actually be on the air next season. Since the networks and major studios seem to have dug their heels in, seemingly confident
that they can get by with showing nothing but unscripted reality shows and not lose their audiences, the strike could drag on for a long time, and since most scripted TV shows are of necessity prepared months in advance, it’s already too late to hope for a normal season, even if the strike were suddenly settled tomorrow.