THIS summer, the latest Steven Spielberg sci-fi blockbuster is released. Tom Cruise will save the planet from an alien attack and notch up yet another victory for America. However, despite this being the most American of futuristic productions, it couldn’t exist without a dead Englishman.
The film is War of the Worlds, based on the 1898 novel by H. G. Wells. His name is even there on the poster if you look hard enough.
It may sound like an absurd proposition, but without the contribution of Britain, science fiction cinema would be in the doldrums. Next week The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is released, the first in Douglas Adams’s much cherished “trilogy in five parts” and possibly the most quintessentially British sci-fi story yet told. The British writer and sci-fi god Alan Moore also has two projects in production. First there’s the adaptation of his V for Vendetta, starring Natalie Portman, produced by the Wachowski brothers and set in a fascistic future Britain, and then Paul Greengrass is hoping to start filming The Watchmen.
The British have an immense influence in science fiction film: we are like an alien spore that’s infected the genre and is running amok. Of course, it’s not an entirely triumphant story: the number of solely British funded and produced science fiction films is pitifully small, but, then again, compared with the American behemoth, no other country stands a chance. Sci-fi generally costs a lot of money to make. Can you think of many German sci-fi films? Italian? Even French? The British success has been in the way we have inveigled our way inside.
Long ago, there was a time when we produced our very own futuristic spectaculars. In 1936 The Shape of Things to Come was a hugely ambitious feature (again based on an H. G. Wells book) that sought to imagine the history of the world from 1929 to 2106. It took a year to make and cost £300,000 and the results are stunning even today. The film features a 60-year war, a peace gas and a moon rocket. How- ever, it did disastrously in the States. An American distributor summed it up by saying: “Nobody will believe the world is going to be saved by a bunch of people with British accents.”
This is the root of the problem facing British sciencefiction cinema: we’re perceived as representing the past, not the future. We can do genteel period pieces but we can’t do battle with an alien Armada.
In Spielberg’s War of the Worlds the aliens now attack New York, not London. Even in a genre that specialises in flights of fantasy, it’s too far-fetched to have Britain representing the centre of the world. It’s worth noting that even the aliens have had their nationalities changed; they’re not Martian invaders any more. Mars, like Britain, just doesn’t have the mystique.
What followed the failure of The Shape of Things to Come was a wholesale Americanisation of the British sci-fi canon. The hero in John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids became an American seaman, played by Howard Keel; The Invisible Man (again based on an H. G. Wells book) has been the source for at least four films but has was played by an Englishman only the first time, Claude Rains ; Forbidden Planet (1956) is nothing less than a futuristic version of Shakespeare’s The Tempest.
Part of the problem is that there is simply too much British material to steal from. Aside from Wells and his astonishing legacy, we can lay claim to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels is often cited as the origin of much satirical sci-fi (and was certainly an influence on Douglas Adams); and while between Orwell (1984) and Huxley (Brave New World ) we have the templates for virtually every utopia or dystopia yet filmed.
However it’s misleading to assume that all the British do is provide source material for American studios. British directors have had an amazing influence in imagining the future. James Whale went to Hollywood in the 1930s and made two classic Frankenstein movies and the original Invisible Man. Ridley Scott is responsible for two of the most influential sci-fi films yet made, Alien (1979) and Blade Runner (1982). Stanley Kubrick was an honorary Brit and shot both A Clockwork Orange (1971) and 2001:
A Space Odyssey (1968) over here.
Beyond all of this petty Brit-spotting (and there is a whole thesis to be done on the British contribution to Star Wars: Alec Guinness, Ewan McGregor, countless designers and technicians . . . ) there is the very valid point that sci-fi cinema should be above the entire concept of nationalism. In 1966 François Truffaut shot Fahrenheit 451 in Britain. It was the French director’s only English-language film, starring an English actress (Julie Christie), an Austrian actor (Oskar Werner), based on a book by Ray Bradbury, an American, and set in an unnamed country where all books have been banned. So what nationality is the film? Does it qualify as British? More recently Michael Winterbottom’s Code 46, set in the future, shot in India and China, filmed by a German cameraman and written by an Irishman. Code 46 predicted that, in the future, language would become increasingly conflated, English would be mixed up with bits of Spanish and even Chinese, and climate change would cause mass migrations, changing the world’s borders. Surely this is the true purpose and realm of sci-fi, to be liberated from current thinking and restrictions? After all, much of it takes place in the future, where present boundaries are a thing of the past, or out in space, where Britain, America or even Earth mean very little.
HOW TO AVOID ALIEN ATTACKS
Faced with a silver robot about to nuke us because we can’t stop threatening to nuke each other, say: “Klaatu barada nikto”. NOT ASIMOV’S RULES OF ROBOTICS
Run for the hills at once when a robot disobeys you, even if it is extremely polite.
