IT SEEMS terribly unfair. In the blue corner you have the cream of high-profile blockbusting summer sci-fi product: Revenge of the Sith, War of the Worlds, The Island, Fantastic Four, Robots and Stealth. Movies with a combined production budget of more than half a billion dollars, plus a bonus promotional purse of $150 million, and sporting some of the most recognisable and aggressively marketed names in the business — Cruise, Spielberg, and Lucas — each one pushing their own megalomaniacal brand of innately spectacular thrill- ride entertainment into every available flea pit on the planet. While in the red corner you have a 31-year-old former Dallas software engineer called Shane Carruth, sporting the modest, virtually un-marketable, no-budget $7,000 sci-fi mind bender Primer.
And yet, while the Hollywood big boys are burdened by axiomatic story beats, ubiquitous screen-tested CGI set-pieces and bum-numbing exposition, Primer exists exclusively on its own idiosyncratic terms. Here, writer-director-producer-actor-editor-composer Carruth imbues his tricksy time-travelling parable with a deadpan banality and anti-effects sensibility that makes human doubles, anti-gravity accelerators and the malleable secrets of the time-space continuum seem utterly accessible to the casual viewer.
“This is a story that couldn’t be done in Hollywood,” says Carruth, ruminating on his film’s clever narrative chicanery and deliberately disorienting lo-fi style. “Not because they don’t get it, but because they simply can’t do it. They have to be thinking about spectacle, and what’s going to get people into the theatres. They don’t have the luxury of playing to the smart science-fiction crowd!”
Carruth is not alone in turning away from the dull vacuity of Hollywood Space Opera to the threadbare energy of no-budget sci-fi. Jeff Renfroe and Marteinn Thorsson recently scored a critical hit with $50,000, a digital camera and a TV actor (Six Feet Under’s Jeremy Sisto), in the futuristic paranoid thriller One Point O. While Robert Young’s equally thrifty corporate satire Below the Belt depicts a cut-price post-apocalyptic future with unapologetic verve. Even George Lucas himself, the Dark Lord of bloated summer sci-fi, has announced that he wants to return to the low-budget “highly abstract, esoteric films” such as THX 1138 that originally made his name in the genre.
Surprisingly, and despite years of blockbuster evidence to the contrary, No-Budget sci-fi isn’t exactly a new phenomenon. Ever since the French visionary Georges Méliès famously sent a stop- motion bullet careering into a custard pie moon in Le Voyage dans la Lune in 1902 the primal thrill of sci-fi has been deeply implicated in a fundamental act of faith on behalf of the viewer.
Traditional sci-fi has long required an overriding belief in the material that denies the conceptual gap between fantastical intent and shoddy effects. Like a 2-D Chinese lantern show, or the delicate interplay between lifeless marionettes, here it’s the conviction of the story that matters.
Similarly, shoestring sci-fi from the Fifties and Sixties thrived off this same simple rubric. The paranoid narrative energy and stony-faced integrity of movies such as The Man from Planet X (1951) and the later Quartermass series often meant that these films succeeded because of, rather than despite, their flimsy production values. In the Seventies, the budgetary constraints on films such as THX 1138 and Death Race 2000 were hidden by avant-garde technique in the former and sheer propulsive energy in the latter. Then, of course, came Star Wars.
After the triumph of Star Wars, and especially after the simultaneous establishment of the director George Lucas’s dominant Industrial Light and Magic visual effects company, the sci-fi goalposts seemed to shift. Suddenly, it was all about big-budget blockbusters with credible creatures, realistic environments, and fantastical verisimilitude. A Visual Effects category was immediately added to the Oscars, and when the impeccable digital dinosaurs of Jurassic Park were revealed Lucas famously announced that technology had finally caught up with his prodigious imagination and that it was time to begin work on his effects-filled prequels (hurrah!).
Similarly Peter Jackson admitted that advances in visual- effects technology were key to his realisation of Tolkien’s Rings vision. Earlier this summer, Jeffrey Katzenberg, the co-founder and CEO of Spielberg’s DreamWorks studio (producers of The Island and War of the Worlds) proudly declared that current cutting-edge effects technology meant that, nowadays, “if you can imagine it, then we can pretty much make it happen.”
Unfortunately, the imaginative complexities of greater Hollywood currently runs the gamut from banal (Fantastic Four) to uninspired (The Island). While the ongoing obsession with bigger and better effects set-pieces — a reductive philosophy that the critic David Thomson has named “the indecency of the visual” — tends to run against basic storytelling concerns.
“Ultimately your film has to rely on something at the core of the story that could have been told a thousand years ago, or a thousand years in the future,” says Carruth. “Anything that relies too heavily on computer-generated technology is probably missing the point.”
One Point O’s director Thorsson agrees. “A science-fiction film doesn’t need to be $80 million and use CGI,” he told the geek bible Wired. “Science fiction is about human beings interacting with each other and with technology. It’s about who we are today.”
In other words, Carruth, Thorsson and Co are actually engaged in a chivalrous act of reclamation on behalf of all sci-fi fans. They are dragging the genre back to the plastic monsters, cardboard space-ships and pie-in-the-sky planets of its roots. In doing so they are again boldly widening the gap between imaginative intent and on-screen reality, and returning to moviegoers the precious thrill of belief.
Postscript: a word of caution from Carruth to all would-be Lo-Fi heroes. It’s hard work, he warns. “I quit twice when I was making Primer. It took me nearly two years to edit the movie. I had no money left, and I had to get a real job again. The process is such a great way to kill yourself and then make your entire future dependent on a crap shoot. Knowing what I know about it now, it’s just not something I could advise anyone to do.”
FIVE LEADING EXAMPLES OF BALSAWOOD SCI-FI
THE MAN FROM PLANET X (Edgar Ulmer, 1951)
Spooky man wearing fishbowl on head haunts the “Scottish Moors” (aka Hal Roach Studios in LA) and acts as singular vanguard for massive and too-expensive-to-film alien invasion.
Budget $50,000
PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE (Edward D. Wood Jr, 1959)
Terrifying fleet of silver Christmas tree decorations wobbles across cardboard sky and re-animates life in graveyards below, creating pack of celebrity zombies.
Budget $60,000
THX 1138 (George Lucas, 1971)
Robert Duvall’s eponymous hero and Maggie McOmie’s LUH 3417 are trapped in a dystopian future of cheap white rooms, policemen in Hallowe’en masks, and lots of empty corridors.
Budget $777,000
PI (Darren Aronofsky, 1998)
Maths savant Max Cohen (Sean Gullette) finds recurring patterns in the Universe by staying in his Brooklyn apartment, taking computers apart and even cutting his own hair. Now that’s cheap.
Budget $60,000
ONE POINT O (Jeff Renfroe, Marteinn Thorsson, 2004)
Computer programmer from the future Simon J (Jeremy Sisto) lives in an empty building, overlooking empty streets, and receives ominous deliveries of empty cardboard boxes. No extras, no sets, no props. Nice.
Budget $50,000
