Otherways- Fiction Fanatics

I am not a purist. One of my all time favorite television series, the ill-fated Joss Whedon Firefly series, ignores a few minor laws of physics, and I seriously don't care. I'm a bit of a geek, and bad science usually bothers me, but sometimes it just doesn't matter. You can, in a story that revolves around the characters and action, just get away with never explaining how your ship has gravity. We in the audience are willing to accept a certain amount of "it just is" for the sake a great story telling. We at home care far more about what is happening to the people we've invested in than we do about what exactly the function of a primary grav boot is.

Last night, I managed to watch two of the most annoying science fiction movies I've seen in a long time, back to back, and I feel the need to get a few things off my chest. Beware, there are some necessary spoiler alerts.

First, and foremost, in books or in movies, we want to invest in your characters. Snowpiercer, which really should have given itself away as bad just on the merits of its short blurb, is the audience bully.  We are led to connect with a series of characters who are improbably trapped on a speeding train in a frozen world, hurtling forward in an endless loop. Of course, a caste system has developed, so the ones in the back of the train are living horrible lives, exploited by those in the front. Throughout the movie, we see examples of how fast you'll die outside, and how their survival depends on the warmth the train provides.

Once you get invested in the grubby tail sectioners, they inevitably stage a revolution. Wars kill people, and killing a few characters is often necessary to tell a good story. Slaughtering pretty much every person your audience has invested in may not be the best move. Dropping the entire tail section, with the few surviving grubby and pathetic oppressed people, off a massive cliff was overkill in every sense of the word. Yes, the obnoxious people in the middle also died, but we're left at the end with only two people still standing, neither of whom has demonstrated much in the way of survival skills. You just ended a movie about the survival of the human race by leaving a drug addicted seventeen year old girl that doesn't know what dirt is out in the supposedly lethal cold in front of a wrecked train with a five year old boy and a polar bear. If I were a betting person, I'd bet on the polar bear.

I'm not saying a movie, or novel, has to be happy in order to be good. It does, however, have to do something, anything, well. Your audience has invested a bit of their lives in your work, and you need to pay that off. Snowpiercer has very unrealistic science, even if we simply consider the probability that a high speed train could even operate for seventeen years in the bitter cold without ever once needing track maintenance, it is unlikely. Freezing the entire world, also unlikely. Train careening about on two wheels while speeding around mountain curves at breakneck speed? Please. If the characters told a compelling story, I could forgive the crappy science, but it is difficult to tell a compelling story when you are dead. Audience investment, about two hours. Payoff? Nil.

And then there's Interstellar, one that tries really hard to be both an edgy science fiction movie and a character driven thriller all at once. There are some wonderful actors in this one, and each one of them does a good job with their characters, but some things just can't be saved. If I, klutz that I am, were to attempt to rollerskate, I would be fine. If I attempted to rollerskate while reciting Shakespeare, there might be problems. If I tried to rollerskate, recite Shakespeare, and knit a cozy afghan while dodging bullets and performing skate-park worthy maneuvers in mid-air, there would definitely be problems. First off, I can't knit.

This is pretty much what Interstellar did, or tried to do. While Snowpiercer decided to completely screw over their audience, giving them nothing, Interstellar tried to give them everything, which just isn't possible. There is a lot of nice sciency stuff for the geeky type like myself, but then you pretty much blow that out of the water by travelling through a black hole, and surviving. Yes, it is possible to have a planetary system circling a black hole. Not where I'd want to leave the last hope of humanity, personally, but it could happen. Even using the gravitational force as a slingshot is possible, but you aren't going to live through a trip into one. The human body doesn't do well with the pressure of our own oceans, putting it in a place that even light can't escape is not going to be recommended by your family physician. If it is, change physicians, pronto,

So, fine, it tried to be a science fiction work and failed. We still have story and characters, right? They spend a long time setting up how close the hero is to his kids, generating a big emotional investment in those relationships, and in his promise to come back. So through a series of events that Douglas Adam's Heart of Gold ship would have difficulty calculating the improbability of, he does manage to make it back to a space station, where his daughter travels to him. Their touching reunion scene is her deathbead, and lasts all of about ten seconds before he steals a ship. Okay, her life of feeling abandoned, and his mistakes, all fixed in five minutes. Hell, he didn't even bring her a card. Not really satisfying there, and he never even asks about his son, or his grandson. 

Not doing too well on being the touchy-feely family first movie either.

Well, maybe it's a romance, then.

I mean, there is a beautiful young lady, and a giant frozen box of fertilized human embryos. What could be more romantic than that? Well, you did abandon her, too, and she is in love with some guy we never see on new home possibility planet number three. Enough so that she's using her love for him to guide her decision making. For all our hero knows, this true love guy is the one she's with right now, but he steals a plane...er, spacecraft...and hops into a wormhole to make his way back to her. We never see that he makes it, just that she's buried her love interest and she's now alone with a big jug of embryos.

As far as love stories go, that isn't the most satisfying ending I can think of, and we won't even go into where it tries to be a ghost story, or its struggle to wax philosophical.

The moral of this pair of stories is that your readers, or viewers, want some kind of payoff for their time invested. Let them leave with a good story, or brilliant ideas, or stunning visuals. They deserve that for supporting you. Just remember that you are still bound by the physical constraints of normal space-time, and you cannot be all things at once. Attempting to do so will only result in a jumbled mess. Do one thing, maybe two, really well, and your audience will be thrilled. Try to do it all, and you'll only get in your own way.

Cheers,

Michelle