Steampunk, Star Trek and Salvation - John Scalzi Answers More SciFi Questions
Hey kids! My ThinkTron 3000 (your people call it a "brain") has melted out of my ears and I can't come up with a topic this week. You know what that means: To the mailbag!
First e-mail:
Why hasn't steampunk hit it big in movies yet? It seems perfect for the movies, visually.
You'd think so, wouldn't you? For those of you not in the know, "steampunk" is a type of science fiction that imagines what the world would be like if we had today's technology, retrofitted for the Victorian era. So, lots of steam-powered technogadgets (thus the name) and groovy waistcoats and ascots. It's visually awesome stuff, and really does seem well-suited for the spectacle of the silver screen.
And yet steampunky movies have been critical or commercial flops. The most successful would have to be Wild Wild West, which made $100 million despite being absolutely terrible, thanks to star Will Smith. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen flailed domestically ($66 million box office on a $78 million budget), was disowned by creator Alan Moore and was such a stressful shoot that director Stephen Norrington essentially abandoned Hollywood for almost a decade. Then there's 2004's Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, which despite being the first "total green screen" movie, took a dive on the silver screen.
What all three of these major movies have in common, aside from their steampunkery, is the fact that they're all awful: Badly written, badly directed stuff that looks great but doesn't go anywhere.The fact that they're so bad -- and generally performed poorly -- will probably kill steampunk on the big screen for the foreseeable future.
Second e-mail:
You said you liked the new Star Trek film, but how could you sit through it when the actual science was so bad? You know it's bad. You said so on your blog. I thought you called yourself a scientist!
If I called myself a scientist, my friends with actual science degrees would kick my butt. But yes, the science in the new Star Trek is epically bad, particularly with the bits involving black holes and that insipid deus ex machina known as "red matter."
Why I'm able to tolerate it: Well, come on. Star Trek science has always been epically bad, hasn't it? It's been bad in the movies since the explanation of how V'Ger got halfway across the universe in Star Trek: The Motion Picture. The various TV series were never any better: I was always amazed in Star Trek: The Next Generation that Geordi LaForge had not won the Nobel Prize for discovering so many new sub-atomic particles (and then immediately making beams out of them, and routing the beams through the warp nacelles, etc).
There is no reason the science in Star Trek needs to be as aggressively wrong as it is. But we're 42 years, five series and eleven movies in, you know? It's a little late. You might as well get hung up on how Kirk goes from being suspended from Starfleet Academy to captain of the Federation flagship in about the same amount of time it takes the rest of us to order lunch from Taco Bell. And on that path lies madness.
Last e-mail:
Terminator Salvation got punked by Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian. How did that happen?
This is referring to the fact that over the Memorial Day weekend, the new Terminator movie made $51 million while the Night at the Museum sequel brought in $70 million.
First things first: $51 million for four days (and $65 million for five days, since Terminator opened on Thursday) is nothing to sneeze at; it seems reasonably likely that this Terminator will match Terminator 3's domestic gross (about $150 million) and even more likely will outperform it internationally. I personally thought it would do better, but it's no flop.
It's also not entirely surprising Night at the Museum was on top. The first Museum flick made $100 million more in domestic box office than Terminator 3, and came out more recently, so its built in support was bigger and fresher. Second, despite its PG-13 rating, Terminator: Salvation is no "family film," whereas the whole clan could get out to see Museum. Third, Museum had the box office boost of IMAX screens, for which people pay more. Finally, Museum was on 500 more screens last weekend than Terminator, which translates to a significant advantage -- even if Terminator had made the same amount per theater as Museum, it still would have made $10 million less. Add that all up and the box office disparity makes more sense.
Winner of the Hugo Award and the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, John Scalzi is the author of The Rough Guide to Sci-Fi Movies and the novels Old Man's War and Zoe's Tale. He's also Creative Consultant for the upcoming Stargate: Universe television series. His column appears every Thursday.
You know, John, the first question here reminded me of a thought that's been bouncing around my head for a while: the blasters in the original Star Wars seem to me to be in the finest steampunk traditions. I mean, Han Solo's blaster is definitely what you might end up with if you decided to steampunk a Mauser c96, likewise the stormtroopers' blaster rifle and the Sterling smg.
If they made a movie out of Phil Foglio's "Girl Genius," that would NOT suck at all. I'm not a huge fan of steampunk, but anything Phil does seems to completely rock.
Wild Wild West was a script shy of a good movie. I read an interview with Barry Sonnenfeld about the original script he was handed when he took on the project. That was the TONED DOWN version. I'd have scrapped it wrote something not involving a steam-powered metal tarantula or that stupid scene where Kevin Klein projects the back of a dead guy's eyeballs onto a screen.
Star Trek: At least there are no miticlorians. Vulcans are logical (despite the bad science all around them) because they tend to be crankier than humans when they're not. So we were spared Sarek or old Spock saying "Young Spock's logic germ count is low. You can really piss him off now."
Don't forget the upcoming Sherlock Holmes movie - looks quite steampunky!
You can't really call Sky Captain steampunk. It's Art Deco. If you call it steampunk, then there is a lot of the stuff out there, including the various Flash Gordon versions. It's an entirely different paleofuture.
The Fourth Doctor's TARDIS had a lot of rosewood and brass for a while. But it takes more than that to give a proper steampunk feel.
Actually, in some ways, the Harry Potter movies are steampunk. Magic seems to have replaced technology someplace in the Victorian era and they still use lanterns, quills, steam trains, etc.
Two more Steampunk influenced films that did really well - Hellboy and its sequel.
Looking at Box Office Mojo, both of them made a decent chunk of change over their production budgets without a huge built in fanbase.
I'd love to see an adaptation of Perdido Street Station, but I think there's no way it would work as a feature length film - maybe if A Game of Thrones is hugely successful HBO or one of its competitors could give it a shot.
You can't really call Sky Captain steampunk. It's Art Deco.
Streampunk Moderne?
Wouldn't Brazil qualify as steampunk? Dystopian sure, but surely still steampunk. Come to think of it, the steam itself serves as a major plot element....
Anyway, an example of steampunk done right and well.
I liked Sky Captain, but then I went into that film specifically for visual imagery (based on what I had seen in the trailer) and not for the story. It reminded me a bit of a Tintin book - planes, gadgets, foreign travel, spies, a reporter, rockets - in that it was episodic and linear and, if I remember right, full of implausible coincidences, though darker in visual tone. But some fabulous images. And like Tintin, not steampunk as such... it looked more 30s and 40s, like TV Poirot with killer-robots and a lot of smoke.
David Lynch's 1984 Dune had a bit of a steampunk look to it (or noir-baroque, as Wikipedia calls it) that to me didn't match the impressions I got from the book; it also wasn't successful.
I can think of at least one movie I really enjoyed that was thoroughly in line with the steampunk aesthetic.
City Of Lost Children.
Of course I have no idea how well it did, but I thought it was gorgeous -- one of the first films I saw where the integration of CGI with conventional sets and special effects really worked well. And hey, there was even a little bit of biotech in there for good measure.
Patrick:
I think it's a heck of a stretch to call Brazil "steampunk" -- "technologically distressed," sure, but not steampunk (also in my experience "steampunk" does not tend toward "dytopic," but that's another matter entirely). But even if we grant it is steampunk, it's worth noting that it made less than $10 million in domestic theaters; again not an excellent argument for making more films like it.
Sean Craven:
I love love LOVE City of Lost Children, but it's not salient to this particular conversation, because it's a foreign film, not one made here in the US by US studios.
Also for folks out there: Another great visually Steampunk film is an anime: "Steamboy." Check it out.
I feel like a pedantic internet nerd for knowing this, but "Sky Captain" falls more into the "dieselpunk" genre (which Wikipedia also lists "Brazil" as, although considering the source is likely pedantic internet nerds...) I loved the concept of the film, but the weak plot and 100% green screen thing kind of killed it for me.
What about Stardust? It was steampunky, kind of silly, but with a good story.
The biggest problem I had with Star Trek was definitely why the hell Starfleet, as a huge humanitarian/scientific organization with ships that require hundreds or thousands of people to run them, apparently had to crew its flagship almost entirely with cadets in the first place.
John is a connoisseur of science, but not a scientist in the modern sense (i.e. degree in, job in, etc.). And never claimed to be. But my, he does have fun. (grin)
That said, movies and television frequently leave a lot to be desired in the technical areas. How many real Crime Scene Investigators go out and arrest people? How long does it REALLY take to match fingerprints? Why, when you enlarge a frame taken by an ATM security camera, does the image GAIN detail? With just a couple examples like that, and you're going to complain that Star Trek can't be watched because its science came out of a pack of bubble gum? Sorry -- CSI and NCIS can be hit TV shows, just as Star Wars and Star Trek can have huge fans in the movie theatres.
Would I rather they make the science right? Sure, up to a point. I mean, the basic premise of zipping from planet to planet -- that's not a sound starting point but makes for a helluva lotta fun stories.
Dr. Phil (doctor as in Ph.D. in Applied Physics)
Re: Terminator Salvation vs Night at the Museum 2:
One final reason you left off (though granted may not be significant) - TS is almost a half-hour longer in run time than Night 2 - scheduled right, theaters can squeeze in an extra showing of Night over TS.
To add to Dr Phil's comment: alien computers that can interface with Macs, top secret files secured by passwords that would make most IT people ROFL, and other similar computer science presentations in movies and TV shows.
Hey, I liked LXG.
I point this out a lot, and doesn't Alan Moore disown every film based on his work because he doesn't care about movies?
It's not precisely steampunk (if you're going to get all PARTICULAR about your steampunk), but one excellent meld of old-fashioned style and new-fashioned technology was Whedon's Firefly. You've got a captain wearing suspenders and an old-fashioned Wild West gun holster manning an honest-to-God spaceship. Tweak the time periods both backwards a bit and you'd have steampunk. I'll put that out there as evidence that it could be done, if only - as Scalzi says - the scripts didn't suck so very hard.
hmmm " Wild Wild West, which made $100 million despite being absolutely terrible, thanks to star Will Smith."
Did you perhaps mean to say "Wild Wild West, which made $100 million (thanks to star Will Smith) despite being absolutely terrible" I don't think I'm being too picky to suggest that there is a difference in the above.
(then again, you're the pro, so you'll prob'ly not appreciate this and I may in fact be wrong).
I am a pro on science however, and I find (as I've said elsewhere) the excuse "the science is Star Trek was always bad" to be just as credible as "well, this is what Spock MEANT to say", and "you know, just read the graphic novel, as it's all explained there". The difference between the science in this Star Trek and ALL the tv series and MOST of the other movies is that the "bad science" in the others was in not doing a good job of explaining made-up science (you know, the SF kind) while in this Trek it was in absolutely screwing up science we've known between 50 and 350 years.. As a scientist, I can sometimes excuse the first form of error as bad writing, while the second form is just stupid and shows zero respect for the art form. You think it's an accident that J.J. Abrams was a co-writer of the screenplay for Armageddon, which along with The Core, is the worst "science in science fiction" movie ever written? If you get "science we know now" this wrong in your next novel (which I certainly don't expect), would you be surprised if it turned readers off? (not mentioning the horrible cliche's and other plot holes in this Star Trek). My idea is that a majority of people who see Star Trek movies are so enamored of the S.T. Universe that they can suspend ANY amount of disbelief required to not hate this movie. This is a BAD thing, because it only encourages much more of the same.
I think this explains exactly why "Wild Wild West" bombed. And it's got nothing to do with the steampunk.
http://boingboing.net/2009/04/27/kevin-smith-explains.html
Thank you, tariqata. I was MUCH more bothered by Kirk's drive-through ride to Captain of the fleet than the absurd science in Star Trek. The science was worse than usual, sure, but if you're going to Star Trek to learn, well, you're doing it wrong.
What about the Prestige? That one even had Tesla in it. I'm pretty sure that the presence of Nikola Tesla in a thing raises the chance of it being steampunk by a huge margin.
That movie did well both financially and critically, and the script was awesome. Now granted the movie didn't get thoroughly steampunk until the second or third act when you actually go see Tesla, but still!
The recent live musical performance of War Of The Worlds by Jeff Wayne was spectacularly steamy.
To me, the problem is that people set out with a goel, be "hyper real" or "emo" etc,, they love the fabric, but not tye clothes they are making out of it!
So far, in my many years, the one TRUE Steampunk movie is Captain Nemo And The Underwater City (1969)
It creates a wonder world of brass, knobs, adventure, and doesn't spend all it's time outclevering iyself with gadgets.
Sleek, brass art is made to perform many purposes, not to be overextended or gimmicky. A faucet looks awesome because it should, but its background to the (admittedly wooden) actors.
Oh if AMC would show this jem, it's not available for purchase, which is a shame.
The steampunk writers/producers etc have to learn that you dont make a "Steampunk" movie... you tell a compelling tale about people we grow to care about and they happen to be supported by awesome contraptions, but thats not what it's ABOUT!
It was always about Nemo, not the sub! sheesh.
And the Mother of all Steampunk movies:
20000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954)
One of my first silver screen exposures, thus fondly to my heart to this very day and a true classic. And NumberSix is absolutely right, it was always about the Chars, not the Gadgets
This could be worse then nerdgassing, nerds arguing over the sub-genre classification of a film... :)
To which I add: Sky Captain... is not Steampunk imho, way too late in it's vision. I'd nominate Wiliiam Gibsons description of 'Raygun Gothic' as more fitting (ray guns, artdeco, future that never was yaday yada).
I thought Golden Compass had a very nice steampunk aesthetic going on. I don't think it was a flop, either, although it wasn't the huge success some had hoped.
My partner reads a lot of steampunk, and he loves the look in films that do it well, but he says he'd rather not have his favorite novels adapted for the screen. Because they'd screw up the science!
I think Sanctuary fits nicely into the steampunk category. Granted, this is a TV show vs a movie, but there has been some very nice retro-tech (tm) on that series.
I thought A Series of Unfortunate Events had a bit of a steampunk vibe.