Science fiction has rarely been seen as a genre that produces valid
candidates for consideration as 'quality' cinema. This is certainly the case in
Britain, where the tendency is to unfavourably compare home-produced films with
the country's rich literary science fiction heritage. However, without wishing
to make any exaggerated claims for the genre, British science fiction cinema, as
well as having a lengthy heritage in its own right, has more to offer than has
commonly been acknowledged, having produced a number of films that can stand
with the best of the genre.
While it may not have produced the very first science fiction film, Britain
was the birthplace of some of the earliest examples of the genre with The X Rays
and Making Sausages (both produced by G.A. Smith in October 1897), trick films
that flirted with futuristic technology. Succeeding examples of science fiction
films (although that term only enjoyed common currency from the mid-1920s) were
either similar trick films or near-future invasion scenarios, as with the
Hun-inspired invaders of England Invaded (1909), The Airship Destroyer (1909)
and The Great German North Sea Tunnel (1914).
A major development in the genre was the first direct adaptation of a work by
that 'father' of science fiction, H.G. Wells, with First Men in the Moon in
1919. The most prominent film of the silent era, however, was High Treason
(1929), with its vision of a futuristic London heavily influenced by Fritz
Lang's Metropolis (Germany, 1927), although the film itself did not quite measure up,
either narratively or aesthetically, to its German forebear.
It was by returning to Wells that Britain was to produce its first great
genre entry, London Films' ambitious, expensive, over-didactic but fitfully
brilliant Things to Come (1936). Despite purportedly attracting respectable
audience numbers, it proved too expensive an undertaking to go into profit (as
did The Tunnel (1935), another expensive undertaking that reputedly
underperformed at the box-office). The relative lack of success of these films
no doubt acted as an alarm bell to those considering similar projects.
At the other end of the scale, the low-budget Once in a New Moon (1935),
depicting the social and political reorganisation of an English village after it
has been thrown into space, bore novel and intriguing ideas, but was handicapped
by a meagre budget. Only the sublime The Man Who Changed His Mind (1936)
appeared to find the right balance.
It was not until the 1950s that British science fiction cinema, kick-started
by the contemporary Hollywood boom in genre production, began to make its
presence felt (the 1940s had been a fallow period for the genre, at least
cinematically, on both sides of the Atlantic). Thanks to its transatlantic
impetus, however, much, though not all, of Britain's contribution to the science
fiction of the period was fashioned after the American model, a strategy that
did not help to endear the genre to the more serious critic.
In a faint but discernible echo from the silent era and those beastly Huns,
the invasion scenario became the most common theme in the post-war period. Other
than a benign visitor in A Message from Mars in 1913, aliens did not set foot on
British soil until Patricia Laffan inaugurated the sub-genre in the risible
Devil Girl from Mars in 1954, playing a leather-clad dominatrix visiting Earth
to seek suitable male specimens to help in the repopulation of her home planet. Production budgets being what they were, aliens generally either came alone
or in very small groups, usually conveniently landing in villages or other
remote locales. Laffan limited her search to a remote Scottish pub, while,
despite its title, the alien-controlled robots of The Earth Dies Screaming
(1964) were never shown outside the Home Counties.
On those few occasions when the journey was reversed and man ventured into
space, misfortune was the only result, as in The Quatermass Xperiment (1955), in
which an experimental rocket brought a parasitic virus back to Earth. It
remains, together with its successors, Quatermass 2 (1957) and Quatermass and
the Pit (1967), one of the more superior examples of British science fiction,
although the film's success initiated a trend for conflating science fiction
with horror, a stratagem that only served to alienate British critics all the
more. With its brood of telepathic, alien-sired children, Village
of the Damned (1960), an adaptation of John Wyndham's 'The Midwich Cuckoos', is
one of the more subtle and intelligent examples of the sub-genre, as is the
eerie Unearthly Stranger (1963), with its female alien protagonists eradicating
human scientists working on space research.
Dystopias and catastrophes may have been recurring themes in the literary
heritage, but they were only sporadically attended to in post-war British
cinema. An adaptation of George Orwell's dystopian vision 1984 (1955) was a tame
affair, especially compared to the BBC television version of the previous year.
But the catastrophe theme gave rise to two of the best of all British science
fiction films: Val Guest's The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961), with its vision
of London suffering in the heat after the world has been knocked off its axis by
nuclear testing, and Joseph Losey's The Damned (1963), which, with its
irradiated children being reared to live in a decimated world, concerned itself
with planning for catastrophe. The latter remains a shamefully undervalued film.
While space travel was rarely undertaken in the cinematic science fiction of
the period, Stanley Kubrick's seminal 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) certainly
made up for its relative neglect. Nominally a British film (made by MGM's
British subsidiary), it could easily have been made in Hollywood or elsewhere,
and can be seen with hindsight as a defining moment in the diminution of any
identifiable British characteristics that American-financed films shot in
Britain, such as MGM's own Village of the Damned, may have once possessed.
With the notable exception of Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (1971), subsequent
American-financed films shot in Britain, such as Star Wars (1977), Alien (1979),
Judge Dredd (1995), with its bowdlerisation of a British comic book character,
and Event Horizon (1997), targeted an international audience and could arguably
have been produced anywhere. Any possible claims to Britishness, even with those
that may have had a small amount of British financial involvement, now lay with
the director (in the last three examples) or other technical talent, and a
roster of familiar actors.
From the 1970s onwards, an identifiably national science fiction cinema, like
the British film industry as a whole, began to encounter its own dystopia. But
when the genre was tackled, and when sex comedies such as The Sexplorer (1975)
were not being produced, low-budget catastrophe and dystopia scenarios,
including Memoirs of a Survivor (1981) and Shopping (1994), now outnumbered
alien invasions. The lamentable Split Second (1992), with Rutger Hauer hunting a
killer alien in London, was among the few in the latter category.
While it may now be an irrelevancy to try and identify the Britishness of
films produced within an industry largely sustained by international
co-productions, all is not lost. The onset of the new century has seen the
production of a handful of films, including 28 Days Later... (2002), Children of
Men (2006) and Sunshine (2007), that suggest a new injection of energy and
imagination, and point to the development of a distinctively modern - and
identifiably British - take on the genre.
John Oliver
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