My friend Alan Zilberman has a piece up at Roger Ebert arguing that 2014 has been a particularly good year for sci-fi flicks. He highlighted three flicks in particular for praise: The One I Love, Coherence, and Edge of Tomorrow, noting their use of a subjective (tied to a particular character) point of view rather than an objective (third person omniscient) point of view. His piece is good and interesting; you should read it. I take issue with two sentences in it, however:
These films are involving because they forces us to empathize with an extraordinary situation, which then forces us to care about the characters. When big-budget entertainment gets bogged down by an overabundance of exposition and the trappings of objectivity, these films could provide a lesson on how to make the genre truly exciting again.
Let's leave aside, for now, the implicit argument here that Interstellar is not "truly exciting," because I don't want to turn your computer screen into a repository of Alan's lies. Instead, let's just ask if sci-fi, as a genre, isn't exciting right now. Because it seems to me that the last decade has been pretty great for interesting, innovative sci-fi.
Consider the emergence of director Duncan Jones. Moon (2009) and Source Code (2011) both are fascinating, innovative sci-fi dramas. And, interestingly, they are both told from a subjective POV: We follow one man as he discovers he's a clone bred to work and die in a short amount of time on the surface of the moon in one film; in the other, we follow a man who has to come to grips with the fact that he's been horribly crippled and is now a tool of the government destined, possibly, to live a life of agonizing, repetitious pain.
You can see something similar in Los Cronoscrimines (2008, English title: Timecrimes) and Primer (2004), a pair of sci-fi dramas that deal with regular people coming to grips with the paradoxes they've created for themselves as they jaunt through time. Though a bit derivative—borrowing bits and pieces from Back to the Future, The Terminator, Akira, and other sci-fi classics—Looper (2012) offered audiences a bigger-budgeted, action-oriented version of the same conundrums.
District 9 (2009), of course, was nominated for best picture at the Oscars, and delivered a fascinating and intimate look at the life of an alien culture through the transformation of man into bug. This year's Under the Skin did much the same, but in reverse, as we watched an alien temptress come to grips with her empathy for humanity. I'm not sure we should categorize The Cabin in the Woods (2012) as "sci-fi," exactly—seems more like a horror film with some sci-fi trappings—but again, we're asked to empathize with those on the screen, forced to confront and wrestle with the audience's (that is, our own) innate, unsatisfiable bloodlust.
Sunshine (2007) and Europa Report (2013) each offered some space-based hard sci-fi/horror. While I wasn't thrilled with the way either of these flicks ended, their engagement with the psychological problem of prolonged confinement and the difficulties of extended space travel provided some keen insights into man's status as a social animal.
Sci-fi comedies have had a pretty good run in recent years as well. Safety Not Guaranteed (2012) and Robot and Frank (2012) each offered humorous sci-fi prisms through which to view the creation of friendships and trust. And The World's End (2013) asks us to contemplate homogenization and the death of originality in an increasingly globalized community.
All of which is to say that 2014 hasn't been a particularly special year for sci-fi films. But only because there've been so many good sci-fi flicks in recent memory. And such variety! Indeed, if there's one genre that's not in any particular need of saving, it's science fiction. I'd rather watch any of the films above—or any films similar to them—than yet another Oscar-bait, competent-but-uninspired docudrama about complicated men changing history. God knows we've seen enough of those in recent years. And will see yet more this year. If we're going to talk about a genre that could use a little excitement, it's that one.