Bad Sci Fi ROI -- AI?
I can see a future where I start writing something else
We were in a rare “background tv” mood. We looked for something we knew would be bad, out of a sick sense of curiosity, I guess. We picked an eight year old Hollywood sci fi movie, knowing full well that it would fit the bill.
Zowee, was it bad.
It’s important to discuss why it was so bad, but first I must list my qualifiers.
I never blame actors for bad movies, or for being in bad movies. They have to work, like everyone else. Generally, I don’t blame directors, either. Typically, they work with the material the studio tells (forces) them to use. It takes a rare set of circumstances for a director to have enough influence over the script to truly improve it, especially to improve it enough to turn water into chai, especially in 2025 Hollywood. They’d have to be someone with enough power, influence, capability, and inclination to both direct and executive produce and essentially write, and possibly to fund their own movie. Like a James Cameron type under just the right circumstances.
No, I don’t blame them. As usual, as it has been since “Total Recall” (1990), I blame the (‘soulless’, formula-minded, creative-equivalent-of-insurance-actuaries executives at the) studio. The same types who gave “Total Recall” enough setup time to be an interesting “what’s reality?” question, and then pulled a bait-and-switch (with a clear switch in mid-stride), turning the second half of the movie into the cheesiest, corniest, bloodiest, man-with-a-gun vulgarity fest that also abandoned reality accuracy in a way that science fiction should not. Truly jarring. The same types who destroyed “Firefly” (2002) before it could find an audience. The same types who allowed Darth Vader to take off his helmet, become a simpering old man, and through a single act instantly be forgiven of his various genocides and oppressions. Etc., et al.
Those types at the studio were clearly behind this terrible 2017 movie we knew would be bad.
It really is worth listing why it was so bad, and not just because I need to continue to make it clear that I don’t write this kind of shite. It’s important not just because it’s yet another case study in why no one should see a movie (i.e. give it money) simply because it has actors they like and fancy special effects sci fi action, at least not if they want studios to make better movies. It’s important not only because of those reasons, but also because this sort of thing might eventually drive me to give up trying to write better works than that in the sci fi genre and to switch to a different genre altogether.
Along similar lines, there’s already a trend toward this same Hollywoodized ruination of horror and fantasy genres. Some day, everyone will give up on books in other speculative fiction genres the same way sci fi books are prejudicially given up on. After TWD and GoT, I’m already guilty of that, I admit. Hell, I was guilty of it with sci fi back in 2002, when ‘Firefly’ came out. I didn’t even bother trying to watch it. It took a strong recommendation by someone whose sensibilities I trusted, and, as I recall, gifted DVDs, to get me to try it.
Read on to understand how this 2017 movie has such an effect. And keep in mind that this list is aside from the formulaic personal story of the 1D characters and bad dialogue.
Humanity has a web of satellites over the planet that can stop tornadoes, hurricanes, blizzards by firing explosive charges throughout the storm from above.
Why would explosive charges inserting more energy into the atmosphere shut down storms? Is this where a certain narcissistic oligarch got the idea that we should use nuclear weapons on hurricanes? Why would you need a web of satellites to fire minibombs into storms, which is something aircraft could do?
The satellites can also "use acoustic waves" to change temperatures on the ground. This capability gets misused to flash-freeze an entire village in a hot Afghanistan desert. And apparently it can freeze much more than that.
Acoustic waves. From space.
The protagonist is launched into space, vertically only, straight up, through an apparently physically connected network of satellites that are only satellites in the sense that they’re above the atmosphere. There’s no sense at all of being in orbit. They’re statically above the Earth, like a tent top. The moment he's above the atmosphere, the protagonist unbuckles and floats around the cabin... even though the engines are still burning. Zero-g is about altitude in this movie! And it's quantum, i.e. off/on!
His winged shuttle banks and pitches as it approaches the giant space station, flying in space like it's an aircraft in air. And yet it also fires attitude control thrusters. It’s not like they saved money by making it fly like an aircraft. They chose to do that. (There are many other rocketry and science related issues I’m not even mentioning, lest you think this is all about esoteric science/engineering complaints.)
The electric cars in this high tech world, by the way, when they flip over they explode completely, like they're made of TNT.
The satellites, being able to stop storms and freeze entire villages on the ground, can also instantly create and direct walls of tornadoes, blizzards that drop boulder-sized hail, lava eruption events, and create and direct hundred meter tall ocean waves, anywhere on Earth. The system is so powerful, it can create all these storms globally at the same time, triggering a self-propagating global storming condition where the satellite-created storms trigger a cascade of other storms, destroying the world. And so, the whole system gets weaponized by villains in a power grab. Of course it would!! They’ve created a system of satellites far more capable of destroying the Earth than our nuclear arsenals! And it’s all flipped using a single computer virus, of course.
With this kind of power, why would they need to rely on minibombs to stop storms? Why would such technological powers require deployment on space-based satellites at all? Why not at banks of sites around population centers? Why not mounted on trucks and airplanes, for mobile deployment?
More to the point, why would the global, international coalition that built this system allow it to be operated with less redundancy, system-level engineering and administrative oversight, and anti-virus protection than a construction site?
The villain and his CIA and/or Secret Service myrmidons took over the system using a virus and weaponized it in order to destroy the rest of the world except the U.S., allegedly to put Murrica ‘at the top again’. Never mind that we live in a global economy and the U.S. would fall to pieces without the rest of the world's people and systems, be they agricultural, industrial, or intellectual systems. It’s the story equivalent of the villain choosing to kill all other humans in order to have the planet to himself. “Doctor Strangelove”, the absurdist satire about the Cold War’s threat of accidental global annihilation, mocked such things, definitively. Yet here we are.
And there’s more. The movie features an attractive female actor, someone inherently sexy, for audience draw purposes. She’s a Secret Service agent who whips out her gun unnecessarily and dramatically poses with it, multiple times. They did this because men find women wielding guns sexy, but also because the other main adult female in the movie, who by the way is the chief astronaut on the giant space station, is made a damsel in distress for the main male character to rescue, several times. The only other times we see that Secret Service agent female is when she’s in a sexy nightgown. Sorry, but the two don’t add up to respectful treatment of women. This is on top of all the main characters being white, the main techie being an Asian who is the first to be killed, and other non-white characters being background support. 2017.
The writers really have no clue how reality works, and/or they think very little of the audience, and/or they made this movie for children, even though it has serious violence in it and serious adult themes about apocalyptic and horrific, genocidal actions.
Can it be considered at all responsible for Hollywood to depict reality in these ways?
The movie’s bookmarked message, delivered through narration, is that we're all on this planet together, so let's work together to save it and ourselves. But the movie is so bad, so backward in so many ways, it almost makes me want to become a narcissistic, male chauvinistic science denier. It almost feels like Musk was behind this film as a way to co-opt science fiction’s valid and proper use as a tool of enlightenment, while at the same time casting space systems as blue collar work that can use COTS parts and processes, a myth he likes to propagate because it plays well with his fanboys (and based on his actions in recent years, because he actually believes such things). That’s not a dis on blue collar work. As Bender says in ‘The Breakfast Club’, without lamps there’d be no light. But space is hard. It requires more.
They spent 100 million dollars on this movie.
You know why? Because they knew they'd make a profit. The ‘soulless’ creativity actuaries behind so much of Hollywood’s sci fi got the formula right. Worldwide box office sales for this thing were over 220 million.
Or was the formula of this movie an early test case of an AI-written sci fi blockbuster script? I can’t tell! It has the same one-dimensionality as so many AI-created sci fi book covers (see https://xhoyenauthor.substack.com/p/representation-in-my-writing) and at least as many mindlessly unrealistic ‘artifacts’. What does it say about a successful Hollywood sci fi movie that you can’t tell if it was written by an early version of a mindless large language model AI program? What writer aspires to that?
Normally, I’d rave on about how disheartening this is, but I’ll nip that in the bud right here. I leave it to the reader to digest what a 2017 movie like this might mean to a writer trying to offer educational, enlightening, engaging spec fic. It’s all too easy for an observer to flippantly say, “write for yourself”. But it’s just not as simple as that.
Here’s an AI-generated image created using a prompt requesting a depiction of bad science fiction movies:
