Smart Characters, Smart SF

Dan, you brought up a great point about Prometheus that I think big-budget SF filmmakers often overlook these days – that it’s a little odd to see characters who seem like they ought to be pretty intelligent do really stupid things. For instance, those two scientists who freak out, leave the group (some of whose members are military, if I remember correctly), and suddenly decide to treat the gooey alien spacecraft as their own personal petting zoo: when the actions of these two buffoons require a greater suspension of disbelief than the muscle-bound albinos creating life on earth, you know there’s a problem.

In a panel on “Science Fiction as a Literary Genre,” SF author Neal Stephenson argues that one of the defining characteristics of SF – as opposed to something like horror – is that the characters on the screen will often anticipate and mirror the thoughts of the audience:

“Consider how Ripley, the character played by Sigourney Weaver, responds to the threat posed by the aliens.  In the second film, once she and the marines she is with have made first contact with the aliens and had a chance to catch their breath, they very quickly agree that they should simply go back to the orbiting ship and nuke the place.  It is a brilliant move on the part of the film makers, precisely because it is the obvious and intelligent thing to do.  It is exactly what we in the audience are all thinking to ourselves, but because it is a kind of horror movie and we have been conditioned to expect stupid behaviour from characters in horror movies, it is the last thing we are expecting.  When the idea is raised and agreed on, we wake up, sit a little straighter in our chairs, and say, 'Oh, this is a movie about real people,' which is to say people who behave intelligently, and for the rest of the film, that promise is largely borne out as Ripley goes on to do a number of more or less intelligent things…”

It could be argued that this doesn’t apply to Prometheus because it’s more horror than science fiction, but when more than half of the characters have Ph.D.’s in geology, archeology, biology, etc., the movie’s gotta at least be considered scientist fiction. And sure, Ph.D. doesn’t = common sense. But it strongly implies an ability to think through problems and predict consequences.

So yeah, here’s hoping James Cameron comes along and makes Prometheuses.