Honorable Mention
Trust me, I know what the title says.
But that still doesn’t make this a science fiction film.
What it is, exactly is slightly harder to define: most summaries will tell you that this was a Dogme (or Dogme 95) film, although that probably doesn’t mean much to the average viewer. A group of Danish filmmakers, led by Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg, got together in 1995 and published a manifesto for cinematic purity — no filters, no artificial lighting, no sets, location only, and everything shot with handheld cameras (although very few of them kept to it for more than a film or two).
Technically, though, Science Fiction isn’t a Dogme film, and not just because it was a decade late or that the director, Pablo D’Stair, isn’t Danish. No, it isn‘t Dogme because he chose to use black and white film.
Not color.
That just isn’t Dogme.
Instead, Science Fiction is a series of short vignettes about a group of loosely connected wannabe science fiction writers, grappling with questions of eternity, the future, their own obscurity, and whether robots should be allowed to enter dance contests.
This all comes with a major dose of self obsession: most of the time, D’Stair’s cast do not so much interact with each other as sort of bounce off each other, going on and on about their theories, their ideas, their struggles with publishers and their general dissatisfaction with the universe.
But what is hard to convey is just how witty D’Stair’s dialogue is. We get a lot of potentially interesting science fiction ideas tossed around, some of which might be worth developing (assuming no one else hit on that same idea decades ago!), we have a writer desperately trying to get an online magazine to drop his story so he can get it in a slightly better magazine, and another writer who is unhappy even though her story will become a graphic novel because she just doesn’t like that particular artist’s work.
And then there are several long readings of what we assume was the work of one of our collection of Science Fiction slackers — readings which tend to be a bit pretentious, and decidedly florid.
Although you never know. It might be good enough for a paperback novel or even a short story in a semi-pro magazine.
Now if I had to make a grumble here, it would be that the film doesn’t have much structure. It reminds me a lot of Richard Linklater’s Slacker, with a similar collection of oddballs with obsessions, but it lacks his “pass it along” story framework, where each new group of people leads us to the next. Instead, we cut back and forth between the members of this loosely knit group, see them paired with someone else — whether one of the other writers, or one of the other side characters — or talking to each other on the phone.
But rarely listening.
However, while it lacks the strong editing rhythm of Slacker, or a connected storyline, I still did not find myself checking my counter to see how much of the film was left. Instead, I suddenly realized that the scene I was watching was probably the end of the film, and the screen faded to black leaving only a young woman’s voice reading a long descriptive passage.
And, yes, I suppose it does help that the film is only an hour long.
So, no, Science Fiction isn’t science fiction. I’m not even sure you could call it Meta-Science Fiction.
But it is an entertaining little Indie comedy, a funny slice of life featuring a sharply observed crew of oddballs. It also gives a somewhat jaundiced (if mostly accurate) portrayal of the business side of writing (which Pablo obviously knows as he has published several novels) and of the sort of people who try to write those stories. I quite liked it, even if it had no great space battles, mighty starships or weird aliens.
Except, perhaps, in all those fragments and ideas D’Stair’s strange collection of writers have written…
rivets on the poster 