Scott: We’re far removed now from the glory days of science-fiction filmmaking—which Keith has been covering so thoughtfully in his Laser Age column—and the persistent gripe I’ve heard over the years is the paucity of good, true science fiction onscreen. It’s more common—on a big scale, anyway—to see effects-driven space adventures rather than think-pieces. There are plenty of relatively recent exceptions worth exploring—Primer, Moon, Inception, and Steven Soderbergh’s Solaris immediately leap to mind—but maybe the two best films I’ve seen in the last year, Spike Jonze’s Her and Jonathan Glazer’s Under The Skin, suggest a possible trend in development. We live in an era when technology has quickly, dramatically altered the way we communicate (he said, typing these words into a shared Google document), and it’s in times like these that science fiction can comment on how it feels, and perhaps speculate on the road ahead. Her and Under The Skin are vastly different animals: The former is a 21st-century love story set in the not-too-distant future, and it’s as much about relationships and divorce as it is about changing times. The latter is about an alien in contemporary Scotland, and it feels like a companion to (and departure from) the great 1976 Nicolas Roeg film The Man Who Fell To Earth. 

Her and Under The Skin don’t have much in common tonally, either: Her is earnest, open-hearted, and almost emo in the way it makes the relationship between a human being and an operating system plausible. Under The Skin is abstract and discordant, with an aggressive soundtrack and disturbing revelations both about what Scarlett Johansson’s alien is doing on Earth, and what pretending to be human does to her. Yet a Venn diagram of the two overlaps at alienation, that desire to make a connection that never quite happens, for one reason or another. They both feel true, in that respect, to what it’s like to live in 2013 and 2014, and they both make it seem like science fiction as a genre is due for a serious revitalization. What do you guys think? 

Noel: Actually, Scott, I’m going to push back a bit on your impression of the current state of science-fiction movies. Over the past five years, there’s been a sizable number of smaller indie films with a strong science-fiction component: Another Earth, Sound Of My Voice, Upstream Color, and more. The difference is that they aren’t effects-heavy, unlike most of the good recent SF films you mention. The trend in these movies is toward hazy atmosphere and abstract ideas, with the fantastical elements so faint that the films barely register as science fiction.

By contrast, the fantastical elements in Under The Skin are so foregrounded that the film doesn’t immediately register as a character sketch. But as I argue in my review, that’s exactly what the movie is: an intimate portrait of an entity that looks human, but isn’t. We aren’t meant to understand her in the context of human feelings and desires (although she experiences flickerings of both); we’re meant to be immersed in her world, to feel how cold and strange it can be. 

But the question I grappled with while writing my Under The Skin review is, “Why?” I don’t think Glazer necessarily needs a reason to make a movie that’s so visually distinctive and odd, but it does make the movie harder to talk about, beyond saying, “That was awesome.” So Scott, I’m intrigued by your suggestion that Under The Skin, like Her, is a study in modern alienation. I’d like to explore that more. Keith, did you see it that way?

Keith: I was waiting until I got a chance to see Under The Skin before contributing to this conversation. Now, an hour out of it, I’m still piecing my head together. I’d say there are at least three or four prominent strands worth grabbing onto, the notion of modern alienation among them. In some ways, it’s a science-fiction twist on something like Camus’ existential novel The Stranger. We see Johansson’s character going about the business of being human in a highly studied way, while observing life around her like an alien anthropologist. She’s removed from everyday actions—shopping, driving, dancing—even as she partakes in them. It’s called Under The Skin for a reason, though. Actually, for a couple of reasons I can think of, her ultimate purpose for seducing so many men among them. But it’s also a movie about the tragedy of empathy, and the perils of her character’s desire to experience human existence for real, and not just as a means to an end. And there’s a lot to mull over here about gender roles, a subject that could take up a whole piece of its own.

I’ll stop because we’re not here to unpack Under The Skin, but to talk about how it might fit into a larger trend. But the fact that we could keep dwelling on the film is encouraging to me as a fan of science-fiction movies. There’s a lot going on here, and none of it would work without the science-fiction trappings. That’s equally true of recent films big, like Inception, and small, like Upstream Color, which have attempted to do more with science-fiction elements than blow up spaceships in distant galaxies. 

Is it a trend? Maybe. Despite having that one important element in common, these are still vastly different movies. Inception works as a big action blockbuster—albeit one at its core concerned with memory and loss—and Under The Skin and Upstream Color border on avant-garde. Maybe this is the year that determines whether a science-fiction revival is actually happening. It might be up to Interstellar and Transcendence to determine that.

Scott: Let me go back to Noel’s original question about Under The Skin and alienation. Science fiction, even when it’s as far-out as this movie, is often a roundabout way of revealing the human condition. And though Glazer scraps the social commentary from Michel Faber’s novel—basically, anything having to do with what these aliens need from humans—seeing the world from an “alien” perspective naturally puts the audience at a distance, too. Later, the alien’s pivotal encounter with a man with a disfigured face lets her connect with his own alienation from the human race—which has the effect of making her more empathetic and human. Is Glazer commenting on modern alienation as explicitly as Spike Jonze in Her? Not really, because modernity itself isn’t as much of an issue in Glazer’s film. But the film communicates that feeling of apartness as well as any I can recall.

I’m happy to see you both cite Upstream Color, which has to be understood as a movie about relationships, because it’s hard to understand as a movie about anything else. Where Glazer practices a kind of avant-garde minimalism, Shane Carruth is a maximalist, at least in terms of the information he puts out there. (Crucially, both directors are obsessed with sound and tone, and both invite viewers to intuit their way through their movies, rather than spelling out the narrative for them.) Glazer and Carruth don’t need to spend much money, either. Glazer said in a Chicago Q&A that Under The Skin cost about $7 million to make, while Upstream Color cost far less, though Carruth has been coy about giving an exact number, since Primer’s $7,000 price tag ate up too much press. Both films are prime examples of how directors can innovate with digital cameras, making heady, visionary films at a budget level low enough to keep anyone from looking over their shoulders. Because unless your name is Christopher Nolan, and the Batman films have earned you the privilege of staging hard science fiction on a mass scale, SF directors are often forced to do a lot with a little. Which might serve the genre well, ultimately. What do you guys think of the economics of science-fiction filmmaking? Are there other indies that have piqued your interest? 

Noel: Really, the idea that science-fiction films need to be big-budget blockbuster events is relatively new. Some of critics’ hostility toward Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 back in 1968 had to do with the idea that a filmmaker of his caliber spending his big budget on the kind of movie that used to be shot on plywood sets with rubber monsters. Now, after decades of filmmakers building off Kubrick, digital effects and equipment have allowed low-budget filmmakers to reclaim science fiction, whether they go the cheesy Syfy Original route, or make what amounts to an art-film with a freaky twist.

In the latter category, I want to go back to the two Brit Marling films I mentioned above: Another Earth and Sound Of My Voice, both of which she stars in and co-wrote. I don’t think either film is great, but both of them are heartfelt, and benefit from the deep ache at the center of a lot of highbrow science-fiction. It all stems from the idea that the sudden emergence of something fantastical should satisfy the characters, but doesn’t. If the people in these movies don’t have their lives improved by appearance of a mirror Earth or the prospect of a time-traveling guru, then what the hell hope do the rest of us have?

Stepping up from low-budget to mid-budget, I also want to hail one of my favorite science-fiction movies of the past decade: Rian Johnson’s Looper, which uses a time-travel premise to set up a nifty, complicated narrative and explore the concept of fate and fatalism. Looper is a more recognizable genre piece than the Marling films or the Carruth films, but it still largely uses science fiction as an accent to the story, not as something that needs to be stoked constantly. More than half the movie takes place on a farm, for heaven’s sake. That’s pretty ballsy.

Keith: It’s also a good example of people taking the genre into interesting places. It might just be the haze of memory, but looking back, the 1990s seems like a time when science fiction was narrowly defined as films that focused on big spectacle. Some of these were terrific (Jurassic Park) and smart (Dark City), and it all climaxed with The Matrix in 1999. But few used science fiction on a smaller scale, and the few that did, like Pi, stood out. I think for the genre to remain healthy, there have to be films of all shapes and sizes, pushing it in many different directions at once. It feels like we have that now. Or we’re about to, if trends persist. I could be wrong, though. Is it possible we’re reading too much into too small a sampling of movies?

Scott: It’s more than possible, Keith. We almost certainly are. But to follow up on Noel, I think Looper (and Nolan’s Inception) counts as a promising hybrid, a way to sneak thoughtful, knotty, mind-bending science fiction into films produced on a larger scale. Looper and Inception both have strong, high-concept hooks—a man confronting his older self via time-travel, and the practice of infiltrating dreams, respectively—that are easy to pitch and sell, but elastic enough to where Johnson and Nolan can go anywhere they’d like with them, even to a farm for an hour. And their success proves that audiences are more eager to process complex, potentially befuddling material than Hollywood would perhaps like to give them credit for. That bodes well for the future.