No one, looking back at a year that brought us (a Spider-Man spin-off about a clairvoyant) and the director鈥檚 cuts of parts 1 and 2 (director Zack Snyder鈥檚 take on Star Wars) could seriously claim that big-screen science fiction is in a particularly healthy state at the moment. Cinema itself is on the ropes, financially and artistically 鈥� but I will leave it to bigger boots than mine to go galumphing across the post-apocalyptic wasteland that is modern Hollywood. Let鈥檚 round up the year instead by hunting for those ever-elusive green shoots of recovery.
Not every franchise blew up in its owners鈥� faces. Riffing off Ridley Scott鈥檚 45-year-old film series, Fede 脕lvarez鈥檚 played a great first half, before trying to stuff every bit of Alien lore onto the screen at once. Then there was Dune: Part Two. At the time, I wrote a mightily sniffy review of Denis Villeneuve鈥檚 adaptation of Frank Herbert鈥檚 sci-fi novel. I feel kinder towards it now. It was a feast for the senses, if not for the mind.
After last year鈥檚 medium-budget smash , rival monster-movie projects seem to have crawled under the bed in shame. Only one poked its head above the coverlet this year: , which wasn鈥檛 really about monsters (magnificent as they were: an extraterrestrial fever dream, all fur and elbows and teeth), so much as the importance of being a wonderful dad (and Nicolas Cage) in the end times.
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You can鈥檛 beat a bit of dystopia. This year鈥檚 crop is represented by the body-fascism-is-bad sermon , set in a future where plastic surgery is all but obligatory (because the film was just awful), and Turn Me On (because it was charming and clever and unexpectedly moving and cost about threepence; some day soon, believe you me, all films will be made on this budget, so we had better start taking notes.)
Incredibly, given the amount of coverage it generated elsewhere, artificial intelligence got the thinnest of big-screen treatments in 2024. The overbearing-going-on-psychotic digital assistants in and were but shallow replies to 2022鈥檚 killer-doll hit M3gan. Sci-fi romance Wonderland, whose lonely characters become ever more captivated by the digital dead, was more interesting.
But to be frank (and you may clutch your pearls now), I think science fiction has had its day. If it is green shoots of cinematic recovery you want, then you need to shuffle along the aisle to the horror section, and there you will encounter what has to be the most memorable film of the year, .
The Substance, starring Demi Moore, is the most memorable film of the year: daft and utterly disarming
Fading Hollywood star Elisabeth Sparkle has lost her daytime TV gig. A simple injection splits her into two, and one of her (played by Margaret Qualley) is a lot younger than the other (played by Demi Moore). Nothing can prepare you for the film鈥檚 deliberate swerve into silliness and sheer exuberance. It gleefully resuscitates the monster-movie genre, not by contributing to body horror, or Hollywood satire, or films about the male gaze, but by beating on all three like a 5-year-old let loose on a pi帽ata. It is daft and utterly disarming.
Other horror-inflected gems this year included , a delightfully nasty satire about what we are willing to sacrifice to solve the climate crisis (clue: relatives) and , a body-swapping dark comedy about a souped-up board game.
We end our run-through of 2024 films, though, with Francis Ford Coppola鈥檚 , a film of such baffling over-complexity and mind-numbing tedium you may wonder how I dare mention it in practically the same breath as The Substance. But Megalopolis has, in its own, unlovely fashion, something significant to to say about our technological future. Its tale of the wholesale reinvention of 鈥淣ew Rome鈥� is about the future as Elon Musk would have it.
It pits the millenarian thinking of Adam Driver鈥檚 Ayn Rand-inspired architect against the grubby, make-do-and-mend of Giancarlo Esposito鈥檚 mayor. In execution, it resembles nothing so much as a nasty accident during a Christmas commercial: a catastrophic collision of dance numbers, portentous pouting and whirling bling. Conceptually, however, it is frighteningly on the button.
2024 also saw the rerelease of , Barry Hines鈥檚 famously traumatising BBC docudrama about a nuclear strike on a UK city. This cost 拢400,000 in 1984 鈥� just $1.5 million in today鈥檚 money. Madame Web cost $100 million or so. Every few decades, the film industry must bankrupt itself before realising that a film is simply a kind of story, and good stories don鈥檛 need to cost the earth.
The art and science of writing science fiction
Take your science fiction writing into a new dimension during this weekend devoted to building new worlds and new works of art
