Film and series-science fiction is degraded to the war film

Will a good science fiction year in 2025? At least in the streaming area, this spring is served a whole bouquet of flowers from different stories from the future. In the series “Familie Like Our” by the Dogma director Thomas Vinterberg, Denmark slept down due to climate, the latest season “Black Mirror” offers a continuation of the price-crowned episode “Uss Callister” about a sadistic tech nerd, and Disney continues in “Andor 2” about the revolutionary subjective of the title Fascism and imperialism fights.

Science fiction is trendy. After the hype about the “Dune” film series, the “FAZ” even outgrowed science fiction as “genre of the hour” last spring, although in Germany science-fictional stories from the future of stepchild of the high-cultural feuilleton remain. The global science fiction boom is not a miracle, the future is broken critically, be it as dystopia, especially in times of crisis, or rarely is utopian potentials.

But that the end of the world, which is staged in the genre in the genre, “runs in the length” and from the end of the world to the apocalypse and again and again to the end of the world, as it was recently called in the posthumous Pollesch piece “The Somety purchase”, leads to boredom despite the visual narrative. In this recurring staging of the end of the world-be it as a climate change dystopia, the planetary life of extinguishing meteorite strikes or zombie shockers-philosopher Guillaume Paoli recently made up the longing for the drastic break with the crisis-shaken presence.

In the fight for odds, the science fiction genre regularly sinks into the bellicist firer.

What these analyzes hardly reflect is the way these dystopian future designs are knitted. Most of the time, the contemporary science fiction staged in the film and series for war film 2.0. This is also shown by the new mega blockbuster “Electric State” on Netflix, with $ 300 million, the most expensive self-production in the streaming service so far.

The underlying image novel by Simon Stallenhag is a quiet pop art picture book with text fragments that tells of the road trip through a war destroyed by war. There is hardly any action here. In the film adaptation of the Russo brothers, which already implemented multimillion dollar budgets for Marvel as a riotous spectacle, the action of “Electric State” is driven by action and firearm use. As a sidekick, the female main character gets a young man who plays around in the area that does not exist in the novel. Stalenhag’s narrative minimalism is compensated for by moody depictions of violence. In the fight for odds, the science fiction genre regularly sinks into the bellicist firer.

The majority of the cinematic SF stories, such as the “Dune” series celebrated by the criticism, comes as a war-staring war film. This also applies to the “Andor” series, although this is in the tradition of a left science fiction. The “Star Wars” spin-off series “Acolyte”, which was recently canceled by the Disney group, which was too feminist and diverse, did not use the usual bellicist primer. Maybe that also brought the right “Star Wars” fans to the barricades.

But where does the fixation of the cultural industry come from on militarized future visions? On the one hand, this has to do with the high budgets of the productions. They have to pay off. A science fiction film flopping on the box office tears tremendous financial holes. The possible fall height for production companies and studios is large. Violence and the reproduction of male hero poses simply sell well, as also show various other action films from “James Bond” to “Fast and Furious”.

The bellicist component is also likely to be due to conservative financial planning that relies on tested. The film “Blade Runner” by Ridley Scott, famous for its urban SF aesthetics. In the literary template Philipp K. Dicks, the main character Decker is an unsettled civil servant who is worried about his social status and tries to compensate for it using consumer goods. In the film, Harrison Ford becomes a cool male hero that runs through Los Angeles with Knarre. In a way, the film reproduces a tendency that is repeatedly said to tell Wild-West stories in space or in the future.

The weapons fetishist or militaristic narrative mode almost works like a filter that is pushed over stories to make them market compatible. Hardly any other genre adapted so many market -proven literary templates that attract a fan base to the cinema.

The bellicist reconciliation does not stop at feminist and critical science fiction, as Ursula Le Guins shows multiple award-winning novel “The Word for World is Wald” (1973), a parable against the Vietnam War and the racist colonization of America. He experienced indirectly (and not officially) a film adaptation with James Cameron’s »Avatar«, who takes up many motifs of this book, but focuses on an American soldier as a hero at the center of history and delivers the usual bale of war. The film, according to the now deceased Grand Dame of the Anarchist SF, “completely reverses the moral premise of the book and represents the central and unsolved problem of the book – the mass violence – as a solution”. Hardly any other SF film washed as much money into the coffers as »Avatar«.

This fixation also has to do with recent film history. The wars of the future, often outside in the vastness of space, were also titled for “Star Wars”. The film series began in 1977 with an “overwhelming aesthetics” (Dietmar Dath) and is “the technically produced evidence of the victory of the spectacular arts about the speculative art to (…) of the effect on the genre law loyalty,” continued Dath.

George Lucas Film from 1977 became style-defining for the subsequent SF wave like no other. The war between the stars at the time, also spectacularly staged between the stars, also for Ronald Reagan’s upgrade program in space, should be meaningful for the warlike orientation of many filmic SF narratives of past decades. In Germany, the bellicist tradition can even be traced a little further. The “Perry Rhodan” series, published with a total of 190,000 pages of text since 1961, had a concise bellicist orientation, especially in the first few years.

Karl-Herbert Scheer, who had launched the series and wrote numerous episodes, even wore the nickname “hand grenade-Herbert” at the end of the 1960s, as there were often militaristically dissolved in the booklets. However, this should not lead to the assumption that there is structural war affinity in science fiction. Because of course the genre can also be emancipatory. The Argentinian Netflix series »Eternauta«, which unfortunately should remain an exception, shows that an alien invasion also does an alien invasion as a political allegory without militaristic staging.