Transnational Science Fiction at the End of the World: Consensus, Conflict, and the Politics of Climate Change

This article considers the signifi cance of transnational production, aesthetic, and narrative strategies in recent forms of “apocalyptic” science fi ction cinema. As the article explores, a more transnational mode of science fi ction offers the opportunity for popular genre cinema to engage with pressing environmental questions, the contexts of climate politics, and particularly the historical and present role of science fi ction in confronting, or sometimes avoiding, these issues. A s I explore in this article, popular science fi ction cinema has been characterized by a recent environmental turn but also by a critical move away from consensus and unilateralism in its politics. Although the globalized tendencies of contemporary fi lm production have encouraged or compelled new forms of international cooperation and collectives, both onand off -screen, these have not always responded to or refl ected the contexts of global policy and action. The diffi culty of achieving consensus and collective response has been especially apparent in the cases of the environment and climate change. These are contexts to which science fi ction cinema, with its capacity for visualizing dramatic and speculative narratives, is at once especially attuned and often reluctant to confront. Historically, there has been a strongly ideological aspect to Hollywood science fi ction fi lm, especially in the ways its narratives seek to reconcile fi lm-industrial and geopolitical concerns. More recent confi gurations of production and content, though, have off ered a diff erent take on these prevailing aesthetics. Considering some varied examples of “apocalyptic” science fi ction, this article argues for a new form of transnational aesthetics and politics informing the genre. An example of this turn can be seen in the movement between the original The Day the Earth Stood Still (Robert Wise, 1951) and its mostly under-regarded remake. 1 This article focuses on theatrically released fi lms, although the discussion here could equally be extended to fi lms made for online viewing or to recent television series. Neil Archer teaches fi lm at Keele University. His books include The Road Movie: In Search of Meaning (Wallfl ower, 2016), Beyond a Joke: Parody in English Film and Television Comedy (I. B. Tauris, 2017), and TwentyFirst-Century Hollywood: Rebooting the System (Wallfl ower, 2019). JCMS 58 | No. 3 | Spring 2019 2 In the later version (Scott Derrickson, 2008), Keanu Reeves’s Klaatu arrives not, like his predecessor, in a sleek flying saucer but in a gaseous and porous globe, the outer shell of which evokes the appearance and fluid weather systems of our own planet. The arrival in the film of similar globes across the Earth is followed by their extraction of biological life in antediluvian reproductive pairs. In contrast to Michael Rennie’s stern yet statesmanlike alien of the original film, Reeves’s apparently benign Klaatu turns out to have little interest in warning the planet’s inhabitants about their destructive behavior. It is the planet’s warming, and its threat to the biosphere, that concerns him, to the extent that, in this instance, there is no initial effort on Klaatu’s part to save humankind. Rather, Klaatu intends to save the planet by ridding it of its pestilential humans. This shift, then, places the film’s concerns less within the terms of human geopolitics and more in line with the ethos of Gaia theory and millennial ecological movements. Before eventually being persuaded to change his mind, in fact, this 2008 Klaatu exemplifies the most extreme viewpoint of a deep ecology perspective. The original The Day the Earth Stood Still is at least prototypically environmentalist in its concerns with planetary responsibility. Klaatu visits Earth—or more pointedly, Washington, DC—to warn its leaders against their continued militarism, all in the context of the Cold War and Korean War and the development of nuclear weapons technology. Klaatu’s warning involves him “neutralising non-essential technological power,” which results in the temporary cessation of global manufacture and production. The conclusion of the film has Klaatu address a markedly international group of scientists and military and religious leaders, in a visual echo of the thenrecently-formed United Nations, whose headquarters had just opened in New York City. Klaatu’s alignment with Washington, and in turn “the political aspirations of the United States,” as well as his willingness to bring about consensus in this “new world order” through a unilateral show of force, makes the 1951 The Day the Earth Stood Still emblematic of a US-centered worldview. Notably, the impending disaster foreseen in Klaatu’s warning is less the end of the world than the end of capitalist productivity, as the alien visitor temporarily brings to a halt electricity-powered industry. The film’s implicit endorsement of a US-centered world power, though, along with its technomilitarist-capitalist utopianism—it is the created “race of robots,” high tech and apparently all-powerful, that are to “preserve the peace”—suggests that it is unconcerned with the contributing effects of technology and of consumer capitalism itself to the coming apocalypse. The new Klaatu’s twenty-first-century arrival in the middle of Manhattan, in contrast, targets not the seat of global political power but the heart of the dominant global economic system: the system that, the film implies, is less under threat from human activity than is the threat to human activity in itself. 2 See Greg Garrard, Ecocriticism (London: Routledge, 2004), 199–201. 3 Christine Cornea, Science Fiction Cinema: Between Fantasy and Reality (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,