Film and series | Science fiction degenerates into war films

Will 2025 be a good year for science fiction? At least in the streaming world, a whole bouquet of diverse stories from the future is being served up this spring. In the series "Families Like Ours" by Dogma director Thomas Vinterberg, Denmark is flooded by climate change; the latest season of "Black Mirror" offers a sequel to the award-winning episode "USS Callister" about a sadistic tech nerd; and in "Andor 2," Disney continues to tell the story of the eponymous hero's revolutionary transformation into a subject, fighting against fascism and imperialism.

Science fiction is trending. Following the hype surrounding the "Dune" film series, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) even declared science fiction the "genre of the moment" last spring, even though, especially in Germany, science fiction stories from the future remain the neglected children of the high-culture-loving arts section. The global science fiction boom is no miracle, since it is precisely in times of crisis that the future is critically reconsidered, whether as a dystopia, or, rarely, utopian potentials are explored.

But the fact that the end of the world, which is staged almost manically in the genre, "drags on" and goes from the end of the world to the apocalypse and back to the end of the world, as was recently said in the posthumously performed Pollesch play "The Sandwich Purchase," leads to boredom despite the visually powerful narratives. In this recurring staging of the end of the world—be it as a climate change dystopia, a meteorite impact wiping out planetary life, or a zombie shocker—philosopher Guillaume Paoli recently identified in "Mind and Garbage" the longing for a drastic break with the crisis-ridden present.

In the battle for ratings, the science fiction genre regularly sinks into bellicose bluster.

What these analyses barely reflect is the way these dystopian futures are constructed. Contemporary science fiction, as presented in films and series, often degenerates into war movies 2.0. This is also evident in the new mega-blockbuster "Electric State" on Netflix, which, at $300 million, is the streaming service's most expensive original production to date.

The underlying graphic novel by Simon Stalenhag is a tranquil pop-art picture book with text fragments, recounting a road trip through a war-torn America. There's hardly any action here. In the film adaptation by the Russo brothers, who have already turned multimillion-dollar budgets into riotous spectacles for Marvel, the plot of "Electric State" is driven by action and the use of guns. The female protagonist is given a young man as a sidekick who shoots around the neighborhood and doesn't appear in the original novel. Stalenhag's narrative minimalism is offset by humorous depictions of violence. In the battle for ratings, the science fiction genre regularly descends into bellicose shooting.

The majority of science fiction films, including the critically acclaimed "Dune" series, are presented as weapons-laden war films. This also applies to the "Andor" series, although it follows the tradition of left-wing science fiction. The "Star Wars" spin-off series "Acolyte," recently canceled by Disney, was considered too feminist and diverse for right-wing incels, and dispensed with the usual bellicose underpinnings. Perhaps this also brought right-wing "Star Wars" fans to the barricades.

But where does the culture industry's fixation on militarized visions of the future come from? On the one hand, it certainly has to do with the high budgets of the productions. They have to be profitable. A science fiction film that flops at the box office leaves huge financial holes. The potential fall for production companies and studios is enormous. Violence and the reproduction of male heroic poses simply sell well, as various other action films from "James Bond" to "Fast and Furious" demonstrate.

The bellicist component may also be due to conservative financial planning that relies on tried-and-tested methods. A good example is Ridley Scott's film "Blade Runner," famous for its urban science fiction aesthetic. In Philipp K. Dick's literary work, the main character, Decker, is an insecure civil servant who fears for his social status and tries to compensate for it with consumer goods. In the film, Harrison Ford transforms him into a cool male hero who walks around Los Angeles with a gun. To some extent, the film reproduces a tendency, often attributed to American science fiction in particular, of essentially telling Wild West stories set in space or the future.

The weapon-fetishistic or militaristic narrative mode functions almost like a filter applied to stories to make them market-compatible. Hardly any other genre adapts so many already market-tested literary sources, which also attract a fan base to the cinema.

This bellicist repurposing doesn't stop at feminist and anti-domination science fiction, as Ursula Le Guin's award-winning novel "The Word for World Is Forest" (1973) demonstrates, a parable against the Vietnam War and the racist colonization of America. This was indirectly (and unofficially) adapted into a film with James Cameron's "Avatar," which incorporates many motifs from the book, but places an American soldier as the hero at the center of the story and delivers the usual wartime gunplay. The film, according to the now deceased grand dame of anarchist science fiction, "completely reverses the moral premise of the book and presents the central and unsolved problem of the book—mass violence—as the solution." Hardly any other science fiction film has grossed as much money as "Avatar."

This fixation also has to do with recent film history. The wars of the future, often out in the vastness of space, also inspired the title of "Star Wars." The film series began in 1977 with an "aesthetic of overpowering" (Dietmar Dath) and is "the technically produced evidence of the victory of spectacular artistic means over the speculative purpose of art (...) of effect over the adherence to genre," Dath continues.

George Lucas's 1977 film was more influential than any other in defining the style of the subsequent science fiction wave. The war between the stars, spectacularly staged for the viewing habits of the time and also the title of Ronald Reagan's space armament program, likely epitomizes the bellicose orientation of many cinematic science fiction stories of past decades. In Germany, the bellicist tradition can be traced back even further. The "Perry Rhodan" series, published since 1961 with a total of 190,000 pages of text, had a distinctly bellicist orientation, especially in its early years.

Karl-Herbert Scheer, who co-created the series and wrote numerous episodes, was even nicknamed "Hand Grenade Herbert" in the late 1960s because the story arcs in the issues were often resolved in a militaristic manner. However, this should not lead to the assumption that science fiction has a structural affinity for war. Of course, the genre can also be emancipatory. The fact that an alien invasion can also function as a political allegory for fascism without a militaristic staging is impressively demonstrated by the Argentinian Netflix series "Eternauta," which, unfortunately, will likely remain an exception.