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7 Quotes from Sci-Fi Films Guaranteed To Make You Wonder If It’s Just Sci-Fi*
Science fiction can be great fun. I’ve enjoyed it since I was a kid. But now, as an adult with an academic career behind me, I’ve come to realize that there’s more to it than fun and games. Much more.
Here are a few quotations from seven great films of the past 70 years guaranteed to make you wonder: is this just science fiction?
(1) “I am fearful when I see men substituting fear for reason.” -Klaatu, The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951)
A “stranger in a strange land,” he was.
That’s Klaatu, the man from another world, observing the reaction of people to the landed spaceship he’d arrived in, and its other occupant, the giant robot Gort, an artificial intelligence well before that phrase was coined (Alan Turing’s pathbreaking article “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” would be published the same year).
A film of genius, in other words, decades ahead of its time.
Observing his own ship at the armed perimeter the military had set up, and asked by a passing reporter if he was as afraid as everybody else, Klaatu replied with the above.
Since he looked like us, nothing about him stood out right away.
Except that to those who befriended him, including young Bobby Benson, he seemed somehow kinder, wiser, more benign.
To the scientists who’d studied him, he seemed like a hopeless dreamer even though they knew his true origins.
He spoke of coming from a world whose people had gotten rid of disease, petty hatreds, and above all, war.
Science fiction film came of age in the 1950s, as televisions spread to more and more family rooms across America.
A few short years following Hiroshima and Nagasaki, things were looking up.
We Americans were starting to build the strongest economy the world had ever seen.
