Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., once suggested that science-fiction would increasingly have to deal with the immediate past rather than the future. The theory behind this thought is that the acceleration of technological advancement makes it impossible to second guess the reality of tomorrow without that gadget or gizmo appearing in the most recent issue of Time magazine. With the advent of the atomic bomb, space travel, computers, robots, and the digital watch, the future seems ridiculously close (films like Dark Star and Blade Runner are already viewing a future in which all the sci-fi gadgetry is breaking down). For this reason many science-fiction films age badly. The first lunar voyage in the pseudo-documentary film Destination Moon (USA 1950) comes too close to reality to be accepted as stylization (as opposed to the 1902 trick-film A Trip to the Moon) yet is too inaccurate to be acceptable in comparison to the actual event. Viewing early science-fiction films tells us more about the way we were rather than the way we shall be, and films like Metropolis (Germany 1926) and The War of the Worlds (USA 1953) actually are perceptive symbols of their own time periods.
The early science-fiction cinema can be divided into two periods. The first age was from 1926 to 1936, beginning with Metropolis and ending with Things to Come (England 1936). Industrial development and its consequences; the effect of World War I and the possibility of another world war; and the sprawl of urban society comprised the subject matter of this period. Fritz Lang's Metropolis set the basic themes and standards for the films that came afterwards. One of the most expensive productions of the twenties, Metropolis used massive sets to articulate its vision of a futuristic industrial society. The fact that the society in the film is industrial and not technological (the creation of the robot in Metropolis is magical rather than technological), clearly demonstrates that Lang is not concerned with the year 2000, but with the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution and the 19th century.
Borrowing heavily from Ignatius Donnelly's novel Caesar's Column, Lang creates a vision of an industrial society in which the working class is literally enslaved by the machines they operate. (In one scene, a worker is strapped to the erratically moving hands of a gigantic clock.) Rigidly organized masses of workers are marched through geometrically designed areas of space, emphasizing their entrapment within a system of industrialized slavery. However, Metropolis avoids political analysis and concludes with a compromise built upon nothing more than emotional response. After the rise of Nazism, Lang rejected the film as politically naive, and the fact that Metropolis was one of Hitler's favorite films caused Lang to completely reject his early masterpiece.
Four years later, the American film Just Imagine (USA 1930) would attempt to imitate the grandiose sets of "Metropolis." Part science-fiction and part musical, the failure of Just Imagine to predict what life would be like n 1980 has made the film an inadvertent camp classic. Just how seriously the producers intended their predictions to be is anyone's guess, but the visual impressiveness of the film is undeniable and many later works have referred to it — often sardonically. The film's plot, in which vaudeville star El Brendel awakens from a state of suspended animation, was also the basis for Woody Allen's Sleeper. While the society in Metropolis was grounded in the misery of the Industrial Revolution, the futuristic city in Just Imagine was a combination of American optimism and Busby Berkley.
The last significant film of science-fiction's first era was the 1936 production Things to Come. Authored by H.G. Wells, the film was a didactic overview of future history. In this respect, Things to Come is an epilogue to Wells's massive book The Outline of History and the film is generally locked into academic observations. Wells's faith in the enlightened glories of scientific development may seem, in retrospect, too naive, and the film's explicit equation that technology means democracy would be undercut twenty years later by George Orwell. However the key scenes of Things to Come still have a strong, dramatic sweep, aided in no small part by Raymond Massey's sonorous authority figure.
The second era of science-fiction film making took place in the fifties and, superficially at least, was dominated by the special effects technician's passionate desire to destroy the world in ninety minutes or less. The atomic bomb, radioactive beasties and irrepressible bug-eyed monsters from outer space repeatedly staged their own version of an apocalypse now and the creatures who weren't busy wiping out humanity were preoccupied with taking over your neighbors' brains. While the first era retained a basic optimism about the future, the fifties science-fiction films left little hope that there would be a day-after-tomorrow. Mankind had entered a cataclysmic funhouse as film goers contemplated the world's — and their own — destruction.
In Things to Come, science is mankind's last hope. In the 1953 production of Wells's The War of the Worlds, science is helpless against the Martians' attack. Divine intervention (in the form of the common cold) is the answer as the science-fiction films of the fifties became increasingly theological in their concerns. In the finale of The War of the Worlds, the survivors of the invasion seek refuge in a series of religious sanctuaries, progressively moving from a simple Protestant church to a Catholic cathedral. Science-fiction increasingly began using science not as an end in itself (as was advocated by Jules Verne), but as a device with which to structure allegorical tales.
One of the most overtly allegorical films of the fifties was Jack Arnold's The Incredible Shrinking Man (USA 1957). The fear of atomic annihilation — man's ultimate helplessness against his own technology — is reduced to the poetic symbol of a mysterious, radioactive cloud. Its effect, an irreversible process of shrinking, becomes a form of impotency not just for the shrinking man but for the world in general. Science has become, inadvertently, the enemy, and the film's metaphysical finale expresses a meek acceptance of the problem rather than a solution. Everything has gone out of control and the film opts for humility and a final mystic union with the universe. In this respect, The Incredible Shrinking Man anticipates the conclusion of 2001: a Space Odyssey, the film which began the current era of science-fiction cinema.
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