With Stanley Kubrick’s classic 2001 about to be re-released in digital form, we trace how sci-fi movies reflect the deepest anxieties of each generation

It was the film that turned science fiction from B-movie fodder into an entertainment that combined glittering spectacle with intellectual intrigue. Now 2001: A Space Odyssey is to be re-released around Britain in a new digital format as the mainstay of a national sci-fi film festival, Days of Fear and Wonder.

“Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 was a game-changer,” said the British Film Institute’s Rhidian Davis, producer of the festival. “It gave class and style to science fiction in the cinema, and that makes it the perfect film to act as the cornerstone of our festival when it is re-released nationally on Friday.”

Set up by the BFI, Days of Fear and Wonder will feature in cinemas around the country until the end of December and include dozens of classics, such as Alien, Blade Runner, Solaris and Silent Running. Sites for screenings have included the British Museum and the giant radio telescope at Jodrell Bank.

The aim, say organisers, is to celebrate a genre “that has been responsible for some of the most dramatic and indelible moments in the history of cinema”. These include a world poised between destruction and salvation at the end of The Day the Earth Caught Fire, a spaceship flying through space to the strains of the Blue Danube waltz in 2001; and the flickering images of the Alien hunting down the last of the crew of the spaceship Nostromo.

“It’s not just about the thrill of boldly going,” added the BFI’s Rob Winter, who helped to set up the festival. “These are films that play on our fears of invasion, extinction and annihilation.”

And that is the crucial attraction of Days of Fear and Wonder, say its organisers. Each decade uses science fiction to create a future that mirrors the particular fears and obsessions of the day. Sci-fi films may claim to be visions of coming events, but are really a record of the past obsessions of society. Hence the importance of the festival.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Anne Hathaway and Matthew McConaughey in Interstellar, which reflects contemporary environmental concerns. Photograph: Melinda Sue Gordon

A classic example is provided by Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Filmed in 1956, it is the best of several movies – other efforts include Invasion of the Saucer Men, The Brain Eaters and Invaders from Mars – in which aliens take over the minds and bodies of Earthlings, reflecting a widespread American fear of communist subversion at the time. Cold, ruthless, human-looking but utterly emotionless aliens perfectly encapsulated America’s paranoid vision of the threat of communism.

“The overarching theme of US science fiction films in the 1950s and 1960s was the fear of communism, though director Don Siegel maintained that Body-snatchers was also about our fear of loss of liberty and social control,” added Davis. In later films, cold war paranoia was replaced by a more direct fear – that of nuclear destruction. An early, classic example was provided by Val Guest’s The Day the Earth Caught Fire, in which a Fleet Street reporter uncovers a terrible secret: that Russian and American A-bomb test explosions have destabilised our planet’s orbit and sent it spiralling towards the Sun. A special DVD of the film, which was made in 1961, was released last week as part of the festival and includes a recently made documentary of its problem-plagued filming.

The dangers of nuclear weapons also form the background to Kubrick’s nuclear satire, Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, and later to A Space Odyssey itself. In the latter, the image of an apeman’s bone weapon being hurled aloft cuts to be replaced with one of a nuclear cannon satellite orbiting Earth. Most other references to nuclear war were removed by Kubrick during production, but remain in Arthur C Clarke’s book of the film, which even contains a scene in which the newly-born Star Child detonates the superpowers’ nuclear arsenals.

A decade later, our shifting anxieties are reflected in a very different way in Ridley Scott’s Alien. Its key protagonist is a hideous, acid-dripping monster that stalks the crew of the spaceship Nostromo, with only Sigourney Weaver’s character, Ripley, surviving.

However, as the film and its sequels reveal, the alien’s victims had been deliberately placed at risk by a hi-tech military conglomerate known simply as the company, which wants to study the alien for its weapons division – a culpability that is extended in later films in the series. Thus, by the 1980s communism and nuclear war had been replaced by ruthless, unfettered capitalism as the evil to be feared most in the cosmos – though there are other interpretations of Alien.

Heather Stewart, the BFI’s creative director, considers it to be a feminist narrative and claims that the film’s denouement, in which Ripley vanquishes the alien, is the greatest sex scene in sci-fi.

“Once Ripley strips to her underwear and becomes desirable, the alien – in stark contrast to the blinding speed of its earlier assaults – now stretches its head out, as if preening, moves slowly and languorously,” says Stewart. “Drooling, it’s a sex scene. Ripley of course blows it away with an ejaculatory bolt from her massive gun.”

Other sci-fi fears include worries about political insurrection as expressed through the overthrow of humanity and its replacement with apes, as is depicted in the Planet of the Apes films, which first appeared on our screens in 1968.

In contrast, Douglas Trumbull’s 1972 Silent Running portrayed Bruce Dern as an early eco-warrior fighting to protect the Earth’s last forests, which have been sent into space in giant, orbiting greenhouses. The latter’s environmental concerns have since provided science fiction with a rich source of material that reached its ultimate expression in Christopher Nolan’s recently released Interstellar, which depicts the Earth as an ecologically devastated planet from which astronaut Matthew McConaughey is sent to find a new home for humanity.

Thus our concerns, as expressed through science fiction, would seem to have shifted from the overtly political to ones about the environmental threats that hang over our planet. The interesting issue, of course, is where we turn to next when it comes to worrying about the future.

NEW VISIONS

In contrast to science fiction films’ slightly grubby image in the 1950s and 1960s, today’s movies are remarkable for their high production values and popularity. Advanced digital photography and computer-generated imagery) allow film-makers to create increasingly fantastic but seemingly real worlds that have proved highly popular with young audiences. Studios are now turning out series such as The Hunger Games films; remakes of The Planet of the Apes; new Star Wars films; a sequel to James Cameron’s Avatar; and Christopher Nolan’s latest blockbuster Interstellar.

A reflection of the popularity of modern science fiction films is revealed by studying the top-grossing films of 2014, which have been led by science fiction, fantasy and comic-book hero movies, the most lucrative of them being Transformers: Age of Extinction. By contrast, among the top-grossing films of 1964 (in the US), there were no science-fiction films. Instead the top 10 was dominated by James Bond’s Goldfinger and From Russia with Love, and the musicals Mary Poppins and My Fair Lady.

The appearance, in 1968, of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey – with its glittering cinematography, superbly detailed sets and stunning soundtrack – is generally credited as being the game-changer that transformed the fortunes of science fiction in the cinema.