Human relationships are usually an alien concept in sci-fi films. But two new movies show the genre is journeying into the realms of feelings, romance – and even sex

Science fiction is not an exact science. When it comes to making a serious sci-fi movie, there’s a lot to get wrong: the science will be peer-reviewed by the global chatroom; the special effects have to be more special than last time; you are expected to capture the zeitgeist and point the way for human progress in a way that’s totally mind-blowing but neither too confusing nor too obvious – and all without scaring off the China market. Hollywood has spent years, and billions, trying to crack this formula, but the variables keep changing. It would be easier if audiences were programmable robots, but we aren’t. To be totally fickle is to be human, so there.

Arrival, the new sci-fi by Denis Villeneuve, is the perfect example of the current formula. Intelligent, accessible and spectacular, it is well placed to be this year’s Gravity– though things have moved on even since then. You could call Arrival an alien-invasion story, but its aliens neither attack nor befriend us Earthlings; instead, their skyscraper-sized craft simply hang mysteriously in the air at random points around the planet. Who are they? What do they want? How do we find out? Amid the global panic, linguist Amy Adams and physicist Jeremy Renner are enlisted to try to communicate with these beings, which resemble giant, seven-fingered hands and emit undecipherable croaks and clicks. The movie’s close encounters – conducted through a glowing screen in an eerie chamber inside the alien craft – deliver that sense of otherworldly awe that sci-fi fans crave.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Amy Adams as Louise Banks in Arrival, which is intelligent, accessible and spectacular. Photograph: Jan Thijs

There’s some serious, sciencey meat in Arrival: the nature of language, interpretation, communication, time and space, extraterrestrial intelligence. But there’s also a second strand running through the movie: Adams’s character is haunted by fleeting visions of her dead daughter, somehow triggered by the aliens. She is also drawn to Renner’s character, the only other civilian behind the security cordon and a soulmate in social awkwardness. Nothing so obvious as a romance ensues. To spoil Arrival’s developments would be a crime, but let’s just say there’s a man and a woman – and that in itself is a rarity among sci-fi movies when you think about it.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The trailer for the upcoming sci-fi romance Passengers promises ‘Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt getting it on. In space’. Photograph: Allstar/Sony Pictures Entertainment

Next month we’ll have another example: Passengers. Directed by Morten “The Imitation Game” Tyldum, it looks big and expensive, with cool spaceship sets and a plot suggesting galactic colonisation and its perils. But if there’s one thing you’ll take away from the trailer, it’s “Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt getting it on. In space”. The actors have already been talking about their sex scene together, and the word “chemistry” is being bandied about. How’s that for a sci-fi formula?



Could it be that it really wasn’t rocket science all along? The very opposite, in fact. Both Arrival and Passengers make a point of what Bruce Lee would have called “emotional content”. You know: feelings, romantic ones, even sexual ones. Such qualities are a given in most types of story, but sci-fi can be a sterile sort of place – a realm of utilitarian hardware, wipe-clean surfaces, scientific jargon and dark, cold, existential nothingness. Human conduct is often accordingly stiff. As a genre, it’s a little like the androids in HBO’s new Westworld series, who have had their emotion settings turned right down.

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Emotion is regularly outlawed in sci-fi scenarios including George Lucas’s THX 1138, Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville, Equilibrium, Equals and The Giver. Many classic sci-fi characters don’t really do feelings, either. They are robots or aliens or AIs and they either fail to understand this human thing called “emotion”, or they regard it as a weakness: Schwarzenegger’s Terminator, or the Alien movies’ androids, or Star Trek’s emotionally repressed Vulcans, or the Next Generation’s Data (before he got his emotion chip), or the heartless computer Hal in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey – a sci-fi touchstone whose emotional peak is a tersely repeated request to open some doors.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Trailer for the movie Contact.

In recent years, Hollywood has found a simple fix for this glitch: put a female in the movie. Arrival’s spiritual predecessor could be Robert Zemeckis’s 1997 movie Contact, starring Jodie Foster. Like Amy Adams, she’s a scientist decoding alien signals and making the introductions on behalf of humanity. And like Adams, it’s Foster’s emotional range that carries the story. She weeps tears of joy at the beauty of the cosmos, and tears of pain after a surreal reunion with her dead father, whose form the aliens decide to take (they are emotionally intelligent too, see?). With these emotional women around, the men can stay dry-eyed and manly and rational, as the genre demands.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Noomi Rapace in Prometheus. Photograph: Allstar/20th Century Fox

Even when they are tough women in a testosterone-fuelled world, their femininity is called on to represent humanity: Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio in The Abyss, Noomi Rapace in Prometheus, Milla Jovovich in The Fifth Element. Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley is the most iconically tough heroine of all, but let’s not forget, at the climax of the first movie, she’s an all-too-vulnerable human body in its skimpy underwear. Perish the thought the film-makers shoehorned in some gratuitous lechery there, but it wouldn’t have worked if it had been, say, Burt Reynolds.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway in Interstellar. Photograph: Allstar/Legendary Pictures

But Hollywood has a habit of assembling all the ingredients then stubbornly refusing to let nature take its course. In Gravity, you have got Sandra Bullock to cry the zero-gravity tears (and do the underwear scene), and George Clooney is on board, too – a dream team of romantic leads. But it’s just not that sort of movie, is it? In Contact, Jodie Foster has a young, handsome Matthew McConaughey – the future king of romcoms – as her co-star. They have a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it liaison, then, next time she meets him, he’s a priest! McConaughey was also squandered in Christopher Nolan’s overreaching Interstellar. To the film’s credit, he gets to be an emotional man in a sci-fi movie – the scene of him tearfully watching his children grow up in fast-forward on their video diaries was the movie’s highlight – but again, you’ve got a widowed McConaughey and Anne Hathaway in a capsule together and the world’s about to end, and they just talk about retro-thrusters and event horizons. And you might have forgotten The Martian’s big romantic moment, when Kate Mara kisses Sebastian Stan on the outside of his space helmet. Nothing says “giant prophylactic” like a spacesuit.

If romance is hard to find in sci-fi, sex is barely more than a theoretical concept. The big budget-wielders – Spielberg, Lucas, Cameron, Bay, Abrams – target family audiences to recoup their huge costs, so shy away from anything that might make teenage boys go: “Eeeuw!” Even Han Solo and Princess Leia were pushing it. Tom Cruise seems to have a no-romance clause written into his sci-fi contract. The only penetration in the Alien movies is of the man-xenomorph variety. For all its fetish wear, The Matrix only managed to get Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Ann Moss together for a mid-rave quickie in the sequel. For some proper sexuality in space you would have to go back to Jane Fonda’s sexually liberated Barbarella, or James Bond’s weightless shag at the end of Moonraker.

Then again, turn the dial too far towards “romance”, and you are in the realms of the “epic love story”, and pretty much out the other end of sci-fi: The Time Traveller’s Wife, Richard Curtis’s About Time, The Lake House, Kate & Leopold – they are essentially date movies with a light sprinkling of speculative fiction. The Baileys in the sci-fi minibar.



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It would be over-reductive to express this as a male/female thing, or a left-brain/right-brain sort of thing (putting it in such binary terms is so left-brain, after all). Or even a formula. Of course, there are women who like their sci-fi pure and cerebral, and men left cold by space stories, but research suggests that gender is a big factor in genre preference. A 2012 analysis of BFI statistics found that 83% of respondents who expressed a preference for romantic films were female, 72% for romantic comedies. Conversely, 65% of those who liked sci-fi were male. It’s like men are from Mars and women are from … Earth.

There have been plenty of movies that we adore because they completely ignore any formula – exhibit A: Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin. There are others that, in retrospect, struck the perfect balance. Look at Blade Runner. It’s a film of big philosophical questions and brilliant future-world design, as pure, profound and prescient a sci-fi as you could wish for. But its characters are also wrought with angst and loss and longing and tears in the rain – and there’s a proper, adult love story at its core.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Scarlett Johansson in Under the Skin. Photograph: FILM4/Sportsphoto/Allstar

Arrivals strikes a similar balance. Those two distinct strands to the story – the sciencey and the emotional, the cosmic and the personal, the left brain and the right brain, whatever – ultimately come together to deliver a satisfying conclusion (and a neat metaphor for what we are talking about here). Some might see this as sci-fi selling out. Arrival has already been branded as “sentimental” and “maudlin”. But you could also see it as sci-fi growing up – from a gadget-obsessed kid to a mature, rounded adult with good ideas but good communication skills, too.

Some small-scale Indie films have precisely the mix of big ideas and human intimacy old-school Hollywood has lacked

More than gender, it could be a generational thing. Ironically, the “young adult” genre has been striking this same balance for some time, from the Hunger Games onwards, perhaps appealing to younger audiences less hung up on the old-fashioned binaries, gender, genre or otherwise. In recent years, we have had a steady trickle of smart, fresh emotionally literate sci-fis that do a lot with a little. Spike Jonze’s Her, for example, where Joaquin Phoenix falls in love with his Scarlett Johansson-voiced operating system. In sci-fi terms, it’s as bold and thorny a film about artificial intelligence as we have ever had, but that’s the point, it doesn’t feel like a sci-fi movie – more like a warped romance. A similar example would be Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind with Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet chasing each other through the windmills of their partially erased minds. Is it a sci-fi? Technically, yes. Is it a love story? Very much so, but not an obvious one.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Safety Not Guaranteed: contains the perfect sci-fi meet cute. Photograph: Filmdistrict/Sportsphoto/Allstar

At the even indier end, we have had Rian Johnson’s Looper, which managed to tie all manner of time-travel-related knots without losing the viewer, and threaded a moving love story through it. Gareth Edwards’s Monsters, a lo-fi indie romance with the sci-fi element ingeniously Photoshopped in on the director’s laptop. Or Safety Not Guaranteed, which begins with the perfect sci-fi meet cute: Mark Duplass puts in a small ad seeking “someone to travel back in time with me”. Aubrey Plaza responds. The list goes on: Midnight Special, Another Earth, Coherence, I Origins, Shane Carruth’s Primer and Upstream Color.

This is more than just an interesting subgenre that wins prizes at Sundance: these small-scale films possess precisely the mix of big ideas and human intimacy old-school Hollywood has lacked. No wonder it is feeding into the mainstream. Just look at who’s handling the Star Wars slate (the biggest sci-fi property of all) Rogue One: Gareth “Monsters” Edwards; Episode VIII: Rian “Looper” Johnson; Episode IX: Colin “Safety Not Guaranteed” Trevorrow. Meanwhile, there’s also Denis Villeneuve’s next project to look forward to: a sequel to Blade Runner.