Jar Jar Binks Must Die... and Other Observations about Science Fiction Movies by Daniel M. Kimmel

Author:Daniel M. Kimmel [Kimmel, Daniel M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Star Wars, Metropolis, sf movies, classic science fiction, movie criticism, film criticism, Star Trek, Avatar, Nerds in Love, Hugo Award nominee, opinion, sf films, science fiction movies, film reviews, movie reviews, nonfiction
Amazon: B006LACUME
Publisher: Gray Rabbit Publications / Fantastic Books
Published: 2011-12-09T05:00:00+00:00

THE BARE NECESSITIES

It’s a story at least as old as the Bible. A man or a group of people is lost in the wilderness and has to figure out how to survive. Moses, of course, had divine assistance in providing for the wandering Israelites, obtaining manna from the heavens and water from a rock.

Daniel Defoe’s novel Robinson Crusoe dates back to the early eighteenth century with its tale of a man fending for himself on a remote island inhabited only by savage cannibals. A century later, Johann Wyss would offer up The Swiss Family Robinson, about a family traveling to New Guinea and ending up shipwrecked on an uninhabited island. Even with multiple TV and movie adaptations of both stories, the genre still fascinates, as demonstrated by the Tom Hanks film Cast Away (2000), about a Federal Express executive trapped on another of those conveniently well-stocked, but out-of-the-way desert isles.

For some reason, the 1960s was a time when this type of saga was especially popular. The most enduring example is, of course, Gilligan’s Island, the legendarily silly sitcom that spawned numerous reunion movies, documentaries, memoirs, and even a reality TV series. Disney would do a 1960 adaptation of Swiss Family Robinson with Tommy Kirk and his elders fighting off pirates. What may be most interesting is that the early ’60s saw both the Robinson family and Crusoe adventures recast in the future, with those desert islands being transformed into other planets.

First would come a comic book series remembered, perhaps, only by comic aficionados: Space Family Robinson. Then would come the TV series Lost in Space, about a completely different but equally lost Robinson family. The stories were essentially “space opera,” with little regard for reality or scientific speculation. As with Gilligan’s Island, the emphasis was on entertainment and adventure, not on practical problem solving. It’s something of a joke, regarding Gilligan, that the Professor (Russell Johnson) could make a short-wave radio out of coconut shells, but couldn’t figure out a way to get the castaways home. Neither of the Robinson families managed to match the achievement of their literary forebears, with both the comic and TV runs ending with them still lost among the stars.

The notable exception to this was the 1964 film Robinson Crusoe on Mars. If the solutions the film comes up with in terms of air, water, shelter, and food seem like cheats, it helps to remember what our practical knowledge of life in space, and on Mars in particular, was some forty years ago. Looked at now, it’s not the solutions that are interesting, but the problems. If manned landings and bases are hoped for on the moon and Mars in this century, then a study of this film by prospective astronauts seems worthwhile. Could you survive under these circumstances? Could anyone?

The story opens aboard Mars Gravity Probe One. Its two-man crew consists of Col. Dan McReady (a pre-Batman Adam West) and Col. Christopher “Kit” Draper (Paul Mantee). There’s also a monkey named Mona. When we

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