Thursday, October 20, 2016

Week Nine: Space Opera and the New Frontier

The concept of a "retro future" is a defining trait of Space Opera and was the first factor that really appealed to me visually. The in-class movie "Forbidden Planet" displayed this trait perfectly, in all its mute colored, analog glory. In this type of future, technology is advanced, but still clunky and analogue, presenting an interesting juxtaposition between the past and the future. From the media we saw in class, space opera seems to capture the dramatic and passionate flare of typical romances, the imaginative creations of science fiction, and the action of face paced flicks of the time period. It is an amalgamation of popular culture all mashed into one, then thrown into the far future, with a setting that can only be described as future imagined in the past. For this week, I read "The Nine Billion Names of God", which has less drama and action than Forbidden Planet, but still held the qualities of retro-future and science fiction suspense. It dealt with existential dread more than Forbidden Planet, but was still reminiscent of its contemporaries. I also watched the movie for "The Martian" (not the book, sorry!) and was pleasantly surprised by its scientific accuracy and attention to detail. This particular story was set apart from its peers in that its drama was much less dramatic, for lack of a better word, and that its science was very well explained and rooted in reality. Space opera is a very broad genre, picking the good bits from many other genre favorites, so naturally, space opera itself would contain a broad range of pieces. The Martian fell on the more scientific side, while Forbidden Planet fell on the more dramatic side, and Star Wars was more action-y. However, all of these films contain elements of each other, and form the wacky genre of fiction known as Space Opera.

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