Raygunomics

The notion that raygun fights make sci-fi movies box-office friendly.

Phelim O’Neill introduced the term raygunomics in a recent article for The Guardian bemoaning the not-so-sci credentials of some of this summer’s biggest sci-fi cinema releases:

Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen, Terminator Salvation, Star Trek. Science-fiction is real popular right now, isn’t it? Except while the trappings of sci-fi – the robots, rayguns, time travel and spaceships – are there, it’s all fiction and not much science. Fi-fi would be a more suitable term.

Star Wars proved conclusively that Hollywood does not get sci-fi at all. Even though it was more science-fantasy than science-fiction, Star Wars introduced a baffling world of droids, binary load lifters, navi-computers and other important-sounding technical stuff that had major studios nodding, but not really understanding. What they did get was the action. So to relax the moneymen, sci-fi epics were pitched as action movies. People will always pay to see a good gunfight; same with rayguns. It’s simple raygunomics.

But what about the science? Science used to provide movies with a measure of credibility as the plots predicted terrible/wonderful places technology could take us to. Now it’s just something to help the plot lurch from point A to point B.

(The late great Douglas Adams, author of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” might have joined O’Neill in attesting to Hollywood’s sketchy understanding of the sci-fi genre. According to Adams, Hollywood spent years telling him: “science-fiction comedy will not work as a movie. And here’s why not: if it could work, it would have been done already.” Then in 1997, Columbia Pictures released “Men in Black.” In 2005, four years after his death, Adams’s 1979 book finally appeared on the big screen.)