FLC 4: Science in 80s Sci-Fi
by Matthew Fernandez
edited by Benjie Bernal
It was a surreal, garish image: a man with ripped muscles and torn clothes stood defiantly in a sea of rubble— remnants of a fallen, crumbled city. Holding him on both sides were two scantily-clad, neon-skinned women. A robotic figure of dazzling chrome scanned in the background. Planets loomed in the crimson horizon. Bolts of lightning peppered the sky. The picture looked like it belonged on the cover of some pulp sci-fi magazine. To lecturer and self-professed cinteaste Ronald Cruz, it was a perfect depiction of “the zaniness, the weirdness, the craziness of 80s sci-fi. Because that’s what it is, really.”
Eighties science fiction, with its cyborg assassins, glowing space aliens, and not to forget time travelling sports cars strikes most as fantastical and over-the-top. But no matter how madcap the genre can get, you can’t have science fiction without, well, science. April 20th marked the Loyola Film Circle’s fourth and final Film Literacy Class for 2018, which saw Ronald Allan L. Cruz, Ph.D. (cand.) of the Biology Department discuss the real-life scientific concepts behind the decade’s iconic sci-fi flicks.
According to Cruz, the 80s era served as one of the highest peaks for science fiction. “Some of the best movies to come out in the genre came out during that decade,” Cruz noted. And the amount of regarded classics, as does the numerous subgenres these films have made, as Cruz mentioned, indeed exemplified this. The gritty and futuristic cyberpunk subgenre saw hits such as Blade Runner (1982) and RoboCop (1987). The sci-fi/horror hybrid that is body horror, or biological horror, drew audiences with vile imagery pervasive in David Cronenberg's 1986 remake of The Fly and in John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982). Extraterrestrials invaded the big screen as well, ranging from action gorefests Aliens (1986) and Predator (1987) to the more family-friendly E.T. the Extraterrestrial (1982). The concept of time travel also made a huge impression on moviegoers, with films like The Terminator (1982) and Back to the Future (1985) utilizing the idea as a major plot device.
The films Cruz mentioned epitomized the good and the peculiar in the genre, but what’s more interesting is the fact that they rely on some form of science to explain its main premise. Cruz continues, telling about how our world today is poised to become a mere reflection of the bizarreness present in 80s sci-fi. And that the amalgamation of man and machine as seen in RoboCop is not too far off when you consider people such as Kevin Warwick and his artificial, Internet-connected hand or Neil Harbisson’s synesthetic “eyeborg”. Even the nearly-human Replicants of Blade Runner seem closer to reality with the advent of 3D-printed organs and tissue.
Gene splicing, the process of incorporating foreign DNA to one’s own, could explain the horrific metamorphosis Seth Brundle undergoes after his DNA was mixed with a housefly’s. The humanlike morphologies of the xenomorphs, yautja, and even little E.T. can be stemmed not just from cost-cutting measures for costume designers at the time, but also from the Panspermia hypothesis, which speculates that life on Earth is but one of the planets “seeded” by a common source, implying that there are beings similar to us throughout the galaxy.
Finally, the far-out concept of time travel has produced numerous hypotheses on the possible principles it adheres to. Back to the Future’s take on time travel hinges on the concept of a single timeline that may be affected by changing past or future events, echoing the Butterfly Theory but foregoing the Novikov Self-Consistency Principle which establishes that the general flow of the timeline remains uniform no matter what events are changed, preventing paradoxes and alternate timelines.
The sheer amount of concepts Cruz explained is a big lot to take in, and that’s not even scratching the surface, stating: “There’s so much more I could say about science fiction in the 80s,” while enumerating the many, many other films he hasn’t touched upon. “There's so much more to watch,” he adds, “I encourage you—especially you being film buffs—[to] watch as many as you can.”
Cruz closed our discussion with the advice he’d often impart to his students in his Biology of Science Fiction class. “When I explain the science in science fiction, it's not meant to burst bubbles. [...] That's not the point. The point of understanding the science behind the science fiction that you watch is to gain a whole new [level of] appreciation,” Cruz said, finally concluding the lecture stating: “Because your appreciation for a piece of science fiction will be so much more enhanced and intellectual if you know the science behind it."
