Scientific Fiction: Exploring Fiction Through the Scientific Method
If you ask someone for a recommendation for a “sciency” film you usually get one of two types of recommendations. One is the “experiments gone wrong” type of film, where there’s a mad scientist doing crazy experiments and it leads to disaster, like in Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator (1985). The other is the “scientific exploration” type of film, which tends to be a team of people in lab coats doing research, like in Ken Russell’s Altered States (1980) and Joel Schumacher’s Flatliners (1990); these films often fall in line with the notion of Scientific Fiction.
So, what is this genre on its most basic level? Typically, a film to falls into this sub-genre if it adheres to two principles:
The investigators (whether they be actual scientists, paranormal investigators, or even a regular person trying to explain something happening in their life) are systematically and rigorously testing a hypothesis about something to its natural conclusion.
The film maintains some kind of internal logic in its science that maintains some base level of scientific believability.
Point one separates this from the other types of “sciency” films. One of the biggest flaws you have in something like Re-Animator is the bizarre way in which trained scientists go about testing their mad science concept, which disregards scientific research basics.. Anyone, scientist or not, can tell by the second body he injects that maybe, just maybe, the serum is causing some kind of aggressive behavior. But he completely ignores all of this evidence and continues.
Point two is what separates this genre from hard science fiction. It doesn’t really matter to most people if something doesn’t perfectly adhere to true scientific principles, because most people aren’t going to know the difference. Hell, most scientists aren’t going to know if something is perfectly scientifically accurate in a neighboring branch of science. I have a PhD in neuroscience and I haven’t taken a biology class since high school. I don’t know if the fungi-pocalpyse happening in The Last of Us is possible, but I know about the fungi making zombie ants from reading about it online, so it sounds realistic enough to me! (But I can definitely give you an in-depth thesis on why the concept behind Lucy is a bunch of bullshit.)
The appetite for this kind of film seemingly doesn’t have anything to do with one's scientific background. Most of us do a basic gut check and say “this feels realistic” versus “this requires my complete suspension of disbelief”. However, Scientific Fiction allows us to do a thought experiment: if this thing in the film was real, how would it play out? How would someone go about proving it to other people? What would it take to convince them?
There’s two prototypical examples referred to again and again to explain this genre, and it's interesting because if you look up “sciency” recommendations online, you’ll almost always find these two films listed. In fact, discussing one is what led someone to recommend the other to me. These films are Altered States and Flatliners. In both of these films, the scientists have a hypothesis they’re trying to research. In Altered States, Edward Jessup (William Hurt) hypothesizes that experiencing an altered state of consciousness can help one achieve biological devolution (this is a simplification because the path to get there is pretty wild). In Flatliners, a group of medical students hypothesize that there is a post-death experience. Additionally, in both of these, they systematically test these hypotheses. They repeat their experiments multiple times, in the presence of others. They have skeptics either review their results in real time (Altered States), or undergo the experience themselves (Flatliners) to function as a control in their experiment. By the end of the film, it feels as though the researchers have taken their idea as far as they can go and have more or less proven their hypothesis. Additionally, these movies remain internally consistent. Do I believe that they’re scientifically accurate, in line with hard science fiction? Absolutely not. Do I know enough about the things they’re talking about to refute anything they’re saying? Also no! But they pass the basic gut check of searching for any egregious inaccuracies.
It’s necessary to point out that “science” expands beyond medicine and other “hard” sciences. While Altered States merges anthropology with medicine, Bernard Rose’s Candyman (1992) also fits this genre well, which solely focuses on exploring sociological concepts. I would even argue that films researching “hauntings” and other areas of parapsychology (for example, Mike Flanagan’s Oculus (2013)) fit here, as long as they are conducting systematic and rigorous processes.
When I think about many of the films exemplifying this genre, the vast majority are the ‘70s through the ‘90s, and it’s really challenging to think of modern examples of these films – certainly there aren’t any that were as commercially successful as Altered States and Flatliners. It would be difficult to pinpoint exactly what led to the decline in these types of films. It’s said that the value in and respect for scientific research decreased once widespread information on any topic was available on the Internet, which would fit with these timeframes of popularity, and this sentiment has certainly been exacerbated in recent years. Or maybe the current state of the world is so increasingly dystopian that we want to use science fiction for pure escapism, either envisioning the future world as more advanced to bring us hope, or a world that’s going through something even worse to make the current state of the world feel just a little bit better.
To me, the reasoning for this loss in popularity isn’t all that important. At minimum, I want to bring attention and appreciation to these types of films. Taking something that de facto defines something as non-fiction, the scientific method, and applying it to more fantastical concepts should be a thought experiment worth exploring. And I think that people still ask for “sciency” films and getting these recommendations shows that there is some degree of demand.