fictional astronaut wearing one of those cumbersome suits to stay alive, clumsily trying to maneuver through zero gravity. People who really travel into space must be prepared to look silly, even if it offends Burns’a sense of decorum.
In any event, spacesuits have remained relatively rare in the universe of Star Trek; the only one that immediately comes to mind is the suit that Spock wears for a perilous rendezvous with the immense V’Ger ship in Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979). It is one of the most visually impressive scenes in that flawed film, as the tiny human figure reminds us again of the smallness and vulnerability of humans travelling through space—precisely the message that Star Trek otherwise endeavors to suppress.
The pattern set by Star Trek was generally followed by the other major science fiction franchise of our time—the Star Wars films—though these thankfully minimized the role of television screens and returned to the notion of spaceships with windows. Still, even within a few feet of space, no Star Wars character ever dons a spacesuit. As for the later Star Trek series, the only visible concessions to the environment of space are the large picture windows with scenes of space that are often observed in the background of crew quarters and meeting rooms; once a television channel, outer space now also functions as exotic wallpaper.
In the unlikely milieu of the film Superman II (1980), there occurs one striking moment of interaction between different styles of space films that in a way dramatizes the death of the realistic spacesuit film and the triumph of the unrealistic space film. Super-villains from the planet Krypton, flying through the vacuum of space without spacesuits in defiance of all scientific logic, encounter American astronauts on the Moon; the female villain casually rips one astronaut’s suit, causing his realistically-depicted death from exposure to vacuum. This provides a jarring touch of grim authenticity in a generally ridiculous film, an incongruous juxtaposition that illustrates the generic gap between space film and spacesuit film; and, as the villains abandon the dead astronauts to fly on to Earth to engage in epic battles with Superman, one gets the sense that this era of Star Wars, Superman (1978), and the revived Star Trek signaled the end of the true spacesuit film. Spacesuits would still figure in some serious movies, like the first Alien film (1979), and in some light-hearted ones, like the James Bond romp Moonraker (1979), but the spacesuit would no longer function as a generic marker that could impose an atmosphere of grim reality on space adventure films.
Now, given the other virtues of Star Trek, Star Wars, and similar films and television programs, it might seem petty and irrelevant to criticize them because they are insufficiently focused on the dangers and novelties of space travel; and to be sure, some scientific inaccuracy in science fiction film is far from unprecedented. But it is worth noting that films like these have prospered not only because they are aesthetically superior to the spacesuit films—though they usually are—but also because they are more conventional in all respects: films like Star Wars (1977) fit comfortably into any number of well-established literary patterns, though the same cannot be said of Destination Moon or 2001: A Space Odyssey. Further, a lack of realism in fiction does become an issue when the fiction begins to influence real-life decisions—which arguably happened in the case of Star Trek.
That is, during the 1970s, when support for the space program started to fade, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration visibly sought new popularity by riding on the coattails of Star Trek. In response to a letter-writing campaign, the prototypical space shuttle was named the Enterprise; members of the Star Trek cast attended several NASA functions, including a well-photographed visit to NASA’s Enterprise; and Star Trek’s Nichelle Nichols was recruited to make a promotional film designed to attract women and minority astronauts. All this was harmless enough, but it soon seemed that NASA was also embracing the Star Trek philosophy that space was a safe and comfortable environment, suitable not only for trained astronauts but for “ordinary citizens” as well—the idea that led directly to Christa McAuliffe and the 1986 Challenger disaster. To be sure, the causal chain from Roddenberry’s mini-skirted spacefarers in starships that go “swish” to Challenger exploding in the upper atmosphere is tenuous at best; still, it is at least an unsettling coincidence that the final flight of the Challenger had a seven-person crew whose visible and politically attractive diversity—including two women, an African-American, and an Asian-American—mirrored the diversity of the original seven-person cast of Star Trek. The universe of Star Trek might well provide attractive role models for an embryonic space program, but one should never forget that the actual universe is more strange and deadly than Roddenberry and his successors ever acknowledged.
Today, although America continues to maintain a doggedly conservative pace in human exploration of space, and although Star Trek, Star Wars, Babylon 5 (1994-1998), and all their cousins are still going strong, there nevertheless are signs of a possible revival of the spacesuit film. Some might be heartened by two major 1998 films, Deep Impact and Armageddon, which featured heroic astronauts in spacesuits engaged in desperately improvised missions to stop a large object from colliding with the Earth; but despite their scenes of implausible space heroics, these films retain an earthbound sensibility, terrified of space and entering that realm only to prevent a major disruption in our daily routines.
More noteworthy are the recent spacesuit films associated with the genre’s unlikely new hero, actor Tom Hanks. A lifetime devotee of the space program, Hanks was happy to appear as astronaut James Lovell in the big-budget film Apollo 13 (1995), which offered an authentic account of the most spectacular near-disaster during America’s lunar missions. Interestingly enough, one of the film’s most emotional moments, and one of its rare fictional touches, featured a spacesuit: swinging around the Moon in his dangerously crippled spacecraft, Lovell looks at the Moon and imagines himself standing on its surface, wearing a spacesuit, looking up at the Earth. Though spacesuits could not help the Apollo 13 astronauts, in life or on film, we again see a visual linkage between spacesuits and the grave dangers of space travel.
Immediately after Apollo 13, Hanks persuaded HBO to finance a major mini-series, co-written and co-directed by Hanks, recounting the entire saga of the first American space program, From the Earth to the Moon, which appeared to great acclaim in early 1998. Once again, as in 1950 and 1968, audiences eagerly watched films about men in bulky spacesuits awkwardly attempting to survive in a bizarre and harsh new environment. When asked by The Los Angeles Times why he launched this project, Hanks said he wanted to “show people what an amazing and cool thing it is to go up in space.” This was necessary, he continued, “Because in all honesty, that’s been lost.... We’re all awash in Capt. Kirk and Babylon 5 and Star Wars, in which the whole idea is reduced to essentially cowboys and Indians.”19 The contrast between what Hanks was doing, and what others had been doing, was recognized by the interviewer, who then explained: “In other words, Hanks didn’t want to do a thriller or a creepy sci-fi epic; rather, he wanted to film space history, and in so doing bolster a genre that has one benchmark work (Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey) and a host of other films that played fast and loose with the facts of space travel” (92). On the day that I first drafted this essay, it was eerily appropriate to stumble upon such overt support for my developing argument.
One more issue must be addressed: in mentioning Apollo 13 and From the Earth to the Moon, I have in a sense gone beyond the boundaries of my announced subject, “science fiction films.” After all, how can films about events that really happened, accurately related, qualify as science fiction films? Yet in placing them in this context, I am hardly alone: Apollo 13 was nominated for the science fiction Hugo Award as “Best Dramatic Presentation,” and television coverage of the Apollo 11 Moon landing actually won the Hugo Award in 1969. And other fact-based space films like Return to Earth (1976), based on Buzz Aldrin’s autobiography, and The Right Stuff (1983), based on Tom Wolfe’s book about the Mercury astronauts, are regularly linked to science fiction film. While this might be only an atavistic response, a lingering feeling that all films about space must be “science fiction,” I suggest that other factors are at work here.
That is, since space is such an unprecedented and outlandish environment, it may continue to seem like
