The Desert of the Real: The City in Science Fiction Movies
From ‘Metropolis’ to ‘Star Wars,’ a city is more than just a bunch of buildings.
Pneumatic tubes criss-cross through a clear blue sky, transporting citizens with a satisfying whoosh; black smoke belches from crooked pipes into a clogged super-city; flying cars zip overhead as the masses toil deep underground. No matter how a city’s depicted in science fiction, it’s always doing more than just setting the scene.
“Portrayals of cities in science fiction are not there for documentary-style pedagogy … but to contain narrative, provide spectacle and sustain atmosphere,” John R. Gold said in his 2001 book Under Darkened Skies: The City in Science-fiction Film.
With that in mind, let’s look at some of the ways the city has played a role in your favorite science fiction films.
The Sci-Fi City as Utopia, the Pinnacle of Human Achievement
The dawn of cinema coincided with the emergence of the modern city as a beacon of hope.
That was in the mind of science fiction writer H.G. Wells when he wrote the script for Things to Come, the 1936 British film based on Wells’ own story, “The Shape of Things to Come.” It is set in Everytown, a utopian city modeled on London, which was depicted as a gleaming promise of the future.
“Everytown was a city of progress and modernity constructed by the technological elite for the common good,” Gold said. “It offered a vision of hope in a fictional world after war; a situation that had increasing resonance as Europe drifted towards the Second World War.”
The idea of the city as utopia has fallen from favor in sci-fi movies (more on that in a bit), but it persisted as late as 2015 in director Brad Bird’s Tomorrowland, based on Walt Disney’s mid-20th-century theme-park utopianism.
In the film, the great minds of the age are able to create a city of the future on a distant planet free of the impediments of modern society; futurist Syd Mead (Blade Runner) contributed to the visualization of the city.
Given our cynical times, such utopian visions don’t possess the power they once did: New York Times critic A.O. Scott dismissed the city depicted in Tomorrowland as “a place founded by some of history’s greatest geniuses as a combination Utopian community, R&D lab and ‘Atlas Shrugged’ theme park.”
The science fiction city as utopia achieved its ultimate depiction in Star Wars’ Coruscant, a planet that is completely covered by the massive shining metropolis of Galactic City. (The word “coruscant” literally means “glittering, sparkling.”)
The concept of Coruscant and the Galactic City developed during planning for the first Star Wars prequel film, Episode I: The Phantom Menace, and was retconned into Return of the Jedi. (Interestingly, the idea of a planet-wide city was first introduced by SF author Isaac Asimov in his 1942 Foundation trilogy of books.)
Corsucant is the central planet in the Star Wars galaxy, the home of both good (the Jedi Temple) and evil (the Imperial Center and the emperor himself).
Essayist Emily Maemura saw in Coruscant a representation of optimism.
“The images of Coruscant from space imply a specific organization, with axes, centres, and foci. Ironically, these views of a completely urbanized planet recall diagrams from Ebenezer Howard’s idyllic Garden Cities from the late 1800s. Though drastically different in intended appearance and materiality, both views relate an optimism regarding modernism, progress, the ability for technology to enhance everyday life.”
The Sci-Fi City as Dystopia, the Nadir of Our Civilization
Almost as soon as science fiction cinema latched onto the idea of the city as the hope of the future, filmmakers also saw in it a metaphor for social ills.
German director Fritz Lang used New York as his model for 1927’s Metropolis, the genre-defining science fiction film that imagined the city of 2026 as both a gleaming citadel and the physical manifestation of the oppression of the masses.
Lang incorporated his impressions of post-World War I New York in making the movie.
New York was “the crossroads of multiple human forces (irresistibly driven) to exploit each other and thus living in perpetual anxiety,” Lang said (as quoted by Gold).
Lang added: “The buildings seemed to be a vertical veil, shimmering, almost weightless, a luxurious cloth hung from the dark sky to dazzle, distract and hypnotise. At night the city did not give the impression of being alive; it lived as illusions live. I knew that I had to make a film about all of these sensations.”
The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw called the city in Metropolis “a gigantic 21st-century European city state, a veritable utopia for that elite few fortunate enough to live above ground in its gleaming urban spaces. But it’s awful for the untermensch race of workers who toil underground.”
For more modern filmgoers, the ultimate dystopian metropolis is easily the Los Angeles of director Ridley Scott’s 1982 Blade Runner, which is set in November 2019.
Scott was influenced in part by the literary science fiction subgenre of cyberpunk in his depiction of Los Angeles. (It’s interesting that Syd Mead’s ideas also helped shaped the dystopian L.A. of Blade Runner as they did with the sunnier Tomorrowland.)
Scott’s conception of the city is a “retrofitted future” in which new elements were grafted onto — and literally piled on top of — existing infrastructure.
Scott’s L.A. is a multicultural vision based in part on cities such as Hong Kong.
And it’s a place beset by environmental disaster: Constant acid rain falls, refineries flare gas into the night sky, and artificial animals have replaced most species, which are now extinct. It’s no wonder that the more affluent have fled the city — and Earth entirely—for the off-world colonies, leaving behind only the poor, the desperate and the infirm.
To achieve the distinctive look of Blade Runner’s city — one that has influenced countless subsequent filmmakers—Mead “took the two world trade towers in New York City and the New York street proportions as a ‘today’ model, and expanded everything vertically about two and a half times,” he told BladeZone. “This inspired me to make the bases of the buildings sloping to cover about six city blocks, on the premise that you needed more ground access to the building mass. …
“And the street sets, the architecture,” Mead added. “In my effort to create a jammed look to everything, I borrowed shape cues from Byzantine (the thick, twisted columns) deco, temporary scaffolding, and certainly the curious slanted sidewalls of Mayan architecture. It was all forced together to create the ‘look’ of the Blade Runner world. The fact that real architects are fascinated with the ‘look’ of the film still blows me away!”
The Sci-Fi City as Current-Day Social Critique
John Carpenter’s 1981 sci-fi action movie Escape From New York imagines the Big Apple of future 1997 as a walled-off island, a maximum security prison in a police-state U.S. run by religious fundamentalists. Hero Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell) must navigate the treacherous city grid to locate and rescue the president, whose Air Force One has gone down.
But the New York of Escape resembles the crime-ridden and decaying American cities of the late 1970s as much as any future dystopia. Indeed, the location where Carpenter shot the film is a very real U.S. city: East St. Louis, Illinois, which at the time still bore damage from 1976 urban fires. Many of the burned-out buildings seen in the film were genuine.
“Carpenter conceived the premise for Escape From New York after his first trip to Manhattan, which exposed him to seedier parts of the city. With the inspiration of a ‘completely ruined New York,’ Carpenter wrote the first draft of the script in 1974,” the AFI noted in its catalog entry about the movie.
The New York Times’ critic, Vincent Canby, compared Escape From New York to Jean-Luc Godard’s own sci-fi urban noir, Alphaville:
“Set in the not-too-distant future (1997), the film works so effectively as a warped vision of ordinary urban blight that it seems to be some kind of hallucinatory editorial. It may even remind you a little bit of Alphaville, if Alphaville had been directed not by Jean-Luc Godard but by Frederico Fellini in an uncharacteristically antic mood. Its economy of style, though, would do credit to Don Siegel.”
Stream Escape From New York on Tribeca Shortlist now.
The Sci-Fi City as Metaphor for the Mind
Alex Proyas’ 1998 science fiction movie Dark City depicts an urban landscape unlike anything in reality, past or present. Shrouded in perpetual darkness, the city feels at once old and new, familiar and alien, but always threatening and claustrophobic.
At midnight every night, it also changes, morphing in incomprehensible ways into something altogether different.
It feels like a place of nightmare.
Which is appropriate, given its characters’ dilemma, which is revealed at the end. The city is a metaphor for the characters’ shifting identities and perceptions, and perhaps our own.
The unnamed city’s indefinite provenance is quite deliberate, designer Patrick Tatopoulos told Cinefantastique.
“The movie takes place everywhere, and it takes place nowhere. It’s a city built of pieces of cities. A corner from one place, another from some place else. So, you don’t really know where you are. A piece will look like a street in London, but a portion of the architecture looks like New York, but the bottom of the architecture looks again like a European city. You’re there, but you don’t know where you are. It’s like every time you travel, you’ll be lost.”
Similarly, the city in the Wachowski siblings’ 1990s Matrix trilogy of movies is literally a landscape of the mind more than a real place.
The Matrix’s Mega City is the metropolis as computer-generated virtual environment, in which the minds of imprisoned humans live out their lives, unaware of their captivity. Mega City is an idealized version of a 1990s First World city, represented as the pinnacle of human achievement in the Matrix films’ universe.
Like the Dark City, Mega City is an amalgam of other places. Much of the Matrix films were shot in Sydney and Melbourne, with references to Chicago, and some scenes were shot in Oakland, Calif. Many images of the city are completely computer generated.
It is a non-specific place whose skyline and streetscapes are generic, gray and unobtrusive. It is a pure backdrop and a metaphor for the nameless, faceless place in which the unconsciousness mind slumbers without interruption.
By extension — and because Mega City looks like the place the audience actually inhabits — the urban landscape of the movies becomes a metaphor for the illusion that is our own reality.
The New Yorker captured the thinking of co-director Lana Wachowski:
“By 1994, the Wachowskis had completed the first script for the ‘Matrix’ trilogy. They’d had the idea while working on a comic-book proposal. They were thinking, Lana recalled, ‘about “real worlds” and “worlds within worlds” and the problem of virtual reality in movies, and then it hit us: What if this world was the virtual world?’”
What is your favorite sci-fi city? What does it mean to you? Let us know!
For essential genre-bending sci-fi films, click the images below to stream Gattaca, Escape from New York, and Upstream Color on Tribeca Shortlist.
