Considering sci-fi cinema today, I see a big split between the blockbuster budget-busters that pack in the crowds and the less-popular, more personal indies. Yet if you’ve seen the former, you get the feeling that they hardly even carry the torch for the heart of the sci-fi genre. With all that excessive CGI and pyrotechnic display, whom do these filmmakers think they’re fooling? You’re not fooling anyone, folks! We all know the box office doesn’t reliably reflect the value of any particular film. But push aside the illusions, and what do you have? You’re left pretty much with the indies for some breathing room in what is surely a much subtler genre.
In numerous respects, independent science fiction serves as a checked counter to the glorious commercialized vision of the future mainstream films such as Star Wars or Wild West Productions’ Guardians of the Galaxy present. Where those larger productions rely on spectacle (and investment), indie sci-fi often teeters on the sidelines of the festival circuit, retreating to the low-budget and resource-limited realm of the genre’s roots. This is no ghetto of idiosyncrasy, absent innovation and undistinguished entry. Innovatively growing the genre, indie sci-fi more cunningly unfurls as a means to an end, a way of telling imaginative stories that really have something to reflect on.
Indie sci-fi is important to the genre for the reason that it can tackle intricate subject matter and complex messages without the necessity of softening a few edges here and there to make its storytelling and/or visuals palatable to a broad audience—without, in other words, the indie sci-fi films being made having to be anything like the often regrettable and nonsensical compromises of “entertainment” that many big-budget sci-fi films occasionally turn out to be. Indie sci-fi films are thoughtful, rarely easy, and often conditions-of-possibility sorts of speculative stories that make you engage in the kinds of thinking that we need to do more of in regards to narrative cinema in general and the sci-fi genre in particular.
I’m not suggesting that all indie science fiction is flawless, because it isn’t. However, even when these movies miss the mark, they are still intriguing and often succeed on some levels, primarily because they push thought-provoking ideas. And those ideas keep the whole spirit of sci-fi alive. To my mind, that’s reason enough to see any indie sci-fi film, even if only for the Swan Lake ending in “The Death of Dick Long.”
When I contemplate independent sci-fi films that truly represent the essence of storytelling and innovation, several prominent examples come to mind—films that engross with their plots yet somehow always leave me gasping at the end for breath. The 2013 movie Coherence is a prime example of a low-budget, indie film that doesn’t flop or equivalently “cash in” on its paltry budget when it comes to serious sci-fi entertainment. Directed by James Ward Byrkit, the film tells the story of a dinner party that gets thrown into disarray due to an unfriendly cosmic occurrence. With a budget of allegedly around $50,000, Coherence eschews everything from a sufficiently intimidating score to a boatload of VFX and instead gives us a tightly-woven narrative that does right by the film’s title.
Byrkit’s Coherence is brilliant in its simplicity. With few locations—essentially one house—and a small number of characters, it tells an intimate story that feels cosmically significant. Using the techniques of a thriller, the film nevertheless feels more like a horror movie for science buffs, since it latches onto one unsettling idea and plays it for all it’s worth. The plot centers on a group of friends who experience a disturbance in their “coherent” reality when they get together for a dinner party on the night that a comet is passing overhead. After the characters figure out the basic premise (which nonetheless remains vague in the film), it’s tense and unpredictable.
An exemplary instance of hard sci-fi is Shane Carruth’s 2004 film Primer, a drama about time travel. With a budget of just $7,000, Carruth created a narrative complex enough to leave audiences perplexed and fascinated long after viewing. Indeed, the clarity of “what happens” from beginning to end is not what earns Primer its cherished place in the pantheon of hard sci-fi for many viewers; it’s what earns and cements the film’s narrative in the viewer’s memory, compelling him or her to replay it mentally and to talk about it with others, as if the viewer is now an intern in a secret club that into which not every narrative gets.
Recent big-budget sci-fi films like “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker” and “Jurassic World: Dominion” trade on superficial spectacle. Though visually stunning and inundated with effects-driven “wow” moments, they often lack any real substance underneath the glimmering surface. These films, of course, have as wide an appeal as blockbuster sci-fi can offer. They’re designed to enthrall as many people as possible and in as many ways as possible. But while they might offer some amount of story to be engaged with for the 2-3 hours one is in the theater, once the viewer has left and the music playing in the theater lobby has quieted, these movies present little in the way of any real intellectual post-game for the viewer to engage with at any and all levels.
Indie sci-fi fills the intellectual void. These limited-resource films often think outside the box concerning storytelling. Their focus tends to be on the psychological and philosophical implications of their concepts. They are not spectacle-driven; thus, they explore some concepts that are really worth thinking about. What is consciousness? Is artificial intelligence going to trick us, as in Ex Machina? Director Alex Garland’s Ex Machina: A.I. is human desires/news you-can-use for power—and it’s also a very creepy, what-if look at the potential for our robots to not really love us. Like the few indies I can think of that explore the A.I.
issue in-depth and not just as a jump-off point for human’s growth as a supervillain, Ex Machina is fundamentally scary because it puts human/robot relations in a weird, upside-down, top-of-the-scale mouth harp.
The indie films that I admire are consistently great at drawing me into their worlds and narratives. Despite their budgetary limitations, they manage to immerse me in “fantastic” tales that compel me not only to pay attention to them but also to reassess what’s going on in the “real” world outside those celluloid or digital walls. Beyond effects or even the appearance of science in what’s being told to me, these tales make me rethink stuff profoundly—my relationships, humanity’s condition, morality, and reality as we know it. I see a direct line from them to the science fiction literature in my collection, the books that push me to ponder and sometimes come up with answers to the physics-defying, human-condition-defining questions they raise.
In many respects, independent science fiction is like the short fiction of the genre’s golden age. When Philip K. Dick, Arthur C. Clarke, and Ursula K. Le Guin wrote the fantastic stories that made them famous, they created speculative scenarios that let them shine a light on deeper truths. Maybe they chose the short form because they were too constrained by their imaginations to tell a longer tale. But maybe not; maybe they wrote what they wrote and how they wrote it because they had something worth saying. Today’s indie sci-fi filmmakers often embrace a similar minimalist aesthetic. Working with shoestring budgets, they forgo the idea of impressing studio executives with SFX and instead attempt to do what’s essentially the same thing that Le Guin and Clarke did: tell a story that resonates.
What excites me most about independent science fiction is its ability to push the genre forward. While the tried-and-true tropes and safe narratives of “alien invasions” and “time travel” and “space operas” tend to hold sci-fi up as a blockbuster moneymaker, the indie side of the ocean can afford to be bolder. Those working in this realm can push uncharted narrative boundaries and play with the structures of storytelling in sci-fi, with its explorations and unexplainable events—what Danielewski calls “the fantastic in science.” They can do this, and they’re doing it.
Jonathan Glazer’s 2013 work Under the Skin represents an indie sci-fi film that braves the edge of the genre and is, in many ways, unlike any other film in the genre. Unlike most of its cousins, Under the Skin has almost no dialogue, preferring an ethereal score and atmospheric sounds to tell the story. The film (based partially on a novel) follows an alien in the guise of a woman (played by Scarlett Johansson) who lures men to their doom. The minimalist approach (to story and character development) allows viewers to engage with the visuals and make their own inferences about what the film is trying to convey.
Though Laura’s quest to ensnare young, strong men doesn’t seem to have much to do with science, it certainly has a fair amount of tech in the story’s presentations.
This sort of narrative experimentation isn’t always accessible, and that’s part of the point. Under the Skin invites viewers into a world so ambiguous that even the barest of plot outlines seems too saturated with visuals to give a clear sense of direction. The film’s budget—larger than that of most indie films but a fraction of what many studio pictures receive—does not hinder its seeming indie spirt. In fact, Annihilation is even more of an indie in that respect. However it was financed, the two films are at least semantically linked. They tell stories. Or, rather, they both link together a series of nonsensical invocations to tell virtually the same story.
In my opinion, indie sci-fi allows for the real development of plots and characters. While mainstream sci-fi often feels formulaic and constipated, it is only in indie science fiction that one finds the real substance a story can and should have if it truly values the intelligence of its audience. If indie sci-fi is poor in effects, it is rich in ideas. If it can’t afford the razzle-dazzle, it must attain a narrative level that safely assures it the viewer’s comprehension and, if necessary, the viewer’s rapt attention.
Take Moon (2009), for instance, a film directed by Duncan Jones. Budgeted around $5 million, it is a masterclass in pursuing depth and emotional resonance vis-à-vis limited resources. With Rockwell as the lone occupant of a lunar outpost, Moon is a space tale rooted in a kind of drab reality that makes it far more plausible (and frankly, scarier) than if it had wowed us with computer-generated imagery. Sam’s station is convincingly shown as an actual place in the dull gray of the lunar day combined with the cold metal of the machinery that performs the necessary tasks for a human to survive in such a locale.
Sam’s solitude is the main event, and the film makes us feel how heavy that is.
Indie science fiction carries on the tradition of the genre’s literary foundations, but it is also a force for innovation. It is composed of not just the big ideas but also the little ones—ones that might not seem significant or interesting until you really think about them. Maybe what indie sci-fi really does is ask a lot of questions, as opposed to just answering them. And by doing that, indie science fiction makes audiences work, too. It makes us audience members think not just about what it means to be human but also how it might mean something different when we’re living in, or simulating, a different reality.
If you hold narratives that make you think over narratives that make you feel, then indie sci-fi may be your intellectual jam. Watching a summer blockbuster is a fun experience, but it’s not the same as immersing yourself in a densely packed novel that keeps you interrogating its ideas long after you’ve closed the cover. Indie sci-fi may not always connect with quite as big an audience as the latest installment in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but it’s definitely throwing off some creative risktaking in the genre as a whole—it makes sci-fi “big” in a way summer blockbusters often aren’t.
If you look ahead, it seems the future of science fiction increasingly depends on continued innovation and passion among indie filmmakers. In today’s streaming era, when niche films can find a global audience, sci-fi indie work has found its lifeline. The Vast of Night, a 2019 film from newcomer director Andrew Patterson, is one of the best examples of the burgeoning medium. The movie tells the story of a strange signal and an even stranger set of circumstances surrounding that signal in a small, mostly forgotten part of America. The vexing and enigmatic tale unfolds in an almighty homage to UFO lore and the kinds of paranoia that classic 1950s and ’60s films put into the public consciousness.
The film is one that lives and breaths atmosphere, establishing a sense of place and character through sound and dialogue—not visuals. This was definitely a reminder that indie sci-fi is alive and well, and has a future in our world of franchised blockbuster cinema. Indeed, in its own flat way, the success of The Vast of Night feels like something of a victory for indie sci-fi at a time when the style’s chief purveyor, Shane Carruth, looks unlikely to helm another picture.
As long as there are movie directors ready to delve into the bizarre, the surreal, and the thoroughly human, sci-fi will still occupy an important and lively nook of our cultural landscape. And for those of us convinced that the genre should confront and unsettle us, as well as make us ponder in a wow!-that-was-some twist at the finale kind of way, indie films will remain sci-fi’s strong arm—rock steady, and quiet as a whisper, keeping its essence alive.
