Had a discussion with a fellow writer last evening -- he's had some Fantasy stories published. We dipped briefly into the idea of Big Villain in science-fiction & fantasy films, and he came back with this quip...
"Yep, you can have drama and conflict without a revenge-crazed villain. What a concept."
4 comments:
You can do it in any genre. Take the excellent MASTER AND COMMANDER. At no point do you see a human enemy, yet the tension is palpable.
Do we need another Darth Vader (whose 6+ hour backstory added nothing to his character, in my opinion) or Doctor Doom? Why can't a threat, especially in sci-fi be something uknowable? Something alien, without such traits and "vengeful" or "evil"?
It's time to give the old Out for World-Domination Villain, at odds with his human frailty, a rest isn't it?
"Enjonze" said, above: 'Why can't a threat, especially in sci-fi be something uknowable? Something alien, without such traits and "vengeful" or "evil"?'
What SF film immediately came to mind, in order to answer the question, and in keeping with the season, was "Star Trek - The Motion Picture". The driving motivation of that film's antagonist, V'Ger, and the reason it was barrelling toward Earth, was to meet its "creator"; and to just ask an innocent question: "Is this all that I am?... is there nothing more?"
Brilliance in a flawed film. And one sans raving lunatic screaming quotable lines.
One thing I tried in an (unpublished) story was an antagonist who is making the most of one chance to prove himself and gain recognition... in the society that happened to be opposed to the heroes' society. And they became a prominent part of the conflict between those societies. So, nothing personal, but...
After I wrote my comment, I did think about Star Trek: The Motion Picture. I agree that is a great premise, not fully realized in the film.
I think another reason we're stuck with so few tropes is that, for the past 40 years, sci-fi has been squarely aimed at 14 year-old boys. Nothing wrong with that, unless you happen to grow out of being a 14 year-old boy. Some never do, and will keep buying these regurgitated stories forever. Others graduate to "better" sci-fi such as J.G. Ballard. I purposely didn't include fantasy here, because I think that genre has always been aimed at 14 year-old boys, it never had the intellectual growth that sci-fi had in the 50s and 60s before it was dumbed down for the kiddies.
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