Description:

SUMMARY:
"Science Fiction Film examines one of the most enduring and popular genres of Hollywood cinema, suggesting how the science fiction film reflects attitudes toward science, technology, and reason as they have evolved in American culture over the course of the twentieth century. J. P. Telotte provides a survey of science fiction film criticism, emphasizing humanist, psychological, ideological, feminist, and postmodern critiques. He also sketches a history of the genre, from its earliest literary manifestations to the present, while touching on and comparing it to pulp fiction, early television science fiction, and Japanese anime. Telotte offers in-depth readings of four key films: RoboCop, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, THX 1138, and The Fly, each of which illustrates a particular fantastic branch of science fiction, as well as the difficulties of any genre classification. Challenging the boundaries usually seen between high and low culture, literature and film, science fiction and horror, Science Fiction Film reasserts the central role of fantasy in popular films, even those concerned with reason, science, and technology."--BOOK JACKET.