This summer's sci-fi vision is warm and fuzzy

HOLLYWOOD -- Forty years ago, at the height of the race between the United States and the Soviet Union to lay claim to the cosmos, a much-anticipated science-fiction movie made its debut and sci-fi was never the same again.

Kids whose parents dragged them along to the theater were alternately bemused, disturbed and mesmerized. We knew we'd seen a grown-up movie, even if we couldn't completely make sense of it all. What was up with the weird baby, the deafening Teutonic music, that thing that looked like a giant blackboard turned sideways? We were being initiated into a cultural dialogue that was, after all, about our future.

The movie was Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey," and many critics and much of the public instantly recognized it as a landmark. It was, wrote Los Angeles Times film critic Charles Champlin, "the picture that science-fiction fans of every age and in every corner of the world have prayed (sometimes forlornly) that the industry might some day give them."

This summer, another sci-fi movie, Pixar's animated "WALL*E," is generating the same sort of critical hallelujahs that "2001" did in its day. Technically, "WALL*E" is indeed a marvel, especially the long, nearly wordless opening sequence that shows the title character, a trash-collecting robot, going about his lonely labors on an environmentally devastated Earth.

But this G-rated movie, with its lovable protagonist and ultimately reassuring message about mankind's fate, also strikes me as something of an evasion, a retreat from the knottier issues and themes raised in "2001" and other classic sci-films of the 1960s and '70s, such as "Planet of the Apes" (1968) and "Silent Running" (1972).

Shielding us from truth

Wait a minute, you're thinking: "WALL*E" is a family-friendly popcorn flick, right? It's not supposed to be Ray Bradbury, Ursula Le Guin or William Gibson. It's a gentle, amusing parable about planetary survival that can be grasped by anyone with an 8-year-old's social conscience.

But that's exactly the point. How come this year Hollywood's big-budget take on the four-alarm state of our world is wrapped in a warm-and-fuzzy cartoon? Can we not handle the inconvenient truth about melting glaciers, toxic air and species extinction unless it comes swaddled in feel-good stories about, say, dancing penguins or cuddly trash compactors? And if animated movies are going to tackle serious subjects, as they increasingly do, shouldn't they be held to serious standards?

Ever since Jules Verne and H.G. Wells began writing about spaceships and alien invaders, science fiction has struggled to be taken seriously as a genre worthy of adults. But cinema, beginning with the 14-minute classic "Le Voyage dans la lune" (A Trip to the Moon), in 1902, has helped us envision the final frontier in a way few books could.

As World War II drew to an end, even the most outlandish futuristic scenarios -- rocket travel, weapons of mass destruction, planetary annihilation -- suddenly seemed possible. In the decades since, classic science-fiction movies have demonstrated that imagining the shape of things to come is too serious a task to be treated as mere child's play. The Cold War and Atomic Age anxieties of 1956's "Forbidden Planet," the fears of artificial intelligence run amok in "2001," the pending environmental meltdown foreshadowed in "Silent Running" and the threat of creeping dehumanization raised in "Blade Runner" (1982) helped establish science-fiction movies as being not simply gee-whiz entertainments for adolescents of all ages but valuable pop-culture portals for examining -- and trying to counteract -- the dangerous tendencies of human behavior in the here and now.