Fantasy

Professor Sidney Perkowitz is a deeply deluded man:

Science fiction movies should be allowed only one major transgression of the laws of physics, according to a US professor who has won backing from a number of his peers after creating a set of guidelines for Hollywood.

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The guidelines are by Sidney Perkowitz, a professor of physics at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia and a member of the Science and Entertainment Exchange, an advisory body run by the US National Academy of Sciences.

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"I am not offended if they make one big scientific blunder in a given film," Perkowitz added. "You can have things move faster than the speed of light if you want. But after that I would like things developed in a coherent way."

"If you violate that you are in trouble. The chances are that the public will pick it up and that is what matters to Hollywood. [...]

In written SF, there's a corner of the genre known as 'hard SF' where writers take great pains to base their stories on extrapolations from the current state of the art in physics/biology/information technology/[insert scientific field of choice here]. Done well, it's a satisfying approach to storytelling. Sometimes, even hard SF writers will allow themselves one big breach of the general principle of scientific plausibility, often (as Perkowitz suggests) permitting some form of FtL travel, the better to allow the action to move around.

Unfortunately, sticking to the rules of hard SF tends to rule out visually appealing space battles, face to face conversation in real time between humans and aliens, governments capable of extending their writ across multiple star systems, hand-held ray guns and … well … pretty much all the tools of the trade of the modern, CGI-heavy SF blockbuster. I'd love to see more hard SF films, but I find it hard to believe that the moviegoing masses care. Modern Hollywood blockbusters are more space opera than hard SF.

Put it another way: how many of the Best SF films would survive the Perkowitz test? Of those films in the top 20 that I've seen, I reckon Alien,¹ 2001: A Space Odyssey,², Blade Runner³ and The Thing⁴ might pass, but we'd have lost a whole bunch of highly entertaining SF films to a 'one strike and you're out' rule.

1. Allowing for the existence of the xenomorph. ↩
2. Allowing for the presence of aliens that nudged humanity's evolution in the right direction at crucial moments throughout our history. ↩
3. If you'll permit the existence of replicants. ↩
4. Given the existence of a shape-shifting alien. ↩