Science fiction is a genre of film that depends on suspension of disbelief, more so than any other type of film. We live in a world where there are police cars chasing fleeing suspects every day, so the car chases in action films are reasonable. We live in a world where someone like Jeffrey Dahmer can kill and eat 17 people over 13 years, so even the most outlandish horror movie ghouls aren’t really that far-fetched. But the moment you get robots and aliens and futuristic technology involved? Then you’re talking crazy.
That’s why science fiction movies, in order to not be cheesy, need to work twice as hard to keep the audience grounded. Instead of just using our time period, sci-fi filmmakers have to create an alternate time period and, indeed, a whole new world for their characters to inhabit, from the bleak dystopian future of Blade Runner to the sterile white nightmare of Logan’s Run. Once you’re invested in creating this world and its technology, you can go about telling the story you want to tell with all the frills the audience likes. Everything from types of food to modes of transportation have to fit the new futurescape, otherwise the audience never buys into the story and doesn’t care about the inevitable awesome climax.
Audiences like tension, they like a sense of danger and urgency, and audiences LOVE big, expensive explosions. Sci-fi movies deliver massive kabooms in spades, and io9 has a great list of their favorite science fiction movie ship self-destruct sequences. In an action movie, the heroes will wreck a sports car while stopping the bad guys. In horror movies, things (and people) explode all the time. In sci-fi movies, sometimes you have to blow up an impossibly-expensive star ship to stop the unstoppable alien killing machine.
That’s what heroes do!
