Pessimism is easy. A world that is doomed requires no maintenance, which appeals to laziness. And fiery conflagration will more reliably sell movie tickets than visions of a long-term solution. As a result our popular futurists tend to show us a world consumed by catastrophe far more often than one preserved by ingenuity.
In any Science Fiction movie set on earth the primary plot is usually built around the world being threatened by the unknown. The prototype for this story line can be found in religious texts. Even though the first modern example is H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, the idea of superior beings arbitrarily menacing humanity by reason of their inherent superiority has been with mankind since it could compose stories to explain phenomena it did not understand.
There is however a notable counterpoint within Science Fiction. Based on the traditions of humanism we are occasionally shown films where humans persist and even triumph through ingenuity, cooperation, and goodness or in some case an exterior benevolent force.
This series highlights films that instead of gazing out dejected at the dark and menacing forest of dangers in which we survive, choose to concentrate on tending and feeding the spark and fire of life that our humanity represents.
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