Last week Jeff and I checked out Total Recall from the Oakland Public Library. Jeff thinks this is one of the few passable movies involving Schwarzenegger (if not the only one); I’m not sure I would be so generous with my praise.
In any case, the point of this post is not to critique Arnie’s acting. The point is that this is a movie about humans on Mars.
By chance I ordered Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra at the same time. And I do mean chance; I had absolutely no idea what these books were about when I ordered them, only that they were written by C. S. Lewis, that Jeff had read and liked Out of the Silent Planet, and that we owned the third book of the trilogy and thus that I was obligated to lay my hands on the first two before opening the last.
Out of the Silent Planet is a member of the first, classic generation of science fiction, where almost nothing was known about the conditions in the deep ocean or on the other planets in our solar system, and therefore fantasy was allowed to roam freely where it is now lamentably restricted by fact. For example, the hero of Lewis’ novel simply pokes his head out of his spaceship and breathes freely of the Martian atmosphere.
Anyone familiar with the premise of Total Recall cannot fail to be struck by the contrast. Still, I would be hard pressed to concede that the post-moon-landing movie is any more realistic than Lewis’ seventy-year-old tale.
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