The film industry has had strangely few encounters with the concept of space tourism. Most space writers have concentrated their minds on war, exploitation of resources, and scientific exploration, rather than space travel for pleasure. At first, this seems unsurprising. Most of us realise that conflict is the best source of dramatic entertainment and therefore scripts where people simply have a good time are unlikely to be successful.
Still, there are plenty of films involving pleasant journeys that go wrong in some way (The Hangover; The Roadtrip; Planes, Trains and Automobiles; National Lampoons; to name just a few . . .) and relatively few are set in space. Considering the imminent arrival of space travel for leisure in our lives, or at least the lives of the super-rich, this seems like a failure of science fiction’s imagination. So, what are the best science fiction films about space tourism?
1. Space Tourists
This 2009 documentary contrasts the lives of super-rich space tourists with desperately poor Kazakhs who search for rocket debris that has fallen to Earth’s plains after shuttle launches. Swiss director Christian Frei interconnects the story of the first female non-astronaut space traveller, American-Iranian Anousheh Ansari, who paid US$20 million for her flight into space, with the activities of a group of metal salvagers who collect and sell aluminum and titanium from discarded rocket stages to China. Rare footage of little-seen working communities, candid space station scenes from Ansari’s own camera, and haunting Russian ‘space folk music’ make this Sundance World Cinema Directing Award winner a hugely worthwhile watch.
2. Total Recall
The Philip K. Dick 1966 short story “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” has twice been made into a film, both times named Total Recall. For me, the classic incarnation of main character Douglas Quaid (or Quail in the story) will always be Arnold Schwarzenegger, directed in 1990 by Dutch filmmaker Paul Verhoeven.
The year is 2084 and Mars has been brutally colonized for mining. On Earth, married construction worker Quaid has a dull life and fantasises about visiting Mars and meeting a mysterious woman. He decides to visit Rekall, a company that implants hyper-realistic fake memories. He selects memories of a blue-skied Mars where he is a double agent. From there, the film takes a turn, with the line between Quaid’s ‘real’ and ‘fake’ memories blurred and Quaid apparently taking a trip as an agent who will free Mars from tyranny.
The narrative’s well-managed ambiguity paired with unforgettable scenes of exploding heads, poisonous atmospheres, and disruptive body imagery, make Total Recall a stand-out in both Verhoeven’s and Schwarzenegger’s oeuvres.
3. Aniara (2018)
Though passengers on the Aniara are not leaving Earth simply for a pleasure trip, since Earth has been devastated by climate change, their voyage is still portrayed as routine mass transit – a three-week-long luxurious flight to a new life on Mars. Routine and luxurious, that is, until disaster strikes and the ship veers off course, trapping the commuters (and viewers) into a journey of unknown length and destination.
Virtual reality and AI are employed to keep passengers calm and entertained, evoking their memories of a green, abundant Earth, but the serenity cannot last and the ship gradually becomes a tragic and maddening flying sarcophagus. Based on Swedish Nobel laureate Harry Martinson’s disturbingly beautiful 1956 poem, this is an existential crisis in space.
4. 2001: A Space Odyssey / Star Wars
Though space travel for pleasure is not the point of these films, they both include incidental space tourism.
Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey shows routine space travel with the reusable Pam American Orion III, a craft about the size of a Boeing 737 which could carry around 30 passengers from Earth to Space Station 5, where it would rendez-vous with another craft, the Aries 1b Lunar Lander. Its flight attendants had Velcro shoes to keep them from floating.
The Star Wars universe includes numerous entertaining asides and background scenes involving the concept of interplanetary leisure travel. Droids and humans work alongside each other in Dex’s Diner on the planet Coruscant – a kind of wild west hostelry in space. In the Star Wars films and series, tourists are not ‘beamed’ or magically ‘tele-transported’ anywhere (unless using The Force), but physically shipped. In episode five of The Book of Boba Fett we see ‘Mando’ the Mandalorian attempt to board a commercial ‘starliner’ where his armour and weaponry are found questionable by boarding staff.
Glimpses of space tourism like this give us an entertaining insight into what the future might hold – and indeed, echo what is happening already in the world.
5. E.T. the Extra Terrestrial
Boy meets alien in this quirky 1982 Spielberg-Mathison story which was rejected by Columbia Studios, who thought it had no commercial potential. It went on to become the highest-grossing film of all time (beating Star Wars) and held that position for 11 years. Although the setting is Earth, E.T. fits our leisure space travel criteria here because it tells of an alien on a secret night-time botany trip to our blue planet. Just like an unfortunate tourist on a cruise, E.T. is drawn by bright city lights and so fails to rejoin his ship and is left stranded by his fellow explorers.
A classic tale of friendship, and the redemptive power of love and sacrifice, one of its most famous lines also sums up a very familiar aspect of travel and tourism: no matter how far or exotic, or how much you’ve enjoyed or extended your trip, there’s no place like Home.
