Movie ratings aggregator Rotten Tomatoes serves one function at least: it lets us know where the real crap is. If a movie or TV show has a massive disjunct between critic and user ratings, it’s almost always the users who are right. Who, after all, are you going to believe: the legacy media critics who rate Hannah Gadsby’s dreary moan-a-thons as “100 per cent” the pinnacle of ‘comedy’, or the users who rated it a dismal 26 per cent?
Even more telling is when the website refuses to allow user ratings at all. When that happens, you know it’s a piece of unwatchable crap – but it’s crap that ticks all THE MESSAGE boxes.
Like this:
In Emma Hough Hobbs and Leela Varghese’s award-winning directorial debut, Lesbian Space Princess, outer space emerges as a new and inclusive habitat for a smart, funny story exploring the inner spaces of lesbian consciousness and self-affirmation.
The film pushes hard against the gendered conventions of the sci-fi genre, re-pointing them to unexpected ends.
If the title isn’t warning enough, the parroted catch-phrases like inclusive give it away beyond doubt.
And any critic who blithers about the “gendered conventions of the sci-fi genre” knows absolutely nothing about the science fiction genre.
Robert Heinlein’s All You Zombies featured an intersex protagonist in 1958. Ursula K LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness centred around an ambisexual alien race in 1969. Heroines Jiriel of Joiry and Red Sonja were swinging swords alongside the Conans and other musclebound barbarians in 1934. Arthur C Clarke wrote openly gay astronauts (2010: Odyssey Two, 1982) and aboriginal characters (A Fall of Moondust, 1961). The hero of Heinlein’s Starship Troopers (1959) is Puerto Rican. Julian May’s Saga of the Exiles books had lesbian warrior maids, Native American judges, cross-dressing starship engineers, xenophobic starship captains and many more.
All of those books and characters were bestsellers. Movie heroines such as Princess Leia (Star Wars, 1977) and Ellen Ripley (Alien, 1979) became icons long before ‘diversity’. Science Fiction is a genre whose only convention is busting conventions. Anyone who thinks SF is somehow gender-straitjacketed is talking through their arse.
And anyone who writes didactic crap like this should be frankly embarrassed.
Can introspective Princess Saira rescue her ex-girlfriend, Kiki, from the evil clutches of a rogue group of incels known as the Straight White Maliens?
Gosh, such originality! Such imagination! Wherever do they get such amazingly unique ideas?
Low on self-confidence and belittled by her royal lesbian mothers, Saira sustains an unshakeable attachment to Kiki, a soft-butch bounty hunter who is as attachment avoidant as Saira is clingy. Saira battles through the beautifully drawn pink-hued reaches of constellations and moonscapes in a spaceship (depressively voiced by Richard Roxburgh). As she reluctantly traverses outer space, she must step up to its greatest challenge: plumbing the messy depths of her inner world.
Saira hails from Clitopolis, a place reputed to be hard to find but actually quite easy (one of many running jokes that tap into lesbian takes on heterosexual inadequacy). She has grown up in an exclusively gay space, kept safe by the bubble of drag.
But once this camp seam is pierced, she finds herself in a masculinist universe dominated by Straight White Maliens and others determined to steal her totemic labrys. The Maliens appear as cigarette shapes devoid of colour. Their differences are delineated only by the amount of anger and frustration conveyed in their single-line eyebrows.
They hector and rage in their aptly named man cave, where they train themselves in the old arts of mansplaining and making non-consensual advances. Desperate to pull “hot chicks”, the Maliens have no idea how to build relationships with women.
Jesus Christ, I wrote less embarrassing crap than this when I was a desperately edgy 15-year-old. Even Joseph Goebbels would exclaim, ‘Mein Gott! Zis is as subtle as ein vorschlaghammer!’
Wrap all that up in a package of the most dully generic animation style imaginable, and you’ve got the sort of shit sandwich that steams the knickers of critics, but almost no science fiction fan, let alone general audience member, will ever actually watch it.
