THELMA AND LOUISE
A film review by James Davis Nicoll
Copyright James Davis Nicoll
May 31, 1956
THELMA AND LOUISE is the most recent attempt by Hollywood to cash in on sci-fi. The film is set 35 years in the future and the director chose to avoid the cliches of other B films (Giant insects, Atomic war, Alien invasions) and try for a more 'realistic' feel by looking at the future from the point of view of two women. I suppose it is the same reason UNCLE TOM'S CABIN used a coloured man as the main character; you get a different perspective from underneath. I'm a big fan of sci-fi, and I had high hopes for this film, but unfortunately, what Ridley Scott has produced is a smutty dystopia, whose technology is scarcely more advanced than our own.
First Big Mistake: The Setting
Scott chose to set THELMA AND LOUISE in a backwater state. While this means he didn't have to pay for the expensive sets portraying a futuristic city, which his accountant no doubt thanked him for, it also means that the two characters spend most of their time driving around scenery that seems not to have changed in any major way in the next three and a half decades (well, once or twice, you do get to see what seems to be the Interstate and National Defense road system, but that's just something we're working on *now*, scarcely futuristic). Now, while it makes sense that the two women would want to keep to the backroads, surely in 35 years, we'd have better backroads than dirt and the occasional hardtop.
Second Big Mistake: The Story
THELMA AND LOUISE is at best described as pornographic. Sex scenes abound, and the subject of sex seems to be a major theme in the movie. Now, there's nothing wrong with the occasional kiss or whatever, if it is handled with taste, but this movie goes far beyond good taste. Worse, it is inconsistent. On one hand, Scott presents a future where women apparently have relations with men on a fairly casual basis (One of the women claims not to have "had" any one but her husband, but falls into bed with a hitchhiker the women pick up and the other woman acts pleased that this happened), but women also seem to be the target of continual unwanted advances, and if the comments of the older woman are correct, women who are raped can't hope to be believed (although given the easy nature of the two women in this film, it is easy to see why). Is sex good or bad? Don't ask Mr. Scott, because he doesn't seem to have made up his mind.
Third Big Mistake: The Technology
To put it mildly, Ridley Scott's 1991 is not very advanced, given the 35 years that have supposedly gone by. The cars don't have fins. Ovens have gotten smaller. There are no videophones, though, and although I looked hard, there didn't seem to be very many pieces of technology that we couldn't built today. They have "microwave ovens," which makes sense (radar can cook things *fast*!), they have radio-controlled TV (same programs as we have, judging by the sound track in the scene where the FBI is watching TV). Because Scott tries hard to look at the future from the perspective of someone living in that future, what new technology is shown isn't explained. Why do people have radar dishes in their back yards? What is that TV-like screen one FBI man is studying? We never find out. It would have worked better as a sci-fi film if Scott had figured out a way to put the technolgy more in the spot-light.
The police do seem to have advanced slightly. They have flocks of helicopters, and the police cars have megaphones on them (again, nothing we couldn't do). On the other hand, the cops seem to have softened in 35 years; one policeman seems to care more about the two murderers he is chasing than he does the man they killed, and another is shown crying as soon as he is threatened. Are men supposed to be all soft crybabies or drooling apes in 1991?
Even weapons don't seem to have changed much. No blasters or ray guns for Mr. Scott. The women have a revolver and an automatic and the police have rifles. The rifles looked unfamiliar, but were never used, so I couldn't tell if they were any better than the rifles the army uses now. Again, there didn't seem to be any radical changes, just a lot more of what we have now.
THELMA AND LOUISE is a sci-fi film that suffers from a terrible lack of vision on Ridley Scott's part. His future is not much different from our present, except that it has more sex, funny looking cars, and a lot of helicopters. I had to agree with the despairing note the movie ends on; THELMA AND LOUISE is just a bleak, pornographic version of our present, with the slight advances in technology more than made up for by social decay. This is not a future I would want to live in.
James Nicoll
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