In the summer of 1982, six prominent sci-fi flicks were released within a few months of each other. The Road Warrior, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, The Thing, and Blade Runner are still considered classics 40 years later. Audiences might have been surprised to discover that sci-fi cinema that summer had turned dark, scary, and violent.
The movies on our list are a rebuke to the reputation of the movies of the 1980s as slick, bright, and flashy. They channel the fear of nuclear destruction. They are anxious about the rise of environmental devastation, rapidly changing social values, and exponential advances in computer technology. The 40th anniversary of these sci-fi classics has a thread of darkness running between them.
During the peak of the Australian New Wave, the no-budget Mad Max became a minor hit in the U.S. With a bigger budget and a more developed story world, the hit sequel leaned further into the apocalyptic wasteland and pitted Max against a band of punks who threaten the last remnants of society. Audiences felt like they were going to die when they saw the concept.
The Mad Max movies, directed by George Miller, were released in the early to mid 80s, speculating on what a nuclear war would look like. Miller's films were among the most popular of these entries due to the charisma of Gibson as a man with no-name type who becomes a community savior. The director has an ability to make action/chase scenes that are better than any other director. He would go on to perfect his skills with Mad Max:Fury Road, which is considered one of the best action films of all time. The Road Warrior was praised. The ninth best film of the 1980s was named by a poll.
Fears of nuclear war were exploited by Star Trek II. The sequel to Star Trek: The Motion Picture was a bloody and violent affair, one in which Kirk (William Shatner) and the Enterprise crew try to survive the Khan (Ricardo Montalban), a product of late-20th century.
The movie has a narrative and visual allusions to nuclear war and its aftermath, though they are allegorized as a futuristic space adventure. Khan has been through a lot of world wars. The Genesis resembles the A-bombs the U.S. dropped on Japan. Many of the wounded on both sides of the conflict have been hit by bombs and radiation. The kid was burned beyond recognition when his uncle brought him to the bridge after the battle, and Spock was poisoned when he tried to save the crew. The Day After, the television movie event, was such a realistic depiction of a nuclear holocaust that President Ronald Reagan screened it in the White House.
Steven Spielberg's E.T. is the biggest box-office hit of the summer, and it sports more cute and funny moments than the other entries. The movie dramatizes the damage done by divorce, the struggles of single mothers, and the faceless authorities who do more harm than good.
Spielberg has spoken about how his parents' divorce traumatised him and E.T. is painfully realistic in depicting how that must have felt. The movie shows a time in the early 1980s when divorce was becoming more common and when the phenomenon oflatchkey kids was born, like 10-year-old Elliot and his siblings, Gertie. The kids are left to their own devices so often that they are able to befriend, hide, and later save E.T. It all leads to a wrenching goodbye between E.T. and his found family that channels all of Spielberg's feelings of abandonment and loss.
In the 70s and 80s, TV, movies, and music were all about the 1950s. It makes sense that the 1980s would embrace the sci-fi golden age of the 1950s, and that decade's cinematic allegories for the evolving threat of nuclear war.
John Carpenter's The Thing is a remake of Howard Hawk's famous 1951 sci-fi/horror thriller that received much of its initial attention and criticism for its innovative (and disgusting) use of animatronics and prosthetic makeup effects to depict men.
The Thing is a story about the end of the world. It is a depiction of a war for civilization in which paranoia reigns supreme and nobody can trust their fellow man, especially MacReady, played by Kurt Russell. The movie failed at the box office because of the ambiguous fate of the survivors and the dim outlook on the future of humanity. The Thing is now considered a stone-cold classic because of that chilling ending.
The American Film Institute named Blade Runner one of the greatest American films of all time in 2008 after it became a critical failure and box office bomb. The movie's darkness and despair has become celebrated and is considered to be one of the most influential in all cinema.
Harrison Ford playing Rick Deckard, who shoots two, was a disappointment to Harrison Ford fans who had just seen the swashbuckling of Han Solo and Indiana Jones. The effect of the hard-R brutality was the same for audiences of the time.
The depiction of an environment blasted Los Angeles that rich people couldn't wait to leave was at odds with the political rhetoric of the day.
Disney's TRON, about computer programmers who enter the world of a video game to prevent a menacing virtual intelligence, is the least successful of the summer's sci-fi films in terms of artistic merit and cultural longevity. It was the first film to extensively feature computer-generated imagery, and it was one of the earliest versions of Star Trek II. It makes sense that TRON became famous for its excellent arcade game as much as it was for the movie's content.
TRON seems shiny and colorful on its surface, but it is also more dark and brooding than any of the other films on our list. The idea that advances in computer technology could lead to evil artificial intelligence, and that people might be trapped within virtual worlds, hit a nerve in 1982 when personal computing was entering households en masse and nuclear strikes could be ordered with the push of a button.
The films on our list remain popular, influential and important, great sci-fi adventures whose darkness evokes a time when things were not as flashy and upbeat as pop culture history often makes them seem. For their 40th anniversary, they are worth a revisit.
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