Turning Point SCI-FI: when the Hero’s realization of a Hidden Truth or Failed Strategy triggers a Pivotal Moment of Transformation –forcing them to adopt a different approach and take Action that shapes their personal Destiny … and the course of the Story.
Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972)
Conquest of the Planet of the Apes is an American SCI-FI film directed by J. Lee Thompson and written by Paul Dehn. The film is the sequel to Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971) and the fourth installment in the original Planet of the Apes film series. It stars Roddy McDowall, Don Murray, Ricardo Montalbán, Natalie Trundy, and Hari Rhodes.
Storyline
After a North American pandemic from a space-borne disease in 1983 wipes out all dogs and cats, the Police State government takes chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans as pets, establishing a culture based on ape slave labor (Events foretold in 1973 testimony by Cornelius and Zira, chimpanzee scientists from the future, before they were killed.) Believed to be dead, their baby is secretly raised by circus owner Armando (Montalban). In 1991, fully grown and named Caesar (McDowall), the ape is brought to a city to distribute flyers for Armando’s circus. During their trip, Armando advises him not to speak in public for fear of his life.
After seeing a gorilla being beaten and drugged, Caesar shouts “Lousy human bastards!”. Armando attempts to defuse the ensuing commotion by taking responsibility for the exclamation. He plans to turn himself in to the authorities and bluff his way out while instructing Caesar to hide among the apes for safety. Caesar obeys and hides in a cage of orangutans, finding himself being trained for slavery through violent conditioning. He is then sold at auction to Governor Breck (Murray) and put to work by Breck’s chief aide MacDonald, (Rhodes) whose African American heritage allows him to sympathize with the apes.
Meanwhile, Armando is interrogated by Inspector Kolp, who suspects his “circus ape” is the child of Cornelius and Zira. Kolp’s assistant puts Armando under a machine that psychologically forces people to be truthful. Realizing he cannot fight the machine, Armando jumps through a window and dies. When Caesar learns of Armando’s death, it is a Turning Point: he loses faith in human kindness. In secret, he begins teaching the apes combat and has them gather weapons.
Breck eventually learns that Caesar is the ape the police are hunting. Meanwhile, Caesar realizes MacDonald is an ally to the apes’ cause and reveals himself to him. MacDonald understands Caesar’s intent to depose Breck, but expresses his doubts about the revolution’s effectiveness. Caesar is later captured by Breck’s men and is electrically tortured into speaking. Hearing him speak, Breck orders Caesar to be killed. With MacDonald’s help, they trick Breck into believing Caesar has died. Once Breck leaves, Caesar kills his torturer and escapes.
Caesar takes over Ape Management. While setting the city on fire, Caesar and the rest of the apes proceed to the Command Center, killing most of the Riot Police that attempt to stop them in the process — and have Breck marched out to be executed. MacDonald pleads with Caesar not to succumb to brutality and be merciful to the former masters.
As the apes raise their rifles to beat Breck to death, Caesar’s girlfriend Lisa (Trundy) voices her objection, saying “No!”. She is the first ape to speak other than Caesar, but the other apes are concerned about Caesar’s bloodlust as well. Caesar reconsiders and orders the apes to lower their weapons, deciding that they can afford to be humane, since the fight is already won and they “have seen the birth of the planet of the apes”.
Star Wars (1977)
Star Wars (later retitled Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope) is an American epic SCI-FI film written and directed by George Lucas, produced by Lucasfilm Ltd. and released by Twentieth Century-Fox. The cast includes Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, Peter Cushing, Alec Guinness, Anthony Daniels, Kenny Baker, Peter Mayhew, David Prowse, and James Earl Jones.
Storyline
In a period of galactic civil war, Rebel Alliance spies have stolen blueprints to the Death Star, a colossal space station built by the Galactic Empire that is capable of destroying entire planets. Princess Leia Organa of Alderaan (Fisher), secretly a rebel leader, has obtained the schematics, but her ship is intercepted and boarded by Imperial forces under the command of Darth Vader. Leia is taken prisoner, but the droids R2-D2 and C-3PO escape with the plans, crashing on the nearby desert planet of Tatooine. Darth Vader orders his troops to pursue the droids.
The droids are captured by Jawa traders, who sell them to the moisture farmers Owen and Beru Lars and their nephew, Luke Skywalker (Hamill). While Luke is cleaning R2-D2, he discovers a recording of Leia requesting help from a former ally named Obi-Wan Kenobi. R2-D2 goes missing, and while searching for him, Luke is attacked by Sand People. He is rescued by the elderly hermit Ben Kenobi, who soon reveals himself as Obi-Wan (Guiness). He tells Luke about his past as one of the Jedi Knights, peacekeepers of the former Galactic Republic, who drew mystical abilities from the Force and were all but exterminated by the Empire. Luke learns that his father, also a Jedi, fought alongside Obi-Wan during the Clone Wars until Vader, Obi-Wan’s former pupil, turned to the dark side of the Force and murdered him. Obi-Wan gives Luke his father’s lightsaber, the signature weapon of the Jedi.
R2-D2 plays Leia’s full message, in which she begs Obi-Wan to take the Death Star plans to Alderaan and give them to her father, a fellow veteran, for analysis. Luke initially declines Obi-Wan’s offer to accompany him to Alderaan and learn the ways of the Force. However, he quickly changes his mind after Imperial stormtroopers murder his family and destroy his home while searching for the droids. Luke Skywalker’s Turning Point is deciding to leave Tatooine with Obi-Wan Kenobi after finding his home destroyed and his family killed, transforming from a farm boy into a Jedi apprentice. Seeking a way off the planet, Luke and Obi-Wan travel with the droids to the city of Mos Eisley and hire the smuggler Han Solo (Ford) and his Wookiee partner Chewbacca, pilots of the starship Millennium Falcon.
On the way to Alderaan, Obi-Wan begins Luke’s training in the use of the Force. Meanwhile, the Death Star commander Grand Moff Tarkin (Cushing) has Alderaan obliterated by the station’s superlaser. The Death Star’s tractor beam captures the Falcon, but Luke and his companions manage to avoid detection and infiltrate the station. Vader, however, senses Obi-Wan’s presence, and begins searching for him. As Obi-Wan deactivates the tractor beam, Luke persuades Han and Chewbacca to help him rescue Leia, who is scheduled for execution after refusing to reveal the location of the rebel base. After disabling the tractor beam, Obi-Wan sacrifices himself in a lightsaber duel against Vader, which allows the rest of the group to escape. Using a tracking device placed on the Falcon, the Empire locates the rebel base on the moon Yavin 4.
Analysis of the Death Star schematics reveals a weakness in a small exhaust port leading directly to the station’s reactor. Luke joins the Rebellion’s X-wing squadron in a desperate attack against the Death Star, while Han and Chewbacca leave to pay off a debt to the crime lord Jabba the Hutt. In the ensuing battle, Vader leads a squadron of TIE fighters and destroys several rebel ships, while Tarkin prepares to destroy Yavin 4 with the Death Star. Han and Chewbacca unexpectedly return in the Falcon, knocking Vader’s ship off course before he can shoot Luke down. Guided by the voice of Obi-Wan’s spirit, Luke uses the Force to aim his torpedoes into the exhaust port, causing the Death Star to explode moments before it can fire on the rebel base. In a triumphant ceremony, Leia awards Luke and Han medals for their heroism.
Back to the Future (1985)
Back to the Future is an American SCI-FI film directed by Robert Zemeckis and written by Zemeckis and Bob Gale. It stars Michael J. Fox, Christopher Lloyd, Lea Thompson, Crispin Glover, and Thomas F. Wilson.
Storyline
In 1985, teenager Marty McFly (Fox) lives in Hill Valley, California, with his depressed alcoholic mother, Lorraine; (Thompson) his older siblings, who are professional and social failures; and his meek father, George ,(Glover) who is bullied by his supervisor, Biff Tannen (Wilson). After Marty’s band fails a music audition, he confides in his girlfriend, Jennifer Parker, that he fears becoming like his parents despite his ambitions.
That night, Marty meets his eccentric scientist friend, Emmett “Doc” Brown, (Lloyd) in the Twin Pines mall parking lot. Doc unveils a time machine built from a modified DeLorean, powered by plutonium he swindled from Libyan terrorists. After Doc inputs a destination time of November 5, 1955 (the day he conceived his time travel invention), the terrorists arrive unexpectedly and gun him down. Marty flees in the DeLorean, inadvertently activating time travel when reaching 88 miles per hour (142 kilometers per hour).
Arriving in 1955, Marty discovers he has no plutonium, so he cannot return to 1985. While exploring a burgeoning Hill Valley, Marty encounters his teenage father, discovering Biff was bullying George even then. George falls into the path of an oncoming car while spying on the teenage Lorraine changing clothes, and Marty is knocked unconscious while saving him. He wakes to find himself tended to by Lorraine, who becomes infatuated with him. Marty tracks down and convinces a younger Doc that he is from the future. Doc explains the only source available in 1955 capable of generating the 1.21 gigawatts of power required for time travel is a lightning bolt. Marty shows Doc a flyer from the future that documents an upcoming lightning strike at the town’s courthouse. As Marty’s siblings begin to fade from a photo he carries with him, Doc realizes Marty’s actions are altering the future and jeopardizing his existence: Lorraine was supposed to tend to George instead of Marty after the car accident. Early attempts to get his parents acquainted fail, and Lorraine’s infatuation with Marty deepens.
Lorraine asks Marty to the school dance, and he plots to feign inappropriate advances on her, allowing George to intervene and rescue her, but the plan goes awry when Biff’s gang locks Marty in the trunk of the performing band’s car, while Biff forces himself onto Lorraine. George arrives expecting to find Marty but is assaulted by Biff — his major Turning Point occurs when he gains the confidence to stand up to Biff by knocking him out to save Lorraine. (This pivotal, self-assertive act transforms George from a timid, bullied pushover into a confident, successful writer by 1985.) He escorts the grateful Lorraine to the dance. The band frees Marty from their car, but the lead guitarist injures his hand in the process, so Marty takes his place, performing while George and Lorraine share their first kiss. With his future no longer in jeopardy, Marty hurries to the courthouse to meet Doc.
Doc discovers a letter from Marty warning him about his future and rips it up, worried about the consequences. To save Doc, Marty recalibrates the DeLorean to return ten minutes before he had left the future. The lightning strikes, sending Marty back to 1985, but the DeLorean breaks down, forcing Marty to run back to the mall. He arrives as Doc is being shot. While Marty grieves at his side, Doc sits up, revealing he had pieced Marty’s note back together and is wearing a bulletproof vest. He takes Marty home and departs to 2015 in the DeLorean. Marty wakes the next morning, discovering his father is now a confident and successful science fiction author, his mother is fit and happy, his siblings are successful, and Biff is a servile valet in George’s employ. As Marty reunites with Jennifer, Doc suddenly reappears in the DeLorean, insisting they return with him to the future to save their children from terrible fates.[a]
Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)
Terminator 2: Judgment Day is an American SCI-FI action film directed by James Cameron. Starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Linda Hamilton, Robert Patrick, and Edward Furlong, it is the sequel to The Terminator (1984) and is the second installment in the Terminator franchise.
Storyline
In 2029, Earth has been ravaged by the war between the malevolent artificial intelligence Skynet and the human resistance. Skynet sends the T-1000—an advanced, shape-shifting prototype Terminator made of virtually indestructible liquid metal—back in time to kill resistance leader John Connor when he is a child. To protect John, the resistance sends back a reprogrammed T-800 Terminator, a less advanced metal endoskeleton covered in living tissue.
In 1995 Los Angeles, John’s mother Sarah (Hamilton) is incarcerated in Pescadero State Hospital for her violent efforts to prevent “Judgment Day”—the prophesied events of August 29, 1997, when Skynet will gain sentience and, in response to its creators’ attempts to deactivate it, incite a nuclear holocaust. John, (Furlong) living with foster parents, also considers Sarah delusional and resents her efforts to prepare him for his future role. The T-1000 (Patrick) locates John in a shopping mall, but the T-800 (Schwarzenegger) intervenes, coming to John’s aid and enabling his escape. John calls to warn his foster parents, but the T-800 deduces that the T-1000 has already killed them. Realizing the T-800 is programmed to obey him, John forbids it to kill people and orders it to help him rescue Sarah from the T-1000.
The T-800 and John intercept Sarah as she attempts to escape the hospital. Initially horrified that the T-800 resembles the Terminator sent to kill her in 1984, she joins them and escapes the pursuing T-1000. Sarah uses the T-800’s knowledge of the future to learn that a revolutionary microprocessor, being developed by Cyberdyne engineer Miles Dyson, will be crucial to Skynet’s creation. (Sarah’s Turning Point: when she moves from being a victim to a proactive warrior, choosing to fight for the future after realizing the T-800 can be an ally.) Over the course of their journey, Sarah sees the T-800 serving as a friend and father figure to John, who teaches it catchphrases and hand signs while encouraging it to become more human-like.
Sarah plans to escape to Mexico with John, but a nightmare about Judgment Day prompts her to decide to kill Dyson. She attacks him in his home but cannot bring herself to go through with it and relents. John arrives and reconciles with Sarah while the T-800 explains to Dyson the future consequences of his work. Dyson reveals that his research has been reverse engineered from the CPU and severed arm of the 1984 Terminator. Believing that his work must be destroyed, Dyson helps Sarah, John, and the T-800 break into Cyberdyne, retrieve the CPU and the arm, and set explosives to destroy the lab. The police assault the building and fatally shoot Dyson, but he detonates the explosives as he dies. The T-1000 pursues the surviving trio, cornering them in a steel mill.
Sarah and John split up to escape while the T-1000 mangles the T-800 and briefly deactivates it by destroying its power source. The T-1000 assumes Sarah’s appearance and voice to lure out John, but Sarah intervenes and, along with the reactivated T-800, pushes it into a vat of molten steel, where it disintegrates. John also throws the 1984 Terminator’s arm and CPU into the vat. The T-800 explains that it must also be destroyed to prevent it from serving as a foundation for Skynet. Despite John’s tearful protests, the T-800 persuades him that its destruction is the only way to protect their future. Sarah, having come to respect the T-800, shakes its hand and lowers it into the vat. The T-800 gives John a thumbs-up as it is incinerated.
As Sarah drives down a highway with John, she reflects on her renewed hope for an unknown future, musing that if the T-800 could learn the value of life, so can humanity.
The Matrix (1999)
The Matrix is a SCI-FI action film written and directed by the Wachowskis. The first installment in the Matrix film series, it stars Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, Carrie-Anne Moss, Hugo Weaving, and Joe Pantoliano.
Storyline
In 1999, Thomas Anderson, (Reeves) a computer programmer known as “Neo” in hacking circles, delves into the mystery of the “Matrix”, bringing him to the attention of hacker Trinity (Moss). She tells him that the enigmatic Morpheus can answer Neo’s questions. At his workplace, Neo is pursued by Agents led by Agent Smith, (Weaving) while Morpheus, able to somehow observe their movements, guides him by phone, but Neo ultimately surrenders.
The Agents interrogate Neo about Morpheus, but he refuses to cooperate. In response, they seal his mouth shut and implant a robotic tracking device in his abdomen. Neo awakens at home, believing the encounter was a nightmare until Trinity and her companions remove the device and take him to Morpheus. Morpheus (Fishburne) offers Neo a choice: a red pill to uncover the truth about the Matrix or a blue pill to return to his normal life. Neo’s Turning Point is choosing to wake up from the Artificial Reality — by choosing the Red Pill — leaving his life as a hacker — and he awakens in the Real World, submerged in a mechanical pod and connected to invasive cables. He sees countless humans similarly encased and tended by machines before he is ejected from the building and rescued by Morpheus aboard the hovercraft Nebuchadnezzar.
Morpheus reveals that the year is approximately 2199. In the 21st century, humanity lost a war against its artificially intelligent creations, leaving Earth a devastated ruin. Humans blackened the sky to deprive the machines of solar power, but the machines retaliated by creating vast fields of artificially grown humans, harvesting their bioelectric energy. To keep their captives pacified, they built the Matrix, a simulated reality modeled on human civilization at its peak. The remaining free humans founded an underground refuge called Zion, surviving on scarce resources. Morpheus and his crew hack into the Matrix to liberate others, exploiting its rules to gain superhuman abilities inside it. Even so, they remain outmatched by the Agents—sentient programs that protect the system—and death in the Matrix means death in the real world. Morpheus freed Neo because he believes him to be “the One”, a prophesied figure destined to free humanity.
The crew enter the Matrix to seek guidance from the Oracle, who foretold of the One. She implies that Neo is not the One and warns him of an imminent choice between his life and Morpheus’s. The crew are ambushed by Agents after being betrayed by Cypher, (Pantoliano) a disillusioned crew member who longs to return to the virtual comforts of the Matrix. Convinced of Neo’s importance, Morpheus sacrifices himself to confront Smith and is captured. Meanwhile, Cypher exits the Matrix and begins disconnecting the others, killing them. Before he can kill Neo and Trinity, he is killed by Tank, a wounded crew member, who extracts the survivors.
Smith interrogates Morpheus to obtain access codes for Zion’s mainframe, which would enable the machines to destroy the human resistance. Determined to rescue Morpheus, Neo re-enters the Matrix with Trinity. They free Morpheus, who escapes the Matrix with Trinity, but Smith intercepts Neo. Realizing his potential, Neo fights Smith as an equal and kills him. However, Smith resurrects in a new body and kills Neo.
In the Real World, machines called Sentinels attack the Nebuchadnezzar. Standing by Neo’s body, Trinity confesses her love for him and reveals that the Oracle prophesied she would fall in love with the One. In the Matrix, Neo revives with the ability to perceive and manipulate its code. He effortlessly destroys Smith and escapes the Matrix just as the Nebuchadnezzar’s electromagnetic pulse disables the Sentinels. Later, within the Matrix, Neo communicates with the system, vowing to show humanity “a world where anything is possible”, before flying away
Turning Point SCI-FI often involves a Crisis that triggers an “Epiphany” or sudden profound Moment of Clarity — that forces the Hero to take Action. In the iconic film Network (1976) news anchor Howard Beale (played by Peter Finch) during a rant about the state of the world, put it this way:
“I’m as mad as hell,
and I’m not going to take this anymore!”
Is such a Moment in history fast approaching us now? Only Time will tell.
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