2024 Was a Great Year for Desert Planets
- Uncategorized
- December 10, 2024
“I like sand. It’s good for making castles and burying people in up to their necks then sculpting a fake body for them that’s really muscley or has big boobs and it feels nice when you dig your toes into it,” is what Anakin Skywalker might have said if he had had a happier childhood with less slavery and abduction and having to fight in an actual war.
And that alternate, more cheerful Anakin would have had a great time at the cinema this year. Astronomers have discovered potentially dozens of exoplanets that exist in the “Goldilocks zone” of their stars, neither too close or too far from their stars for those worlds to hold liquid water, but in 2024 movie makers have been brave enough to ask “Why don’t we set all our movies at the ‘Too Hot’ end of that scale?”
So as we roll into the closing weeks of 2024, let’s take a look at the worlds whose job is (the land-based part of) Beach.
Earth - Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, Fallout
Among other things, 2024 marked the 40th anniversary of the BBC docutelemovie, Threads. Threads followed the inhabitants of Sheffield through the consequences of a nuclear exchange and its long-term aftermath. It has become the benchmark for unflinching staring into the horrors of a potential nuclear conflict, shorn of any macho self-reliance power fantasies. It is one long, dark gaze into the abyss.
But science fiction is a genre about possibilities and questions, such as “What if instead of that, it was just really cool?”
So for our first planet on this list we’re going to fall back on the classic twist It Was Earth All Along. This how the world ends, not with a bang, but a sandpit.
First, there was Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. The cause and timeline of Mad Max’s apocalypse has only got vaguer as the number of movies grows. I think originally society collapsed because they ran out oil? But then why is everyone riding around on diesel powered vehicles the entire time?
But it sort of works to give the impression that we’re not being granted a window into events as they happen, but a visualization of an ancient tale being shared with you over a rat on a spit in the centuries-old airliner wreckage.
By now, the Mad Max films sort of feel less post-apocalyptic, and more like everyone has just decided to ride around the Australian outback on motorbikes as a lifestyle choice.
The Fallout TV series, meanwhile wastes not time in making it clear that this is the aftermath of the Bomb being dropped, where “the Bomb” is a giant water balloon filled with sand. Of course, this isn’t our terrifying post-nuclear future. This is the future of an alternate 1950s that is simultaneously more hi-tech, more capitalist and dystopian, and also more socially progressive.
Because if there is one thing science fiction loves more than a sandy post-apocalypse, it’s a gently satirical retrofuture that takes the aesthetics of a previous decade while politely brushing past the reactionary socially conservative ideology that fundamentally underpins it.
Alternatively
If the world ends, and the thing that’s left over is basically the same world but a bit dinged looking and covered in sand, did the world even end?
Fermi’s Progress: Dyson’s Fear avoids this needless ambiguity by killing everyone, including you, the reader, within the first few lines of the book, blowing up the planet and reducing what’s left to a thin cloud of ionized particles. Because if you’re going to end the world, you shouldn’t fuck around.
You can buy Fermi’s Progress: Dyson’s Fear at Amazon and Scarlet Ferret!
Pandora - Borderlands (The Movie)
All the elements of Borderlands were derivative enough that it should have worked. A crazy gang of misfits trying to do good-natured crime on a desert planet where everyone really dug the whole riding-around-on-motorbikes lifestyle from Mad Max. Yes, it had flaws, chief among them the fact that they couldn’t get James Gunn to direct.
But even attempting to mimic Gunn’s schtick can still yield a great time, as Dungeons & Dragons proved last year.
Yet somehow, Borderlands never quite managed to land. The gang of misfits becomes a found family largely because the film say so, rather than any sense that these people have anything to tie them together. Jamie Lee Curtis does that one autistic-coded character movies are allowed to do. Cate Blanchett joins Furiosa’s Anya Taylor-Joy in the club for actresses who male directors have tried to turn into Clint Eastwood types without understanding the mechanic of a Clint Eastwood type and how it might have to compensate for a patriarchal lens (A “strong silent type” means more than just not giving them any dialogue guys!) Kevin Hart is there, which is always a bad sign. And Jack Black does nothing that David Eddings or Jim Foronda couldn’t do better (apart from screw over his bandmate in the most chickenshit way possible).
The end result is a film that very clearly knows exactly what sort of movie it wants to be, but just can’t get it to work.
On the other hand…
While Borderlands transplants the Mad Max style desertopocalypse to an alien planet, Fermi’s Progress: Descartesmageddon gives you a zombie apocalypse on an alien planet.
It offers you a planet where sentient fungus is holed up in shopping malls with piles of guns, trying to fend off the soulless monstrosities that lurk outside.
And Kevin Hart isn’t in it. Not remotely.
You can buy Fermi’s Progress: Descartesmageddon at Amazon and Scarlet Ferret.
Arrakis - Dune Part II, Dune: Prophecy
The one you’ve been waiting for. The original, the biggest desert planet. And it’s a great film. It has scale and ambition that harks back to classic Biblical epics and (not coincidentally) Lawrence of Arabia. Paul’s arc from child to leader to dark messiah feels natural in a way not many films could pull off, and Timothee Chalamet has clearly been preparing for this role his whole career.
And yet, there is something missing. I am talking, of course, about the navigators. If you’re not going to give me a giant baby-faced manatee in a fish tank hopped up on space ketamine, than why are we all even here?
But the absence of the navigators is symptomatic of a large aversion to really leaning into the weirdness of Dune, perhaps fearing comparisons to the glorious trashy weirdness of the Lynch movie.
The problem is put under an unflattering magnifying lens in the Dune: Prophecy series, which adopts the Dune duology’s clean, minimalist designs and monochrome colour palettes, leaving it looking like one of the BBC’s lavishly cast but pared down Shakespeare productions.
The current iteration of Dune on screen is a universe of Great Halls, with no toilets, no kitchens, no marketplaces.
You know how Ancient Greece and Rome were all painted and garish and colourful, but because the paint faded we imagine them as white and austere? Dune feels like somehow that same phenomenon is operating back through time to us from the future.
But Also…
Planet of the Apiaries was conceived as a straight up Dune rip-off. Everyone loves a biome that is hostile to human life that contains a vital and valuable resource and is inhabited by charismatic yet deadly megafauna.
And so, mimicking that time-honoured formula, I came up with the idea of power-armoured beekeepers working on a giant beehive floating in the atmosphere of a gas giant. Instead of honey, these bees manufacture pure, refined rocket fuel.
You can buy Fermi’s Progress: Planet of the Apiaries at Amazon and Scarlet Ferret.
Veldt - Rebel Moon Part Two: The Scargiver
Is Veldt a desert planet? Honestly hard to say, who knows what sort of environment lies behind that murky brown filter that covers everything in this film.
Now it is a well known and established fact that I will watch any old shit with a spaceship in it. I have watched Prometheus multiple times, and I don’t even like it.
I also, perhaps despite my better judgement, don’t hate Zack Znyder. In the right environment with the right story, he can pleasingly batshit and he has a good instinct for visuals, despite a near Garth Marenghi-like devotion to slow-mo.
And the Magnificent Seven Does Star Wars is a total shoe-in of a movie pitch.
But my God watching this movie was a slog. Like trying to watch one of Doctor Who’s Silence deliver beat poetry about their last break-up – your attention just keeps slipping off it.
The characters are Worst Player At Your D&D Table level stuff, and the score is at Maximum Dramatic Orchestral Monk Chanting for the entire film.
Overall, it is so bombastic-yet-generic that it feels like the sci-fi movie that people are making in the background of another movie about making movies.
Or Have You Considered…?
The Phone Job is also a big epic sci-fi climax, but instead of a muddy looking desert planet, it is set in a galactic-scale call centre at the top of an alien space elevator.
It is one of the most fun things I have ever got to write, combining my love of heist stories with my dream of getting to write exactly the sort of giant dramatic big stakes space explosion drama that probably drove Snyder to do Rebel Moon.
You can buy Fermi’s Progress: The Phone Job at Amazon and Scarlet Ferret
Metalstorm - The Fall Guy
“Metalstorm” is the sci-fi movie that people are making in the background of another movie about making movies, but also it just seems a lot more fun than Rebel Moon. Space Cowboy and an Alien Princess in a doomed Romeo and Juliet romance that the director is using to process her breakup with a stuntman, it has all the ingredients of greatness.
And of course it is set on a desert planet.
The film is possibly a reference to and/or reboot of the 1983 movies Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn, which I haven’t been able to see yet but it looks amazing.
But anywhere, the real reason this is in here is that The Fall Guy is lowkey one of my favourite cinema experiences of the year and it deserved a whole lot more love than it got.
In the Meantime…
“Metalstorm” is a movie within a movie, and if you like stories nested within other stories, you will love D & Deception, the first instalment of Fermi’s Progress’s sequel series, Fermi’s Wake.
Having launched a series explicitly designed to give its characters a whole new alien planet to explore in each story, this novella confines those characters to the spaceship’s kitchen to play a tabletop RPG. But of course, stuff quickly gets weirder than that.
You can buy Fermi’s Wake: D & Deception at Amazon and Scarlet Ferret.
"A Planet in the Andromeda Galaxy" - Atlas
In case you haven’t noticed by now, the format here is that am going through all the movies and TV shows to feature desert planets this year, giving them a gently scathing bit of commentary, and than using that to plug one of the stories in the Fermi’s Progress and Fermi’s Wake series, thereby showcasing the rich diversity of the alien planets it portrays
But it would not be right to mention this movie without pointing out that the same idea is done much better in Andrew Skinner’s Steel Frame (and its besidequel, Origin Complex) which delivers a fantastic horse-girl/buddy story mech and driver tale much better than this.
That said, Atlas is cheesy fun that gives you a pleasantly forgettable couple of hours. The main thrust of the narrative is that Jennifer Lopez’s character needs to learn to accept Elon Musk’s Neuralink to get over her childhood trauma.
Although “desert” is definitely a big presence on thsi planet’s biome, Jennifer Lopez’s mech piloting odyssey does take her through some beautiful looking alien scenery, perhaps helped by the fact that the mech-pilot narrative means she only ever has to be filmed sitting in a chair.
We also have…
Like Atlas, Fermi’s Wake: For the Trees is a great big sci-fi war story. Instead of a (mostly) desert planet, it is set on a forest moon (I know! A sci-fi war story set on a forest moon – where do I get my ideas from?)
For the Trees is a lot of things. It’s a story about wars, and about being complicit in systems you know are doing harm. But it is also about how weird it would be to find an entire planet with only a single kind of biome…
You can buy Fermi’s Wake: For the Trees at Amazon and Scarlet Ferret.
Honourable Mentions
And now for the also rans.
Deadpool & Wolverine took us back to “The Void”, a dump at the end of time which in the Loki series looked like Tellytubbyland, but this time was taken straight out the Sandpocalypse school fo wastelands.
Wicked gave us a glimpse of the impassable desert that surrounds the magical land of Oz. Not sure if Oz counts as an alien planet, since the most noted ways of getting there are “Hot air balloon” and “Tornado”, but we’ll allow it for this.
Star Wars: Outlaws, meanwhile, took us to the OG sand planet, Tatooine, the backwater out rim world in the middle of nowhere where literally everything happens.
And finally…
If you like a grab bag of different things that have all been lumped together, the Fermi stories have a variety of options for you to enjoy.
The four stories that make up Fermi’s Progress are available in paperback at Amazon. All four novellas, in individual ebook and omnibus ebook format, can be bought together with Scarlet Ferret’s Fermi’s Progress Season Pass. But there’s more!
The newly released adventures of the Fermi in Fermi’s Wake are now collected in Scarlet Ferret’s the Fermi’s Wake Season Pass, which collects not only D & Deception and For the Trees, but will also include the two as-yet-unreleased Fermi adventures that will be coming out in 2025.
And (spoiler alert!) no, neither of them will be set on desert planets.
