Science Fiction Parody & Satire - Week Fourteen

I think parody and satire work really well with the science fiction genre, especially after watching The Stepford Wives during the break in class this week. I'd seen the movie before and it has been one of my favorites, just because it's so brilliantly funny. Despite how it ends (as most movies that begin really good and fizzle out at the end *cough* horror films *cough*) The Stepford Wives more than makes up for it during the exposition scenes where Joanna is set up to be her own woman and she is removed to a society that is basically a 1950's Better Home & Gardens magazine come to life.

It's a hilarious and, in my opinion, well paced first half of the movie and if they could have maintained that throughout, The Stepford Wives would have been a knockout. It's a great sci-fi satire where the men of this gated community want to have the perfect life and the perfect wife, so they go out of their way to make robotic clones of their currently existing wives. In typical sci-fi fashion, the heroine of the story takes it upon herself to set the little society back to rights any way she can, even without the help of her friends (who were also turned into robotic clones) and the entire Stepford society completely flips with the previously cloned and replaced wives taking their revenge by putting all their husbands on house arrest. Seems fitting.