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"  Science-fiction movies have always provided a reliable prism for addressing social issues. Even the most gonzo cult classics of the 1950s ( The Day the Earth Stood Still, Invasion of the Body Snatchers) sought to frame the Red Scare for mass-cultural consumption, while the USS Enterprise&amp;#039;s cosmopolitan crew was Star Trek&amp;#039;s explicit reaction to the utopian fervor of the 1960s. As all this gonzo gets remade as popcorn, today&amp;#039;s genre explorations from blockbusters like Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen to the indie Moon to this week&amp;#039;s apocalyptic spectacle 2012 have their own overlapping preoccupations. Yet despite their promise of mouth-breathing fanboy ecstasy, geeks might be disappointed to learn just how low-concept their bottom line has actually become: Call your mom. Or your kid or your wife, or your husband, or your girlfriend. Or anyone else you might realize you&amp;#039;ve taken for granted once a mile-high tsunami or an alien-robot invasion, or a Romulan planet vacuum is headed their way. Gone are the days when 2001: A Space Odyssey warned us of the encroaching technology threat, or when the original Star Wars trilogy culminated in one of cinema history&amp;#039;s most violent acts of patricide. Virtually every sci-fi film to emerge in 2009 features a threatened family unit, leaving the survival of cultures, civilizations, and entire planets secondary to the preservation of the parents and children who populate them.  I know the Democrats are having a tough time with that abortion clause in the health-care bill, but didn&amp;#039;t America&amp;#039;s era of demonstrative family values come to a close, like, a year ago? Or have David Brooks and Bill Kristol started a production company based out of the new Bush library?  Nonetheless, our newfound Invasion of the Nuclear-Family Snatchers is a pretty extraordinary development considering the scope and ambition that goes into the contemporary sci-fi epic. It&amp;#039;s also utterly confounding at once a late reaction to 9/11, an endorsement of Bush 43 insularism, a direct refutation of the &amp;quot;science&amp;quot; in &amp;quot;science fiction,&amp;quot; and a wild new paradigm for heroism. A generation after aliens turned Richard Dreyfuss into an iconic deadbeat-dad geek, here&amp;#039;s John Cusack himself twenty years removed from cementing rom-com supremacy in Say Anything playing quite the opposite in 2012. As divorced father Jackson Curtis, his only chance at redemption comes from shepherding his ex-wife and kids to safety from a devastating earthquake, volcano, and flood. But there&amp;#039;s another, more insidious hazard even closer to them: his ex&amp;#039;s new beau, an image-obsessed plastic surgeon usurping Jackson&amp;#039;s paternal influence. Of course, they all flee the apocalypse together, and without giving too much away, you don&amp;#039;t have to stretch to imagine which man will suffer when, as usual with this genre, no good deed goes unpunished.  This happens throughout 2012 in scenarios including everybody from the U.S. president (Danny Glover) with daddy issues to a cruise-ship jazz musician whose son happens to be the prophetic researcher (Chiwetel Ejiofor) who saw the whole thing coming. In their single, tearful conversation, the value of science itself is superseded by a fluky kind of mortality wrong place, wrong time, that kind of thing and the imperative of a dignified goodbye. Our families deserve that, sure, but isn&amp;#039;t our modern apocalypse supposed to be turning around? Are we still so resigned to the bomb shelter as our happy place? It&amp;#039;s still another two months before 24 come back on the air, for chrissakes.  Compromise that familial responsibility, though, and I guess you get something like director Richard Kelly&amp;#039;s head-scratcher The Box. In one of the simplest yet least evolved plotlines of the new millennium, James Marsden&amp;#039;s would-be &amp;#039;70s astronaut and his wife (Cameron Diaz) decide to press a button that will kill a stranger and earn them a million dollars in cash. To them, their motivations are pure or as pure as they can be under the circumstances: keep the kid in private school, repair the wife&amp;#039;s disfigured foot, reinforce the upper-middle-class lifestyle in the Virginia exurbs, and maybe get lucky enough to murder some random death-row inmate. Really, though, they&amp;#039;re just stepping into a cycle of family destruction centered at NASA, of all places, where a top-secret program proves sci-fi maven Arthur C. Clarke&amp;#039;s Third Law that &amp;quot;any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.&amp;quot; And not in a good way. Suffice it to say The Box won&amp;#039;t be the official movie of Mother&amp;#039;s Day anytime soon.  At least not like, say, The Terminator, arguably sci-fi&amp;#039;s flagship entry in the (wo)man vs. machines canon. And even that franchise came full-circle this year: After two friendly robot entries, the post-apocalyptic Terminator Salvation sees John Connor go back in time to save his own father from killer &amp;#039;bots, with help along the way from a hybrid that rejected its anti-human programming. Star Trek&amp;#039;s reboot saw a stroppy new Spock (another mixed breed) avenging his murdered family and James T. Kirk upholding his late father&amp;#039;s legacy. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen upped the world-saving stakes by planting Sam Witwicky&amp;#039;s goofy folks smack in the middle of their son&amp;#039;s Decepticon-thwarting exploits. The pro-family message was just one of Michael Bay&amp;#039;s many jingoistic flourishes, an affirmation of wholesome American values under assault from a foreign power that suspiciously resembled Osama Bin Laden.  Bay even tossed in a jab at President Obama, who is briefly featured in a news segment undermining his leadership during a time of crisis. Ultra-liberal 2012 director Roland Emmerich whose The Day After Tomorrow demonstrated father-son bonding in the face of Bush-era climate policy gone bad wouldn&amp;#039;t think of such an affront, but it still doesn&amp;#039;t stop him from depicting the uselessness of institutions beyond the family itself. After all, the only thing President Glover has in mind after his farewell address is the forgiveness of his daughter (Thandie Newton), and he&amp;#039;s determined to find a lost little girl&amp;#039;s own father outside the White House if it&amp;#039;s the last thing he ever does. Heavy as these common themes are, let&amp;#039;s face it: Sci-fi will always be sci-fi genre romps that we need not read into as much as enjoy, especially with all the menacing stimuli of McCarthyism and HAL 9000 eschewed in favor of moralism. But if the geek in you simply can&amp;#039;t abide the preaching (or if you&amp;#039;re already getting your daily family face time every morning when ascending from your mother&amp;#039;s basement), never fear. You can always rely on James Cameron to vigorously shake out the trend next month with Avatar, and heaven knows Iron Man 2 will supply enough of a guilt-free gadget fix next summer probably enough to get you through to 2011. Nevertheless, even if it&amp;#039;s just a matter of sending a holiday card to the fellow gamers on the other end of your Xbox, reach out. The world shouldn&amp;#039;t have to end for people to know you love them. S.T. VanAirsdale is a senior editor at Movieline.com. His film criticism and industry analysis have appeared in the New York Times, Vanity Fair, New York, the Huffington Post, Defamer, and The Reeler, which he founded. RELATED LINKS:  EARLIER: The Rise of the Modern Geek in All of Us  PLUS: What Makes a Franchise Nerd-Proof?   THE NEW HOLLYWOOD: S.T. VanAirsdale&amp;#039;s Column Every Wednesday   Click here for Esquire&amp;#039;s new Augmented Reality experience &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/a6733/family-values-movie-sci-fi-111109/>