I hereby nominate Viggo Mortensen for Best Actor at this year’s Academy Awards.

Not being a real writer, i feel reluctant to blame my lack of blogging for the past month on writer’s block. I was hesitating and desperately trying to find an angle, something to latch on to, in the various films i have watched during this period, but nothing came. The sweet but bland The Time Traveler’s Wife (2009), the original but ephemeral Where the Wild Things Are (2009), the annoying and commercial Twilight New Moon (2009), and even the cult and cerebral Slaughterhouse-Five (1972), all left me with no inspiration to write.

But The Road….well, The Road just completely threw me off my chair. I am still reeling from the experience of watching this film. Amazing acting, beautiful beautiful cinematography, gorgeous soundtrack and poignant and sparse dialogue. And sad. So sad.

I never read Cormac McCarthy’s Pullitzer Prize winning novel, so i am not constrained by the usual novel-to-film adaptation discussions. I can not evaluate how good of an adaptation this film is, or whether it is too literal to the novel or not. But i can judge, as far as your humble blogger can judge, that John Hillcoat, the director of The Road, has done a magnificent job at telling this desolate and somber post-apocalyptic tale of a man and his son trying to survive in a world that pretty much no longer exists.

I wanted to incorporate one of the two trailers for the film with this post but as i watched them again, i felt that they both dumb the film down considerably and that they do not do justice to the essence of the story. This film is not about action, survival, cannibalism or about the end of the world. Instead, it is about what makes us human and about the beauty of life, and i dare say, the beauty of parenthood. As the father of a 2.5 years old son, this movie touched me on a level deeper than most of the films i have watched in my life. The usual post-apocalyptic and horror movies aside, which should not be compared to The Road, the film reminded me of Andrei Zvyagintsev’s eerie The Return (2003) and of Maggie Gee’s The Ice People, both great and surreal works in their own ways.

It is the year 2050, and we seem to have turned Earth into Mercury. One man remains, isolated in an indestructible tower that has been built to preserve humanity’s legacy: famous works of art, DNA samples of animals, plants and fauna, and naturally, a large digital media archive…This man proceeds to tell us about the many ways in which we screwed up the planet, calling us stupid in the process. I recently came across a solar modules manufacturer whose slogan reads: don’t leave the planet to the stupid. So, is humanity stupid? Are we indeed not realizing the extent of the damage that we are inflicting on our Earth due to our consumption habits?

My field of work these days is directly related to social and environmental issues. As such, i keep abreast of the latest when it comes to global warming, habitat loss, and our fossil fuel addiction. While i leave a bit of room in my beliefs for the skeptics, i am nonetheless very convinced by the fact that we are headed in the wrong direction and that we must quickly turn to renewables and change our consumption patterns. Yet, despite these beliefs, i find these references to the stupidity of the ‘non-believers’ or of those who do not care, banal and not particularly useful. Moreover, i found this documentary to be somewhat devoid of interesting facts and compelling stories (and full of bad CGI and low-quality infographics). It is perhaps because i watch documentaries on similar subjects relatively often, documentaries that explore a particular subject in much more depth, that The Age of Stupid felt too general and broad. I was not convinced or moved by the stories (Iraq and Africa being the exception) and learned very little. The man from the future felt very gimmicky and did not help tie it all together effectively. I certainly do not think that anyone stupid would watch this and become less stupid.

The Age of Stupid made the headlines thanks to the astuteness of its marketing campaign and Indie release system. The endorsement of many celebrities and politicians helped bring this low budget documentary to a record number of screens across the globe, getting a Guiness record in the process for biggest film premiere ever. Local groups of activists here in Berlin, some of whom i know, helped organize the premiere and ensured that as much publicity as possible was generated via the blogosphere and social media platforms. And most of these bloggers rated the film highly, only too happy to find a common outlet for their beliefs and message, which they have not been able to do on such a scale since The Inconvenient Truth.

I share these beliefs for the most part but, as someone who watches lots of documentaries, from a purely cinematic standpoint, i found The Age of Stupid slightly underwhelming.

The Age of Stupid: Trailers: Global Premiere from Age of Stupid on Vimeo.

Watching Pandorum has made me realize how anxiously i await Duncan Jones’ Moon (2009). How long has it been since we have had an interesting, grown-up and cerebral film about the emptiness and scariness of space without the film resorting to superfluous tricks and cheap thrills? Around 30 years since Outland (1981) and Alien (1979), 37 since Silent Running (1972) and Solaris (1972) and more than 40 since 2001 (1968), every effort since feels hesitant, disjointed and happy to compromise for the sake of reaching out to a wider audience. Event Horizon (1997) is perhaps one of the scariest films ever made but i remember the gore much more than i remember the psychological. Sunshine (2007) had a lot of potential but eventually disappointed by turning into ‘just another horror film’. And then there is Pitch Black, Red Planet, Dante 01, Mission to Farce, and countless others, films that range from the decent to the terribly bad and that use space as an excuse for superficial entertainment.

ATTENTION SPOILERS AHEAD
Pandorum reminds us of many such past efforts. On the positive side, its production design owes much to Alien with its sweaty, smoky, dark and claustrophobic corridors where what one does not see is more terrifying than what one does see. There is also, on a couple of occasions, a reasonable depiction of the madness that can ensue after too much time spent in cold-sleep (Pandorum is the name given to such a condition). Yet, we are very far from what Solaris showed us about madness in space and much closer to Event Horizon’s extrapolations. On a more negative side, the camera movements are obscenely fast and disorientating and i continue to wonder why an increasing number of directors and cinematographers endorse this type of film making. It always feels a bit like a cope-out to me, a method to avoid thinking harder about how to create tension or confusion or even rhythm. The result of combining such camera movements with lots of darkness, smoke and selected light sources is that one spends a large part of Pandorum seeing pretty much nothing. But the most disappointing aspect of the film for me were the mutants who looked straight out of I am Legend (2007) and The Descent (2005). First, for them to have evolved in such a manner in a few decades (at least i think it is a few decades - someone correct me if i am wrong as the time frame was not made exactly clear; i am assuming this is the time for Cam to age into Dennis plus a few additional years in cold sleep) makes absolutely no sense, especially not when you consider that they all seem to have a penchant for Mad Max fashion. And second, couldn’t the creators just come up with something a bit more original and plausible?

Pandorum feels to me a bit like Sunshine did. Lots of potential, a good premise that becomes weaker towards the end, and too much energy and focus spent on the wrong parts of the screenplay. If only there had been a bit less of a ‘i am going to eat your flesh’ angle and more time spent (with less crazy camera movements) on the symptoms and consequences of Pandorum in the humans, i would have liked this film a lot more.

I hear Will Smith was offered the part of Marcus Wright in Terminator Salvation but decided to turn it down due to the softness of the ’spirit of giving’ angle. Instead, Smith went for the soapy Seven Pounds (08). Too bad as i can imagine very well Will Smith playing an existentially troubled machine that thinks it is human and that decides to donate its heart to the main protagonist, John Connor.

If i just made up the part about Will Smith, it is only to illustrate how silly of a film Terminator Salvation is. While i respect Will Smith, i found Seven Pounds to be way over the top in terms of cheese factor and this latest Terminator is not far behind, although, after just a bit of reflection, i might have to say that Seven Pounds is a better film. So way to go Will, you have once again chosen wisely. The same can not be said for Christian Bale whose performance in this film certainly did not warrant his much publicized verbal assault on a crew member during the shoot. Ever since The Machinist (04), Bale has built a reputation for strongly getting ‘in-role’ and for his Method Acting intensity, but lately that does not seem to translate into a whole lot. His Bruce Wayne is uneventful and dull, as is his John Connor. But Bale is not a bad actor. He just needs to start choosing better roles.

Terminator Salvation is a poorly written film with lasily developed characters and some of the worst editing i have seen recently. Scenes jump from one to the next without much logic and with very little smoothness. Much of the script is driven by the action without much regard for plausibility and common sense. For example, the resistance penetrates Skynet with such ease, it makes you wonder what the whole fuss with the machines has been about. Then there is the sexy female character who so conveniently meets the machine and falls so madly in love with it that she makes a fairly ridiculous decision that has no other purpose than to drive the action forward. My list of complaints goes on.

McG, the director, recently had a feud with Michael Bay, my old nemesis. I suggest that instead of fighting over who has the biggest robot, they should go have a beer and exchange ideas on how to make crappy films. Bay still has the most knowledge in this area, but it looks like McG is catching up fast.

One of my favorite Sci-Fi books as a teenager was Barjavel’s La Nuit des Temps, translated in English as The Ice People, a reference to the two human beings, millions of years old and yet technologically advanced, found cryogenically preserved deep in the Antarctic ice. It is a simple and somewhat superficial, yet also beautiful, tale of love lost, idealism and global consciousness…..and it flows like a blockbuster, which always gave me the feeling that i would one day see it on the silver screen.

Maggie Gee’s Ice People, the story of a man fighting to keep his family together while the world is falling apart, is a deeper and richer novel than Barjavel’s. And while La Nuit des Temps does have a slight underlying dystopic feel to it, Gee’s novel on the other hand is bleak to the core. It is a slow downward spiral towards a near future without sun, warmth and hope, a future filled with savagery, mistrust between the sexes, chaos and technology gone wrong. But Gee’s prose and wit ensure that the bleakness never feels cheap or forced and that the storyline flows easily and rivetingly to the bitter end.

The Ice People has been compared to Orwell’s 1984 and to Huxley’s Brave New World due to the intensity and realism of its dystopic element and to the strength of Gee’s writing. And Gee, who was the first female Chair of the Royal Society of Literature, is certainly worthy of such comparisons. But her work also brings to mind the style and social concerns of another great contemporary female writer of dystopias: Margaret Atwood. Both have a predilection for speculative fiction based on current societal and technological trends and concerns and both go about it in an unrepentant manner. And both are fantastic writers.

Despite some technological naivety, the Ice People is a sad and beautiful novel whose message will linger in your mind long after the last page has been turned.

Attention tons of spoilers ahead.

Well, BSG is over and i feel a sense of loss that i will no longer be able to immerse myself regularly into this well-crafted, intelligent, challenging and believable world of lost humans, Cylons and hybrids. But after four years of raising salient questions about politics, religion, racism, terrorism, war, technology, good and evil and almost everything else that is pertinent in a post 9/11 world, the conclusion of this much revered show has left me somewhat dissatisfied. It has also made me wonder about the writing process for a TV show, a subject I know little about.

I think the majority of viewers will agree that BSG is an incredibly well-written show. Dialogues, character development, plot movement, the flow of the scenes, all have been admirably handled and are the main reason why BSG is considered to be one of the best shows ever written for TV. Yet, I can not help but ask myself if, in spite of all this, a lot of the plot points were not just thrown together at the end, the writers having sacrificed long term coherence for short term impact, viewers and season renewal. There are simply too many loose ends at the end and too many resolutions that feel forced. That being said, the overall idea of having them land on our Earth to become our ancestors is actually powerful and interesting. But after years of building the suspense and raising our expectations about Hera, the Opera House, Kara, Baltar and 6, the resolutions from this last episode have a bit of an anti-climatic feel to them. So it was all about chasing Hera through the ship and the CIC? These fantastic and grand visions were about the CIC? Disappointing. And the religious and spiritual undertones which were effective until now because they were just that, undertones, and perhaps because they suggested something more, ended up being in fact an end in itself. Unlike some viewers, I am not criticising the idea of bringing religion more concretely into the series, I am simply stating that as with other elements in the last episode, the way the religious angle was brought to a close did not feel properly thought-through and smelled of last minute resolution. It had worked until now because we weren’t quite sure what it was all about. We might have suspected, but the mystery kept it interesting. By turning these religious possibilities into a concrete reality, the mystery has been removed (assuming you don’t associate mystery with lack of answers) and with it, the only thread by which many viewers were still hanging to the religious angle.

I won’t even go into the idea of abandoning all technology so quickly, without any apparent discussion or rebellion by anyone, these space farers suddenly in love with the idea of farming and living in tents for the rest of their lives, assuming they don’t get killed first by the multitude of dangers that populated the African Savannah 150,000 years ago. One of these days, I will watch the entire show again and it will be interesting to see how much does and does not make sense. I suspect there are a lot of inconsistencies.

Yet, and this is where my criticism ends, this shaky ending far from cancels out all the marvellous aspects of the show. BSG has taken us on a wonderful journey over the past four years and it has helped restore Sci-Fi’s good name. It has proven that Sci-Fi does not have to be shallow and mainly visual effect-based, that it can challenge us intellectually and affect us emotionally as good and as deeply as any non Sci-Fi drama. So goodbye BSG and thanks for all the fish!

Novels are notoriously difficult to adapt successfully to the screen. It is not so much a question of whether the visual language of cinema can tell more or less than the written word but rather that it does it in a different way, touching on different connection points to our emotions and intellect. Most people who have read a novel and watched a film based on that novel end up usually disappointed as there is little chance that a film will be able to entirely re-create the world that the written word can sometimes open to us. But great appreciators of cinema will know when the writer and director of a film have succeeded in utilizing the power of the moving image to best interpret and render the essence of a novel. Not necessarily to literraly and faithfully adapt it, but to transport the meaning, intention and atmosphere in the best possible way, based on the possiblities of the cinematic medium.

That is not to say that all novels can be turned into films, nor that it should always be attempted. Especially when the essence of a novel is closely dependent on a very particular style of prose (little punctuation and lack of quotation marks around dialogue) and when the author (a Nobel prize winner) specifically removes many traditional frames of references such as character names and cultural and geographical points of idendification to enhance the power of his message. In short, Fernando Meirelles should probably not have attempted to turn José Saramago’s influencial novel into a film.

Blindness tells the story of how humanity suddenly loses its sight. One by one, the nameless residents of an unnamed city become blind and must learn to live with one another under extreme conditions of chaos and lawlesness (and of course, of blindness). One woman, played with usual consistency and intensity by Julianne Moore, retains her sight and is confronted with the question of what it means to be the one who sees in the kingdom of the blind.

Watching as many movies as i do means that i get exposed to a lot of different styles and cinematic experiences. And through my emphasis on ‘Sci-Fi’, i get my fair share of the disturbing and the unnerving. But that did not prepare me for how tough of a film Blindness is. I found the film so disturbing, and unfortunately at times, so cheaply disturbing, that i had to stop halfway through it to take a break. Saramago and Meirelles illustrate our collective spiritual blindness and lack of empathy by using examples of the absolute worst evil that Man can do. For about one hour, we are subjected to scenes of human degradation that reach a level of such intensity that one can’t help but wonder if the point couldn’t have been made equally as well without resorting to such extremes. I personally found some of the scenes insulting and even perverted.

Yet, there is something haunting about Blindness, something that stayed with me long after the film was over. No longer anger but rather fascination and curiosity towards a message which, although cruel, offers a glimmer of hope and presents the possibility that we as humans have a choice, the choice to learn how to live with one another and to create a better world for all.

Despite my clear lack of knowledge regarding the inner workings of a film studio or of a production company, this is nonetheless how i envision the approval for City of Ember must have happened:

Pitch Guy: So picture this. The world has destroyed itself but a group of people survives and builds a new society underground…
Studio Exec: you mean like in Logan’s Run?
PG: Yes. Well, no, not exactly. Time passes of course, but the society is cut off from progress so it is more based on technology from the past and on old-fashioned values
SE: I see. So a bit like A Boy and His Dog?
PG: Hmm, i suppose so. But just a little bit. It is not a suburbian mentality like A Boy and His Dog. This takes place in a small, dystopic, claustrophobic and buzzing city with strange architecture and
SE: Sounds like Dark City to me…
PG: Hmfff, kind of, but it is not dark, well not really dark, it is more rusty and old and dusty and…
SE: Did you ever see The City of Lost Children? Amazing production values….
PG: Yes i did. Nice film. But you see, City of Ember is also a great adventure because two kids find out how to get out…
SE: Kids? Kids as in Jumanji, The Goonies, Narnia, The Golden Compass, Lemony Snicket, The…
PG: Yes, yes, but the angle here is slightly different because…

At this point, the Studio Exec chokes on his Latte Machiatto and gasps desperately for air. The Pitch Guy understands that this is his only chance, grabs a pillow and places it over the Studio Exec’s face who dies shortly thereafter. Before calling for help, the Pitch Guy manages to fake the Exec’s signature and places the pitch page in the Go Ahead tray.

Anyone got a better explanation?

The Day the Earth Stood Still is a pathetic film. As I much as I love Hollywood for its mystic, history, glamour and for the fact that it continues year after year to enable the creation of marvellous films, I also sometimes hate it for being able to not only green light such trash but also for purposefully creating in the first place such a non-sensical and emotionally deficient waste, tailored to please the common denominator, thus totally disregarding in the process good acting, scene plausibility, intelligent dialogues and well developed characters. I won’t even get into the dishonour a bad remake does to the original film upon which it is based, in this case, one of the best Science Fiction films of all time.

Stiff Keanu Reeves as the stoic Alien already tells us that we are embarking on a risky adventure. Some might see a certain logic in casting someone who does not know how to act (although once in a while Reeves is capable of raising his acting to the level of ‘enjoyable enough’ as in The Gift (2000)) for the part of an alien who supposedly does not initially understand emotions, but I would rather classify this as bad and naïve casting. Or more likely as marketing-based casting. After all, Brad Pitt, who has since shown that he is capable of good acting in such films as Kalifornia (1993), Fight Club (1999), Snatch (2000), 12 Monkeys (1995), The Assassination of Jesse James (2007) and Burn after Reading (2008), proved through his horrid performances in Interview with a Vampire (1994) and Meet Joe Black (1998) that playing blasé and stoic characters (as well as an Austrian character in Seven Years in Tibet (1997)) is not the stuff of average actors.

With the addition of the money-driven and inappropriate casting of Keanu Reeves, The Day the Earth Stood Still also boasts an impressive list of clichés, issued straight out the bad blockbuster manual: the racially mixed infuriating child who will do the most maddening things at the most inopportune moments but who, as even the average viewer will have guessed from the start, will finally overcome his emotional issues and become only slightly less annoying; the bright and single mother who has problems raising that irritating little…mentioned earlier and who seems to know all the right people since she will become the main point of contact for the alien (someone in this whole disaster of a production still had enough good sense to ensure that she does not end up falling in love with the alien); the know-it-all and closed minded politicians who will of course make all the wrong decisions; the beyond repair and impotent military establishment which, as usual, will find bigger and bigger rockets to throw at the problem; the good, tolerant and just scientists who, if it weren’t for the politicians and military, could make the world a much better place; and last but not least, the alien who is so intelligent that, after some small, uninteresting and morally infantile chats with a couple of people, discovers the meaning of emotions and realizes that humans are not such a bad lot after all. My son is 19 months old and has an EQ far superior to the level of this film.

In comparison to the relevance of this film to contemporary environmental issues (its superficial message that we are killing our earth and its ending that seems to lightly suggest – and this was not made very clear - that stopping all technology is the answer to these issues, are an affront to the problems we truly face), Emmerich’s The Day after Tomorrow (2004) seems like a scientific treatise, which of course does not say a whole lot about Hollywood’s ability to take these issues seriously.

I am a lover of great cinema but also of great cinematic trash. This, on the other hand, is bad trash and as such deserves every single bit of negative press it has so far received. In the meantime, I shall pull out the 1951 version of The Day the Earth Stood Still from my DVD shelf for a little trip down nostalgia lane…

Spin, which won the Hugo Award in 2005, is a novel that often feels more like speculative fiction than science fiction. Like much of the work of Kim Stanley Robinson and of Margaret Atwood, Spin takes place in a hypothetical present, and uses current themes and concepts and a solid narrative with strongly developed characters as a backbone for more fictional and apocalyptic speculations.

These speculations revolve around the unexplained appearance of a membrane around the Earth, apparently placed by some extra terrestrial intelligence whose motives will only be revealed at the end of the book. Outside of the membrane, the universe expands at a rapidly accelerating rate, implying that without the membrane, the Earth will quickly fry under the rays of our exploding sun. However, the origin of the membrane remains unclear to the people of the Earth who are condemned to live without understanding why, how, and especially how long. How long until the membrane disappears, signifying the end of the human race?

It is within this existential end-of-the-world context that Wilson develops the story of three friends whose lives will evolve differently under the constant presence and threat of the membrane. Each will use the inescapable uncertainty and ambiguity that now permeates life on earth to make different decisions and to interact with the world according to their own motivations. Yet, their path will cross often, and the truth behind the appearance of the membrane will bring them together in their search for answers.

Despite the fact that Wilson brings additional themes to his story such as conscious self-replicating nanomachines, humanity’s depletion of Earth’s natural resources, the terraforming and colonization of Mars (the depiction of which is in my mind one of Spin’s few weak points), and the connection of various parts of the universe through wormhole-like gates, it is the tale of the three friends confronting the realities of a doomed world that dominates Spin. It is not often that a Science Fiction writer tries and succeeds in bringing such depth to his or her characters. Wilson has done just that with Spin and has done it on a canvas of interesting apocalyptic conjectures and ideas that are reminiscent of Greg Bear’s The Forge of God.

The name M. Night Shyamalan is starting to sound very pretentious.

Although the name is a bit difficult to remember, people usually still manage to mumble something about M and Night followed by some uncomprehensible nonsense. But this confusion adds to its mysterious and intriguing aspect, as it did for the people of Eastwick who tried hard to remember the name Daryl Van Horne. The mystic increased as the director gained international fame with The 6th Sense (1999) and then with Unbreakable (2000). After these two films, M. Night Shyamalan could fully live up this his name by having it displayed in large print above the title of his films, with studio marketing people proudly displaying ‘a film by M. Night Shyamalan’ or ‘M. Night Shyamalan presents’ as if the director, after only less than a handful of films to his credit, could be compared to a Hitchcock or to other Hollywood directing legends.

Unfortunately, Shyamalan has failed to live up to the mystic of his name and to the hype of his reputation. While The 6th Sense was a good, not great, movie, Unbreakable started to show a few weaknesses while Signs (2002) clearly demonstrated that the director was either going through a really bad spell, or that, and this is more likely, the 6th Sense had been a fluke. His films since have proved the later and his most recent, The Happening, is just one more nail in the coffin of this so called new master of horror.

The Happening, about an unknown and never explained suicide-inducing toxin spreading across the North East of the US, has some good moments, especially in the first 30 minutes, and offers an interesting take on man vs nature. However, Shyamalan can not keep it up and proceeds to ruin the next 55 minutes by instering silly comic scenes whose purpose is a total mystery to me and by using so many cliches that one can not help but to feel that the director is trying very hard to scare us. The desire to scare overcomes to need to remain realistic with the result being that the viewer questions rather than feels. In addition, Mark Wahlberg, whom we know is capable of pulling some interesting performances as he did in The Departed (2006), feels totally lost and confused as a romantic scientist and the chemistry between him and Zooey Deschanel is equivalent to mixing bleach with vinegar.

Before the uniqueness of Mad Max (1979), before the madness of Burning Man, and long before the flatness of Waterworld (1995), came the inventiveness of A Boy and his Dog. An unjustly forgotten apocalyptic tale of a young man and his telepathic dog wandering the desert in search of food and sex after the world has blown itself to smithereens, this film has become a cult classic and should be mandatory viewing for any Sci-Fi aficionados.

Satirical, disturbing, funny, unpleasant, anarchistic with strong macho undertones, critical of a petty middle class suburban mentality, A Boy and his Dog has got enough ammunition to rub many people the wrong way. Its social satire of the present is much more powerful than its representation of the future, and like other Sci-Fi films from the 70s, such as Logan’s Run (1976) and THX 1138 (1971), it certainly makes clear that our individual freedom and personal choice must prevail over potential collective, conservative and hygienic visions of the future.

Once in a while, one stumbles upon a work of such quality that one cannot help but to be baffled at how such a work could escape one’s notice for so long. Diaspora, written in 1997 by Greg Egan, is one of the most powerful, mind bending and far reaching book I have ever read.

As I have posted several times before, one of the drawbacks of many Sci-Fi representations and stories brought to the silver screen, is the difficulty in reaching the right balance between depicting a credible future, sometimes a distant future, while at the same time preserving some sense of ‘normality’ as well as traditional frames of references in order to not alienate the viewer. Unfortunately, this balance is rarely reached and most of Hollywood’s visualizations tend to be very limited and writers or directors seem content to show us the same old humans with the same old problems, values and physical characteristics, regardless of when in the future the story might be occurring. Just place these archaic visions of the past in front of a couple of futuristic looking buildings, add some fancy cars with doors that slide vertically and complete the package with the occasional gismo to obtain your average run-of-the-mill Sci-Fi flick.

While Sci-Fi literature offers many possibilities for more credible, fleshed out and geeky visions of the future, there has still been an over-reliance on ‘traditional’ humans as lead or even as only characters. This seems to have changed in the past few years, and the implications of Transhumanisn are increasingly being used as material for many Sci-Fi books. In Diaspora, Greg Egan describes in great detail how the ‘human race’ might split and evolve towards a post human future. While the process of becoming more than human will most likely be very gradual, with humans combining with machines and vice versa (a process that has already started with the adoption of pacemakers, Cochlear implants, prosthetic limbs, or even the mobile phone which has become a natural extension of ourselves), Egan portrays a future a few hundred years hence dominated by three main forms of beings: the Fleshers, ‘traditional’ humans with or without genetic modifications, the Gleisner Robots, robotic shells inhabited by human minds, and the Polis Citizens, the uploaded minds of humans ‘living’ in computer and simulated worlds. In addition, on rare occasions, the polis creates a new mind, a purely artificially conceived one, albeit very human in many ways.

Over a period of several thousand years, Egan traces the quest of some of these Polis Citizens as they attempt to prevent and then escape the destruction of our universe (an early consequence of this destruction is the end of the Fleshers, and thus, the end of humanity as we know it today). This quest will lead these highly advanced non-physical entities, our descendants, to some of the most far-reaching destinations the mind could possibly conceive.

Egan doesn’t shy away from grand mathematical and physical speculation, and for the average reader, his lengthy descriptions of the universe’s most innate workings will seem a bit tedious at times. But sticking through these sections is quite worth it as one is rewarded by an avalanche of fantastic and awe-inspiring concepts. There is plenty to ponder in Diaspora and anyone interested in what existence might be like as an uploaded mind, in a possible direction for the future of the human race, in parallel universes and multi-dimensions, in the potential for alien life, or simply in the infinite mystery and beauty of the cosmos, then this book is an absolute must-read.

Terrible acting, incredibly badly written script, poorly developed characters, horrendous and annoying soundtrack, total rip off of previous films, complete lack of creativity in terms of visualizing the future 25 years from now, amateurish film making…that about sums us this so-called film about a quarantined Scotland in the year 2030 after a virus has killed most of the population.

Any credibility that Neil Marshall gained with The Descent (boy am I glad that I did not join many others in praising it) should be immediately revoked and his name sent back to the depths of obscurity from which it came.

Doomsday has got to be one of the worst films in recent memory and I am very sorry I watched it.

I recently asked a New Yorker if he had watched I am Legend (2007). His reply was that since 9/11, he has had no desire to watch any film that deals with the destruction of his city. While I am Legend didn’t draw obvious parallels to that fateful day seven years ago, it is however difficult to miss them in Cloverfield and to consequently not feel at times slightly uncomfortable at the sight of people dying and being trapped in situations in which they have absolutely no control over their fate.

Cloverfield is an old-fashioned 1950’s monster flick (see my post on sci-fi/horror and the city) that draws heavily on current filmmaking and social trends, especially in its depiction of a YouTube/Facebook need to document and share everything about one’s self, one’s experiences, even possibly about one’s death (everything leading up to death that is, which is clearly a lot more voyeuristic and contemporary than wanting to document what happens after death, which was the premise of the 80’s film Brainstorm (1983)). The Blair Witch Project (1999) had already caught on to these ‘self-documenting’ trends years ago, and as such, proved to be a groundbreaking film. Cloverfield, on the other hand, can only rehash what has been done before, and puts the documenting so much in the foreground that it often takes away from the believability of some of the scenes. It feels too much that the story is built around the idea of documenting whereas in The Blair Witch Project documenting was more seamlessly integrated into a solid narrative. In addition, the intensity and the wobbliness of the camera movements, while effective for the most part, can sometimes be confusing and even tiring.

Yet, Cloverfield also manages to keep us on the edge of our seat and to deliver an overall intense, and at times, frightening experience. The first half of the movie is the most effective since we are left guessing as to what exactly is terrorizing the city. One of the many things that Alien (1979) taught us (its impact on the horror/sci-fi genre has been inestimable) is that one can probably create more tension and suspense by showing less and by letting the potent powers of the imagination do the visualizing, which is most often based on one’s worst fears. Once we have become acquainted with the monster(s) of Cloverfied, the film starts to lose some of its pace and power, a fact reinforced by the increasing silliness of the protagonists’ decision-making. But a nice twist in the last ten minutes saves us from the unexpected dreadful and predictable ending.

In the end, running at a short 85 minutes, Cloverfield turns out to be a decently enjoyable viewing experience that is clearly in a higher league than recent monster films and remakes such as the dreadful Godzilla (1998).

This British low budget mishmash of cyberpunk, horror and exploitation has become a bit of a cult classic in certain circles. The idea was apparently entirely stolen from a story called Shock! that appeared in the 80s in the comic book 2000AD, which is a bit of a shame since it takes away from one of the film’s main attributes: its originality (in spite of several commonalities with Terminator).
Nonetheless, equipped with a meagre budget of 100,000 dollars, Richard Stanley managed to create quite a dreadful, claustrophobic and apocalyptic atmosphere that effectively captured the spirit of decay, waste and techno-paranoia associated with Cyberpunk. The film also contains several musical references that many connoisseurs will enjoy.
Unfortunately, beyond the visual and musical aspects, and with the exception of a few cheap thrills and a couple of funny cheesy lines, the film has little to offer and feels quite amateurish and boring at times.

For a certain crowd only.

Ava Gardner, Gregory Peck, Anthony Perkins and Fred Astair, in one of the bleakest films produced by Hollywood during that period.

With the exception of Australia, the entire planet has been decimated by nuclear war, the origin and details of which are adroitly never explained, and simply blamed on the absurdity and stupidity of humankind. A US submarine escaped the devastation and makes its way towards Melbourne where the locals have only a few months to live until the radiation reaches their country.

Tightly directed by Stanley Kramer, the director of Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), On the Beach maintains its serious and dark premise until the end, never letting cheap and easy sentimentalism take over and never trying to provide a false sense of hope or of a greater moral truth. In addition, and that is commendable for a film from that period, it does not choose sides and refuses to engage in ‘we are better than them’ or ‘it’s all their fault’ type messages.

Instead, the film focuses on a handful of people and how they choose to spend their last months of life and the decisions they face during that time. While the overall emotional intensity feels a bit subdued at times, a feeling reinforced by the decision to avoid showing scenes of madness, folly or desperation (unlike, for example, in The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961), another serious film from that period that deals with somewhat similar themes, where various scenes of chaos and rioting are shown, or in The Day After (1983), the made for TV film that shocked America with its realistic and disturbing scenes of apocalypse, or even in Peter Watkins’s groundbreaking docu-drama The War Game (1965)), the narrative nonetheless works effectively by keeping it all fairly understated, and, well, bleak.

Gardner and Peck are quite a charismatic couple to watch and I can only admire their liberal willingness to play in such a film.

How to begin an explanation of Illium and of Olympos, two novels published in 2003 and 2005 by Dan Simmons, the remarkable author of the Hyperion series?
Where to begin is even more problematic. Four days after finishing Olympos, i am still trying to make full sense of what i just read, and to determine if it is even worth attempting a summary. Or perhaps the only kind of summary worth attempting is a simple list of concepts and ideas that permeate the two books:

Quantum energy and teleportation. Multiple universes. Time travel. Post humans. Old style humans. Nanotechnology. Brane holes. Avatars. Logosphere. Noosphere. Marcel Proust. Shakespeare. The Tempest. Caliban. Setebos. Greek Gods. Achilles. Moravecs from Jupiter. Olympus Mons. Mars. Ariel. Odysseus. Burning Man. Technological singularity. Nuclear apocalypse. Prospero. Sycorax. ARNists. Rubicon virus. Global Caliphate. Wandering Jew. Nabokov. Pantheistic solipsism….

But whereas Illium successfully and wonderfully sets up this amazing and insane concoction of ideas, themes and concepts and made the reader hungry for more, Olympos fails to deliver and to fulfill our expectations. Too many unanswered questions, and too much delivered too early or over too many pages. Still, if you are interested in stretching your imagination and indulging in a little mind bending space opera, this is it.

With Children of Men, Alfonso Cuaron has reinvigorated the dystopic genre with a much-needed dose of seriousness and realism. Films such as 1984, Fahrenheit 451, Alphaville, and A Clockwork Orange inevitably come to mind, not only in their willingness to study the possible future consequences of current trends, but also in the gravity and sincerity with which they do so.

Children of Men potentially deserves to join this pantheon of dystopian classics. Brilliantly directed by the man who saved the Harry Potter franchise from a slow boring death, beautifully shot (side note: what is it with Mexican directors and beautiful cinematography? I have recently reviewed Babel, Pan’s Labyrinth and now Children of Men, and I find myself saying ‘beautiful cinematography’ in all 3 cases) by Emmanuel Lubezki, the DOP for Terrence Malick’s New World and for his upcoming film, Tree of Life, Children of Men explores with great care and details a near future where humanity has become sterile.

Deprived of the ability to conceive and, therefore, deprived of hope, people have slowly lost their grasp on existence. Chaos reigns across the world, with the exception of England where a dictatorial elite barely manages to keep some kind of order throughout the country. The first birth in 17 years propels different factions against each other, all determined to decide the future of the child.

The future of Children of Men, which is loosely based on the 1992 novel by PD James, is as almost as bleak as the one described by Margaret Atwood in the Handmaid’s Tale. Both reveal a post-apocalyptic world that suffocates under the tyranny of an authoritarian regime. And both use procreation as the driving theme of the narrative. But Children of Men offers a glimmer of hope at the end whereas, if I remember correctly, the Handmaid’s Tale leaves open the possibility that the future will not improve, the type of ambiguity that Atwood seems to cherish.

There is an incredibly well choreographed ‘war’ scene in the film that would have made Stanley Kubrick proud. The camera just seems to float and move seamlessly from room to room, from building to building, with bullets flying left and right, making the experience as, and if not more, intense and immersive than anything I have seen before.
Children of Men is perfect on many levels, and it is a pleasure to see a work of science fiction, or, as Margaret Atwood would call it, a work of speculative fiction, be treated with such dignity and importance.

Roger Corman is one of Hollywood’s most amazing personalities and a producer’s favourite case study.

Throughout the 60’s and 70’s, he was churning out films by the dozens, drawing on an ability to discern and understand public taste, trends and fears. His films cost very little to make but generated fairly high returns. He can easily be considered the father of the B movie and continues to influence a large group of filmmakers, producers, and studio execs. He also happens to have given Coppola, Scorcese, Bogdanovich and many others, at the dawn of their careers, a chance to practice, experiment and direct by using his cameras or left-over film stock from his productions.
The Day the World Ended is one of his better films, meaning that it must have taken him 2 weeks to shoot instead of 2 days. The film depicts a post nuclear world where, in addition to struggling to find non-contaminated goods and resources, survivors must also deal with some annoying and incredibly cheap looking mutated animals…

This is all terribly and poorly done and it is hard to think of Corman in a good light when watching this pile of nonsense….

Film architecture and design has existed almost as long as cinema itself. In 1976, Leon Barsacq argued in Caligari’s Cabinet And Other Grand Illusions that the fantasist sets developed by Georges Melies at the beginning of the 20th century were a considerable improvement over anything that had been done previously in that they created a deeper reality and gave the image a more substantial meaning. He further added that cinema escaped its primitive phase once it moved away from simple backdrops to three-dimensional sets, thereby creating an architectural space within cinema[1]. Post World War I, the German Expressionists fully explored this new architectural space through the creation of sets that attempted to reflect the inner emotions of the characters in the films. And David O. Selznik’s use of the term ‘production design’ in reference to the work of the American director and set designer William Cameron Menzies on Gone with the Wind (1939), finally helped film design and architecture gain the official recognition and visibility that has since become an integral part of the cinematic experience and of the output of most film industries.

Following fairly closely the emergence of production values in the history of cinema has been the rise and acceptance of science fiction cinema. It is indisputable that the two are interconnected and that a process exists where both feed off from one another. Cinema learns from architecture and architecture learns from cinema. As far back as 1926, many architects were said to have been impressed and influenced by Metropolis (1926). Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 (1968) also apparently became a source of inspiration for the world of architecture, with the director himself having sourced a lot of his inspiration from several existing architectural and design trends and concepts. Today, terms like ‘science fiction architecture’, ‘high-tech architecture’ or ‘cyber architecture’ are commonly used to refer to a new and ‘modern’ style of architecture that draws heavily on science fiction and new technologies. For many architects, ‘science fiction is an imaginative form of design’[2], making its visualizations worth studying.

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Things to Come is a masterpiece of British Cinema. Based on H.G Wells’ story The Shape of Things to Come, it offers a utopian vision of the future filled with ideas and concepts that, in spite of the fact that we now know that some of these propositions were naive, are staggering in their seriousness and realization.

Often to the dismay and irritation of the cast and crew, Wells was involved in all aspects of the production of Things to Come. This is a project that was very close to his heart and he was keen on making sure that the result would be an appropriate visualization of his ideas and values. Previous screen adaptations of his work had left him unimpressed (First Men in the Moon 1919, The Island of Lost Souls 1932 and The Invisible Man 1933, among others), branding them as amateurish works. Yet, he maintained an admiration and respect for the cinematic medium and saw Things to Come as the opportunity of a lifetime (especially that he was nearing 70 at that time).

He was given almost unlimited powers (plus a substantial sum of money) by Alexander Korda, the Hungarian-born head of London Films who in the 30’s and 40’s would be responsible for many British classics. Fascinated by Wells’ mind, Korda agreed to finance the most expensive British film to date, with a budget close to £300,000.00 and a shooting schedule of one year. The film was marketed as Britain’s answer to Hollywood, a proof that the British film industry could compete with its American counterpart. It was also portrayed as a boost to the economy, bringing hundreds of new jobs for the building of the sets and for some of the scenes in the film.A remarkable aspect of this production, and a substantial contributor to its success (in the context of film history only since it achieved relatively poor commercial success), is the number of personalities and ‘experts’ who contributed to the film. William Cameron Menzies was brought on board to direct. A master visualizer, the recipient of the first Academy Award for ‘Interior Decoration’ and practically the father of the storyboard, Menzies had become famous in Hollywood for his abilities to translate scripts into powerful visual realizations. Menzies would go on to become Hollywood’s first ‘Production Designer’. Vincent Korda, Alexander’s brother, was hired as set designer, and is responsible for the majority of the visual language of the film. A major aspect of his strength as set designer was his ability to collect and compile design and architectural styles and influences and merge them together to create an outstanding final product. As such, one can detect in the many facets of the design of Things to Come various influences, and in some cases, direct contributions, from several masters of that time: Bel Geddes’ streamline concepts influenced the designs of the bombers and tanks as well as various shapes in the interior decoration, Fernand Leger provided ideas for some of the costumes and concepts, Le Corbusier’s work inspired the design of the city of the future with its suspended gardens, much of the furniture design came from Oliver Hill and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy brought his skills to the design of some of the machinery and various objects.

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British Science Fiction cinema has always lived in the shadow of its American counterpart, either as a result of a direct effort to emulate an American style to enable the films to reach broader markets or as an indirect consequence of the fact that, since the 50’s, Science Fiction cinema has been associated with America, drawing on its rich heritage of comics and magazines.

But British Science Fiction cinema has in fact a much greater legacy than is often given credit to. Since the beginning of the 20th century, various British directors and producers have explored the genre, often taking it into new directions, pushing its boundaries, and drawing on the wealth of ideas and masterful works which British Science Fiction writers like H.G Wells, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Arthur C. Clarke, John Wyndham and Michael Moorcock have produced over the years.

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While The Day the Earth Caught Fire was filmed and released in 1961, the idea first came to director Val Guest in 1954, two years after England detonated its first nuclear device.

He wrote an initial screenplay, which, in spite of Guest’s established reputation thanks to films such as The Quatermass Xperiment (1955) and The Abominable Snowman (1957), was turned down by several studios before finally being accepted by British Lion.

It is therefore within a context of 50’s and early 60’s cold war and nuclear paranoia that The Day the Earth Caught Fire must be appreciated.

Recipient of a British Academy Award for best screenplay in 1961, the film is in fact a very serious treatise not only on the foolishness of nuclear activity by scientists and governments, but also on the potential impact such activities could have on the climate and on social structures.

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