Dynamic Subspace

Category: Movies

  • TRON Legacy Brings Cyberpunk Full Circle

    Y and I drove to Pittsburgh today to see TRON Legacy on IMAX 3D at the Cinemark in Pittsburgh Mills. I will write up a full review for the next SFRA Review, but it suffices for now to say that it is a wonderful film that is fully deserving of the hype that led up to its release.

    I like to point to the first TRON film as the popular beginning of cyberpunk in science fiction. There are obviously precedents in novels and short stories, but it was TRON that visually presented “the grid” before Gibson’s receding lines of light. Disney was there first, and they were there again in TRON Legacy–upgrading the original look with slick 3D visuals, and reminding us about the real driving innovator behind consumer digital electronics–video games and virtual spaces (in their many forms). I need to sleep to process the film more fully, but I am very much looking forward to writing this review.

    If you want cool desktop pictures from the high resolution TRON Legacy trailer, cycle over to slashfilm here. If you haven’t already seen the trailer and film segments, see what Apple has to offer here.

  • Terminator Salvation and Battlestar Galactica

    I spent part of today catching up the last part of Battlestar Galactica Season 4, and I saw Terminator Salvation this evening with Y.  I learned in BSG today that the Thirteenth Tribe were actually Cylons–skeletons, bodies, and all. In Terminator Salvation, Marcus Wright is constructed in the other direction than Terminator 3’s Terminatrix–Marcus is the fusion of man and machine.  However, Marcus was once a murderer–the unconscionable, monstrous, the inhuman.  Given his second chance, he becomes human, or at least what we may consider the human ideal–altruistic, helpful, and self-sacrificing.  Thus, the machine makes the man more human.  However, throughout Terminator Salvation and BSG, I’m reading a shift in the concern about the machinic appropriation of the human.  In Star Trek: The Next Generation, the original Terminator and T2 films, and older SF, the fear was only about the surface, about the appearance of human mapped or stretched over a cold, metallic infrastructure.  Now, it seems like the concern has more to do with organs and the organic.  Where does this anxiety over our bodies and the tissues that make them work and function come from?  Obviously, the fear of losing human-ness to the machine is rooted in the emergence and subsequent evolution of anxieties following the integration of humans into the great machine and system of the Industrial Revolution.  Perhaps following the turn of the century into the 2000s, the organic (i.e., genetics) meshes with the machine (i.e., AI representing the networked/computerized landscape of the now).  What this might mean for future SF and our engagement with organic and machinic technologies I do not know.  However, I am eager to discover where this future might lead.

  • Wall-E, Terrific Science Fiction

    Y and I just got back home from seeing Pixar’s latest animated film, Wall-E, at the single screen Highland Theatre in Akron, Ohio.  It’s everything but a “silly cartoon.”  I have to tell you–Wall-E is TERRIFIC Science Fiction, and GREAT filmmaking!

    I’ve seen every film by Pixar except for the Toy Story series, and I’ve enjoyed all that I’ve seen thus far.  However, Wall-E surpasses all of their previous work through a well-thought out story, amazing cinematography, good examples of real-world physics, and the interweaving of American consumer culture with capitalistic-paternalism and eco-disaster.  The most striking element of the film goes back to Leo Marx’s work, The Machine in the Garden, but I believe Wall-E is emblematic of how Marx is wrong.  Marx’s thesis is that American literature imagines an idyllic garden which has been lost and is reattainable through the embrace of technology, but the lost Edenic pastoral is gone forever, and technological progress pushes us further away from it.  The characters of Wall-E and his girlfriend, Eve, show humanity the way toward regaining what we’ve lost through two key scenes (one in the film, and the other during the end credits).  The earlier scene has Eve take Wall-E’s plant offering into what is best described as a womb.  There, the plant is safe until returned to the corporate robot controlled Axiom starship (accepted/unquestioned truth, wow, what a perfect name!).  Wall-E and Eve keep the plant safe, and reawaken obese humanity’s connection with (mother) Earth.  Then, during the end credits, there are developing scenes in a variety of stylzied animations covering cave paintings to Egyptian heiroglyphics to Impressionism.  In these scenes, the garden is recreated by the cooperation of humanity with its autonomous robotic creations.

    Wall-E is a really fun movie for all ages, and I guarantee that you’ll be as enchanted as I was by this amazing Science Fiction allegory!

  • The Cigarette Smoking Man and Ms. Yutani in AVP2 Requiem

    Another interesting aspect of AVP2 Requiem is the appearance of the Cigarette Smoking Man from The X-Files. Okay, so the character is called Colonel Stevens, and he’s played by Robert Joy and not William B. Davis. However, he serves a similarly shady function within the AVP2 narrative. This American government/military official donning a black suit instead of uniform, orders the nuclear strike on the small town Alien infestation. Additionally, after the survivors make it out of the blast zone, they are intercepted by Special Forces members, who disarm them of the Predator energy weapon. This weapon in turn is then given by Col. Stevens to Ms. Yutani (Françoise Yip). This is an interesting development, because it serves to strengthen the bonds between government and corporate bodies. As you may know, Yutani is the other half of Weyland-Yutani, the mega-corporation from the original Alien and Aliens films (the Weyland aspect of the corporate puzzle is explained in AVP with the appearance of Charles Bishop Weyland played by Lance Henriksen). AVP2 does not go into the reasons why a government official would give otherworldly technology to a corporation, and my assumption is that this is a retelling and continuation of Cold War tropes embedded in Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex. Perhaps this signifies the hard currency payback by the government for its wholesale purchase by corporate interests in the here-and-now.

    More AVP2 commentary on Dynamic Subspace here and here.

  • More Thoughts on Forced Fellatio in AVP2 Requiem

    There’s one point that I didn’t make that clear in my last posting on Aliens Vs. Predator Requiem and that is the underlying problematic nature of the hybrid Alien-Predator. It signifies the ambiguous sex of transsexuals. Its body contains the Predator’s vagina-like mouth, which in turn houses the Alien’s phallus-like mouth extension. Through this imagery of design, the Alien-Predator hybrid represents both the female and male sexes. Which leads me to wonder if the Alien-Predator hybrid’s forcing a pregnant woman to have unnaturally impregnating fellatio represents a culturally derived fear of transsexuals and the intersexed? Is the Alien-Predator hybrid the new barbarian at the gates? Intersexed persons are most definitely individuals and human subjects, so how do these SF images of the marauding/barbaric/primitive/animal Alien-Predator hybrid Other challenge cultural progress in regards to sex and gender? It’s time to reread Sandy Stone’s “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto.”