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The Future Is Almost Now - The Atlantic
In popular culture, science-fiction stories look more like the real world than ever before.
"There are still plenty of films that continue the genre’s tradition of truly fantastical worlds: Mad Max: Fury Road, Snowpiercer, and, of course, Star Wars: The Force Awakens. But recently, such exercises in strong futurism seem to have been outnumbered by more modest speculative efforts—narratives imagining a moment that seems to barely anticipate, if not intersect with, the present. Compared to many of the canonical works of science fiction past (Planet of the Apes, Dune, Alien, 2001, Ender’s Game, The Road Warrior), the visions of the future furbished in recent films like Ex Machina, Her, and Gravity, or series like Orphan Black or Black Mirror (
), feel positively cautious in their predictive scope. It’s as if the genre has been struck by some combination of ambition and restraint: a desire to prognosticate, but not overstep, to achieve maximum prescience with minimum risk. The result is a genre less invested in world creation, per se, than world acceleration."
"If the job of science fiction has been “to imagine what life would be like on a plane as far above us as we are above savagery,” what does it mean that so much recent sci-fi has been taking place on a plane that’s relatively proximate to ours?"
"Susan Sontag’s 1965 essay, “The Imagination of Disaster,” presents a different possibility. In it, she argues that the science-fiction film should be understood as an “emblem of an inadequate response,” or a byproduct of humanity’s inability to deal with the “unthinkable.” Should the fact that sci-fi seems to now be handling such scenarios more concretely, then, be seen as a sign of progress? Or is this insistence on concrete-ness merely a symptom of what the sci-fi luminary William Gibson sees as the end of speculation—the collapse of imagination into a reality that has already outpaced it? In other words, perhaps the reason writers and filmmakers are less inclined to imagine new “disasters” is that they’re already adapting to so many. As Gibson explained in a 2007 interview, “I have to figure out what it means to try and write about the future at a time when we are all living in the shadow of at least a half a dozen wildly science-fiction scenarios.”
"There may be no stronger confirmation of the notion that reality is keeping pace with fantasy than the arrival, last fall, of an auspicious date: October 21, 2015, the day that in Back to the Future II was made to represent “the future.” What in 1989 had seemed impossibly distant had suddenly arrived. Yet what struck many observers was not the dissonance of Robert Zemeckis’s Reagan-era vision, but instead, its surprising resemblance to postmillennial reality. As The New York Times noted in an article chronicling the things the film got right (video conferencing, voice activation), “this strange world is not so far-fetched after all.” And it may be that contemporary audiences find themselves in a position not unlike that of the film’s protagonist, Marty. These days, no matter where people turn, they can’t keep from running into their future selves."
Zelf denk ik bij dit artikel ook meteen aan
Accelerating Change. Hoe meer verandering op korter wordende tijdschaal, hoe moeilijker het wordt om over de toekomst iets zinnigs te kunnen zeggen. Als je nu een realistisch toekomstbeeld van het jaar 2050 wil schetsen moet je met zoveel zaken rekening houden dat het geheel dreigt te verzanden in iets zo onoverzichtelijks dat het voor de kijker onmogelijk wordt het gehele plaatje te verwerken gedurende de film. Misschien daarom dat het gemakkelijker is om dichter bij huis te kijken aangezien ook daar reeds grote verandering ons opwacht.
● De nieuwe van Herzog, Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World
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ThePlaylist publiceerde onlangs een ranking van de 50 beste SF films van de 21ste eeuw en als je die eens afgaat kan je niet anders dan vaststellen dat we de laatste 16 jaar reeds ongelooflijk verwend zijn. Naar mijn mening missen ze er een paar en maken ze ook wat bizarre keuzes maar dat wordt ruimschoots goed gemaakt door de verscheidenheid aan minder bekende parels die ze in hun lijst hebben opgenomen.
Under the Skin op #2
De film die ik het hardst mis is The Congress aangezien ik die in mijn top 10 zou plaatsen.
Verder zouden ook The Animatrix, Pitch Black, Mr. Nobody, The Skin I Live In, Cloud Atlas, Watchmen, Paprika, FAQ About Time Travel, The Man From Earth, Vanilla Sky en Save the Green Planet! zeker in mijn top 50 voorkomen en films als Avatar, Star Wars, Chappie, Oblivion, Elysium, Pandorum, K-Pax en Prometheus waarschijnlijk ook.
Holy Motors Sci-Fi? Dan Tree of Life ook!
● Holy crap! Ik ben er misschien wat laat mee want SOMA is al bijna een jaar uit maar toch vond ik er hier geen enkele thread over terug. Wel... na het in één ruk (13 uur) uitgespeeld te hebben blijkt dat een regelrechte schande te zijn. Wat een dijk van een spel is me dat zeg! Zonder twijfel één van de strafste games die ik ooit gespeeld heb. Deze moet niet onderdoen voor andere verhaal gedreven toppers en mag gerust in één adem vernoemd worden met groten als Half-Life en Bioshock. Net zoals die games is SOMA een lineaire rollercoaster van wereldformaat die je van begin tot einde op het puntje van je stoel houdt met een verhaal zo goed dat je gewoon niet kan stoppen met spelen tot je weet waar het eindigt. Het level en sound design zijn van torenhoog niveau en de wereld is zo gedetailleerd en realistisch vorm gegeven dat het geheel meer wordt dan de som van de delen. De game verschilt van HL en Bioshock in het feit dat SOMA geen shooter is maar eerder een mix van stealth en "walking simulator". Veel gamers gebruiken die term vaak negatief maar sinds de release van games zoals Dear Esther, Gone Home en Firewatch is het zowat uitgegroeid tot een officieel genre. Een genre dat mij geweldig ligt. Sommige titels, zoals bijvoorbeeld Bioshock Infinite, waren imo veel beter geweest als walking simulator dan als shooter. Morele keuzes en het al dan niet beëindigen van iemand's leven hebben een veel grotere impact als je niet zojuist als een psychopaat 1000en NPCs hebt afgeknald. SOMA respecteert op alle punten zijn eigen regels en dat resulteert in ongeëvenaarde immersie.
"From the creators of Amnesia: The Dark Descent comes SOMA, a sci-fi horror game set below the waves of the Atlantic ocean. Struggle to survive a hostile world that will make you question your very existence."
● "After nearly four decades of exposure, the ichor-dripping design of Ridley Scott's 1979 sci-fi/horror classic Alien is the the rare monster concept that hasn't had its effectiveness blunted by time."
En nu we het toch over Alien hebben;
Aliens is nothin like Alien - and all the better for it.
Een artikel van AVClub uit de history of violence reeks waarin ze een kijkje nemen naar de beste actie film van elk jaar, van de geboorte van het genre tot vandaag.
"Sigourney Weaver has talked about how she played Ellen Ripley, heroine of Aliens, as Rambolina."
"Cameron’s aliens might not have the sticky, mysterious power that Scott’s one beast did. But Cameron couldn’t just make the same movie, and he did amazing things with what he had. Working with a mere $18 million budget and a level of special effects technology that necessitated rubber monster suits, Cameron worked miracles."
"While Cameron was using Giger’s design, Cameron himself gets credit for designing the Alien Queen, the massive and terrifying creature who gives Aliens its great showdown finale. The Alien Queen might be a creation of pure puppetry, but it gets real character moments. It acts like an honest-to-god dangerous animal, enraged over the destruction of its eggs, and so the ending plays as a standoff between two protective mother figures. The life-size model that Cameron used for the Alien Queen has been on display in museums before, so maybe you’ve seen it in person. I have, and even frozen in one spot, it’s a thing to behold."
Fans weten dit ongetwijfeld maar wat Cameron met die film heeft klaar gespeeld blijft enorm indrukwekkend. De making of van Aliens is een ware lust voor iedereen met ook maar een greintje interesse in filmmaking en hoe ze tijdens die productie onder zware beperkingen grenzen niet enkel wisten te verleggen maar verpulveren. The magic of movie making spat eraf.
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How Children of Men took us through the looking glass - Interessant artikel over de hedendaagse relevantie van Children of Men.
"Despite being set in the not-too distant future, Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men pulsates with contemporary sensibilities. Concerns over immigration and the persistent rise of nationalism fit rather too comfortably into the dominant 2016 narrative. Indeed, the demise of Western society looms large, if apocryphally, over neoliberal and right-wing politics. "
"The film’s recurring narrative beat is that of refugees, or “fugees” as they are disparagingly called. While thankfully the widespread pseudo-Nazi internment camps featured in the film do not exist today, immigrants have become societal fall-guys, at least according to the discourse spouted by the Brexit campaign in the UK and Donald Trump in the US. Without wishing to put too fine a point on it, the refugees in Children of Men are as culpable for the film’s infertility crisis as the Mexican migrants of 2016 who are symptomatic of America’s supposed need to become ‘great again’."
"Back in the city, people are visibly paranoid about the imminent threat of terrorism. The film’s opening salvo is a stunning single take in which Theo averts a blast in a café. Whether it be flash backs to the days of the IRA, 9/11, or events in France over the past 12 months, audiences today hardly need suspend their disbelief in order to buy into the film’s dramatic stakes."
"Socio-economic class divisions sharpen into a clear demarcation between rich and poor. The ‘busy middle’ is no more. The rich live within the confines of a bourgeois society which would make Karl Marx wince, while those worst off live in a quasi-Victorian slum. The palace which has become of Battersea Power Station represents the pinnacle of high society, but also a nuanced debate over what people have to live for now. Interestingly, both Cuarón’s conception and the Tate Modern are derelict factories remodelled into pantheons of art and culture. Herein, Theo’s friend has collected the cultural genome of the human race. Michelangelo’s ‘David’ stands proudly, while the pair eat dinner sat across from Picasso’s ‘Guernica’. Theo acerbically states that no one will even be around to enjoy such opulence in 50 years – but isn’t that precisely the point? Devoid of the ability of childbirth then isn’t humanity judged by what it can create?"
Tijd voor een rewatch denk ik dan.
● Deze short, Never Happened, is één van de beste die ik in lange tijd heb gezien.
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Science fiction: Boldly going for 50 years- Een retrospectieve op Star Trek voor zijn 50ste verjaardag.
"Star Trek's portrayal of human diversity and refusal to engage in national exceptionalism remain landmark achievements."
"Fifty years later, how does our world compare with Roddenberry's universe? The changes in technology are transformational; and although interstellar travel has yet to become reality, NASA's projected 2030s human mission to Mars follows the dream “to boldly go”. The progressive social values that Star Trek pioneered on television are now much more widely held. But new conflicts and geopolitical stand-offs have erupted, despite efforts by our own federation, the United Nations. Amid these shifts and tensions, this vastly influential franchise continues to carry a subtle but clear message — we can be better than we are."
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Science journals: The worlds of H. G. Wells
"Science fiction pioneer H.G. Wells conjured some futuristic visions that haven't (yet) come true: a machine that travels back in time, a man who turns invisible, and a Martian invasion that destroys southern England. But for a man born 150 years ago, many of Wells's other predictions about the modern world have proven amazingly prescient.
Wells, born in 1866, was trained as a scientist, a rarity among his literary contemporaries, and was perhaps the most important figure in the genre that would become science fiction."
"The War of the Worlds inspired Robert Goddard — inventor of the liquid-fuelled rocket, whose research led to NASA's Apollo programme — to devote his life to space travel. The book's “heat-rays” also presaged military lasers. The hero of The Island of Doctor Moreau, Edward Prendick, “had spent some years at the Royal College of Science, and had done some researches in biology under Huxley”; the book's animal–human hybrids are rough precursors to today's embryonic chimaeras. Wells's 1914 The World Set Free predicted the atomic bomb, drawing on and subsequently influencing chemist Frederick Soddy's work on radioactivity, and influencing physicist Leo Szilard in his work on the neutron chain reaction."
● De 'Tammy & The T-Rex unrated gore cut' 4k remastered bluray is uit!