dystopia – sfgirl Reviews…

“Advantageous”

Posted on November 27, 2015July 11, 2016 by thealiennextdoor

“There are women with voices and brains and power and intelligence that have been waiting for this moment.”—Director Jennifer Phang

Advantageous is a low budget indie film by Jennifer Phang that explores a near-future world—a kind of “pre-dystopia”, according to Katharine Trendacosta of io9—where jobs have become heavily automated and opportunities for education are cutthroat. Women have been generally forced out of the workplace and onto the streets: the logic being that they will be less violent while living on the street than men.

While the world vaguely resembles a vibrant City with flying ships and some bizarrely futuristic architecture (including a high rise that functions as a giant water feature), a sense of unease permeates most scenes, punctuated by occasional terrorist explosions and snippets of disturbing news reports. Artificial intelligence has supplanted most people in middle management, “The people you do see are either impoverished and disenfranchised or are hidden in the upper floors, the protected places,” says director Jennifer Phang. Unemployment is close to 50% and there are no public schools. The only options for a young girl—if she is not to end up on the streets, either as a beggar or prostitute—is to attend a highly selective free magnet school or a very expensive private school.

Gwen Koh (Jacgueline Kim) is the spokeswoman of the Center for Advanced Health and Living, a wellness corporation that offers health and beauty treatments to an elite who can afford it. When the Center informs her that she looks too old, Gwen—desperate to secure her bright daughter’s expensive education—submits to the experimental treatment she was initially hired to promote. Jules hadn’t made it into the free magnet school, leaving Gwen to come up with extensive funds to get her into a private school. The corporation has subtly backed Gwen into a corner by reminding her that her generation doesn’t have the skills to compete—all of education currently being STEM-based—and they fully understand that she is too old and too unconnected to do anything other than offer herself up to their new procedure to secure her position and a future for her daughter Jules. Constantly walking the edge of privilege, Gwen struggles to make the elite-connections necessary to place Jules. “Gwen is too old, too female, and too unconnected to do anything other than offer herself up as a sacrifice,” writes Trendacosta.

The true nature of her sacrifice is not understood at first; it unravels slowly, like an internal wound, until we learn that the procedure—putting her memories into a younger person’s body—means that Gwen’s “mother-connection” awareness with her daughter will be lost when her original body dies in the procedure. This is particularly significant, given their close and loving relationship, which is evocatively conveyed throughout the film.

Advantageous “is riveting, emotionally gripping, and offers up a vision of the future that is disturbingly easy to picture, even as some of the technologies it imagines seem out of reach,” says Ariel Schwartz of Business Insider Magazine. While the trope of mind-upload into a younger, prettier body has been around for while in standard SF, how Phang presents it, in the muted notes and pace of “everyday” and “mundane” events, brings a kind of realism to it that both invigorates and chills. Like watching a building explode in person rather than on TV. The immediacy and reality of it is visceral. Phang does this through sparing use of sound, language and colour. And all presented in a pace that does not rush, but lingers and reflects. Long moments of quiet punctuate scenes of significance, giving us the chance to examine, resonate and reflect in “real-time” with the character. These, in themselves, provide some of the most poignant footage of the film as we are given the time to descend into deeper reflection. Each plays out, short vignettes of life that string together like pearls on a necklace. Life moments. Unflinchingly and confidently performed at the pace of life.

In one of many quietly powerful scenes, Gwen stumbles upon a street woman, huddled in a small grassy alcove under an old blanket. When Gwen asks her if she is okay, the woman instead responds, “Are you okay?” This is a natural response for a woman; we think of others, of their welfare. We carry the “mother” archetype within us, everywhere we go, no matter what befalls us. This natural sense of compassion and altruism runs through our blood.

And, yes, it makes us a different kind of hero.

Gwen’s heroics are not accompanied by percussive violence or gut-wrenching action; they are silent choices that percolate from deep within. They are choices that ultimately bleed into great consequence.

“The plot suggests a standard ‘body swap’ sci-fi storyline,” says Danielle Riendeau of Polygon. “But Advantageous is much more about motherhood, the sacrifices women make for their children, and to a large extent, the difficulties of being a non-white woman in an increasingly intolerant society. The writing, directing and performances are so strong that they elevate the film far beyond a simple twist on a classic trope. Advantageous is a potent, heartbreaking meditation on parental love and the sacrifices women make for their families. It has a lot to say, and it does so with clear-eyed, fearless intensity.”

Trendacosta writes, “People are going to judge Advantageous by the things it lacks. There are no battles, no mustache-twirling villains, and not even any giant science fiction spectacle sets. People are also going to judge it for what it has. There are some intense discussions of classism, racism, ageism, sexism, and elitism. But don’t judge this movie for either of those things—instead, it’s worth appreciating for all the things it does so incredibly well.”

What Advantageous does so incredibly well is portray a near-future vision worth pondering and discussing.

Nina Munteanu is an ecologist and internationally published author of award-nominated speculative novels, short stories and non-fiction. She is co-editor of Europa SF and currently teaches writing courses at George Brown College and the University of Toronto. Visit www.ninamunteanu.ca for the latest on her books.

Nina’s latest release is La natura dell.acqua / The Way of Water, a bilingual story and essay on water and climate change (Mincione Edizioni, Rome), set in Canada.

“Snowpiercer” and the Machine of Life

Posted on November 30, 2014July 10, 2016 by thealiennextdoor

snowpiercer-curtis-stands-up — Curtis stands up to the goons

What’s left of humanity—after we broke the world—is crammed in a speeding train that circles a frozen Earth … forever.

Bong Joon-Ho’s motion picture Snowpiercer is a stylish post-climate change apocalypse allegory. A dark pastiche of surrealistic insanity, welded together with moments of poetic pondering and steam-punk slick in a frenzied frisson you can almost smell. Joon-Ho casts each scene in metallic grays and blues that make the living already look half-dead. The entire film plays like a twisted steam-punkish baroque symphony. Violence personified in a garish ballet.

The train’s self-contained closed ecosystem is maintained by an ordered social system, imposed by a stony militia. Those at the front enjoy privileges and luxurious living conditions, though most drown in a debauched drug stupor; those at the back live on next to nothing and must resort to savage means to survive. This film isn’t so much about climate change—which serves the premise of a study on how society functions—or rather copes—within a decadent capitalist system, based on an edict of productivity (which may indeed correlate with climate change): serve the machine of “life”. Satisfy the sacred machine at all costs; complete with subterfuge, oppression and references to cannibalism. Beneath the film’s blatant statement on the emptiness of the pursuit of capital at any cost lies a deeper more subtle exploration on the nature of humanity. Die to live or live to die?

snowpiercer-curtis — Curis Everett (Chris Evans)

In a recent interview with io9, Joon-Ho said, “the science fiction genre lends itself perfectly to questions about class struggle, and different types of revolution.”

Revolution brews from the back, lead by Curtis Everett (Chris Evans), who confesses to a forced recruit, along the way, “A thousand people in an iron box. No food, no water. After a month we ate the weak. You know what I hate about myself? I know what people tastes like….I know that babies taste best.”

Minister Mason (Tilda Swinton), an imperious yet simpering figure who serves the ruling

snowpiercer-mason — Minister Mason (Tilda Swinton)

class without quite being part of it, reminds the lower class that, “Eternal order flows from the sacred engine. We must occupy our preordained position. I belong to the front, you belong to the tail. Know your place!”

It’s all about the engine for both front and tail. It saved humanity, after all. It is their future. Curtis tells his colleagues that they will move forward: “We take the engine and we control the world. It’s time we take the engine.”

“Reform and revolution are shibboleths that distinguish liberals from radicals,” explains Aaron Bady of The New Inquiry. “While liberals want to reform capitalism, without fundamentally transforming it, radicals want to tear it up from the roots (the root word of “radical” is root!) and replace capitalism with something that isn’t capitalism…If you’re the kind of leftist who thinks that the means of production just need to be in better hands—Obama, for example, instead of George W. Bush, or Elizabeth Warren instead of Obama, or Bernie Sanders instead of Elizabeth Warren, and so on—then this movie buries a poison pill inside its protein bar: soylent green is people.”

The train “eats” the children of the poor; using them to replace the sacred engine parts that have worn out in a kind of retro-transhumanist collaboration of human and machine and creating a perverse immortal cyborg entity. Only, the individual children die in the process and need to be constantly replaced to maintain the eternal whole. They have become cogs in a giant wheel of eternity.

Curtis’s revolution is doomed from the start; once he reaches the front, it is revealed to him that the entire conflict and resulting deaths were orchestrated all along to help maintain population balance. Wilford (Ed Harris), the genius who created the train with a perpetual motion engine, tells Curtis once they meet that, “this is the world…The engine lasts forever. The population must always be kept in balance.” Which begs the obvious question: why not just get rid of all of the lower class “scum” (as Mason calls them)? That would make room for the privileged. What purpose do these lower class serve? Well, aside from providing their children as parts to the sacred engine, they are there to be hated, feared and despised by the elite. When the soul is empty and needs “filling” but can’t be filled, then it finds a substitute.

snowpiercer-revolution — Curtis leads the revolution

Aaron Bady of The New Inquirer relates, “Instead of giving Texans a health care system, for example, late capitalism gives them the illegal immigrant, to hate, to fear, and to dis-identify with. Prisons do more and more of the system-maintaining work that was once done by schools and hospitals: instead of giving us something to want, they give us something to fear, hate, and kill. And so, we eat ourselves.” We die to live.

Wilford grooms Curtis as the new engineer and reveals to him the true nature of the engine. “You’ve seen what people do without leadership,” says Wilford to Curtis. “They devour one another.” This is dark irony considering what the train is doing. And it is when Curtis discovers this awful truth that his reformist revolution comes to a dead halt and he makes a decision that takes him into the realm beyond the train.

This movie is about hard choices and transcendence. … Save humanity, but at the consequence of our souls? Or transcend a machine that has robbed us of our souls at the expense of our mortality? The film continually questions our definition of what life is; what makes life worth living.

snowpiercer-gilliam2 — Gilliam (John Hurt)

The film, whose script by Joon-Ho and Kelly Masterson is based loosely on the French graphic novel Le Transperceneige by Jacques Lob, graphically portrays the fecklessness of a reformist/revolutionary movement to transcend the decadent capitalist machine (the train). It begins with the adoption of a failing system from a previously failed system. Perhaps it is a truism that most reformist movements fail to challenge the true hegemony of the system they intend to overtake, given their origin. What we get is little genuine change; just a shuffle in protocol.

Peter Frase of Jacobin Magazine shares that, “it’s all the more effective because the heart of that critique comes as a late surprise, from a character we might not expect.”

snowpiercer-nam — Namgoog Minsoo (Song Kang-Ho)

Namgoog Minsoo (Song Kang-Ho) is a spaced-out drug addict that Curtis ‘liberates’ from a drawer to help them open the gates to the forward sections. Like everyone on the train, Nam is a little crazy. But he differs in one important way: he believes there is hope outside the train. Unlike his reformist brothers, he’s looked outside the construct, studied the realm beyond the train. Perhaps it is drug-induced fantasy. Perhaps he’s simply had enough of a lifetime of “non-life” onboard the train and would rather die outside to truly live, even if for a brief moment. When the chance for this moment materializes, we, like Nam and his daughter Yona (Ko Ah-sung), are more than ready to jump the train. In fact, we’re desperate to get off this shadow game of bread and circuses. Even if it means freezing to death in moments.

Only Yona and one of the rescued children from the engine, survive the train crash, thanks to Curtis’s truly revolutionary decision.

“Is it more revolutionary to want to take control of the society that’s oppressed you, or to try and escape from that system altogether?” asks Joon-Ho.

I felt a cathartic surge of relief when the train came to a violent crashing stop; even though it effectively meant the end of humanity. My visceral response was incredible relief. The scene following the train crash was —despite the inhospitable and cold environment—surrealistically fresh, invigorating and serene. Along with Yona and one of the children Curtis rescued, we’ve escaped the rushing perversity: the obsession to survive at any cost. We’ve chosen to live to die.

As Yona and the child crunch through the snow in the quiet depth of coldness, they glimpse a polar bear. There is life! Perhaps not humanity. But life on Earth.

And in that connection, we live. Even if just for a moment.

Nina Munteanu is a Canadian ecologist and novelist. In addition to eight published novels, she has authored award-winning short stories, articles and non-fiction books, which were translated into several languages throughout the world. Recognition for her work includes the Midwest Book Review Reader’s Choice Award, finalist for Foreword Magazine’s Book of the Year Award, the SLF Fountain Award, and The Delta Optimist Reviewers Choice.

Nina regularly publishes reviews and essays in magazines such as The New York Review of Science Fiction. Strange Horizons, IROSF, Europa SF and others. She serves as staff writer for several online and print magazines. She teaches and coaches writing online through her website Nina Munteanu. Her books on writing “The Fiction Writer: Get Published, Write Now!” and “The Journal Writer” were translated into Romanian and published by Editura Paralela 45. Her latest book, The Way of Water / La natura dell’acqua is a post-climate change story and essay published by Mincione Edizioni (Rome).

Live, Die, Repeat: “The Edge of Tomorrow”

Posted on July 31, 2014July 9, 2016 by thealiennextdoor

Edge Of Tomorrow - Emily Blunt warrior — Emily Blunt

She’s called The Angel of Verdun. You also see another name scrawled in bright red over a London bus: Full Metal Bitch. When we first see her, angry and fierce in her battle gear (which resembles a modern-day knight’s armor) she’s heading out to battle, stomping out of the bunker, surrounded by an entourage, and summarily knocks an acolyte down who gets in her way. She’s badass. She’s the Full Metal Bitch.

Her real name is Rita Vrataski. She wields a sharpened helicopter blade as her weapon of choice and serves as the poster girl for the United Defense Force to recruit more into the fight.

Rita (Emily Blunt) is a very different kind of poster girl for the war effort of the recent SF action movie Edge of Tomorrow, directed by Doug Liman and written by Christopher McQuarrie. There is an “edge of tomorrow” in this military SF story that explores how much we’ve changed since the time of World War I and II. And that change is most apparent in how women are seen and act.

Edge of Tomorrow makes subtle and not so subtle reference to both world wars: from its June 6th release (70^th anniversary of D-Day and the massive and decisive Normandy landing) to its reference to the trenches of Verdun in WWI, the Nazi or German Empire forces as the original seat of the Omega entity and many more.

The premise is straight-forward science fiction stuff: Earth is under attack by an alien species, who have seeded themselves with a meteor shower. The aliens have conquered Russia and China and now threaten France and England. Evoking echoes of World War II’s Normandy invasion, the United States joins the fray in support of their allies.

American Major William Cage (Tom Cruise), who is with the PR staff of the war effort, gets unwillingly drafted to the front as a rookie private and dies in the first five minutes of landing on the shores of Normandy—but not before he kills an alpha alien, which covers him in blue blood. This sends him into a vicious time loop, where he must relive and die over and over in that horrendous bloodbath. Each time, he glimpses the Angel of Verdun repeatedly killed. On one occasion, Vrataski runs across him, lying injured in the mud. He can’t move, sure victim to the aliens. She snatches his battery pack and moves on, leaving him there to die. Astonished at the Angel’s apparent lack of compassion, Cage will later mimic her “let him die” attitude when he knowingly lets fellow soldier Kimmel get crushed.

In a later iteration he finally meets Vrataski on the battlefield, where she realizes (having gone through the time loop and lost it) that he is now in a time loop and therefore the key to their victory; she tells him to find her when he wakes up just seconds before she lets herself get blown up and they begin their looping journey together. To his complaint, “I’m not a soldier,” Vrataski replies, “No, you’re a weapon.” That’s how she sees him. And to that end, she mentors him in the art and science of soldiering. When things go awry she time and again unflinchingly shoots him dead to reset the time. Cage tries to engage her in casual conversation and finds her taciturn. “You don’t talk much,” he observes, to which she quips, “Not a fan.” She’s all about the business of defeating the enemy before the human race is wiped out.

Emily-Blunt-in-Edge-of-Tomorrow2 — Emily Blunt as Rita Vrataski

Edge of Tomorrow provides a refreshing kind of woman hero; someone who is equal to her male protagonist in skill, intelligence and heroic stature. What I mean by heroic stature is that her heroic journey of transformation does not play subservient to her male counterpart’s journey. This almost happens on two occasions when Cage gives her an “out” to stay behind and let him take over. She declines. In fact, Cruise lets her character take the lead, even though this it truthfully Cage’s story of metaphoric transformation from “onlooker” to “participant”.

In so many androcentric storylines, the female—no matter how complex, interesting and tough she starts out being—must demure to the male lead; as if only by bowing down to his superior abilities can she help ensure his heroic stature. Returning us right back to the cliché role of the woman supporting the leading man to complete his hero’s journey. And this often means serving as the prize for his chivalry. We see this in so many action thrillers and action adventures today: Valka in How to Train Your Dragon, Wyldstyle in The Lego Movie, Neytiri in Avatar, Trinity in The Matrix, and so many more. There’s even a name for it: the Trinity Syndrome.

Tasha Robinson writes in her excellent article entitled, We’re losing all our Strong Female Characters to Trinity Syndrome: “The idea of the Strong Female Character—someone with her own identity, agenda, and story purpose—has thoroughly pervaded the conversation about what’s wrong with the way women are often perceived and portrayed today, in comics, video-games, and film especially…it’s still rare to see films in the mainstream action/horror/science-fiction/fantasy realm introduce women with any kind of meaningful strength, or women who go past a few simple stereotypes.”

I give Cruise, Liman and McQuarrie full marks for not doing this. For example, after Cage makes his case to his Squadron to go find the Omega in Paris, they remain reluctant until Vrataski emerges. “I don’t expect you to follow me,” says Cage. “I do expect you to follow her.” The Angel of Verdun—or better yet, the badass Full Metal Bitch. And why not? Who wouldn’t follow her?

Is this one of the reasons that this movie didn’t do so well in the North American box office as it did in Europe, whose audience may reflect a more mature, open and enlightened audience?

When a female lead is stronger than the male protagonist, some reviewers (OK—some male reviewers) treat and categorize that movie as a “woman’s story”. I’ve been told by some of my male friends that they couldn’t possibly empathize with such a character—mainly because she is a woman and she is stronger than the male lead “they want to be”. Invariably, in many of these, the male counterpart is so much “milk-toast” compared to that awesome female-warrior. And have you ever noticed that, while the male hero gets the girl, the female hero usually ends up alone? Great examples include: Buffy the Vampire Slayer; Xena: Warrior Princess; Sarah in The Terminator and of course Vasquez in Aliens. These women are amazons; they stand apart, goddess-like, unrelenting, unflinching—untouchable. It’s actually no wonder that my ex-husband dislikes Sigourney Weaver to this day—she could crush him underfoot and eat him for breakfast at a moment’s notice. And probably would…

In a superb article in NewStatesman entitled I hate Strong Female Characters, Sophia McDougall says:

“…I want to point out two things that Richard has, that Bond and Captain America and Batman also have, that Peggy (Carter of Captain America), however strong she is, cannot attain. They are very simple things, even more fundamental than “agency”.

1) Richard has the spotlight. However weak or distressed or passive he may be, he’s the main goddamn character.

2) Richard has huge range of other characters of his own gender around him, so that he never has to act as any kind of ambassador or representative for maleness. Even dethroned and imprisoned, he is free to be uniquely himself.

On the posters [women are] posed way in the back of the shot behind the men, in the trailers they may pout or smile or kick things, but they remain silent. Their strength lets them, briefly, dominate bystanders but never dominate the plot. It’s an anodyne, a sop, a Trojan Horse – it’s there to distract and confuse you, so you forget to ask for more.”

There is another type of female hero. She is equal to her male counterpart. Her story is not secondary to his story; her heroic status and hero’s journey is equal to his; in fact they may share the same journey. Examples include: Bonnie and Clyde; Peter Chang’s Aeon Flux; Farscape; Battlestar Galactica…

And now Edge of Tomorrow. As with the above examples, Vrataski and Cage form a team, in which together they are more than the sum of their parts. A marriage of independent autopoiesis, combining skills, abilities and vision. This is also why, in my opinion, the ending of Edge of Tomorrow is totally appropriate: not because it’s “the happy ending”; but because it carries the message of the enduring collaboration of equals.

Nina regularly publishes reviews and essays in magazines such as The New York Review of Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, IROSF, Europa SF, and Amazing Stories. She serves as staff writer for several online and print magazines. Nina teaches writing at the University of Toronto and George Brown College in Toronto Canada and coaches writing online through her website Nina Munteanu. Her books on writing “The Fiction Writer: Get Published, Write Now!” and “The Journal Writer” (Starfire) were translated into Romanian and published by Editura Paralela 45. Her newest release, The Way of Water / La natura dell’acqua (Mincione Edizioni, Rome) is a bilingual short story (and essay) on water and climate change.

You Want to Go to “The Island”

Posted on October 19, 2013July 16, 2016 by thealiennextdoor

From its metaphoric title to its powerful end, Director Michael Bay’s The Island had me fully engaged. Told in the genuine style of great science fiction commentary by screenwriters Caspian Tredwell-Owen, Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci (in 2005), The Island reflects the escape-from dystopia films of the 1960s and 70s such as Fahrenheit 451, THX 1138, and Logan’s Run. This elegant story examines a full range of human foibles—consumerist greed, racism, fascism and isolationism—through a premise that is as frightening as it is possible.

In the year 2019, Lincoln Six Echo (Ewan McGregor) and Jordan Two Delta (Scarlett Johansson) live in an isolated community where behavior is governed by a set of strict rules. This includes the avoidance of too close contact. Everything is the same; residents all wear the same white uniform and carry out simple duties. They’ve been told that the outside world is too contaminated for human life with the exception of one island. Everyone lives for the weekly lottery, where the winner gets to leave the compound to live on the island.

It’s a simple and banal existence. We glimpse a scene of adults reading Dick and Jane out loud. When in the opening scene Lincoln Six Echo finds a shoe missing in his provided wardrobe, this becomes a major focus of his day (when greeted by a colleague with, “How are you doing?” he responds with, “I’m missing a shoe.”)

Lincoln can’t accept this mundane existence. In an interview with Dr. Merrick (Sean Bean), the scientist who runs the compound, Lincoln naively unleashes a tirade of items that frustrate him, like why everyone wears white, who determined tofu Tuesday, and then ends with: “I want to know answers and I wish there was more than just waiting to go to the island.” He also suffers from dreams about a life he doesn’t understand—they are, in fact, memories of his ‘sponsor’, the original man (Tom Lincoln) that he is a copy of. When he discovers a moth and follows it, he stumbles into the hidden part of the compound. There he witnesses what really happens to “lottery winners”: they are killed and used for organ harvesting, surrogate motherhood, etc. for each one’s sponsor.

the-island-merrick — Merrick (Sean Bean)

Lincoln is just an insurance policy. An ‘agnate’ according to Dr. Merrick, who describes them as in a “persistent vegetative state that never achieves consciousness” to clients, willing to pay millions of dollars for a second chance at life—and blithely unaware that ‘agnates’ are alive and fully formed with thoughts and feelings like them.

When Lincoln learns the truth, and knowing that Jordan just “won” the lottery, he convinces her to escape with him. Merrick hires Albert Laurent (Djimon Hounsou), a mercenary and former GIGN veteran, to find and dispatch them.

The Island received mixed reviews from critics, with a 40% “Rotten” rating, based on 185 reviews. Variety’s Justin Chang called the film an “exercise in sensory overkill.” Salon’s Stephanie Zacharek lamented that when the film got really interesting, Bay seemed to think he needed “to throw in a car crash or round of gunfire to keep our attention.” If these critics found fault with this elegant action-thriller, I hate to see what they make of 90% of the so-called SF movies out there today. Unlike them, The Island provides a refreshing meaningful face to action-adventure.

Roger Ebert suggested that The Island missed the opportunity “to do what the best science fiction does, and use the future as a way to critique the present.” Again, I disagree. The Island does what the best science fiction does well: it examines the nature of our humanity through the choices we make in adversity within a future world and premise that provides great opportunity for abuse.

the-island-lalalala — Albert Laurent (Djimon Hounsou)

The theme of this parable is carried evocatively by Steve Jablonsky’s score. Like a swelling tide it sweeps us on a journey to some distant shore. From the melodic strings and yearning chorus, the music builds to a powerful conclusion at the film’s end, when it lifts us to victory, resonating with our divine evolution.

I was particularly struck by the timing of the strings and chorus with the appearance of Albert Laurent, walking among those he had just liberated. It is a pivotal and powerful moment that escalates into a resonating vibration of liberty and victory as his eyes meet briefly with Lincoln and Jordan, reunited, and he smiles—for the first time. A beautiful smile of inner joy. It is the smile of a man who has “come home” and is finally free.

Laurent’s subplot is particularly compelling and carries one of the principle elements of the film. In some ways, Laurent represents you and me, caught up in our societal ‘duties’, seduced by self-serving entrapments only to awaken to a path of courageous compassion for all of humanity. Laurent’s journey from jaded mercenary to liberating hero begins when he notices Jordan’s skin branding and, recognizing a connection with her plight, helps her free the mass of ‘defective’ lottery winners about to be incinerated. We learn that his father had been killed as a rebel and Laurent was ‘branded’ as less than human. So, there he walks, brilliantly black among the white-clad ‘agnates’ who slide down the hill after emerging from the underground bunker in which they were incarcerated.

This motion picture is ultimately about finding dignity in the face of adversity and ridicule. It is about confronting the bully and gaining victory over one’s own barriers of fear and doubt toward compassion. It is about the power of love and connection with humanity. It is about retribution and finding one’s true path through the knowledge that we are all one.

“I am you; you are me. You are the waves; I am the ocean. Know this and be free, be divine.” Sri Sathya Sai Baba

Nina’s latest release is La natura dell.acqua / The Way of Water, a bilingual story and essay on water and climate change (Mincione Edizioni, Rome), set in Canada.

Reaching for “Elysium”…

Posted on August 31, 2013July 10, 2016 by thealiennextdoor

In the “Hero’s Journey” myth, Elysium (or the Elysium Fields in Greek mythology) is the paradise that true heroes go to when they die (think of Frodo in Lord of the Rings and the hero in The Gladiator). To the ancient Greeks, Elysium was a place at the ends of the earth where heroes, favored by the gods for their altruism, went. It is a state or place of perfect happiness; the equivalent of Heaven.

Elysium is also the name given to the Earth-orbiting space station of Neill Blomkamp’s (District 9) new science fiction political allegory of the same name. Elysium is where the privileged live in luxury and perfect health (thanks to health-pods) — after they abandoned Earth to the squalor they no doubt helped create. This is not made clear enough for me and is one of the film’s major weaknesses, in my opinion (more on that below).

The year is 2154 in a Los Angeles that strangely resembles the slum shanties of Johannesburg, South Africa (where Blomkamp filmed District 9). We soon learn that Earth struggles in the mire of humanity’s waste in a state of general social strife. Abandoned by the wealthy elite (who have moved to Elysium), the rest of an overpopulated humanity lives in the squalor of abject poverty without food, healthcare, or the motivation to live. I, for one, would have liked to know a little of how humanity devolved so dramatically on a planetary scale.

A Different Hero’s Journey

From the time he was a young orphan, Max Da Costa (Matt Damon; Maxwell Perry Cotton) dreamed of going to Elysium, its impressive phantom form visible in the daytime sky. He promised his childhood love Frey (sympathetically played by Alice Braga and Valentina Giros) that he would take her there, to paradise. His mentor, a kind mother-figure nun of the orphanage, gives him the hero’s talisman (a locket with a picture of Earth inside), and prophesizes, “Es su destino hacer algo maravilla cuando tu es hombre” (“It is your destiny to do something great when you are a man”). She reminds him that when he gets to Elysium, he will see the most beautiful thing: planet Earth. “You see how beautiful it is,” she says to him as he gazes out at the ghost of Elysium in the sky. Then, as she hands him the locket with Earth inside, she adds, “look how beautiful we are from there. Never forget where you come from.” Seen from this perspective, the planet Earth is a beautiful thing to behold.

Max is a reformed criminal who, like Blomkamp’s “workaday” anti-hero in District 9

elysium-jodie-foster — Jodie Foster plays the smartly-clad antagonist

(Sharlto Copley), is not very hero-like until the last five minutes of the film, when he has his personal epiphany and decides to act altruistically rather than self-servingly. This is a pattern that Blomkamp has used before; the reluctant-hero (Wikus Van De Merwe) of District 9 was an unimpressive man with many obvious blemishes. A rather unlikeable man until he makes his heroic decision in the end. This is where Blomkamp’s heroes differ from most action movie heroes, who generally start their journey from higher positions on the evolutionary scale. Blomkamp’s heroes must journey farther to gain their hero-status; they are perhaps more realistic portrayals of ordinary men who finally shine under extra-ordinary circumstances. Men who we start out disliking—hating, even—but find ourselves cheering for, perhaps even crying for. Max’s behavior defines that true hero: rising from his need to save himself to his quest to save humanity—at the cost of his own life. But, as with the ordinary man, it is only when he connects a personal quest to save the daughter of his first love to his global quest to save Earth that Max transforms into the altruistic mythic hero he is destined to become. Everything came together at the film’s end, in a montage of scenes that depict the locket of the planet Earth in his dying hand (Earth is Home; save the planet), the demise of a police state, the savior of his love’s daughter, and med-pods landing on Earth to dispense aid to the dying masses.

A Story About the Planet Earth

Ironically, it is to do with our beloved planet Earth that I felt in Elysium the most discord in plot/thematic story treatment and lack of resonance. Blomkamp begins with the planet and he ends his film with the planet. The symbolism is clear: in the stylish shots of Earth seen from Elysium (and vice versa); in the strategic scenes of Max and the image in his precious locket of not his childhood love Frey but of planet Earth; and his mentor’s advice to Max, delivered in one of the most powerful scenes of the movie. Yet, Blomkamp fails to follow through to give us that visceral connection. Why is the planet so important? How is Max connected to it or anyone else, for that matter. What is Spider’s story (Wagner Moura), a latter-day Che-Guevara, who fervently leads the proletarian rebellion of Earth? Who, why and how did the planet come to be so destroyed? There is not one ounce of suggestion, backstory or context. This is an important consideration; because without it, instead of feeling total resolution and redemption in the end, I felt a disconnect to those masses being helped and even some distrust in their fate and direction. Instead of feeling true victory, I felt ambivalence.

Called a “sci-fi socialist film” by P.J. Gladnick of Newsbusters.org, Elysium is clearly an attempt at examining and dramatizing the social segregation of humanity and economic fascism: a dystopia that promises commentary on social and economic issues in society today. However, I felt that its delivery was compromised by Blomkamp’s choice to focus more on action tech at the expense of good backstory, context and empathic character development. I’m not saying that it’s a bad story. It is a very good story; it’s just that it could have been a great story. The heart of the story—delivered through the main protagonist—lacks the global connection it could have had. This is not, as some reviewers suggest, due to any infirmity of the hero, his antagonists, or lack of symbolism (of which there is much), but the lack of context, backstory and richness of setting (I’m not talking about the visible setting, which was spectacular, elegant and stylish). It comes back to how each character relates to “home”, the planet, and to each other.

Matt Goldberg of Collider.com says that, “Elysium‘s message about economic inequality is couched in a finely-drawn sci-fi world, but the power of that message becomes diminished when we cease to care about the messenger.” Detroit News Tom Long added that, “Elysium is the sort of big, noisy sci-fi film that seems to want to say something but opts instead to concentrate on fight scenes involving gimmickry.” While I appreciated the depth and breadth of Blomkamp’s references to pop culture from an Armani-clad female Darth Vader to the Judeo-Christian references and symbolism, it just didn’t hold its promise.

What began as a promising exploration about an important social issue, devolved into a sequence of ever-escalating gratuitous gore and violence—clearly aimed for a different audience. For me this movie disappointed; not because it wasn’t good, but because it could have been great, and wasn’t.

“World War Z”

Posted on July 31, 2013July 10, 2016 by thealiennextdoor

wwz-pitt-family running — Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt) gathers his family

I don’t watch zombie movies.

I steer away from them. I find them generally tasteless, unimaginative and lacking anything remotely connected to “story”. Most appear, at least from their trailers, to focus on violence and gore with little interest in anything else (what could be more gruesome than a person stalking then eating another?).

As a writer of science fiction and fantasy and avid fan of this genre in motion pictures, I lamented that zombies had become the “in thing” in stories and film these days. We’d just gotten over werewolves and vampires. Now I felt doomed by an infestation of the “undead”. I mean, how many ways can you portray such listless deadbeats?

Now there’s the action thriller “World War Z”. Despite my intrigue with the trailer, it took my trusted friend’s insistence for me to go see it. Remember: it’s a zombie movie and I don’t watch them.

I was vindicated in my trust of her good taste.

“World War Z” is not your typical zombie movie. In fact, to call it a zombie movie is to fail to acknowledge the deeper thematic reflections portrayed. What struck most was that this action thriller focused less on what zombies did (all that missing blood and gore that some reviewers lamented over gave me relief and gratitude) than on the effect of a plague that turned most of humanity into them. It actually had a story! While the motion picture apparently honored the iconic lore and criteria established in the zombie mythos, director Marc Forster and screen writers J. Michael Straczynski and Matthew Michael Carnahan (based on the book by Max Brooks) cleverly did not let themselves be limited by it. In fact, zombies per se serve more as plot tools in a far more interesting and deeper story arc and theme.

I’m referring to the subtle notes of ecology, biology and co-evolution interlaced throughout this visually stunning and rather disturbing film. What happens when you disturb Nature? The opening titles and scenes show a montage of curious and subtly dark reflections on the consequences of our general indifference to Nature and her growing unbalanced ecosystems. “Mother Nature is a serial killer,” virologist Andrew Fassbach tells our hero during his first—and last—ten minutes on screen. During that short time they spend together, Fassbach shares some key insights into how Gaia plays. And she doesn’t always play “fair”. Fassbach also tells us that this zombie plague started with a virus. Which brings up some interesting questions. Was it an “intelligent virus”, manufactured and introduced? Did the virus co-evolve with some organism as an aggressive symbiont and was spontaneously triggered by a disturbance? What was that disturbance and was it an accident or a mistake? How did it come to be?

I didn’t fail to notice the reference to swarming ant colonies in the title montage that foreshadowed a later scene of zombies piling onto each other on the walls of Jerusalem in a frenzied search for warm bodies to eat. This is clearly a film about Nature’s powers and mysteries. You can be sure that questions about what triggered and defined the zombie plague will be addressed in the sequel, already scheduled. Because, like any serial killer, Mother Nature wants to be caught, says Fassbach.

Co-Evolution & Symbiogenesis

Which brings me to what this film really touches on: how Mother Nature takes care of herself and her own… whether we like it or not. The key is evolution and something called co-evolution: this is when two normal aggressors cooperate in an evolutionary partnership to benefit each other. Ehrlich and Raven coined co-evolution to explain how butterflies and their host plants developed in parallel. I wrote about it in an earlier post called “Co-evolution: Cooperation & Aggressive Symbiosis”

Virologist Frank Ryan calls co-evolution “a wonderful marriage in nature—a partnership in which the definition of predator and prey blurs, until it seems to metamorphose to something altogether different.” Co-evolution is now an established theme in the biology of virus-host relationships. The ecological “home” of the virus is the genome of any potential host and scientists have remained baffled by the overwhelming evidence for ‘accommodation’.“Today…every monkey, baboon, chimpanzee and gorilla is carrying at least ten different species of symbiotic viruses,” says Ryan.

“Why,” asks Ryan, “is co-evolution [and its partner, symbiosis] such a common pattern in nature?” Ryan coined the term “genomic intelligence” to explain the form of intelligence exerted by viruses and the capacity of the genome to be both receptive and responsive to nature. It involves an incredible interaction between the genetic template and nature that governs even viruses. Symbiosis and natural selection need not be viewed as mutually contradictory. Russian biologists, Andrei Famintsyn and Konstantine Merezhkovskii invented the term “symbiogenesis” to explain the fantastic synthesis of new living organisms from symbiotic unions. Citing the evolution of mitochondria and the chloroplast within a primitive host cell to form the more complex eukaryotic cell (as originally theorized by Lynn Margulis), Ryan noted that “it would be hard to imagine how the step by step gradualism of natural selection could have resulted in this brazenly passionate intercourse of life!”

Aggressive Symbiosis

In his book, “Virus X” Dr. Frank Ryan coined the term “aggressive symbiont” to explain a common form of symbiosis where one or both symbiotic partners demonstrates an aggressive and potentially harmful effect on the other’s competitor or potential predator. Examples abound, but a few are worth mentioning here. In the South American forests, a species of acacia tree produces a waxy berry of protein at the ends of its leaves that provides nourishment for the growing infants of the ant colony residing in the tree. The ants, in turn not only keep the foliage clear of herbivores and preying insects through a stinging assault, but they make hunting forays into the wilderness of the tree, destroying the growing shoots of potential rivals to the acacia. Viruses commonly form “aggressive symbiotic” relationships with their hosts, one example of which is the herpes-B virus, Herpesvirus saimiri, and the squirrel monkey (the virus induces cancer in the competing marmoset monkey). Ryan suggests that the Ebola and hantavirus outbreaks follow a similar pattern of “aggressive symbiosis”. All you need is a perceived hostile trigger. A disturbance in an otherwise balanced ecosystem, for instance.

Aggressive Symbiosis & Human History

The historian, William H. McNeill, suggested that a form of “aggressive symbiosis” played a key role in the history of human civilization. “At every level of organization—molecular, cellular, organismic, and social—one confronts equilibrium [symbiotic] patterns. Within such equilibria, any alteration from ‘outside’ tends to provoke compensatory changes [aggressive symbiosis] throughout the system to minimize overall upheaval.”

So…what triggered the zombie plague of “World War Z”? And how will humanity prevail in this new paradigm of nature? I guess we’ll have to watch the sequel…

“Oblivion”: Earth is a Memory Worth Fighting For…

Posted on May 31, 2013July 16, 2016 by thealiennextdoor

I just recently experienced the visually stunning motion pictureOblivion in an IMAX theatre and I highly recommend it. Directed by Joseph Kosinski (based on his graphic novel), this SF action thriller is worth seeing on the big screen. It takes place in a devastated NYC (no longer recognizable as a vast lonely landscape of buried skyscrapers and dried up rivers). It’s 2077, sixty years after aliens invaded and destroyed the moon and much of the planet as consequence. This film is LARGE. Kosinki’s spectacular imagery and M83’s other-wordly and evocative score must be seen large.

Technician Jack Harper (Cruise) and Victoria Olsen (Andrea Riseborough) are assigned to mop up the remaining resource extraction of a “fallen” Earth, before they join what’s left of the human race, who have settled on Titan, Jupiter’s moon. Victoria oversees operations and communicates with mission commander Sally (Melissa Leo) in the Tet (a large space station orbiting Earth) from the 3,000-foot high Sky Tower, a posh high-tech home/work station where she and Jack live. Meantime, Jack risks his life daily, servicing the droids that chase after “scavs” (remnant aliens), who keep sabotaging the giant resource harvesters.

Oblivion harvesters — Harper has lunch with harvesters in background

Jack and Victoria have been stationed there for five years and are due to leave in two weeks. Faced with the prospect of leaving Earth, Jack grows maudlin for humanity’s home. Without disclosing to Victoria or Sally, he’s been collecting Earth memorabilia (e.g., baseball cap, toys, sunglasses, books); It doesn’t help matters that he is haunted by dreams of living in pre-war NYC with another woman (Olga Kurylenko).

Every day Jack leaves his ultra clean and tidy Sky Tower home and descends to Earth’s gritty and dangerous landscape. On some level, he thrills in the place, finding a strong connection between its vast and lonely landscape and his own identity. Jack is a man in search of an identity; he was ‘mindwiped’, after all (to keep the scavs from getting important intel if he was ever captured). Jack desperately summons shadows of memories and collects Earth memorabilia every chance he gets. “Is it possible to miss a place you’ve never been, to mourn a time you’ve never lived?” he reflects. When he finally learns what he truly is and the heinous role he (and those like him) unknowingly played in the near-destruction of humanity, Jack does the only thing he can; he sacrifices himself to save what’s left of humanity and those he loves: “If we have souls, they’re made of the love we share. Undimmed by time, unbound by death.”

Showatcher.com calls Oblivion“a slick 21^st century science fiction pulp actioner” with genuinely amazing CGI and action set pieces. Showatcher adds that “it was refreshing to witness a film that, though it did not break new ground, held the attention of a jaded sci-fi audience.” A large part of its attention appeal lies in its “techno-bass” musical score composed by Joseph Trapanese and Anthony Gonzalez with M83 (a French electronic/shoegaze band named after the spiral galaxy Messier 83). They elegantly orchestrated a score that was locked in step with the narrative imagery of Claudio Miranda in a viscerally synchronized life-pulse. The score surges and ebbs like an intelligent sea; at times assaulting the senses with an open-throated tsunami of crushing sound; at others a throbbing caress of longing nuance.

Oblivion-Movie-TET — Harper’s ship enters the TET

Many reviewers (see the litany on Rotten Tomatoes) have trashed the film for various reasons, from plot holes and appropriation, mismanagement of suspense, to it being a Tom Cruise film. Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian calls Oblivion “bafflingly solemn, lugubrious and fantastically derivative sci-fi, which serves up great big undigested lumps of Total Recall, AI, Planet of the Apes–with little snippets of Top Gun.”

Oblivion-morgan freeman — Morgan Freeman plays a rogue Earther

Roy Klabin of Policymic is less kind: “Unfortunately, I got to see an early preview and doubt it will satisfy even the most dim-witted of audiences…the film’s unsubtle commentary on our own use of robotics in warfare is lackluster and anticlimactic…the weak story is sprinkled with a heavy dosing of famous actors [with] wooden-faced expressionless performances.”

David Dizon of ABS-CBN News calls Oblivion “an idea-movie, except the idea seems like a rehash of ideas from other, much better sci-fi flicks.” He and others cite Mad Max, Moon, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Halo, Matrix, and Star Wars Episode 1 as examples. Dizon calls Oblivion “a pretty movie served cold.” He claimed that the movie’s sin wasn’t in the “idea” department, but in the way it was executed.

I couldn’t disagree more on all counts.

Oblivion is not a “pretty movie” and certainly not served cold. Vast. Beautiful. Eerie. Elegant. Visceral. Memorable. I also saw many similarities with the various films Dizon and others mentioned (I would include Bladerunner and Solaris in the mix). But here’s the thing: science fiction is the literature of “the large”. SF metaphorically explores our evolution, the meaning of our existence and our place in the universe through premise and idea. It is not surprising that viewers will see similarities with other films in Kosinski’s meditation on the nature of the soul, identity, self-actualization, love and community.

Several reviewers suggest that the film flirts with such big questions” yet makes no effort to fully answer them. Showatcher adds, “Where the film falls short is not in its visual styles; and its pacing can be forgiven in that it actually builds to a satisfying conclusion. The film falters with its need to include cliched action set-ups… the film addresses some very interesting questions of the human soul, religion, and the meditation of loneliness; however, it never takes it as far as it could. Instead we are left with a slick visual style and action scenes.”

Good art always asks the big questions; unlike propaganda and polemic, good art also lets the viewers answer those big questions for themselves. This concept is not as palatable to North America’s multiplex crowd, eager for easily accessed answers.

Some movies are like appetizers or snacks. Others, like Kosinki’s Oblivion, returns the film experience to a full meal, engaging all one’s senses and where sound (its own character) marries with setting and actors to create an epic and heart-thrilling experience. Like many things in life, and certainly in good art, the most potent aspect of communication lies in the often subtle and oblique non-verbal narrative. Good art “shows more than it “tells”.

For those receptive to his art, Kosinski–like Kubrick in 2001: A Space Odyssey and Soderbergh in Solaris–lets the imagery and score express a sensual dance that invokes both mind and heart.

In the final analysis, Oblivion is a simple film dressed elegantly. Oblivion goes beyond surface plot constructs and intellectual proselytizing; it dives deep into thematic representation to pose questions on identity, love, community, and the meaning of “home”. Rather than offer up a platter-full of rhetoric, Kosinsky keeps the narrative slim; instead, he provides us with a multi-filigreed tapestry of sensual possibility.

And choices.

After making the startling discovery of who and what he is, Jack transcends his “mind wipe” and remembers what is worth remembering. In a final scene, Jack tells Sally why he is doing what he must do, even though it means his certain death. He quotes from an old book that he’d picked up earlier in the movie (Lays of Ancient Rome narrated by Centurian Horatius): “to every man upon this earth death cometh soon or late. And how can a man die better than facing fearful odds, for the ashes of his fathers, and the temples of his Gods.”

Ben Kendrick of “Screenrant” summarizes what lies at the core of the film: “Oblivion could have easily been a convoluted and indulgent movie-going experience; instead, the film keeps a restrained focus on Jack’s character journey—which, thankfully, is an “effective team” of drama and post-apocalyptic adventure.”

Do me a favor; when you go into the theatre to watch this film, park your intellectual self at the door and bring all your senses with you. This film needs to be FELT. Prepare to participate.

Nina’s latest release is La natura dell.acqua / The Way of Water, a bilingual story and essay on water and climate change (Mincione Edizioni, Rome), set in Canada.

The Paradoxes of “Aeon Flux”

Posted on December 31, 2012July 10, 2016 by thealiennextdoor

When I was first tantalized by the high-speed head-smashing trailer for the Paramount motion picture, Aeon Flux, directed by Karyn Kusama (Girlfight) and released in late 2005 (now on DVD), I was blissfully unaware of its history: that it was based on the darkly irreverent and raunchy 1995 MTV Liquid Television animated SF series created by Korean American animator, Peter Chung. The series achieved cult status among a select audience of insoniacs (it played at midnight on MTV, if that tells you anything). This may have worked in my favour. I had no expectations or preconceptions, except for a hair-flying ride. As a result, when the content (written by Matt Manfredi and Phil Hay) had merit as social commentary, I counted it as a bonus. But, then there was the matter of the reviews that emerged between the trailers airing and my seeing the film.

Unfortunately for the motion picture, Paramount’s lack of press-screenings (and subsequent press reaction because of those lack of screenings) may have predisposed critics to dislike it. And many provided negative, though conflicting, reviews; as if they couldn’t all agree on why they didn’t like the film. Kieth Breese (Filmcritic.com) found the film “gorgeously surreal and vacuously arty.” According to Jami Bernard (New York Daily News), “in the dystopian future [of Aeon Flux], apparently, women will be bendable Barbies in leather scanties, and everyone will speak like brain-dead robots…a silly live-action movie.” Justin Chung (Variety.com) decided that Aeon Flux protrayed “the future [as] alternatively grim and hysterical…a spectacularly silly sci-fier.” A.O. Scott of the New York Times said that Aeon Flux was “flooded with colors and chilly effects [but was] drained of emotional interest, to say nothing of narrative coherence.” And, finally, William Arnold of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer called it “too somber and cerebral for the young action crowd.” Silly or too cerebral? In truth, this disappointment is because the Aeon Flux movie was wrongly perceived (and wrongly marketed) as an action thriller; it is more aptly described as a dystopian political thriller—not the brazen cry of V for Vendetta—but a subtle cautionary tale of the consequences of complacency, greed and living in absense of—and trying to cheat—nature.

In typical dystopian fashion, we join the Aeon Flux story roughly four hundred years after an industrial-related virus has killed 99% of the world’s population. Scientist, Trevor Goodchild (Marton Csokas) has developed a cure and the Goodchild dynasty secures a home for the five million survivors in the last city on Earth, Bregna, a paradise walled off from the unrestrained wilderness that ever-threatens them. Dystopias, like Bregna, often appear utopian on the surface, exhibiting a world free of poverty, hardship and conflict, but with some fatal flaw at their core. A dystopia (“dys”=bad; “topos”=place) is a fictional society that is the antithesis of utopia. It is usually characterized by an authoritarian or totalitarian form of government or some kind of oppressive, often insiduous, social control. Other examples that depict a range of distopian societies in literature and film include: 1984, Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, The Handmaid’s Tale, Metropolis, THX-1138, Blade Runner, and V for Vendetta. Built from scientific premise and intended only as a temporary measure, the technocratic society of Bregna continues long after its intended span as the Goodchilds attempt to deal with an internal and enduring glitch (infertility) of the “cure”. Like most imposed provisional governments, this one’s solution to a problem (cloning) has created yet another problem (fugitive memories from the previous clone’s life).

It is now 2415 and the walled society of Bregna appears utopian—clean and organized, beautiful, rich and spatious; but beneath the laughter and contentment, stirs an uneasy disquiet. Bregnans are losing sleep, having bad dreams, and are plagued by memories that don’t belong to them. Rebels challenge the Goodchild regime, run by Trevor and his brother Oren, and among the rebels is a highly competent and ruthless assassin, Aeon Flux (Charlize Theron), whose tools include whistle-controlled ball-bearing bombs, drugs that allow her to meet people on higher planes of existence, and interchangeable eyeballs. She is aptly named, as she serves a true agent of discord to Goodchild, the guardian of order and all that he naïvely believes is good.

“Some call Bregna the perfect society,” Aeon tells us in the opening scenes of the motion picture, “Some call it the height of human civilization…but others know better…We are haunted by sorrows we cannot name. People disappear and our government denies these crimes…But there are rebels who…fight for the disappeared. They call themselves the Monicans. I am one of them.” Several critics disliked the narrative introduction. I found that it particularly worked, by adding a reflective literary quality to the motion picture. It is noteworthy that in the original animated series, Trevor Goodchild often frames each episode with his reflections; only fitting that Aeon gets her chance in the film version. The reflective narrative of the motion picture is meant to enlighten its audience that this is not your ordinary action thriller. What follows is a fast-paced yet thoughtful story, with elements of romance, that explores notions of longevity, social structure and connection, faith and greed to a satisfying end.

Twitchfilm.net aptly called the motion picture “biological science fiction”. Says Oren, Trevor’s treacherous brother who betrays him: “We’ve beaten death. We’ve beaten nature.” The film’s clean organic high-tech look faithfully captures the “sense of biotech gone wild” of the TV series by exploring several paradigms inherent in a society that lives deliberately in the absense of nature’s chaos. Indeed, the lack of connectivity resonates throughout the motion picture in its exploration of friendship, family, loyalty, and purpose. When her sister is murdered in the beginning of the film supposedly by Trevor’s men (but in actuality by his scheming brother, Oren), Aeon’s mission becomes personal: “I had a family once. I had a life; now all I have is a mission.” We never learn what the animated Aeon’s motives are.

The film truly launches into stylish action and intrigue when Aeon gladly accepts a mission to assassinate Trevor, thinking that this violent act will make it all better. Instead, it unravels her, beginning with when she confronts him; finding him uncomfortably familiar and alluring, she hesitates and decides not to kill him. “What do you want?” Trevor asks her. “I want my sister back. I want to remember what it’s like to be a person.” It is indeed he—or rather what he knows—that holds the key to who she is. The key is that she, like he and all those in Bregna, is a 400 year-old copy of someone before the virus. Four hundred years ago she was the original Trevor’s wife.

Filmed in Berlin, the movie is visually stunning, from the opening shot on the steps of Sans Souci to the labrinthine wind canal used by the Nazis. Displaying an eclectic mixture of spareness and mid-century design the film is acted out in a fluid dance to Graeme Revell’s (Sin City) haunting score. The action is rivetting and seamless with both plot and underlying theme of bio-tech gone awry. Early on we are treated to a thrilling sequence of Aeon and her biotech-altered rebel colleague negotiating the security of Goodchild’s sanctuary that consists of a beautiful but deadly garden, guarded by patches of knife-sharp blades of grass and poison dart-spitting fruit trees.

Aeon champions moral ethics and single-handedly destroys the relicor, the supposetory of the clone DNA, pursuing honour at the expense of loyalty (to Goodchild) and heralding in a new age of “mortality”. The movie ends as it begins, with Aeon’s narrative: “Now we can move forward. To live once for real and then give way to people who might do it better…to live only once but with hope.” This is truly what Aeon Flux represents and what her very name embodies.

The term Aeon comes from the Gnostic notion of “Aeons” as emanations of God. Aeon also means an immeasurably long period of time; the Suntelia Aeon in Greek mythos symbolizes the catastrophic end of one age and the beginning of a new one. This is apt for our heroine, who, at least in the movie version, pretty well single-handedly destroys an old corrupt world, and heralds in a new age. Aeon was “emanated” back after four hundred years by the gentle oracular Keeper of the relicor, whose original version saved her DNA and kept it hidden and safe until the right moment.

Fans of Peter Chung’s baroquely violent animated Aeon Flux will recognize some similarities between Kusama’s 2005 film adaptation and the original MTV cartoon. While admitting that the motion picture version was only based on Peter Chung’s characters (check the credits), Karyn Kusama intended to “honor [the cartoon version’s] wierdness in spirit and…pay homage to its esoteric boldness and…strange energy.” Homages to the animated series include: Aeon’s signature fly-catching with her eyelashes, demonstrating a woman extremely in tune with her body; Monican anarchists (though in the film they are subversives within Bregna rather than from an adjacent society); a virus that kills off most of the population and assassination attempt on Goodchild (Pilot); the harness worn on the torso that transports the wearer to another dimension (Utopia or Deuteranopia?); passing secret messages through a french kiss (Gravity); issues of cloning and two colleagues crossing a weaponized no-man’s land together (A Last Time for Everything). Original and movie adaptation also share at their core the exploration of the consequences and ambiguities of choices in life and the role that nature plays, subversive or otherwise.

Although they share recognizable motifs and characters, the 2005 movie adaptation contrasts in some important ways from the six 5-minute shorts of 1991 and 10 half-hour episode TV series that aired in 1995. Chung’s avante garde series is set mostly in a surrealistic dark future Earth (presumably) where two communities, Bregna and Monica, are juxtaposed but separated by a wall (not unlike East and West Berlin). Bregna is a centralized scientific-planned society and Monica is Bregna’s ‘evil twin’, an anarchistic society. Chung’s innovative use of “camera angles” reminiscient of cinematography, together with a spare, graphic choreography, portrays a sprawling Orwellian industrial world. Peopled with mutant creatures, clones, and robots, it features disturbing images of dismemberment, mutilation, violent deaths and human experimentation as Chung explores post-modern notions of cloning, mind and body manipulation, and evolution through a series of subversive aggressively non-narrative pieces. On the subject of his cloning experiments (A Last Time for Everything) Goodchild says to Aeon: “My work offends you. Why? Human beings aren’t so unique, just a random arrangement of amino acids.” To which Aeon retorts, “These people you’re copying are already superfluous. You’re trafficking in excess.”

The title character in the animated version is a tall, scantily-clad anarchist (featuring the sultry voice of Denise Poirier) skilled in assassination and acrobatics, who infiltrates technocratic Bregna from the neighbouring revolutionary society of Monica. As with the movie character (elegantly portrayed by Theron), the animated Aeon is a stylish dance; completely in tune with her body. Says Chung of his creation: “The way she’s dressed, the way she looks, the way she moves was tailored to seduce the viewer to watch more, even though they may not understand at every moment what was happening.” Despite their similar intelligence, physicality and drive, the two Aeons depart as characters. For instance, one of the major differences between original animation and adapted film is the ongoing relationship between Aeon and her nemesis/lover, Trevor Goodchild (John Rafter Lee). The sexual and intellectual tension between Flux and Goodchild is far more palpable in the TV series and does not explain itself or resolve itself like it does in the movie. The opening of the animated series describes their odd relationship, which suggests that their destinies are bound together: Aeon: “You’re out of control.” Trevor: “I take control. Who’s side are you on?” Aeon: “I take no side.” Trevor: “You’re skating the edge.” Aeon: “I am the edge.” Trevor: “What you truly want only I can give.” Aeon: “You can’t give it, you can’t even buy it and you just don’t get it.”

The Gnostic “Aeons”, emanations of God, come in male/female pairs (aptly represented by Flux and Goodchild). As with the Gnostic “Aeon pairs”, Flux and Goodchild make up inseperable parts, the yin/yang (complementary opposites) of a whole, and represent the paraxical oxymoron of chaos in order. Long-limbed and continually in fluid motion, Flux dances through Goodchild’s rigid scientific world of order with an ease that stirs both his fascination and his fury. He, in turn, enthralls her and ensnares her with his intellectual hubris. The Gnostic “Aeon” male/female pair (called syzygies) of Caen(Power) and Akhana (e.g., Love) closely parallel Goodchild and Flux as they flirt with each other in a complex dance of power and love. Their attraction/antagonism mimics the characterizations of Eris(Greek goddess of discord) and Greyface (a man who taught that life is serious and play is a sin) in the Discordian mythos. Like Eris and her golden apple, Aeon Flux stirs up trouble for Goodchild’s complacent technocratic regime, constantly challenging his hubristic notions of human evolution, perfection and even love.

The cartoon Aeon Flux—and Trevor Goodchild, for that matter—are also far more compelling than those depicted in the movie. Headstrong, foolish and selfish but also dedicated and deeply compassionate and honourable, Chung’s Aeon Flux is a paradox. She scintilates with passionate self-defined notions against an industrial tyranny, while nurturing a naïve desire for personal love; the target of both being found in one man, Trevor Goodchild. Often cruel at times, she shows moments of selfless consideration, compassion and humour. Despite her violence, perverted fetishes and lustful obsessions, she is as appealing as she is strange; a discordant rock tune, which often enough hits a resonating note that draws out one’s interest and captures one’s empathy. In contrast to the super-hero competence and aloofness of the two-dimensional movie Aeon, the animated Aeon is wonderfully flawed; she is a complex paradoxical character, who makes mistakes, blundering often due to over-confidence and poor decisions (usually connected with her feelings for Trevor). Chung’s Goodchild is equally complex, and is, unlike the naïve feckless scientist of the movie, a true equal to Flux’s energetic and often misplaced heroics. Kusama’s Goodchild is neither menacing nor diabolical; rather, he is a well-intentioned and watered-down version of the Machiavelian scientist that Chung created. And, though quite appealing, he is also uncompelling as a result. Chung’s Goodchild is a visionary pedant, who often spouts twisted Orwellian diatribe: “That which does not kill us makes us stranger.” “The unobserved state is a fog of probabilities…” “There can be no justice without truth. But what is truth? Tell me, if you know, and I will not believe you.” Flux cuts through Goodchild’s dogma with her own one-liners—“Trevor, don’t trouble me with your thin smile”—and usually shuts him up with either a smack or a kiss.

The animated series is far more gritty and edgy than the movie version, featuring twisted eroticism and dark humor amid scenes of graphic violence. It oozes with a delicious perversity that the movie version abandoned in favour of cohesive narrative (and a PG-13 rating). Showing a healthy and irreverent disregard for that very narrative continuity, Chung’s animated series successfully makes commentary on various societal notions and behaviours through his uniquely disjointed and liberating form. Chung asserts that this plot ambiguity and disregard for continuity were meant to satirize mainstream film narratives. I think it does far more than this as art form, by providing a journalistic style of reporting the nuances and filigrees of life that gives it an immediacy hard to overlook. Chung’s apparent intention was to emphasize the futility of violence and the ambiguity of personal morality. This is best shown in his six 5-minute shorts and pilot, created in 1991. The shorts commonly featured a violent death for the title character, sometimes caused by fate, but more often due to her own incompetence.

The TV Aeon Flux flows like a subversive movement; punctuated by a series of abstract, often garrish, statements on various themes of souless biotechnology. Each episode is a vignette that explores singular questions of integrity, honour, loyalty, belief and love using the clever platform of the kiss/kill dynamic of Aeon and Trevor. Their interactions scintilate with clever wordplay, often amid physical-play that usually involves a pointed weapon: Aeon: “You’re psychotic. You no longer have a common conscience with your fellow man.” Trevor: “I understand the will of evil…[it] is like an iron in a forge…conscience is the fire.” Aeon: “you’ve lost the substance by grasping at the shadow.” The underlying question of connectivity and what it is to be human filter through his discordant series primarily through the twining of his two main characters, both loners with little connection to anything except to one another (which they both seek and abhor). The motion picture version pursues through a more structured and lengthy narrative, the same theme of connectivity (with nature, with others of our society, with family, and our beliefs) and the consequence of living a life with out meaning, though on a far more simple level. At the end of Kusama’s movie, Aeon challenges Trevor’s assertion that cloning is their only answer for survival: “We’re meant to die. That’s what makes anything about us matter…[otherwise] we’re ghosts.” In contrast, at the end of Chung’s episode, Reraizure, Trevor closes with these words of reflection: “We are not what we remember of ourselves. We can undo only what others have already forgotten. Learn from your mistakes so that one day you can repeat them precisely.”

Kusama’s film version chose narrative coherence to make its statements by sacrificing character for story and challenging its audience cerebrally. Chung’s cartoon version challenges us more deeply, at a visceral level, through the interplay of his characters where cohesive narrative doesn’t matter. In the final analysis, the motion picture version pursues the same questions posed by Chung’s original animated version. Only, Chung isn’t so eager to provide answers, leaving both interpretation and conclusions to the individual. Both versions are mind-provoking and a celebration of excellent art. While the film’s moralistic tale resonated and lingered like a muse’s long forgotten poem, the subversive kick of the comic series (which I thankfully saw later) struck deep chords and left me breathless with questions.

“District 9”

Posted on November 30, 2012July 10, 2016 by thealiennextdoor

Science Fiction is in its very nature a symbolic meditation on history itself—Frederic Jameson, critic

We call them “prawns”: bottom feeders, vermin: feared and hated aliens who descended unannounced—and unwanted—over Johannesburg twenty years ago. Their massive starship hangs poised over the crowded city, casting a daily reminder that we are not alone in the universe.

The ship came and hovered in the hazy skies over Johannesburg, in a pall of silence. Humanity waited for something to happen; nothing did. A United Nations team was finally dispatched to investigate and what they found was not an imposing conquering force of great superiority but a million starving refugees in a shipwreck. Multinational United’s (MNU) Department of Alien Affairs housed them in a compound while humanity decided what to do with them.

Blomkamp leaps into the story mid-stride, effectively skipping twenty years of feckless inter-alien relations to a nexus in the storyline, where we find the aliens incarcerated in a ghetto that resembles the South African townships: they are essentially not allowed out. The analogy between the marginalization of the aliens and the South African segregationist policy of apartheid is obvious and further parallels Nazi Germany, Palestine and other scenarios of irrational prejudice and cruelty. The aliens even speak in a language that includes clicking that reflects many native South African languages. So, begins Peter Jackson and Neill Blomkamp’s film District 9.

Jackson and Blomkamp intersperse action scenes with “back-story narrative” provided through the device of expert interviews, ranging from sociologists to entomologists. Blomkamp filmed his opening scenes using hand-held video cameras and stop action in news reels and interview format to capture an authentic immediacy to this powerful social commentary of humanity’s first encounter with the “other”.

We first see the aliens as the humans see them: unattractive unruly and repulsive insect-like creatures, who are not terribly intelligent and are pathetically addicted to cat food—until we meet one. Chris Johnson (or so he’s been named by the humans, reminiscent of the white people’s renaming first nations peoples or the Europeans who came to America) is on a secret mission to get home; along with his son and others Chris has been secretly building a shuttle to get back to the mother ship for over 20 years by collecting a rare liquid to fuel their organic technology. We quickly realize that these creatures possess the intelligence and knowledge that reflects the technologically advanced spaceship hovering above the city and the alien weaponry that only they can operate. The humans just haven’t taken the time or effort to find out.

Enter our not so likeable “hero”, Wikus van de Merwe (Sharlto Copley), a shallow, rather insensitive and not so bright Afrikaner bureaucrat, who, like his colleagues at MNU, sees the aliens as no more than pests, not meriting the respect beyond the common insect. For instance, when he is assigned the task of evicting the aliens from the crowded ghetto to District 10, a tent city no better than a concentration camp, he treats them all like imbeciles and potential criminals. When he finds an illegal “nest” (the aliens are forbidden to procreate), he cheerfully kills the growing young by setting fire to them and blithely reflects that their death-cries sound like popcorn popping. He even gives a colleague of his one of the murdered babies as a souvenir. Eric Repphun of The Dunedin School, describes Wikus as both “compelling and chilling”, given that “his casual racism towards the aliens is an uncomfortable mirror of apartheid [and] reflects racism accurately.”

It is only when Wikus is forced to interact with one as an individual and finally recognizes Chris as a “soul” that he shows true compassion and acts accordingly—which doesn’t happen until the end of the movie, by the way. Until then, he is a lame version of the reprehensible rest of MNU who reflect the fear and insecurity and consequent open prejudice and fear of humans toward “the other”.

We find out that MNU’s primary directive is not humanitarian to help the aliens but is pursuing weapons technology research and conducting experiments on them to acquire the secret to their DNA-manipulated weaponry. Through one of the interview sessions we discover that MNU is the second largest weapons manufacturer in the world. The plot thickens…

Blomkamp chooses his metaphors carefully, from the less than attractive insect-like aliens to the ordinary and feckless bureaucratic “hero”. Blomkamp dissects and lays out a shameful platter of our bullying nature, driven by our insecurities and fears and exposes us as a fearful, intolerant race. “The place is swarming with MNU,” says Chris to his son. I liked the reverse use of insect-terminology.

Chris’s son likes Wikus. “We are all the same,” says the boy with a wisdom that far surpasses anyone else there. He is, of course, referring metaphorically to the universal truth of a “family” of intelligence and compassion.

Meantime, Wikus had become a most valuable business artifact because he could operate alien weaponry. This points out one of our most appalling weaknesses borne from insecurity and greed: the devaluing of human and any other life to the level of commodity. Everything is commodity or product for the “rightful” use of those self-appointed “above the law” moguls.

As he lies on his back, about to fall out of his robotic “insect shell”, now far into his metamorphosis and spewing alien black “blood”, Wikus watches the shuttle rise up toward the mother ship, and smiles his victory; it is the aliens’ victory and ultimately Wikus’s too—for he is one of them now.

Wikus is the unlikable “hero”, more like Dante’s “everyman” a very ordinary man of shallow character with no real heroic qualities. He is a good enough person (he loves his wife and objects strongly to being forced into killing one of the alien adults). Throughout the film, he is offered several chances to elevate himself to “hero status” and each time he fails. It is only at the very end, when he is close to fully transformed physically, that Wikus demonstrates heroic qualities and sacrifices himself to save Chris and his son. This suggests, rather cynically, that humanity’s acceptance of something this foreign can only be achieved once we are forced to directly experience “the other”. It is a sad commentary on our inability to rise above our own limitations of deriving value through “self-image”. But it is one I tend to agree with. One of my esteemed colleagues disagreed. Objecting to this shallow portrayal of humankind, she attested her faith in our evolution. I hope she is right.

Largely overlooked by the Academy Awards, District 9exposes the very worst in human nature with an unforgiving gritty quasi-documentary realism. It’s not a pretty film. It is not a story of humanity’s triumph; indeed, Wikus’s heroism is directly related to his physical transformation from human to alien (hybrid). He only acts as hero once he is mostly alien, spilling alien blood and seeing through alien eyes. Is this why District 9 faired so ill with the Academy?

Eric Repphun calls District 9 a powerful allegory that deconstructs the post-colonial costs and asks unsettling questions about colonial powers. It is subversive science fiction that viscerally grapples with the ghosts of the past, particularly that of South African apartheid. “Its almost unrelenting dark vision of humanity” suggests that horrifying things hang “over the world of men like Wikus, who perform utterly irrational acts of prejudice and injustice in the name of safety and rationality, even after apartheid as an official policy has ended.”

Many viewers saw no further than the thrilling elements of this social commentary: aliens come and there’s a war with kick-ass weapons and cool creatures getting blown apart. But as Brian Ott notes, “it is a profound mistake to interpret the genre [of science fiction] literally.” Science fiction is both “the great modern literature of metaphor” and “pre-eminently the modern literature not of physics but of metaphysics,” says Peter Nicholls. Ott reminds us that it is not what the aliens are but what they represent that matters.

Nina regularly publishes reviews and essays in magazines such as The New York Review of Science Fiction and Strange Horizons, and serves as staff writer for several online and print magazines. She teaches at The University of Toronto and Geroge Brown College in Toronto Canada and coaches writing online through her website Nina Munteanu. Her books on writing “The Fiction Writer: Get Published, Write Now!” and “The Journal Writer” (Starfire) were translated into Romanian and published by Editura Paralela 45.