Contemporary Science Fiction Films Research Articles

Kilbourn, R.J.A., & Empey, J.A. (Eds.). (2023). Feminist posthumanism in contemporary science fiction film and media. From annihilation to high life and beyond. Bloomsbury.

Feminist Posthumanism in Contemporary Science Fiction Film and Media strategically places itself within a consolidated and distinctly recognizable field by prioritizing science fiction as “the ideal venue for the exploration of [a] constellation of crucial themes” (1). These themes notably include HuManism and Anthropocentrism, along with their implications for the erasure or marginalization of ‘Woman’. Simultaneously, the book goes beyond mere placement within this established field, actively taking steps to advance and enrich the interconnections between feminist theory, posthumanist perspectives, and the expansive realm of science fiction. In doing so, it does not only acknowledge the centrality of science fiction in unraveling key societal themes, but it also contributes to the ongoing debate that seeks to bridge these critical frameworks for a more nuanced understanding of contemporary cultural narratives.

Upload, Cyber-Spirituality and the Quest for Immortality in Contemporary Science-Fiction Film and Television

As a genre, science fiction has long played with the idea of all-powerful virtual beings and explored notions of transcendence through technological advancements. It has also been at the forefront of exploring our anxieties and hopes regarding new technologies and the ethical and moral consequences of scientific advancement, raising deeply philosophical and theological concerns about an age-old question, namely: what makes us distinct as human beings and what lies beyond our own existence? This article aims to provide an overview of recent themes that have emerged in science fiction film and television, especially with regard to extending our lives beyond their natural biological age. As the article will outline, these ideas generally appear in notions of cyborgization or mind uploading into cyberspace. Both indicate a deeply human desire to avoid death, and the films and shows discussed in this article offer a range of different ideas on this. As we will see, the final case study, the Amazon Prime television show Upload (2020–), brings both of these elements together, touching on a broad range of ideas about cyber-spirituality along the way. The article concludes that although many shows raise interesting questions about the ethical challenges inherent in transhumanist fantasies of mind uploading, they ultimately remain ambiguous in their critique of the dream of digital immortality.

Imagined reality, the liquid, dystopia, and virtuality in science fiction cinema: Don’t Worry Darling, a case study

The history of cinema has never shied away from the representation of the future, and beyond the abstract nature of the contemporary concept and its temporal fluctuations, the sheer profusion of scenarios and their different links to the very concept of the real have generated a wide range of futuristic film references, especially those conceptually linked to the dystopian. This article presents a case study of Don’t Worry Darling, directed by Olivia Wilde in 2022. It is a contemporary science fiction film proposal that condenses retro aestheticism and the American Way of Life with the historical proposals of science fiction and its forecasts about humanity’s connection or disconnection with sensory reality and the birth of virtuality. The analytical methodology, which links patriarchal dystopia, virtual reality and gender studies, is based on the analysis of differentiating elements that provide signs with which to question the reality of the experiences of the film’s main character and the environment that surrounds her. This research employs a qualitative analysis by means of case analysis with a dual approach: the audiovisual language and signs of gaps in the filmic reality created. Firstly, the audiovisual language will be analysed through the use of the decoupage technique and, secondly, the sequences that generate gaps in the filmic fiction and lead the spectator to realize that he or she is facing a simulation of reality will be organized. The anomalies identified and inferred have been subdivided for analysis into: unrealistic space/time (synchronizations and repetitions, duplications, spatial incongruities, logical errors and perfections), mediated reality and the eye metaphor and, finally, diegetic technological analysis.

Urban Dystopia on Screen: The City, Architecture and Power in the Contemporary Science Fiction Film

This paper investigates the urban, architectural and spatial mise-en-scène of major western 21st-century science fiction film dystopias portraying urban societies under totalitarian rule. While extensive scholarship exists on architecture, the city and power and similarly on architecture, the city and film, the triad of architecture/city, film and power remains under-researched. This paper therefore concentrates on how power is mediated through built form on screen. It also investigates whether recurring visualizations and meaning(s) of built form concerning power can be observed. Considering key works about the built environment and its relation to power, this study also uses a semiological approach in order to assess the symbolic-metaphorical use of urban, architectural and spatial form. We assume that producers, directors, set-designers, screenwriters on one side and the film audience on the other ‘speak a similar language’ and share cultural codes and symbols. The frequent recurrence of specific urban, architectural and spatial visualizations in science fiction films which mediate specific meanings of power may be proof of a widespread, conscious or subconscious reading of these visualizations and understanding of their meaning(s) with regards to power – meanings which may therefore be deeply rooted in the culture of western societies.

Loneliness and Love

Science fiction films about artificial intelligence have often perpetuated anxieties about new technology as a widescale threat to humanity. However, more recently, the genre seems to be moving toward more positive and open-minded representations of technology that envision humans embarking on relationships with AI in varying capacities—perhaps a reflection of technology’s increasing value and permeation within all aspects of contemporary wider culture. Thus far, such texts have been given little scholarly attention, yet they offer significant insights into our possible coexistence with advancing technologies of the future. This article analyzes three contemporary science fiction films about artificial intelligence and demonstrates how they are offering unique perspectives that lend support to wider applications of AI, specifically as social companions.

Dirbtinis intelektas moterišku kūnu filmuose Ex Machina ir Ji

The article explores how artificial intelligence is constructed in a female body and showcases the boundaries between human and technological traits, as well as the relationship between human beings and technology. The article defines the notion of artificial intelligence and discusses how artificial intelligence is portrayed in science fiction films. The article does not attempt to provide new theoretical insights into artificial intelligence but, instead, to show how artificial intelligence is characterised in the context of modern science fiction films. Two contemporary science fiction films, which focus on the artificial intelligence in the female body, are analysed: Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (2014) and Spike Jonze’s Her (2013). The analysis of the films showcases the blurred lines between being a human and being a robot: AI in the female body is portrayed as having adequate cognitive abilities and an ability to experience or to realistically imitate various mental states. The AI embodiment found in the films explores different narratives: the anthropomorphic body (Ex Machina) motivates to get to know the world and thus expands one’s experience, while the partial embodiment (Her) “programs” intellectual actions and development beyond the human body. Ex Machina highlights the anti-humanity of the female robot: another (human) life is devalued in order to pursue a goal. On the contrary, Her highlights the hyper-humanity of the operating system: continuous improvements exceed the boundaries of communication with other people.

Through a (First) Contact Lens Darkly:Arrival, Unreal Time and Chthulucinema

Science fiction is often held up as a particularly philosophical genre. For, beyond actualising mind-experiment-like fantasies, science fiction films also commonly toy with speculative ideas, or else engineer encounters with the strange and unknown. Denis Villeneuve's Arrival (2016) is a contemporary science fiction film that does exactly this, by introducing Lovecraft-esque tentacular aliens whose arrival on Earth heralds in a novel, but ultimately paralysing, inhuman perspective on the nature of time and reality. This article shows how this cerebral film invites viewers to confront a counterintuitive model of time that at once recalls and reposes what Gilles Deleuze called a “third synthesis” of time, and that which J. M. E. McTaggart named the a-temporal “C series” of “unreal” time. We finally suggest that Arrival's a-temporal conception of the future as having already happened can function as a key to understanding the fate of humanity as a whole as we pass from the anthropocene, in which humans have dominated the planet, to the “chthulucene,” in which humans no longer exist on the planet at all.

Cinema de ficção científica lo-fi: uma categoria sob escrutínio

This article aims to review the concept of lo-fi sci-fi , a term applied to part of the world’s contemporary science fiction film production, more authorial and independent SF films which dispense big budgets and fancy visual effects in favor of more thought-provoking kinds of speculative fiction. Thus, this work will investigate the relevance and effectiveness of the term lo-fi applied to SF cinema. Keywords: science fiction film, independent cinema, lo-fi-sci-fi.

Sidelining Women in Contemporary Science-Fiction Film

The present article examines the role and space given to women in contemporary science fiction films since the 1980s. While the character of Ripley in the Alien franchise has been widely quoted and analyzed, I wish to argue that Ripley is an exception obscuring the general sidelining of women in a genre concerned first and foremost with masculine concerns. The emergence of women as active sidekicks in the 1980s (in RoboCop or Universal Soldier) led to the fleeting rise of action heroines in the 1990s (e.g. Terminator 2 and Ghosts of Mars), but the turn to postfeminism has contributed to the marginalization of women’s issues and roles in the films of the last decades. So why include women at all? This paper contends that the female characters literally play a supporting role vis-à-vis the male hero, defining and confirming the acceptable bounds of masculinity.

“Let there be Light”... in Times of Digital Darkness: Visualizing Cyberspace through the Lens of a Contemporary Science Fiction Film

“Let there be Light”... in Times of Digital Darkness: Visualizing Cyberspace through the Lens of a Contemporary Science Fiction Film

Sounds between worlds: the audiovisual hyperchiasm in The Thirteenth Floor and The Matrix

Representations of virtual reality within contemporary science fiction films have focused considerable resources, in terms of special effects, on rendering the boundary between real and virtual worlds and bodies. However, the philosophical and phenomenological significance of this partition has received little scholarly reflection. Drawing upon Maurice Merleau-Ponty's concept of the ‘chiasm’, which mediates the reversibility of subject/object relations through the intertwining of the senses, this paper hopes to explore the combination of sound and vision in the expression of what I will call the ‘hyperchiasm’ between the real and the virtual. The hyperchiasm extends the unique communicative powers of cinema as a medium to enable modes of reversibility impossible within the everyday world, and it is sound I will argue that plays a key role in expressing these capacities. The hyperchiasm also focalizes a dialectical struggle of subordination between sound and image within cinema, in relation to which I will analyze The Thirteenth Floor and The Matrix as representative of key variations.

The Blade Runner Experience: The Legacy of a Science Fiction Classic (review)

Reviewed by: The Blade Runner Experience: The Legacy of a Science Fiction Classic Janani Subramanian The Blade Runner Experience: The Legacy of a Science Fiction Classic Will Brooker, ed. New York: Wallflower Press, 2005, 250 pp. In the process of canonization, a film such as Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner earns titles such as “classic” and adjectives such as “essential.” The Blade Runner Experience, edited by Will Brooker, reopens the 1982 text and exposes it to recent scholarship in media studies, revealing and exploding notions of canonization at the same time. In the words of Brooker, Blade Runner (BR) has “splintered and warped” (2) since its 1982 release, and this collection of essays explores the various platforms—literary, fan, digital, and theoretical—where the film continues to resonate. The collection opens with essays by Brooker and Judith Kerman that discuss the spatial and temporal dimensions of the film, specifically how the film maps onto a contemporary Los Angeles in the wake of the new millennium. Brooker’s essay “The Blade Runner Experience: Pilgrimage and Liminal Space” delves into the liminality of fan culture, addressing the phenomenon of fan pilgrimages to sites where BR was filmed. In the attempt to reconcile the actual spaces with those portrayed in the film, fans find themselves in an “in-between” state that allows for multiple meanings to be transcribed on the actual sites and back onto the film. Judith Kerman also investigates BR’s apocalyptic foundations in “Post-Millenium Blade Runner,” considering the film in light of the millenium and the apocalyptic fervor that accompanied the transition to the year 2000. The first section of the collection focuses on the cinematic influence of Phillip K. Dick on BR and science fiction in general, an aporia that both scholars and fans feel is often overlooked. Although several of Dick’s works have been adapted to the screen, scholars such as Aaron Barlow and Dominic Alessio look at the way Dick’s works have pushed the science fiction genre as a whole. Barlow’s essay, “Reel Toads and Imaginary Cities: Phillip K. Dick, Blade Runner and the Contemporary Science Fiction Movie,” discusses the way both Dick and Ridley Scott introduced themes from noir and the hard-boiled detective novel into the male protagonists of contemporary science fiction. The resulting ambiguity in characters such as Deckard and the like, according to Barlow, has led to new depictions of morality in general within the genre; the influence of the pulp tradition has lent an introspective tone to science fiction, where fault lines are blurred, and conflicts are internally, rather than externally, prompted. Dominic Alessio’s essay, “Redemption, ‘Race,’ Religion, Reality and the Far-Right: Science Fiction Film Adaptations of Phillip K. Dick,” expands on Barlow’s discussion of moral ambiguity by adding facets of religious and moral redemption; looking closely at how the characters in BR and other Dick adaptations challenge categories of “human” and “non-human” and add dimensions of race and class to his works, Alessio points out how Dick’s often religiously motivated themes of love and morality translate to the contemporary big screen. Although the previous section highlighted the influence of the films’ two “authors,” the second part of the collection, “Playing Blade Runner,” explores the extension of Dick and Scott’s science fiction themes into digital realms. Contemporary science fiction films, with their elaborate mise-en-scène and technologically motivated narratives, lend themselves to video game translation, and both Barry Atkins and Susana P. Tosca address the implications of turning BR into a video game. Atkins, in “Replicating the Blade Runner,” argues that computer game Blade Runner PC, by turning the film’s two-dimensional space into three-dimensional possibilities, allows users/viewers to explore the spaces of the film in [End Page 63] detail, and his argument for this type of “remediation” adds another kind of space to the fan pilgrimages of Will Brooker’s study. Although the game does encourage new interpretations of the film’s themes, Atkins is careful to mention an ideological inconsistency: whereas the games present a utopic vision of technology, BR is more invested in interrogating technology’s dystopic tendencies. The ideological constraint that Atkins mentions...

Saviours and Sexuality in Contemporary Science-fiction Film: Reflections on Virginity, Chastity and Gender

In contemporary science-fiction film the myth of a saviour thrives. Though the stories clearly borrow themes from the Christian tradition the myth is also changed and challenged. This article explores what happens to Christian ideas of the sexuality of the saviour when science-fiction film-makers take on the myth. The focus in the article is on two aspects: the virgin birth and the chastity of the saviour. The analysis shows how these aspects are both transformed and reinforced in the stories. Gender and changing gender roles in the films are revealed to be of key importance. Strong female characters bring both love and sexuality to the centre, but not without some problems appearing. The attitudes towards sexuality and religion that the films suggest are complex, underlining the ambiguities connected with this issue today.

Postmodern messiahs: the changing saviours of contemporary popular culture

The messiah myth is alive and well in the modern world. Contemporary science fiction film has taken the myth to heart and given us an endless stream of larger than life heroes. The heroes of the present are, however, not exactly the same as the heroes of the past. A changing world demands new things of its saviours. Using a textual and narrative analysis based on insights gained from feminist film theory and cultural studies, this article looks closely at the messiah theme in science fiction films and TV series from the last three decades. The study explores the changes that have occurred in relation to images of the body, the attitudes and personalities of modern heroes, gender, questions of power and ideas of the transcendent. The article then discusses what these changes both between newer and older heroes and between contemporary heroes and the traditional messiah story might say about religion and spirituality in the modern world. Finally the article explores the question of why the messiah myth still finds an audience today.

Recreating Prometheus

Recreating Prometheus

Celluloid Projections: Images of Technology and Organizational Futures in Contemporary Science Fiction Film

This paper explores the posited role of technology in our organizational futures as portrayed in contemporary science fiction films. Whilst the dominant imagery of such films has much in common with the way new technology is portrayed in mainstream management and organization texts, it is argued that the latter have much to learn from the imaginative constructions of the developing relationship between technology and organization that is offered by science fiction film-makers.