Among the standard schlocky dramas (J. Edgar), this year's AFI Festival has surprisingly quite a few works of speculative fiction. Here are the trailers:
Overall, there's a lot more decent genre material than in years past, and it's free.
Among the standard schlocky dramas (J. Edgar), this year's AFI Festival has surprisingly quite a few works of speculative fiction. Here are the trailers:
Overall, there's a lot more decent genre material than in years past, and it's free.
Here is the debut film from my nephew, Orion. It's entitled The Bossy Alien. I love it soooooo much more than Avatar.
Most alien invasion movies deal with the central idea in H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds, a radical change in perspective. His Martians look upon us as we might look at microbes through a microscope. Humans are made to face the question of what our cumulative history (moral, social, etc.) amounts to in the presence of a superior, celestial other. Wells suggests there's hope for us, that we're not so insignificant, by having the Martians taken down by bacteria, which were no more significant to us than we were to the invaders. As it turned out, we should've had more respect for bacteria.
An optimistic response to our diminished ontological status would be Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek universe, where Earthlings get over their petty (in the cosmological sense) differences to work together in establishing our species' significance in an ever expanding world. The success of Earthlings in the Federation is because liberal humanism is taken to be an absolute, superior to all the alien moral alternatives found in the universe (Vulcans might be our intellectual superiors, but they don't possess our heart and good old common sense). The wish fulfilled here is that humans overcome all our cultural, socially constructed differences to prove the importance of what unites us, presumedly biology and whatever inalienable rights obtain therefrom (again, liberal humanism).
The more pessimistic spin is seen in Robert Wise's The Day the Earth Stood Still, which involves a representative, Klaatu, from a council of master races (not unlike the Federation) coming to Earth with a warning: do what you want to each other, but should you try any of that human-all-too-human bullshit with us as you travel into space, we have the technology to annihilate you. If we're to be united, it'll be through negation, all of us being fundamentally different from the other, causing us to cuddle together in fear. A similar togetherness led Earth to attack the bug planet in Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers, the bugs not possessing the technological power of Klaatu.
Even more cynical is Neill Blompkamp's District 9 that suggests if there is a unifying human instinct, it's bigotry. The alien arrival doesn't fundamentally alter class and racial divisions, but instead proves shit rolls down hill. The aliens are restricted to the poorest area where they're subjected to discrimination from the most discriminated of humans. Although biological alteration of the protagonist results in his empathizing with the alien plight, it's not biology per se that's the basis for moral insight (as it is in Star Trek), but rather being socially reconstituted as other in the eyes of his (formerly) fellow humans, particularly those from his bourgeois background.
Gareth Edwards' Monsters applies a similar socio-historical determination to extraterrestrial reception as District 9, where the invaders aren't seen as transcendent beings that defy our categories, but are instead reduced to extant concepts of class, nation-state boundaries and otherness. The octopoid aliens (a cross between those in The War of the Worlds and Watchmen) are quarantined in Mexico along with the majority of Mexicans. Fulfilling the Minuteman Project, there's a Great Wall now separating Central from North America. Regardless of the terror and destruction being inflicted on the resident population by the giant octopuses, the only immigrants allowed into the States are the wealthy. An interesting enough premise, but nothing much is made of it except as backstory for yet another bourgeois coupling.
A lot of people come up to me and say, "Love the blog, especially the ones about moons, planets and dwarf planets in film, music, video games, &c... so why haven't you done one on Mars?" Actually, no one said that and I just never did one until now because I figured it would be too much work. However, it turned out to be pretty manageable, so here we go on this, the two year anniversary of the discovery of water on Mars. So, the good news for me was that although Martians show up all over the place in films, mainly as invaders, we rarely ever see the planet or culture itself. This is primarily about Mars in film, not Martians.
Marriage of Venus and Mars
O MIGHTY MARS!
Mars is named after the Roman god of war. He was the sun of Juno and Jupiter. He started out as a god of fertility, vegetation, cattle, fields, boundaries and farmers. Over time, he became the most prominent of the martial gods. As the father of Rome's founder, Romulus, he is the ancestor of all Romans.
BACKWARDS SIGNIFIER OF FIRE AND FLOW
Easily visible to the naked eye and recognizable for its reddish color, the planet named after the Roman god was an object of study and speculation for ancient Babylonians, Chinese, Dogon, Egyptian, Greek, Indian, and Mayan astronomers. To the Egyptians, the planet was Horus the Red, the backward traveler. To the Dogon, it was Yapunu toll, the planet of menstruation. To the Chinese, it was ruled by fire.
Marriage of Venus and Mars
O MIGHTY MARS!
Mars is named after the Roman god of war. He was the sun of Juno and Jupiter. He started out as a god of fertility, vegetation, cattle, fields, boundaries and farmers. Over time, he became the most prominent of the martial gods. As the father of Rome's founder, Romulus, he is the ancestor of all Romans.
BACKWARDS SIGNIFIER OF FIRE AND FLOW
Easily visible to the naked eye and recognizable for its reddish color, the planet named after the Roman god was an object of study and speculation for ancient Babylonians, Chinese, Dogon, Egyptian, Greek, Indian, and Mayan astronomers. To the Egyptians, the planet was Horus the Red, the backward traveler. To the Dogon, it was Yapunu toll, the planet of menstruation. To the Chinese, it was ruled by fire.
He understood that the task of molding the incoherent and dizzying stuff that dreams are made of is the most difficult work a man can undertake, even if he fathom all the enigmas of the higher and lower spheres -- much more difficult than weaving a rope of sand or minting a coin of the faceless wind.
-- from "The Circular Ruins" by Jorge Luis Borges
Christopher Nolan's Inception is another one of those sci-fi tales confronting the problem of infinity lurking behind subjectivity. Because it uses dreams instead of virtual reality, the film is structurally closer to the short story quoted above than the cyberpunk-influenced Matrix (although the action puts it closer to the latter). In Borges' tale, a sorcerer spends years dreaming a man into reality only to learn that he, too, was given life via the same method. And it's just as likely that the dreamer of the sorcerer is himself being dreamed, etc., ad infinitum. This is the old phenomenological problem of the Transcendental Ego.In order to have a collection of intentional states (which are always regarding some mental or physical object) cohere as a self (the 'I' that's doing the believing, desiring, etc.), Edmund Husserl posited a transcendent pure subject that couldn't be objectified. This I was pre-reflective, the guy who was there each time an intentional state was being reflected upon (the I thinking "it is I who likes pizza" at one time and "It is I who hates the rain" at another). As with all such metaphysical "buck stops here" explanations (cf. the final cause argument for God), the question soon arose as to why this Ego didn't require another, more transcendent one to ground its reflective relations. And since then, many theorists from various disciplines have been perfectly happy with the notion of a fractured self, that the I is nothing but a comforting mask for deterministic forces (cf. the death of the author, social Darwinism, or connectionism). Causal language is more scientistic, but problematic for suggesting the possibility that we humans have free agency, that there is something of a self not purely reducible to objective control, or material determinations. Thus, philosophical libertarianism sounds suspicious to many, like a new agey charlatanry.
