From Le Voyage dans la Lune directed by Georges Méliès released in 1902 to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey released in 1968, outer space exploration in cinema has become increasingly popular throughout the years. Although the novelty of the dark and faraway unknown is enough to spike the curious audience’s interest, space and our [...]
Introduction In THX 1138, George Lucas tackles the question of what would happen if science, religion, and the state all merged together with the corporation. In an hour long amalgam of state mandated drug plans, a repressive surveillance state, psychological torture, and sexual repression George Lucas asks the question - is freedom worth it even [...]
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine’s “In the Pale Moonlight” premiered on April 15th, 1998 and is definitely an outlier in the Star Trek universe. Star Trek has always been considered a utopian science fiction universe. When the Star Trek premiered in 1966 it depicted a future that where humans made it past their nuclear adolescence [...]
Dollhouse is a science fiction television show created by Joss Whedon and produced in 2009. The story follows a series of “dolls," which are essentially indentured servants who have signed away their consciousness, personality and memory for five years in exchange for a large sum of money. These dolls, also called 'actives,' are temporarily implanted [...]
Released in 1998 under the direction of Shinichirō Watanabe, Cowboy Bebop is a hot genre mess. The title of the show already points towards two of the main stylistic pillars of the show: the American western and (the also American) jazz music; but those are hardly the only two ingredients in this brew! the delightful [...]
Gene Roddenberry may have been the first to pitch his television show as a “wagon train to the stars” (Worland, 20), but subsequent series such as Firefly have shown us that there’s more than one way to write a space western. While Roddenberry’s final frontier is explored by members of a utopian society intent on [...]
Futurama occupies a curious place in the history of science fiction media. The animated television show, created by Matt Groening, is both science fiction comedy and science fiction parody. It engages with a rich history of science fiction, representing and reimagining it within its own universe, while at the same time developing its own ideas [...]
***Note for reading: Westworld (italicized) refers to the film production as a whole while Westworld (not italicized) refers to the artificial wild western vacation world. The mechanical creation of a host in Westworld Westworld, the 2016 version released by HBO in early October, is loosely based off of a film that debuted in [...]
Set at 8:49pm, “somewhere in the 20th Century,” Brazil (1985) conveys nightmarish aspects of the past, present, and future. Its unnamed metropolis is dark and dystopic. When the bombs explode, the band quite literally plays on because terror is so commonplace. Denizens dress in the fashion of the 1940s, and the propaganda posters are styled [...]
Orphan Black follows protagonist Sarah Manning (Tatiana Maslany) as she discovers that she is a clone, meets her sister clones and Tony (a transgender brother clone), and uncovers several clandestine organizations and plots related to human cloning and eugenics. Set in modern day, the clones’ (all played by Maslany) interactions with powerful institutions, each other, [...]
