Ghost in the Shell 攻殻機動隊 The 1995 film Ghost in the Shell by Momoru Oshii is a significant work in the Japanese Sci-fi and cyberpunk animation film history, based on the same name manga series by Masamune Shirow in 1989. The film explores the boundary of humanity and artificial intelligence, and to what extent can [...]
As a filmic adaptation of Boris and Arkady Strugatsky's 1972 novel Roadside Picnic, Tarkovsky's Stalker (1979) carries the viewer via philosophical drama into what is known as the “Zone”. Although directly taken from the novel, Stalker does not provide any exegesis on the origin of the Zone itself and we are left grasping to understand [...]
In 1985, the now cult classic film adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s Re-Animator had its theatrical release. It stars Bruce Abbott as medical student Dan Cain and Jeffrey Combs as scientist Herbert West, the titular re-animator, who moves in with Dan and drags him into his dangerous and morally questionable experiments to conquer death. Herbert is [...]
Watching Thor: Ragnarok is an exhilarating experience, like the adult equivalent of being at the playground and swinging so high the chains of the swing set buckle when you’re at the top. Director Taika Waititi brings an improvisational sense of humor and self-awareness to the film that was sorely lacking in the first two installments [...]
Third Essay: Xenogears and the death of God Twenty years ago Squaresoft Inc. a Japanese videogame company famous for games such as Final Fantasy, Chrono-trigger, and Saga Frontier, released Xenogears for the Sony Playstation. Written by Kaori Tanaka, wife of the game’s producer, the game faced production issues since the beginning and launched incomplete; its [...]
For this critical study of a media text, I would like to examine Doctor Who using an aspect of queer theory called chosen family. Chosen family is a phenomenon in the LGBTQ+ community that stems from the stigma many of these individuals face from both blood relations and local communities. It was first defined by [...]
William Cameron Menzies’ “Things to Come” [1] (1936) is based on H.G. Wells “The Shape of Things to Come” (1933) and narrates the transformation of Everytown: from a war-torn industrial town from the near future 1940’s, to a progressive and rational futuristic city of 2036 (a hundred years since the release of the film). Everytown [...]
Michael Gondry’s 2004 film, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, is a meditation on the complex interpenetrating dynamic between memory, identity, and our relationship with the world and the people we share it with. The film was allegedly inspired by conversations between Michael Gondry, the director, and one of the film’s co-writers, Pierre Bismuth. After [...]
THX-1138 is a 1971 dystopian science fiction film directed and co-written by George Lucas. Set in a massive underground city, completely cut off from the natural world, the film presents a society whose human population is forced into dehumanizing and oppressive conformity. Co-living arrangements between men and women are chosen by a central computer, and [...]
Part allegory, part space opera, and part technological dystopia, the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica series presents a future rife with twenty first century concerns. The show, a remake of the 1978 series of the same name, consisted of a two-part miniseries (2003) followed by four full seasons (2005-2009); I will focus on the events of the [...]
