Sci-Fi

dir: Kogonada

2022

The future looks pleasant… Easy on the eyes. Very tasteful.

But of course there are still problems, mostly because people are still around.

After Yang is the kind of science fiction flick that people lament doesn’t get made often enough, and then don’t watch because it doesn’t have explosions or guaranteed Hemsworths in it.

It might be set in a brave, new future, but its issues for its characters are still recognisably human ones.

Even if much of the story is about what happens when an android (Justin H. Min) stops working.

There’s a family, made up of Dad (Colin Farrell), Mum (Jodie Turner-Smith) and their adoptive daughter Mika (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja). She is of Chinese extraction, and the parents, feeling an obligation to have her learn about what they see as her culture and heritage, buy a Chinese android they call Yang (Min), to be like a big brother to her, who can tell her all these facts about China, and teach her Mandarin.

Right from virtually the beginning of the film, Yang shuts down, and can’t be restarted. They try switching him on and off, they probably try to reset him to factory settings. They don’t try whacking him on the side of the head, thankfully.

It’s not that subtle, but the family don’t have a lot of money to throw around, can’t afford to officially get him repaired because, hey, he was purchased in a dodgy deal in the first place. The legit people the Dad takes his Yang to get repaired at can’t do anything, the dodgy guy he takes him to can’t really do anything, but he does find something in Yang’s chest that proves what he suspected all along: that someone was spying on him!

You know, as opposed to the slender black objects we all carry in our pockets or bags that tell all sorts of corporations everything we’ve done, said and searched for on any given day. In their future, though, they are beyond such petty devices.

dir: Daniels

2022

I don’t just think this is now one of my favourite films of the year thus far, but it’s quite possible it’s somehow pushed aside a dozen other films in my consciousness to become one of my favourite films of all time.

Fuck you, Andrei Tarkovsky! Go to hell, Werner Herzog! Get out of my dreams and into the bin, Stanley Kubrick!

Maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration. I did enjoy the absolute fuck out of this flick, though.

This is an insane flick seemingly put together by two lunatics who egged each other on and kept saying to each other, possibly while stoned, “wouldn’t it be cool if…” and then proceeded to film it.

That kind of anarchic spirit, which, let’s face it, rarely can survive the revision process or the years long production process of an actual film, somehow manages to retain a spontaneous and insane energy in a flick that I don’t imagine was easy to make or understand, especially for the people in it.

But thank you for making it all the same. Michelle Yeoh is generally wonderful in all of the movies she’s made for over 40 years, but she’s rarely the lead. She is definitely the lead here. She is all of the leads here.

The reason that she is multiple leads is that this flick posits that our universe is one of an infinite number of universes, all branching out from all the decisions we make and the ones we don’t make. Every time we make a choice from either a binary of choices, or an array of them, another universe branches off from that choice or from the opposite of that choice.

I’m not going to pretend I understand it on a metaphysical or cosmological level. I’m not even going to pretend that it makes sense or that these jerks were the first to come up with it. It’s obviously not a new idea, but this is their version of it, and they use it to both amuse us, the great unwashed in the audience, and to tell a touching story about regretting the path one has taken in life, and that having taken different paths wouldn’t necessarily have led to any better an outcome.

Evelyn Wang is tired, frazzled, overwhelmed. She moved to the States when young, was cut off from her family, operated a laundromat for years, had a daughter, and that’s about it. All she sees before herself is misery, and all she sees behind her is missed opportunities. Her daughter Joy is gay, and has a loving girlfriend, but Evelyn is too ashamed to admit to her perpetually disappointed father (played by the legendary James Hong) that his granddaughter is out of the closet.

dir: Chloé Zhao

2021

Strange days have found us…

Marvel is so confident in its marketing abilities that the masses will consume anything that says ‘Marvel’ on it, that they’re making movies out of the unloved, unwanted, unsuccessful parts of their back catalogue deliberately now. No-one’s been able to make the Eternals work as an ongoing series, and it’s hard to imagine that anyone was really clamoring for them to appear in cinematic form.

Ironically, this feels the least like a Marvel flick, despite being extruded ultimately into such a familiar final form.

We know nothing of these beings, of their characters beforehand, but we’ll be too familiar with them when two and a half hours have elapsed. When some of them ‘die’, we might feel nothing, not even mild surprise.

The ‘trick’ earlier Marvel flicks pulled was having a character, oh, let’s say one played by a very tall blonde Australian, which is a character known of outside of comic books but also within comic books, being Thor, a hammer wielding jerk with a murderous trickster for a brother, being Loki.

The conceit is that, sure, on this Earth we know of the Norse myth of the very strong, very dumb son of Odin who wields a hammer called Mjolnir and gets drunk a lot, but in the ‘reality’ of these movies, the myth springs from the reality, which is that there’s actually a guy called Thor, and he has a hammer, and lives in another realm called Asgard, and they’re so advanced they’re kinda like gods?

Well, if you can swallow that claptrap, let me introduce you to a bunch of other superbeings who also sounds familiarish because their names appear in a bunch of disparate Earth mythologies.

I can’t bring myself to even type their names, because it feels so generic. The important thing to say is that, there’s ten of them, and they came to Earth on a spaceship thousands of years ago, and they’ve protected humans from these monstrous creatures called Deviants. Whenever these creatures appeared, the Eternals destroyed them using their powers, and then they’d sit around for ages waiting for the next attack.

In between attacks, human civilisations generally flourished, populations grew, but the Eternals weren’t getting involved any of the other times when bad stuff happened, nor were they meant to protect humans from their own stupidity.

These Eternals mostly have analogs in old stories, because, we’re meant to think, they would occasionally get bored and tell people, or want to speak to someone’s manager, and bellow “do you know who I am and what I’ve done for your wretched species?”

dir: Lana Wachowski

2021

Well. I have seen The Matrix Resurrections. I imagine I will be one of the lucky few.

I have the feeling not a lot of people are either going to watch this or like it, and the ones that do like it won’t be believed, and the ones that hate it will really, really hate it.

What I’m going to do now is not something I usually do in reviews, seeing as it’s going to be pretty annoying and not very illuminating without context. But I’m going to type out a sequence of dialogue verbatim as it was in the movie.

All the context I’m going to give you is this: Keanu Reeves, as Neo / Thomas Anderson, is alive, and works for the biggest gaming company in the world. He has a boss, and it’s the boss talking to Keanu / Neo:
“I’m sure you can understand why our beloved parent company Warner Brothers has decided to make a sequel to the trilogy.”
- “What?” (that’s Keanu saying “what”)
“They inform me they’re going to do it with or without us.”
- “I thought they couldn’t do that.”
“Oh, they can, and they will, and they made it clear they’ll kill our contract if we don’t cooperate.”

Okay. So. The people, who have made this film, including the director Lana Wachowski, didn’t want to make this film. If you include lines of dialogue in a film, and mention Warner Brothers specifically, being the company that Lana is saying she was pressured into making this film by, what possible incentive is there to make a decent flick?

I have no idea just how resentful Lana might be, but she’s certainly delivered on her contractual obligation, as have apparently Keanu and Carrie-Anne Moss.

How are their characters alive, you may ask, since we watched both of them die for the good of all humanity at the end of the dismal Revolutions? Well, the pesky machines, the AIs that dominate the Earth in the future and who enslaved humanity, literally within the context of the movie resurrect both of them, put them back in pods like they were in the beginning, and use Neo to keep enslaving humanity.

In the Matrix, as in, the virtual reality within the context of the films where most of humanity live and think is their actual real lives playing out, the machines resurrected Neo in order to have him keep enslaving humanity with entertainment.

That entertainment, within the Matrix, is the Matrix films. So the people enslaved by the Matrix are the ones who are entertained by the Matrix films / games.

So that would mean… we’re the ones enslaved by the machines? Or is it the Wachowskis, who feel they're enslaved by Warner Brothers?