2014

Wed, Jul 9

<19:36 EEST> A bunch of movies from the past days, that each deserve a brief review for all their great, interesting, and reach-out-and-touch-face moments.

Transcendence is the one that easily gets most of the critique. The somewhat classical SF story, with a nice touch of closure at the very end, would make a brilliant movie. Unfortunately, it represents many of the things that are wrong with the "SF for the masses" genre.

The imagery and dialogue are simply patronizing, with an unintended campiness that is almost moving — awwwwwwwwwwww-kward. It might be OK if you've never seen or read much science, fact or fiction. Look kids, this is a Faraday cage; we used copper to make it look like it needs particularly good conductance, even though something like aluminium would have been much more convenient. We also kept the mesh size big enough to see/shoot through easily, even though this makes it less effective for many modern comms frequencies (I'd expect the AI to be able to easily change them).

Another wrongness that just won't go away from this sort of SF is the clinical space-age style. I was expecting to see something like the War Games font to complete the effect. I understand the problems of depicting the wonders of computing on a big screen, but I think we've seen too many of these transparent displays already.

Films like The Matrix get this right with their cyberpunk aesthetics. Show what computing is really like, a little gritty here and there, but having the honest kind of technical coolness. The circuit board and the terminal are beautiful things, let them show. Transcendence's clinical style reminds me of the beige box idea of hiding all that technology in an ugly piece of furniture.

On the other hand, The Matrix also showed how technology can creep into your surrounding reality unnoticed, until it is too late. In the context of nanotech rather than virtual reality, this is kind of the opposite style, with the most jarring effects on the mind. Perhaps some your vintage furniture is actually a piece of nanotech that one day decides to stand up and kill you; not something that could happen in Transcendence, because you know what is tech and what isn't, even if it's tech with a boring corporate facade.

IMHO, the clinical SF style works best when portraying some faceless corporate/state big brother, in contrast to the gritty human communities. So when the rebel scientists set up an underground lab and make it look like Microsoft or Apple HQ, you can feel the eerie attraction between your hand and your face.

On with some prettier films. Snowpiercer didn't look like much to begin with, and the global warming theme felt a bit too obvious, but at least the future-punk style was right from the start. A surprisingly elaborate stylistic journey followed, reminding me of the macabre carnivalism of films like Tuvalu at times. The train provided a nicely contained setting, leading to the eternal questioning of whether we really need to be contained.

Another nice, well contained piece of art quite far from SF was Sound of Noise. In short, if you liked the short Music for 1 apartment and 6 drummers, you'll love this feature-length exploration of musique concrete, bound together with a neat fantasy story.

This film feels particularly important to me as someone with high musical sensitivity — I am fascinated by sounds, but easily annoyed by music that is too loud, repetitive or unimaginative, calcified into genres of entertainment for easy consumption. This probably explains why I've ended up a theatre sound guy and occasional musician, instead of a "real" musician. While the film does hint at the juxtaposition of musicians and such sound guys, it has a deeper theme of connecting the latter with the love of silence.

Finally, an underrated gem of a movie, The Cell. It has everything that was wonderful about Deja Vu and Inception, years before either of them. It was not quite as epic in scope as either of them, but the originality easily makes up for it. The only problem is that, for example, after seeing Inception, the dream manipulation ideas won't seem as exciting, but know that The Cell was there first, nearly a decade before.