1. The Landscapes of Science Fiction

The urbanized dystopic landscapes made manifest in Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927), Alphaville (Jean-Luc Godard, 1965), Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982), and Brazil (Terry Gilliam, 1985) – situated within varying social, cultural, political, lingual, and historical conditions – successfully underscore the four films' appreciably diversiform thematic priorities. Cinematographic depth, surface, (a)symmetry, architecture, and composition on a whole – mise en scène – are artistically cultivated, frame by frame, to visualize a director's vision for audiences. In the case of Metropolis, Lang renders a hierarchical system of mediated social strata to denote the compartmentalized separation between its metaphorical “head, heart, and hands.” To this end, the film's visual setting situates both the film's narrative as well as an expression of social organization. The rational, linear, geometric modernist architecture accentuates the cold, rigid mathematical precision of the film’s institutional apartheid. To this end, the film’s cinematography presents a model for exhaustive technological efficiency, which ruthlessly necessitates the reduction of extraneous, expendable hands (workers). Scenes of laborers marching in stringent symmetry underneath a perfectly balanced archway replicate similar structural practices conducted by automakers in their assembly lines – the intention of the director, according to R.L. Rutsky’s ”Between Modernity and Magic.”

Meanwhile, Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville presents an autocratic dystopia. Although urban landscapes are rendered in passing (albeit largely unexposed, claustrophobic buildings shrouded in noir-like shadows), the majority of the film takes place within public spaces such as hotels or government buildings, or scenes of transitory passage. This may speak to the prominence of the technocratic state, and the eradication of personality and individuality – even homes – found within a world where words like “love” are abolished, sex is largely reduced to a business transaction, and feelings of affection and bereavement are punishable by execution. The aesthesized idealization of death as a water sporting event – simultaneously objectifying women – serves as perhaps the most disturbing scene of the film in attesting to the way masses are subdued. In sum, the film borrows heavily from the rationality posited by Metropolis – the interiors of buildings are bright, sterile, and geometric – in a more explicitly political context made evident by its subtext as well as its release date and technological superiority over its prototypical predecessor. Tellingly, Godard chose to render the film without color despite its availability, attesting to Alphaville’s voluntarily bleak, contrasting, and mechanical absolutes.

Blade Runner, which is predicated upon the ceaseless continuance of postmodern stagnation as reflected in the imminent future, presents a world in which a multitude of languages, attires, vehicles, hairstyles, and contextual customs coexist within a grim cauldron of senescence. The “accelerated decay” of humanity as we know it has been incurred by the lack of significant advancements or innovations – a sense of arrested development – and the erosion of distinctions characterized by the layered hybridity of postmodernism and post-industrial existence. The film's hypothetical 2019-based mise en scène landscape is characterized by a bleak sense of darkness, often shrouded in fog, steam, smoke, or rain – as if other elements of the natural world have been wholly subsumed by the precipitation. The only “dominant” colors seem to represent marketing or technology – for instance, the iconic, and vibrant plasma-screen Coca Cola advertisement with the ubiquitous gaze of its woman, or the Tyrell Corporation's gold logo, with the rest of the masses confined to a jarringly drab coexistence. Finally, the mise en scène of Terry Gilliam's Brazil seems to contribute most to the film's narrative by nature of the overwhelming array of billboards, advertisements, and messages – from “Consumers for Christ” to “Don't Suspect a Friend, Report Him!,” and overtly Nazi-like guardsmen and soldiers to accentuate the notion that the protagonist is wading through a satirically totalitarian nightmare.

2. Visions of Outer Spaces

Throughout George Lucas' Star Wars franchise, the vastness of space is presented as often too large for cinematographic containment – which may explain the legions of spin-offs and merchandise it inspired. Cinematically, the series' magnitude, in some manners, can be visually exemplified. For instance, the Death Star is typically displayed at angles designed to highlight its protuberance. Galactic empires and civilizations of fluctuating development, colonization, slavery, race, spaceships, modernity, and antiquity are all represented – although with very broad strokes – as part of the fabric of a universe that has captivated imaginations and permeated itself within popular culture as a fantasized alternative to our own existence. Its landscapes and inhabitants fluctuate, from impressively futuristic (Cloud City), to rustically nomadic (Tatooine) or endearingly primitive (Endor), depending upon the particular stellar, urban, agrarian, or naturist setting within the space opera's boundless universe. To this end, Star Wars transcends many of the confines that characterize our comparatively drab and monotonous existence on earth as a cinema of the imagination.

Meanwhile, Stanley Kubrick's cinematographically-stunning 2001: A Space Odyssey reflects the beautification of the otherworldly in its glowing, immaculate uncertainties – and as an impenetrable void of nothingness. While there is a palpable juxtaposition between the high-tech and primitivism, as in Star Wars, the two differ dramatically in thematic depth; Kubrick film's opening sequence, in its portrayal of the beginning of civilization and the continuity rendered by the continuous transition into the film's future, suggests, in self-referential critique given the groundbreaking technological achievements rendered by the film itself, that humanity has yet to truly evolve beyond its primordial instincts for survival. Another comparison to Lucas' franchise can be drawn in HAL's unlikely display of emotion, in singing “Daisy” and fearing for his life, which offers parallels to Droids such as C3PO and R2D2 – machines anthropomorphized with distinctly human attributes that often exhibit more emotion than their human models. In the case of HAL, this seems to be the case, suggesting that technology's advancement has spurred the dilution of emotion at its expense.

3. Cyborgs, replicants, androids

J.P. Telotte's “The Doubles of Fantasy and the Space of Desire” asserts that science fiction cinema, as exemplified most poignantly by high-tech futuristic visions in films such as James Cameron's Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), and Ridley Scott's Alien (1979) and Blade Runner (1982) creates a speculative space for the consideration of artificially-rendered humanoid substitutes – whether cyborgs (hybrid mechanical and organic beings), androids (entirely synthetic human replicas), or “replicants,” the “skin job” substitutes portrayed as perhaps the most chilling of the three by Blade Runner. Beyond these corporeal duplications, directors have also manifested emotional facsimiles of the human psyche, which can potentially supersede their organic counterparts, given that their superior mechanical constitutions are less inhibited by mortality, morality, and human emotion. In the case of Blade Runner, the so-called “replicants” are wholly organic in their make-up, but artificial in their origin, and possess superior cognitive and physiological attributes – actualizing Telotte's fears of “ models of real desire for life, love, and meaning, which may indeed seem better than the original.” Another model is presented in Terminator 2. despite the mechanical origins of Arnold Schwarzenegger's titular protagonist, his adopted “humanity” is idealized as endearing and sentimental. Finally, Ash's duplicity in Alien presents an incognito and deceptive portrayal of the android.

Although I have still yet to see the original Terminator in its entirety, in Terminator 2, Arnold Schwarzenegger is introduced to viewers as a menacing and violent thug who senselessly steals a motorcyclist's clothing, sunglasses and equipment. Although the film makes Schwarzenegger's core reliance upon his “mission” to protect John Conner abundantly and sometimes comically clear (such as when the child Conner commands Schwarzenegger to make movements and teaches him slang terminology, including the memorable “Hasta la vista”), the terminator seems to develop a sincere affinity for Conner and his mother, as well as a sense of appreciation for human life despite his mechanical organs. The paternalized idealization of the Terminator comes as he takes upon a fatherly, protective role for the fatherless Conner, who has also brutally lost his foster parents – made more moving by his eventual self-sacrifice. In stark juxtaposition to this positive representation of a cyborg, the terminator's enemy – a more advanced model – is ruthless and completely lacking in compassion as he pursues the annihilation of young Conner, as exemplified by the means through which he literally impales the obstacles (human beings) that stand in his way.

In Alien, the presence of Ash as an android comes as a startling revelation to the crew in the midst of widespread panic and terror upon the deaths of other crew members and the missing alien. This again casts the replication in a negative light for the purposes of a science that values its advancement over human life itself. Ash's mission – to return intelligent extraterrestrial life to the crew's corporate, human life-devaluing commissioners, even if it costs the crew members' lives – is comparable to the Terminator's in its rigidity, but for less moralistic or identifiably good purposes. To this end, can an android's moral core be freely determined, or is it merely an extension of its creator's intentions? Are we to pass judgment on “Ash,” or on his creator? And does the advent of synthetically or mechanically-produced human substitutes present a moral dilemma in itself, with humans assuming an unprecedented degree of creationist divinity?

Finally, with the binary opposition of portrayals of human replications in Terminator 2 as either positive or negative, and in Alien as exceedingly negative, Blade Runner presents a much more ambiguous portrait given the fabrication of memories and emotion vis-a-vis photographs and speculation that Harrison Ford's protagonist himself may be a “replicant” (based upon his unicorn dream). Because they are physically indistinguishable from organic, womb-based human life, the notion of replicants in Blade Runner seems pertinent to Jean Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation, which posits that within our postmodern era, the distinctions between the real and its representations often become blurred beyond recognition – that simulations overshadow the reality they were ostensibly created to represent and become their chilling substitutes in “hyper-reality.” Although the essay was written over a decade after the release of Blade Runner, the parallels cannot be denied.

4. Technophobia

In an era of accumulating technological advancement, especially with the advent of the Internet, technophobia has emerged as an almost neo-Luddite means of resisting its potential tyranny, oppression, and invasiveness. Although films that highlight these negative aspects of technology are necessarily somewhat contradictory in the sense that they are predicated on technological prowess in the first place, they can also be interpreted as a means of subverting the medium with a message that opposes its detrimental effects. In Alphaville (Godard, 1965), the technocratic regime – led by a sentient robot called Alpha-60 – represents the doomsday scenario in which technology has overcome humanity entirely, imposing its rigid rationality, demanding obedience, and suppressing all semblances of emotion or expressive thought. As the creation of Natascha Von Braunn's father, is the machine an extension of its creator, or has it taken upon its own means in the suppression of humanity? To what degree can computers exhibit independence? Ultimately, Alpha-60 and the tyranny of Alphaville are overcome – in a cliché but relevant sense – by Natascha Von Braun's will to love. Although other films, as discussed earlier in this paper, grapple with machine's capacity to love, the notion that humans are characterized by emotion and “Others” by its rational lack thereof is also a frequent staple throughout the science fiction genre.

George Lucas' THX 1138 (Lucas, 1971) presents a grimmer – or literally whitewashed, sterilized, “cleaner” alternative to our own society. Humanity is excessively regulated to the extent that drugs are forcibly administered (lest subjects be punished severely), sex for pleasure is entirely forbidden, dress codes and hairstyles are mandatory in their enforcement. When the protagonists stop taking their medication, the government's retaliation is predictably ruthless, and eventually, their execution is called for. “Normalizing” and sedative pharmaceuticals, in this sense, are called into question as agents of oppression; loss of sex drive and creativity are frequently mentioned as side-effects to antidepressant medications within our own world. Furthermore, in 2009, prescriptions are often imposed by psychiatrists for profit-driven motivations rather than the well-being of patients, and while such research may or may not have been conclusive in 1971, the film is eerily prescient in this sense.

Finally, in the Wachowski brothers' 1999 The Matrix, drawing upon Cartesian philosophy, presents a world in which the unknowingly shackled and enslaved masses live within a fantasized reality as a means of placating and subduing a humanity that has been rendered subservient to machines. The film is perhaps most ironic in its opposition to technological overindulgence considering the great lengths its filmmakers took to render it with “bullet time” effects. Nevertheless, the film presents an optimistic philosophy of revolutionary subversion in the face of digital tyranny, which can be considered analogous to our own world given the virtual existences on the Internet that many find themselves and their identities repressively overpowered or replaced by. Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation becomes relevant again as a metaphor when “Neo” pulls out a floppy disk from a deceptive copy of the book near the beginning of the film. Reality's usurpation by its virtual equivalent, both within the film (to an exaggerated degree) and our lives, has become a threat to livelihood, and new media continues to exacerbate its dangers. Unfortunately, our collective addictions to its brainwashing effects make such illusions – the “blue pill” – more attractive to the masses.

5. Contemporary anxieties, fears and concerns

Like thematic predecessors such as Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1981), David Cronenberg's Videodrome (1983), and the Wachowski brothers' The Matrix (1999), Alfonso Cuaron's 2006 Children of Men commentates on contemporary controversies associated with the postmodern condition. Some of the broad thematic concerns pinpointed by the film include an increasingly intrusive, totalitarian government; the brainwashing pervasiveness of trite infotainment media with a profit-driven agenda to depreciate legitimate exigencies, thereby subduing the masses; the marginalization of “illegal aliens,” “terrorists,” revolutionaries, Muslims, and distinctions of existence and identity deemed subversive and/or Other; mandatory, homogenizing drugs and/or fertility testing; and torture inflicted upon the disenfranchised enemies of the state. Tellingly, each of these apprehensions, however exaggerated within the context of the film, is predicated upon conditions that characterized Western civilization when the film was released. Above all, Children of Men bleakly prophesizes that the constancy of our coeval post-millennial existence will inevitably – within two short decades – bring about an even more sordid and deeply disturbing future. Beyond these explicitly socio-political anxieties, like Blade Runner more than any of the other films discussed, the director's mise en scene presents a “future” that largely resembles the present in its landscapes and setting; the advertisement-emblazoned metro-buses, large plasma-screens embedded into nominal skyscrapers, and putrid city streets have semblance to Western capitals in 2009 as much as they do in the film's hypothetical 2027. In fact, the streets of London are so nondescript in Cuaron's film that they could be any metropolitan post-industrial sprawl.

Disorientation and powerlessness can be pinpointed in the portrayal of characters. Theo is a gambler, an alcoholic, and a heavy pot smoker, and his vices, while unremarkable, represent the faintest measure of escape available to the populace in such a grim setting. Lack of control is made most frightening in the inexplicable death of fertility and procreation, rendering humanity's demise hopelessly inevitable until the surprise pregnancy. Social commentary is espoused most effectively by nature of the exact duplications of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay torture presented when the concentration camp bus arrives at the refugee camp, and while the bus itself remains in the foreground, these vivid representations remain completely in focus, confirming the director's explicit exposition. During the film's final sequence of scenes, when Theo, the pregnant woman and her child are attempting to escape, the physical act of running through the war zone is filmed in real time, presenting a heightened realism to portray the chaos more devastatingly. When these characters emerge from the building an into the war zone, the camera takes upon a jarring and unsteady shakiness vis-a-vis a tracking shot to highlight the uncertain, deathly volatility of running through a battlefield.

On The Cinematic Expression of Time Travel

Buoyed by the latter half of the 20th century's accumulative technological progress – by measures such as science, medicine, warfare, and post-industrial development, but most poignantly for the purposes of this essay, within the literally “timeless” medium of cinema – the exploration of time travel, a concept that has existed as a human fantasy for quite some time, has managed to effectively penetrate the human and cinematic psyche. This has been accomplished by the advent of influential films dealing with the provocative subject matter such as Chris Marker's innovative 1963 La Jetee, from France; James Cameron's 1991 Terminator 2: Judgment Day, the second film in the popular Hollywood franchise; and Terry Gilliam's 1995 12 Monkeys, its tagline confirming that the U.S. film was officially “inspired by La Jetee.” Significantly, all three of these films fantasize the notion of a post-apocalyptic future, in which the dismal prospect of humanity’s extinction or complete usurpation by the growing (and hauntingly realistic) advent of all-pervasive technology spurs the development of a form of time travel. Inherent within this fantasized technology is the hopeful mission of somehow changing the future – or even restoring it to its rightful place, therein taking solace in the past either by simple reminiscence or literally returning to it, as a means of coping with the monstrosity of the present or our impending anxieties regarding the high-tech future. But no matter how idealized our recollection of this heyday may be, audiences may still be lost on the fact that our collective nostalgia is still predicated on a past that, both within the context of these films and within our lives, ultimately if circuitously contributed to humanity’s present (or future) “critical dystopia.” To what degree can impending catastrophe really be averted, if at all?

In challenging their viewers with the impossible notion of a “time loop paradox,” La Jetee and 12 Monkeys force their respective protagonists – and by extension, viewers – to come to terms with the traumatic notion of not only seeing one's self while traveling in time, but witnessing one's own death. As inevitable as death may be for all living creatures, this motif suggests that in attempting to transcend the linearity of time and space, despite unprecedented technological prowess, humankind is still incapable of transcending its own mortality and the manifest apprehensions surrounding it. Humankind’s collective existential desires and anxieties, in many ways, seem to trigger the desire to travel through time and space to attain an outlet for humankind’s survival in lieu of the impending uncertainties or destruction imposed by technology. In Terminator 2, and indeed the franchise itself, temporality is explored as a cyclic institution with effects that are directly related to their causes, regardless of ex post facto breaches in the fabric of time. Therefore, by returning to the past from a dystopian future to destroy the child version of rebel leader John Conner, he will also cease to exist in the future. In the original Terminator, this hypothetical cause and effect relationship is explored within another context: the notion of choosing one’s own parents by retroactively altering the course of history, and in the case of the franchise, idealizing John Conner’s father – the “primal scene,” a concept reminiscent in some ways of Sigmund Freud’s observation of the irreparable and transformative trauma a child faces in observing one’s own parents making love.

“Observation,” interestingly enough, is a theme explored in Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys, as the protagonist Cole is chosen for his mission precisely because of his exceptional observational abilities stemming from the indecipherable childhood trauma of witnessing his death. Fascinatingly, the film’s ending in which the child Cole witnesses the older and disguised version of himself being shot at an airport and dying is also the beginning of the film’s narrative – mirroring La Jetee, in which the nameless protagonist’s vague recollection of a traumatic incident on “the sea by the pier” serves as the catalyst for the perpetual re-experience of his own death. Both films, to this end, provocatively call into question the notion of temporal priority itself, and posit that within the cinematic realm, the impossibility of traveling through time can flourish precisely because narrative structures themselves can be upheaved and reshuffled to the director’s liking. This point is underscored in La Jetee by its creative production from photographic stills, which additionally implies a sense of stagnation within events that remains frozen in time beyond our attempts to manipulate and revolutionize them for humanity’s betterment. Tellingly, the only moment in which there is actual cinematic movement (or the illusion of such movement, given the structure of film’s projection at 24 frames per second) in La Jetee comes from a woman opening her eyes, as if in realization of humanity’s failure. Temporality – and death – cannot be surmounted.

Fantasmatic Violence as Distinguished From the Real: Neutralizing Legitimate Concerns and Easing Apprehensions with Idealization in the Cold War

In “The Imagination of Disaster,” Susan Sontag posits that in the developing and adolescent stages of the Cold War between 1950 and 1965, as established by the division of the post-war world into the ideologically adversarial East and West and the development of nuclear weapons by the United States of America and Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, as well as the preceding demonstrative nuclear catastrophes in Hiroshima and Nagasaki , science fiction cinema emerged as a new filmic medium designed not only to commentate on the perpetual threat of nuclear war, but to pacify the devastating psychological anxieties associated with it. In conceptualizing the titular “imagination of disaster,” Sontag also writes of another, perhaps equally menacing threat to the American and international psyche: banality itself in an era of accumulating industrialization and suburbanization associated with the historical context. With increasing material excesses beginning to subsume everyday American and Western life (though shockingly, not to the degree of contemporary globalized society), science fiction cinema has not only taken upon for itself the mantle of “normalizing what is psychologically unbearable, thereby inuring us to it,” but also providing for an imaginative fantasized escape that fulfills our extravagant desires. When flying saucers, encounters with aliens or the Other, devastating metropolitan destruction, technological catastrophe, and generalized invasiveness are made and perceived as commonplace, our actualized fears of such carnage in the nuclear era are diluted – and even idealized for the viewer through endearing entertainment. In this sense, science fiction cinema does not glorify violence, but its fantasmatic equivalent – thereby alleviating human uneasiness and allowing for a distracting escape from the mundane.

In Robert Wise’s 1951 The Day the Earth Stood Still – released only a few short years following UFO sightings in 1946 and 1947 – social commentary is espoused in the form of a benign, peaceful, and intelligent alien named Klaatu landing on earth and leaving it, appalled with humanity’s comparative warlike stupidity and childishness. The ugliness of human nature is made more pressingly ironic by Bobby’s excusable childlike naïveté being more civilized than the cynicism of many adults featured prominently (and antagonistically) in the film, such as his mother’s boyfriend. Wise also skewers humanity’s increasing dependence on technology in the scene during which electricity is disabled for thirty minutes, ensuing global human stagnation – as if man is incapable of even the most basic functionality without lights, cars, and television, among other things. This may resonate all too realistically, as the film is shot in a black and white “documentary”-like style in an effort to portray how humanity may really react to the “invasion” of a peaceful Other. The media is ridiculed for its sensationalism, ironically ignoring Klaatu’s intelligent commentary on the invasion in favor of more hysteric remarks by the brainwashed masses, to better complement their agenda. The filmmakers make a concerted effort to distinguish Klaatu from other humans despite his kindness and humanoid appearance; personality-wise, he is stoic, reserved, and typically emotionless, yet pacifistic and deeply moral. This suggests that such stereotypically “lacking” traits may in fact be the most ideal human qualities, with most conflicts predicated on emotion. The film seems to idealize the notion of an austere and peaceful existence; for instance, despite its complex technological advancement, Klaatu’s spaceship maintains a sleek and minimalistic aesthetic, implying a sense of beautification of the otherworldly. In the most literal sense of Sontag’s argument, The Day the Earth Stood Still “normalizes” the anxieties associated with foreign invasion by portraying the “invader” as intelligent, strong, beautiful, respectable, and kind despite his lack of emotion or indulgence in mortal trivialities – thereby lessening the generalized fears associated with such an invasion (whether communistic or otherworldly) in the first place, simultaneously requesting that its audience abandon its overly emotional and cynical distrust for those who are perceived as “Other,” as well as its materialistic excesses and reliance on the media and technology (a primary source of our banality), in favor of a cleaner, more minimalistic, and more serene sense of utilitarian, moralistic efficiency.

Furthermore, Sontag’s thesis can be applied to another of other films, including Gordon Douglas’ 1954 Them!, which features an “invasion” of less celestial origins: from giant mutated ants who were transformed in New Mexico deserts by U.S. nuclear testing. Like Ishiro Honda’s 1954 Godzilla, released in the same year, Them! passes judgment on the ethics of the nuclear era itself, and in presenting oversized and destructive, monstrous versions of familiar creatures that inhabit earth (more debatably in the case of Godzilla, though lizards and dinosaurs are still “recognizable” to the general public), these directors attempt both to familiarize the potentiality of a nuclear catastrophe and stress the fact that they are man-made disasters – that perhaps humanity itself is the real menace as the catalyst for an ugliness that Godzilla and the ants cannot control. The relative vilification of the otherwise familiar, a common motif within the context of science fiction cinema, serves to create a fantasy element to entertain viewers by usurping the otherwise banal and ordinary nature of such creatures. Both films also include urban settings that may appear familiar to their target demographic audiences (such as Tokyo and Los Angeles), and conclude with the familiar open-ended science fiction cinematic motif that the threat may return one day to wreak further havoc – creating a fused notion of fantasmatic banality that also calls upon viewers to draw comparisons with the real-life potential implications of man-made disaster, and perhaps to a lesser extent given the endearing entertainment value, to wrest with the moral implications of man’s monstrosity.