Spoiler Warning – this article contains major spoilers for Blade Runner, Ghost in the Shell and Minority Report.

Identity

Who are we? How do we know who we are? How do we know who someone else is? Who and what can we trust? In Blade Runner humans have constructed replicants, virtually identical to humans but stronger, needing a complicated one-on-one test to determine who is who. These replicants work as forced labour on off-world colonies, desperate to escape. Even more, it is revealed the new replicants have been given memories so they think they’re human. In Ghost In The Shell “ghosts” can be moved into new cyborg bodies and ghosts can even combine to become a new identity. Identity is a common theme of noir, sci-fi and the mixing of the two. While classic noirs are not as overt questions of identity are constantly raised – we have private detectives, criminals, victims, police, authority figures and a character’s status in these groups is important and changes constantly.

Trust

Who do you trust and should you trust them? Noir detectives venture into the criminal world but it’s not just their obvious antagonists who they need to worry about. The classic opening of a noir film is a “dame” seeking help from the private detective and how often do we learn this person is actually manipulating the detective? In Blade Runner, the question of trust is on another level. Can Deckard trust the police? Can he trust passers-by who might be replicants? Then can he even trust himself? Can he trust his own memory? Is he a replicant programmed with decades worth of memories? Maybe. Kusanagi in Ghost in the Shell has similar problems, plots within plots, foreign agents, her superiors, everyone around her – who is there to trust?

In Minority Report Tom Cruise plays a police officer running the pre-cog crime unit, where they glimpse the future and then stop the crime. When Cruise’s character is said to be a criminal he suspects that it is Colin Farrell’s character who has betrayed him, a sceptical outside investigator, when, in fact, it is his mentor, determined to see the pre-cog crime unit succeed. A recurring theme of noir films is realising the one person you put absolute trust in is your real enemy.

Morally Grey

Deckard is the good guy in Blade Runner. He is the protagonist, we follow his story, essentially a detective and cop, he’s played by all-time hero Harrison Ford. But Deckard’s job is to kill replicants who have made it to Earth. Sometimes that is the only crime they have committed. They are intelligent creatures, easily the equal of any human in the complexity of thought and they are “retired” without trial or hesitation. Why is Deckard the good guy? In Minority Report Farrell’s character specifically questions the fairness and justice of the pre-cog system, people are charged with crimes they have not actually committed. In the city there have been no murders in two years, is that proof of success? The incredibly dedicated Cruise upon being determined a pre-criminal himself then goes on the run, refusing to believe that this prediction is right…because this time it’s him.

Visuals

Blade Runner and Ghost in the Shell are rightly famous for the way they look, both are iconic. Despite being set in LA which we now think of as a land of permanent sun Blade Runner LA is dark, grimy and usually raining. It also has the unusual oxymoron of managing to be both dark and bright, dark skies lit up by fiercely bright advertisements. Ghost in the Shell has a tall and vast city that is constantly looming over everything, something impossible to escape or even ignore. Perhaps this is just the passage of time (we are past the date Blade Runner is set in) but their examples of sci-fi often seem positively low-tech. The computer monitors in Blade Runner would be laughed at now, Ghost in the Shell and its endless cables as a sign of tech likewise seems odd.

As time goes by and those classic noir films get further and further away how will this odd blend of genres evolve? Some of these sci-fi noir films are over forty years old, generations of filmmakers will have grown up on these films and will surely have something to contribute.

Also Read: Animated Horror: The Overlooked Genre Fusion

The post Exploring Sci-Fi Noir: How Blade Runner and Ghost in the Shell Define the Sub-Genre appeared first on Big Picture Film Club.

2001: A Space Odyssey

One of Stanley Kubrick’s many masterpieces 2001 is very good on a lot of issues involving space travel. For example, when the astronauts have a television interview on the ship it is mentioned that it takes a long time for each response to travel the distance to the ship and back but for the television broadcast that has been cut out. Famously 2001 is one of the few sci-fi films that doesn’t have sound in space; space is a vacuum and as such there would be no sound, but for the sake of tone, most sci-fi films ignore this. Another issue most sci-fi films ignore or hand-wave away is that of gravity but not 2001 – we see many examples of weightlessness, and there is a famous shot of an astronaut climbing down a ladder and then seemingly running along what would have been the wall when he was on the ladder.

Accuracy – While certainly not perfect 2001 certainly tried to be as accurate as possible, this whole article could have been about this film and how much work was put in to making it accurate.

Transformers

Most of the movies mentioned in this article deal with complicated ideas like space travel, artificial intelligence and time travel and can be forgiven for getting details wrong. However, the Transformers franchise seems to exist in a world where the basic laws of physics are forgotten about. You can ignore questions of how are these robots made, how they travel through etc and get onto basic things like their different size in different transformed states, or these giant robots jumping around and not causing huge devastation from their tremendous mass. It absolutely forgets that if a human falls from a great height a robot catching them moments before they hit the ground is not going to save them and will have much the same result as hitting the ground.

Accuracy – None whatsoever – but not particularly trying either.

Sunshine

An underappreciated Danny Boyle film Sunshine is a movie where the filmmakers have clearly thought about scientific accuracy a lot. In a nutshell, the plot is that the sun is dying and there is a spaceship heading there to “restart” the sun. Professor Brian Cox was the scientific consultant for the film and has said that he used some ideas in physics to give the plot some credence, but it’s not a documentary, for example in the film the sun has been damaged by a Q-Ball (which is a genuine idea in physics) but our sun isn’t dense enough to be affected by it. It would seem Boyle asked for scientists to come up with something vaguely plausible in science and he would then run with it.

Accuracy – this is a difficult example as much of the film is not accurate but does take a lot of inspiration from science.

Interstellar

Christopher Nolan’s sci-fi epic has a number of interesting sci-fi elements going on – from robots to spaceships and more. One of the concepts that runs through the film is that of time combined with space travel; time is not a simple constant in the universe, it is affected by gravity. As such if you travel to a planet of different size the planet’s different gravity will affect time, so when the astronauts visit one planet they are told every hour on the planet seven years will pass on Earth. Most sci-fi films that feature travel between solar systems and vast distances in space pay no heed to such problems. Not only is this incredibly difficult to grasp accurately it would cause chaos in most attempts at telling a story – the astronaut returning home could be decades younger than their children.

Arrival

Another sci-fi masterpiece Arrival has clearly spent a lot of time on research, in particular away from the traditional sci-fi interests of spaceships and lasers but about language and communication. In Arrival, linguist Dr Louise Banks is tasked with communicating with an alien race that has arrived on Earth. Not only do they have a different language but they have a different perception of reality and understanding of it, particularly that of time. Dr. Banks insists on learning the whole language before any attempts at negotiation, pointing out how easy it is for misunderstandings between humans who speak different languages. The film engages with the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, in that learning a new language can change how your brain works, in the film this allows Banks to experience time the way the aliens do. This is a real theory in linguistics but the way things work in Arrival is far beyond anything any linguists actually propose.

Accuracy – a genuine attempt at portraying linguistics well but doesn’t quite match up with the science.

Movies do not need to be scientifically accurate to be good movies. They don’t even need to be scientifically accurate to capture ideas in science, for example in Sunshine a lot of what happens simply isn’t possible but the understanding of the universe as an incredibly precarious place where forces that are so huge and so outside of our ability to do anything about could destroy us is conveyed well. Transformers clearly couldn’t care less about scientific accuracy and it is in no way trying to pass itself off as an insightful film about the real science of transforming robots and the way it discards everyday physics is no different to non-sci-fi movies like The Fast & Furious franchise. Sci-fi doesn’t need to be scientifically accurate, usually, sci-fi is more about our interaction with science than the science itself.

Also Read: Netflix and The Science of Recommendations

Your contribution to Big Picture Film Club will allow us to continue to produce content. No matter the amount your contributions are greatly appreciated.

The post From 2001 to Arrival: Exploring the Scientific Realities in Sci-Fi Films appeared first on Big Picture Film Club.