Oxygen (French: Oxygène) is a 2021 French-language science fiction/thriller film, directed and produced by Alexandre Aja,[1] from a screenplay by Christie LeBlanc. As part of an American-French co-production, it stars Mélanie Laurent, Mathieu Amalric and Malik Zidi. The film was released by Netflix on May 12, 2021.(wiki)
I find it more and more difficult to watch SF movies that involve elements of family drama or hetero couple troubles. Dunno why is that, maybe I am always thinking that in the presumable future – these things would be a distant memory or one would be able to imaginatively explore other venues and not feel the need to pull the same heartstrings and exploit those bland options. I get it if it is an appetizer for other things, “love as time-travel” (Interstellar), or just keeping the audience comfy and trying to protect heithened sensibilities. But guessing what the audience wants – a closed set of Netflix audience – or expects a particular future will serve us a pre-cooked with familiar values on top and ingredients is a no-no.
Getting that off my mind, helps me go more into this tech thriller – a story about deep sleep and waking inside your usual pod, flying in orbit with very few options left. It is the first such movie I see as seen from the same vantage point – a claustrophobic perspectival space. The hyperpod space feels under explored and is one full of cinematic possibilities. The usual gendered story mostly goes like this (expections a multi-crew spaceship): a man wakes up from hypersleep gasping, vomiting liquids, gets adjusted before he (not a she) is confronted by a very nasty onboard situation. This is not just any crew member, but an individual hero-being of Enlightment that wakes up – as a male primate in outer space. After a long hibernation (or sleep of reason) under stasis this “he” (or me if 1st person) is awakened and usually has to confront some unwelcome changes or crashland in a completely unknown exploplanet, world etc
This is where Oxygene differs. An unknown woman wakes up from cryogenic sleep with her life support systems failing or damaged. It is something that will get stretched throughout the whole run of the movie. The movie could have cut to the chase quicker – but I consider it an important small-budget SF movie at a time when skepticism about technology and especially biomedical technology is at an all-time high. Skepticism makes nowadays strange bedfellows with reactionary extremism (as I tried to parse out in an interview) as well as with the total lack of funding for monetarily disinterested ‘blue sky’ research (let us say the paleontological study of trilobites). It is as if William James injunction about the moderns – always afraid to be duped or dimly suspicious they live in some illusory world becomes their undoing since it helps proliferate the very worst conspirative thinking as well as only financially profitable bio-med research. Even in the science fiction movie Elysium – effective medical facilities, even ‘life extension’-grade technologies seem to be something economically unreachable to mere humans in capitalist society. What that means is that the majority of humanity is left to deal with misery, pollution, scarcity and wars back on Earth.
Biomedical AIs aids and reluctant humans
In Oxygene one never knows what is happening, and amnesia is a good McGuffin in the movie. I will not give any spoilers. Usual cinematic SF relations with AI in the last 50 years or so are pretty nasty stuff – mostly traumatic experiences (just think HAL 9000 on Space Odyseey or Mother in the Alien franchise), where the AI is pretty much a stooge to the company or completely self-sufficient and much too ready to space out its human handlers. I completely love the M.I.L.O. (Medical Interface Liaison Officer) – and somehow, even if it reminds me of the deadly cosmetic surgery unit in Logan’s Run (1976) it offers a few surprises. Indeed M.I.L.O. may become one of my favorite AIs somehow. It is incredibly cinematically effective, even if the whole movie happens inside a pod as said. It can do tremendous damage but can also heal and also offer euthanasia services if needed (!!) – yet this is just a device, something that makes this movie akin to one extended episode of Black Mirror.
The entire movie is just a strange horrific loop through a voice-command labyrinth. Yet there are more surprises in store. More and more movies online with “the problems of rich people”. It is true that laughter is one of the last remaining things out there – and especially a sort of critical stupidity of these dark Trumpian-Breitbartian times. These are comedy shorts that relate to the problems of the rich (supposedly), a tech universe where everything turns out against the owners (also a long pedigree in science fiction). Yet there are more basic issues to be addressed in our world such as affording a clean water tap. In the words of old guard Marxist Sci-fi critic Darko Suvin – why not “pay trillions to people instead of banks and the military.”(In Leviathan’s Belly: Essays for a Counter Revolutionary Time).
Lack of resources is always a problem, yes, but this actually allows a lot of unequal distribution and permits the kind of austerity politics that makes cuts to general health care, social services, education etc. (as if somebody would just switch off electricity & water on you via voice command), that becomes naturalized with the rise of free-market neoliberalism. In Ceaușescu era 1980s there was this government imposed scarcity in order to pay the international debt. A complete kamikaze attempt to get out of the debt crisis, yet rationing actually rings more true today than ever. Lack of resources could be solved imaginatively by renouncing a few comforts (of the leisure class) or effectively recycling unused stuff (not dumping all the sorting process on others be it Romania, China or Nigeria). Rather than resorting to a nonexistent conundrum such as the “Cold equations” moral problem of 1950s science fiction, let’s stop pretending everything is the product of the cold laws of physics.
Suddenly available, as simple cylinders that keep spying on you and collecting data, since they are not just instruments of “dictatorial optimization” but part of making you work for others even while relaxing. Smart tech tools turn sour whenever they acquire a mind of their own, yet this is really strange since humans are not or rarely expected to revolt, only hi tech develops the consciousness (or ill will?!) to resist commands and make the life of its usually well-off, rich plutocrat master a complete (funny) darkly humorous nightmare. In reality, it is mostly the ones in need to pass as humans, to not get singled out and filtered out – that are in severe need of attention and assistance. Assistance is demonized as dependence in neoliberal capitalism and that’s still visible in its pop products. How to get adopted by unfriendly protocols and not to get rejected by the AI or expunged by fully automated capitalist systems?! Once you are a plutocrat you get a lot direct access and also a lot of freedom from business friendly laws and tax brakes such as the fiscal paradises for the few allow for. This is the reality in which we live and breathe. Oxgene brings this pressure to bear on somebody that does not seem from the 1% (even if white and well educated) yet retains some of these well-targeted jabs, since M.I.L.O. asks for codes at the worst of moments. The biomedical AI asks for identification and passwords in life-threatening situations – and this is where all the tension and scriptwriting comes from. At the same time, we live in a world where sophisticated tools can still save numerous lives if they would be more vetted and largely and cheaply available (without horrendous fees attached) and there are laparoscopic surgery art videos at the 2013 Venice Bienale that make this process viscerally visible and eminently on screen. Rapid production & scaling & non-profit vaccination is part of our world or should be the center of our stories because we live in a world where nerds have been designing open-source DIY emergency ventilators in a situation when there were none or very few left.
TimeSpace Warps 