2355 – Scavengers Reign (animation mini series 2023)

timespace coordinates: planet Vesta in the far future when interstellar cargo ships roam the galaxy

adult animated science fiction drama television series created by Joseph Bennett and Charles Huettner (here is an interview)

Probably this is one of the most expected pieces of SF this year. And it delivers and is excellent on several accounts, contrasting with most of what gets labeled as SF nowadays. There is no lack of visually stunning cinematic works that seem to lack something – be it plotwise, involvement, or character development or are bound to repeat some form of techno-orientalist cliche with super-advanced yet missing Asians.

Is there any type of exoplanetary SF possible today when most of the future visions are somehow retro vintage SF golden age or very derivative? This was contradicted at the end of 2023 by Joseph Bennett and Charles Huettner with a new independent, daring SF “eco-gothic” SF series production for the Max video-on-demand subscription channel that emanated out of the Californian animation industry. Scavengers Reign has somehow demonstrated that not everything is being consumed by the Disney Studios monster. Although I doubt there’s life after you fall into the D sarlacc’s capacious stomach.

Scavenger Reign stands closer to the European animation school and in particular the French comics and animation. It oozes Métal Hurlant and René Laloux with the geometric forests, panoramic vistas and its changeling alien ecosystems. But there is certainly also an anime/manga aspect – or the traces of the best of anime and manga. There is a touch of weird naturalism, of eerie transformations, and of horrific metamorphosis, particularly if one thinks in terms of the Katsuhiro Otomo’s masterpiece Akira from 1982 which was stunning for its realism and Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind manga (not anime!) by Hayao Miyazaki. Biological genomes get hijacked, and the extended virome that permeates alien planets trafficks information across the species barrier. Everything is inter-species, everything sporulates, and telekinetic parasitism abounds (something close to the rove beetle eating baby ants while the ants think it is one of them – thx Ben Woodard for reminding me of this crazy true fable), but also the dance of co-evolution.

It is also the first US SF product (with help from South Korean animators – Studio JDD) – and it is no accident that it is an animation piece that finally does justice to some authors that have never been adapted for the screen such as the exoplanetary works of Joan Lyn Slonczewski (The Children Star) or only partially so – Jeff VanderMeer (particularly Borne and The Strange Bird two of my favorite pieces of new weird & postapocalyptic post- biopunk SF).

Otherness participates here at every level – from hallucinations of even the most common kind, say your lover’s voice and image that is being somehow puppeteered by something really different (do not think Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris), a plethora of really alien creatures using human carriers via their feelings and thoughts, but these thoughts and feelings somehow animating the alien critters as well in return. To affect means to be also affected (thinking here of Deleuze, but also Whithead’s Critique of Pure Affect). Also, we should not expect alien sentience to conform to our technological imaginary – it can be really very much a creature of strange and lowly appetites, irrespective of its extra sensorial powers. So you could really imagine the corporate alien slugs from Charles Stross’s Accelerando leaving sticky marks on Scavengers Reign’s world.

It is also one animation that takes into account our new scientific knowledge about species being as complex communities, interplays, or choreographies of genes or societies of genes of entirely different species. This knowledge constantly reshaped our understanding of what an individual being is or offers us continuous glimpses into how tight-knit such relationships are or how human agency or artificial agency dissolves or is being constantly rerouted within these webs of agency, non-agency, and misplaced intentionality. Parasitism is pervasive but it is also just one expression of the complexity and mutualism of such an ecosystem – it’s fleas upon fleas all the way down and up. There’s also a bizarre in-betweenness, much on this planet actually thrives on cross-fertilization with non-alien, human intruders and their creations (robots). There is a great scene where Azi and Levi (a human and robot partnership that survived the crash of the Demeter 277 cargo ship) who was cultivating and gardening new earthly gardens – Azi the robot is itself a walking garden. Inside its machinery there is some kind of new hybrid semiconductor with slime molds as a partner (it seems to me), maybe something close to unconventional computing is aiming at since some time.

imdb // wiki

2262 – Plane (2023)

spacetime coordinates: Trailblazer Airlines Flight 119 from Singapore to Honolulu via Tokyo // Jolo island in the Philippines

Plane is a 2023 American action thriller film directed by Jean-François Richet. The film stars Gerard Butler, Mike Colter, Yoson An, and Tony Goldwyn. (wiki)

imdb   //   rt

2186 – The Woman King (2022)

spacetime coordinates: 1820’s the West African kingdom of Dahomey

The Woman King is a 2022 American historical epic film about the Agojie, the all-female warrior unit that protected the West African kingdom of Dahomey during the 17th to 19th centuries. The film stars Viola Davis as a general who trains the next generation of warriors to fight their enemies. It is directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood and written by Dana Stevens, based on a story she wrote with Maria Bello. The film also stars Thuso Mbedu, Lashana Lynch, Sheila Atim, and John Boyega.

(historical accuracy) John Boyega plays King Ghezo, a real-life figure who ruled Dahomey from 1818 to 1858 and engaged in the Atlantic slave trade through the end of his reign. Hero Fiennes Tiffin plays the white Portuguese-speaking slave trader Santo Ferreira who is fictional and portrayed as an enemy to Ghezo. History vs. Hollywood said the character was “possibly loosely inspired” by Francisco Félix de Sousa, a Brazilian slave trader who in actuality helped Ghezo gain power.

Historically, Dahomey was a kingdom that conquered other African states and enslaved their citizens to sell in the Atlantic slave trade, and most of the kingdom’s wealth was derived from slavery. The Agojie had a history of participating in slave raiding, and slavery in Dahomey persisted after the British Empire stopped Dahomey from continuing in the Atlantic slave trade.

In the film’s setting of the 1820s, Nanisca confronts Ghezo about the immorality of selling Dahomey slaves to the Portuguese and suggests trading in palm oil production instead. Nanisca being fictional, the confrontation did not take place. Smithsonian wrote, “Though Ghezo did at one point explore palm oil production as an alternative source of revenue, it proved far less lucrative, and the king soon resumed Dahomey’s participation in the slave trade.” wiki

The film does not mention or depict the Kingdom of Dahomey’s practice of human sacrifice. (read more: A look at Dahomey’s gory history of human sacrifices on a large scale)

The all-woman Dora Milaje regiment featured in Black Panther is based on the Dahomey warriors.

imdb   /   rottentomatoes

2172 – The Greatest Beer Run Ever (2022)

spacetime coordinates: 1967 – 1968  New York City / Vietnam

“A man’s story of leaving New York in 1967 to bring beer to his childhood buddies in the Army while they are fighting in Vietnam.”

The Greatest Beer Run Ever is a 2022 American biographical war action comedy-drama film directed and co-written by Peter Farrelly. Based on the book of the same name by John “Chickie” Donohue and Joanna Molloy, the film stars Zac Efron, Bill Murray and Russell Crowe. wiki

imdb

2109 – Love, Death & Robots Volume III (2022)

Love, Death & Robots (stylized as LOVE DEATH + R⬤BOTS, and represented in emoji form as ❤️❌🤖) is an adult animated anthology streaming television series created by Tim Miller and streaming on Netflix. Produced by Blur Studio, it consists of stand-alone episodes that contain different narrative and animation and are produced by different animation studios from a range of countries, exploring diverse genres particularly comedy, horror, science fiction, and fantasy. Each episode is connected to the themes of the titular subjects matter. However, not every episode includes all three topics. Miller serves as the showrunner and producer alongside Joshua Donen, David Fincher, and Jennifer Miller.

The third volume holds a 100% rating from 15 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, with an average rating of 8/10, the website’s critical consensus stating, “A concise collection of memorable cybernetic fables, Love, Death + Robots’ third installment is its most well-balanced yet.” Writing for The Verge, Andrew Webster called volume III “arguably the strongest collection yet” praising the stories and various animation styles used in each short. (wiki)

imdb

Volume I   /   Volume II

2029 – Green Animal/La vie secrète des plantes (2015 documentary series)

South Korean nature documentary directed by Seung-woo Son 

“With 4K UHD quality, EBS Docuprime ‘Green Animal’ is a documentary of plants’ life stories by looking for wonderful plants on the Earth by visiting five major oceans and six major continents for about two years. It shows nature’s beautiful scenes with a secret of primal, and illuminates plants that were discounted as static existences with a new point of view. It follows plants’ lives with the actor Sung-hwa Jung’s narration.

As plants cannot move, they couldn’t choose good land by themselves. The program reveals plants’ dynamic movements and strategies for survival and their unimaginable life stories. It lively describes images of plants moving for survival by fair means or foul through interval filming, micrography, and electron microscope. With a high-speed camera, it also captured even a hundredth of a second movement created by plants.” (here is more about the documentary from the press conference launch)

Here is a French/ARTE version of it in three parts:

2018 – Brand New Cherry Flavor (2021)

Brand New Cherry Flavor is an American horror drama streaming television limited series created by Nick Antosca and Lenore Zion, based on the novel of the same name by Todd Grimson. 

dark, zany and shape shifting

Probably my favorite series of the last few years and one of the best Netflix experiences of the early 21 century. It might come as no surprise that this is not the usual science fiction pean – nor a radically new expression of our times, but a more modest retro tribute to 1990s body genre cinema. Not many horrors nowadays can provide such an enticing mix of grotesqueries, artificiality, comedy, x-ploitation with such panache!

It also stars what might turn out to be one of the most amazing young actresses of these end-times: Canadian-American Rosa Salazar. Salazar channels both bare knuckles, no frills, to the bitter end attitude with everything that we might regard as going-down-the-drain/doomer/crap-I-did-it-again black hole we find ourselves in.

Plenty of good, recent lists of movies take on the celeb path to destruction-perdition (or monstrous transformation into something else). The nascent, young female horror movie director turns out to be the worst nightmare of its sleazeball, libidinous, profiteering male producers or hapless boyfriends and arrogant actors. Hollywood/LA is since (1950) Sunset Boulevard the festering noir Babylon of cinematography, but also a vice-den full of vengeful aging yet still respledent and haunting superstars. Recent horrors have been turning a lot of these powerful early examples on their head somehow. In Starry Eyes – directed by Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer, a young starlet (Alexandra Essoe) gets targeted by the (unsurprisingly demonic) Hollywood elite and suffers the most horrific and non-beatific shapeshifting.

there is no exit only the kitchen sink

Becoming a female star or a female director is almost like a satanist ritual or a serial killer praxis. In I blame society (2020) writer/director Gillian Wallace Horvat, uses furious irony to lacerate an omnipresent and condescending patriarchal ‘bro’ culture, too secure (and dumb) to notice how it is producing its own nemesis. A male world full of obnoxious fantasies that keeps denying female authors/directors all due recognition, respect etc. +authorship. This is not rotten to the core, it is just insufferable and blind. That is why it is swallowing the allergic sandwich, the poisoned hook, or gets butchered or ritually maimed on its own self-congratulating altar. Most of the time you will learn to root for the female director no matter what – since the situation as we know and knew even before MeeToo is pretty dire. Method acting in a male-dominated cinematic world imposes more and more bizarre contortions and transformations that never end well or with a tadah- a happy ending.

the sweltering apartment jungle

Back to Brand New Cherry Flavor – where Lisa N. Nova (Rosa Salazar) – a young horror film director enters a netherworld of sex magick, ruthless body snatching, ancient Amazonian lore, witchcraft infused transformative vendetta with plenty of unsuspected zombie voodoo/hoodoo spells. There are newborn kittens everywhere getting vomited and there is a vine growing from the ceiling of a building and hallucinatory brain worms are harvested from its pollen. All this and more awaits the unsuspecting traveler. The horrific – in Linda William’s 1991 body genre’s critical essay (melodrama, porn, horror) usually gets the ‘gross’ label attached, where blamed bodily excess on-screen somehow lets viewers be affected in the most sensationalistic and visceral ways, making detachment impossible and affects hard to deny or to refuse. One of the repeating patterns is Lisa N. Nova’s both horrific and completely ridiculous vomiting live blind kittens that usually get snatched right away. There is this sensation that everything averted might turn out to be even more horrific. When she tries to rewrite the kitten-birthing pact, her body manages to reroute the process. Processes (magical or not) have a life of their own. Kittens start exiting other parts of her body – this is all happening under the most plausible, bodily exhausting, and sticky embarrassing situations.

the debt of kittens

The movie is both eerie, both dark and colorful (cherry flavored?!) at the same time. There is this boring cliche of horror wearing its awfully drab garment proudly – full of dry red, black blood, dressed in mourning colors and hues. Brand New Cherry Flavor is anything but monochrome. In fact, it is best described as being luxuriant. It luxuriates (plot-wise also) with jungle entanglements plants and animals.

patching and changing skins

Although tarantulas and orchids have a long history in noir movies and horror trash, they did not get joined as a related (imported) ecosystem of horrors. This I find the greatest addition of BNCF to the Sunset Boulevard haunted decaying canon of silent star era mansions. It is the undeniable fact that that there might be a hothouse out there, full of exotics and a spirit world in the basement. A tropical taxonomy of non-typical growth amidst perfect preened lawns and green acres. The whole series and its characters are almost like generating their own tendrils, acting out their darkly vitalistic nature, like infesting, seductive invasive species brought onboard some crates of lingering, unwatched movie copies that got buried under production hell. Suffice to say music is also right on top.

another kind of spa

imdb