This neo-fairytale set in Wyoming, USA follows three mischievous children as they embark on an odyssey when their mother asks them to run an errand. On the hunt to obtain her favourite blueberry pie, the children are kidnapped by poachers, battle a witch, outwit a huntsman, befriend a fairy, and bond together to become best friends forever. (rt)
Director: Weston Razooli
timespace coordinates: 1988 Jasper, Missouri
Road House is a 1989 American action film directed by Rowdy Herrington. The film stars Patrick Swayze, Ben Gazzara, Kelly Lynch, and Sam Elliott.
Its plot follows a cooler at a newly refurbished roadside bar who protects a small town in Missouri from a corrupt businessman. The film has gone on to be a cult classic, being voted the most watched film on cable in 2020.
A sequel, Road House 2, was released in 2006.
timespace coordinates: 2020’s Florida Keys community of Glass Key
A remake, also called Road House, was released in 2024, starring Jake Gyllenhaal and directed by Doug Liman.
timespace coordinates: 2010’s East Los Angeles
Lowriders is a 2016 American drama film directed by Ricardo de Montreuil. and starring Demián Bichir, Gabriel Chavarria, Theo Rossi, Melissa Benoist, Tony Revolori and Eva Longoria. (wiki)
timespace coordinates: somewhere in the near future in a high tech billionaire Arctic retreat in Iceland.
Created by Brit Marling & Zal Batmanglij
Suffice it to say after Netflix killed “The OA” everyone must have eagerly waiting for news any news regarding any new production from the Brit Marling & Batmanglij duo – IMHO one of the most ambitious, consistent, and surprising actors/screenwriters/director collaborations in the Anglophone world.
In an era where franchises driven by algorithms churn more of the same, Brit and Batmanglij single-handedly introduced memorable “high-concept” SFs thrillers into the cinema world of the early 21st century. What I enjoy is that they never dispense with the emotional valences – even if they’re intelectual provocateurs (especially considering the formats). We on Timespacewarps are fans of their work and have been following it from early on (even on our previous blog entries – Planetneukoln for those who know). Starting with the startling Sound of My Voice (2011)– two documentary investigators go under cover for their scopp but instead get their certitudes checked by a charismatic cult leader (played by Brit Marling herself) allegedly coming from the future. The same intensity and emotional palette colors the doppelgänger encounters of Another Earth (2011) . Contemporary entanglements and a continuing preoccupation with under cover reporting, activism, violent action vs non-violent civil disobedience, dirty deals of corporate crime, private agencies – abound in the slick espionage SF drama The East (2013) that I totally recommend as an appetizer for the rest of their work. I think the Brit-Batmanjlij collaboration and involvement with The OA has produced so many threads, so much speculation & online debates that is makes it impossible to sum up. There is even a caricature version – where one expects non-sequiturs and portals, speaking octopuses at every step. Yes, Murder At the End of the World does not deliver in that sense, because it is a more subtle and muted beast. All that makes it impossible for me here to summarize or discuss the cult following they have garnered over the yearsbut you get the idea.
Murder at the End of the World is certainly a flawed product, but hey the had to play it safe after what happened to the OA I guess. I could go on criticizing the somehow worn-out premise (rich obnoxious guy inviting or challenging his competitors in a remote mansion), disjointed often filler storylines, masked assassins (think Ghostface but with anti-face recognition mask), claustrophobic situations, and an out-of-ordinary cast (of somehow unnerving) misfits and entrepreneurs.
It’s also a show about how technology permeates the everyday life of the super-rich – rich kids play with VR or AR environments largely outside of the purview of their parents, rings function as personal keys and insect robots are digging more underground retreats or special extreme weather suits. From the beginning, the non-linear plot moves from the present readings of a book with events about past to the past events themselves, or between a subplot in the US desert where murder after murder brings us closer to the serial killer – a cis-romance sleuthing of two young charismatic (Gen Z) hacker and a sexy artist-activist that will get famous, split up and be invited in the future by the rich tech billionaire. If this whodunit murder drama in the Arctic retreat of white expanses and majestic almost lifeless landscapes attracts you in any way, then feel free to watch.
You can also watch it just for the visual and emotional kicks this might deliver because the stark surroundings and deadly nature end up being the perfect background for various murders and medical situations (including immortality dreams of the rich). The series is not so much about conclusions, or solving the murders, but about certain obsessions, and a generalized contemporary vulnerability, of being both strong and very weak at the same time. Of being technically adept and not being able to prevent crimes from unfolding. The ending is not about the impending End of the World, but about places at the end of the world that are being colonized by the rich in their wish to decouple and insulate themselves from the troubles of a sacrificed majority. Such modulations of (climate) and emotional changes provoke strange encounters and bizarre romantic relationships (think Elon Musk and Grime), strange bedfellows compounded by omnipresent affordances, of the grid ecological terrorists (that nevertheless turn out to not be very effective). Ok, there under constant surveillance under ‘surveillance capitalism’ but watching the repetitive loops and pans of surveillance cameras is mind-numbingly boring. Murder At the End of the World makes it clear how our world is being drenched by audiovisual recording and playback technologies.
The hacker sub-genre has a certain revival with Mr. Robot, and Murder At the End of the World does put an effort to bring gender balance into the mainly manly hacker geek den. It does this credibly and excitingly in my opinion, although one would prefer more from the main hacktivist played by Marling.
If there’s also real (full automation) and productivity out there, it’s not very sure how it will benefit the rest of humanity meaning lots of mining by robot swarms up North (the new warming climate is actually profitable for the super-rich). It’s also one of the few media productions that depicts activists in a sympathetic way. Scientists turned activists in a positive light and not straight away as eco terrorists or renegades or Luddytes or anarcho primtivists.
Disappearing or not leaving digital traces is either a rich man’s ability or the ability of a hacker to delete or blur oneself and skip recordings times or hack into heavily AI-assisted environments, even if this in the end brings us no agency or no real way to change the past. Solving murders seems to be a collective procedural thing – also crowd-sourcing sleuthing to former victims or a growing online community of serial killer hunters.
I am not so convinced about the detective genre in general in the 21st century, but if murder mystery drama thriller is your thing, go for it.
This miniseries leaves more questions than it answers. I also get the sense that it is a vehicle for the major issues of today (the exterminist capitalist tendencies and the villainous libertarian billionaire ‘geniuses’ building luxury bunkers in remote areas outside of any accountability), US/CN competition over technological hegemony, fears over AI black-boxing, etc In a way it all goes against deductive reasoning in a way. It is Agatha Christie and it isn’t at the same time, because it rejects the usual sense-making mechanisms of this modernist genre – all the big mysteries seem solved, identifying and recognizing does quite work and in the end, it is a new ‘kind’ of culprit altogether (collective guilt?). And maybe transforming it into a personal family drama of a rich asshole is the best way to get people’s attention, who knows?
Feeling we are more dependable than ever on the benevolence of the rich entrepreneurs, and the unwanted tech Web3 “free” gifts, blockchain-specific technologies (DAOs, DeFi, NFTs) and uberization they are raining on top of us, while processes and algos that most of us do not understand or harness have free-range – is the larger theme here. Maybe a crime story is just the surface icy layer (everything is quite icy despite the high emotions) and maybe the drama leads us somewhere beyond the sleuthing whodunit of murdered activists. What is the most major crime story of our times? Well, we could well argue the actual murder case is the ever-worsening climate emergency. But that is eminently no mystery. No sleuthing to be done, no uncertainties, no whodunit from the future to the past, because we now know that since 1979 experts at Exxon Mobile were already warning about the warming greenhouse effect of the planet. So, nothing there to uncover in the snow. We know before long who the culprits and the denialists were.
imdb // wiki // rottentomatoes
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.
timespace coordinates: 2010’s UK, Dubai, Japan, France, Germany, Austria, Turkey, Spain
Gran Turismo is a 2023 American biographical sports drama film directed by Neill Blomkamp from a screenplay by Jason Hall and Zach Baylin. Produced by Columbia Pictures, PlayStation Productions, and 2.0 Entertainment, it is based on the racing simulation video game series of the same name developed by Polyphony Digital.
It tells the true story of Jann Mardenborough, a teenage Gran Turismo player who became a professional racing car driver. The film stars Archie Madekwe as Mardenborough alongside David Harbour, Orlando Bloom, Darren Barnet, Emelia Hartford, Geri Halliwell Horner, Djimon Hounsou and Josha Stradowski. (wiki)
Planet of Lana is a 2023 puzzle-platform game developed by Wishfully Studios and published by Thunderful Publishing for Microsoft Windows, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S.
In the game, the player assumes control of teenage girl Lana and her companion Mui, as they explore a fictional planet invaded by hostile alien machines. The game was inspired by cinematic platformers such as Inside, while its visuals were inspired by films from Studio Ghibli. (wiki)
SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS (MINIMUM): OS: Windows 10 / Processor: Intel Core i5 / Memory: 4 GB RAM / Graphics: GTX 660 / Storage: 10 GB available space
TimeSpace Warps 