time machine // database // travel guide
spacetime coordinates: Los Angeles 2019 // 2049
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blade_Runner imdb
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blade_Runner_2049 imdb
cityscapes:
Land of the Dead (also known as George A. Romero’s Land of the Dead) is a 2005 post-apocalyptic horror film written and directed by George A. Romero; the fourth of Romero’s six Living Dead movies, it is preceded by Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Deadand Day of the Dead, and succeeded by Diary of the Dead and Survival of the Dead.
The story of Land of the Dead deals with a zombie assault on Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where a feudal-like government exists. The survivors in the film have fled to the Golden Triangle area of downtown Pittsburgh. The region is protected on two sides by rivers and on the third by an electric barricade that survivors term “the Throat”.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0418819/
Dawn of the Dead is a 2004 American horror film directed by Zack Snyder in his feature film directorial debut. A remake of George A. Romero’s 1978 film of the same name, it was written by James Gunn and stars Sarah Polley, Ving Rhames, Jake Weber, and Mekhi Phifer. James Gunn labeled it a “re-imagining” of the original film’s concept.
spacetime coordinates: future London
The Girl with All the Gifts is a 2016 British post-apocalyptic zombie horror drama film directed by Colm McCarthy and written by M.R. Carey adapted from his novel of the same name. Starring Gemma Arterton, Paddy Considine, Glenn Close, and Sennia Nanua, the film depicts a dystopian future following a breakdown of society after most of humanity is wiped out by a fungal infection. The plot focuses on the struggle of a scientist, a teacher, and two soldiers who embark on a journey of survival with a special young girl named Melanie.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4547056/
the city:
Singularity began as a low-budget sci-fi film called Aurora, which was shot in 2013 in the Czech Republic and Switzerland. John Cusack was not involved in the original shoot. Years later, scenes with Cusack were shot and inserted into the new production, and extensive CGI effects were used to tie the new material to the original film.
spacetime coordinates: Chicago, 2055 > the cretaceous
A Sound of Thunder is a 2005 science fiction thriller film directed by Peter Hyams, and starring Edward Burns, Catherine McCormack and Ben Kingsley. It is a co-production film between the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany, and the Czech Republic.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0318081/
_____________________________________________________
a classic example of “failed return” or “no return” cautionary tales is A Sound of Thunder by Ray Bradbury published in 1952. on a personal level i love both the EC comic book adaptation with artwork by Al Williamson and the 2005 movie adaptation by Peter Hyams that was a box office flop and has receive mostly negative reviews by critics. the original story features one of the first instances of the butterfly effect, in particular as applied to time travel paradoxes and uncontrollable evolutionary/ political outcomes. this was way before it became a meteorologic mainstay of chaos theory after its use by Edward Lorenz to describe stormy ripple-like effects on nonlinear systems, seemingly very sensitive to minute initial conditions.
the movie A Sound of Thunder features a time travel tourist agency from the year 2055. Time Safari Inc. is a chronocapitalist enterprise that organizes prehistoric retro-hunting expeditions to far-off epochs where dinosaurs roamed the earth. in order to do that, mankind is cheating on the big dinosaur mass extinction. long after humankind has killed most of the big game life on earth it tracks down other, more elusive and ferocious megafauna. the whole ‘hunting’ for the ultimate predator T-Rex (or an Allosaurus in the movie) turns out to be a very complex business. the paleo-poaching is based on hiding your acts under the cover of natural occurrences, trophy hunting pretending to be a mass extimction event. in order to fake the killing shot one must plan ahead every retro-killing move. practically Time Safari Inc. is cheating evolutionary history by trying to synchronize with ‘naturally’ occurring death events and extract entertainment value out of impossible inter-species encounters, normally separated by enormous gulfs of time. (…)
geohistory becomes a perfect crime scene – where the time traveling expedition has to erase all traces – all influence that might otherwise impact the future with definite catastrophic (especially anthropic future) results. as often, humans are kind of role-playing hide and seek with natural selection. in this bizarre and strange inversion of the anthropocenic stratigraphic proof – masquerades as natural force, where a devious human causality is trying to hide behind a pre-human mass extinction event. it is almost the same principle guiding the climate denialist that pretends to hide behind previous catastrophic climate fluctuations.
as one might expect, it’s a chronoclysm waiting to happen. all the clients of Time Safari Inc. are prone to making mistakes, and not only do they leave marks (the absolute no 1 rule of time travel is non-intervention) but they also bring back something (the 2nd most important rule) basically invariably smuggling the prehuman past into the future. somehow a prehistoric dead butterfly makes it through the biofilter (a great example of what I would call New Wallace Lines) that is scanning every living reentry into the present, every possibility of warping the timelines. the alteration of the past produces a chronoclysm that manifests itself as a rhythmic, rapidly accelerating ‘time waves’ that transform the city and its denizens. more to the point in the Peter Hyams movie, the first divergence is a sudden appearance of teeming swarms of beetles and a gigantic strangler fig-like tree bursting through a Chicago high rise building, while the main characters Ryan and Rand make a narrow escape. it is by no means accidental that swarms and insect swarms in particular are associated with time waves. multiply proliferating and and highly distributed, swarms are chronoclysmic purveyors that help carry and suffer the radical effects of timeline distortion.
there are reports of global increases in temperature and humidity and plant life seems to prosper, while this time warped climate change suddenly seems to be echoing sweltering hot pre-human conditions of long gone geological epochs and dead jungles. (…)
stefan tiron – Cosm/c Dr/ft & T3mporal D/vergence (2016)- EXIT THE PORTAL: The Strange Comeback to a Weird Earth
Written by Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver, it is 20th Century Fox’s reboot of the Planet of the Apes series, intended to act as an origin story for a new series of films. Its premise is similar to the fourth film in the original series, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972), but it is not a direct remake of that film.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_of_the_Apes#Reboot_film_series
Ex Machina is a 2014 British-American science fiction psychological thriller film written and directed by Alex Garland. Domhnall Gleeson, Alicia Vikander, Sonoya Mizuno, and Oscar Isaac star in a story that follows a programmer who is invited by his CEO to administer the Turing test to an intelligent humanoid robot. Film based on The Tempest by William Shakespeare.
spacetime coordinates: 2035 Chicago
I, Robot (stylized as i,robot) is a 2004 American science fiction action film directed by Alex Proyas. The screenplay by Jeff Vintar and Akiva Goldsman is from a screen story by Vintar, based on his original screenplay “Hardwired”, and suggested by Isaac Asimov‘s 1950 short-story collection of the same name. The film stars Will Smith, Bridget Moynahan, Bruce Greenwood, James Cromwell, Chi McBride, and Alan Tudyk. In 2035, highly intelligent robots fill public service positions throughout the dystopian world, operating under three rules to keep humans safe. Detective Del Spooner (Smith) investigates the alleged suicide of U.S. Robotics founder Alfred Lanning (Cromwell) and believes that a human-like robot (Tudyk) murdered him.
Morgan is a 2016 British-American science fiction thriller film directed by Luke Scott in his directorial debut, and written by Seth Owen. Film scored by Max Richter.
spacetime coordinates: 2005 > 2048 >> 2205 San Francisco Bay Area / Washington, D.C.
Bicentennial Man is a 1999 American science fiction comedy-drama film starring Robin Williams, Sam Neill, Embeth Davidtz (in a dual role), Wendy Crewson, and Oliver Platt. Based on the 1992 novel The Positronic Man by Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg (which is itself based on Asimov’s original 1976 novelette “The Bicentennial Man“), the plot explores issues of humanity, slavery, prejudice, maturity, intellectual freedom, conformity, sex, love, mortality, and eternal life. The film, a co-production between Touchstone Pictures and Columbia Pictures, was directed by Chris Columbus.
spacetime coordinates: 2043, Santa Irene
Eva is a 2011 science fiction film directed by Kike Maíllo. It had its world premiere on 7 September 2011 at the 68th Venice International Film Festival, where it was screened out of competition. The film stars Daniel Brühl, Marta Etura, Lluís Homar and Alberto Ammann.
Eva was nominated in twelve categories at the 26th Goya Awards, scoring three wins—Best New Director, Best Supporting Actor and Best Special Effects. It earned nominations for Best Actor, Best Cinematography, Best Editing, Best Make Up and Hairstyles, Best Original Score, Best Original Screenplay, Best Production Design, Best Production Supervision and Best Sound. The film was also nominated for sixteen Gaudí Awards, winning five.
The film combines computer generated imagery of robots and engineering devices and retro clothing and props like a Saab 900 car. (wiki)
spacetime coordinates: the 22nd century Madison, New Jersey, resort town of Rouge City, the flooded ruins of Manhattan (rising sea levels from global warming have wiped out coastal cities, reducing the world’s population.)
A.I. Artificial Intelligence (also known as A.I.) is a 2001 American science fiction drama film directed by Steven Spielberg. The screenplay by Spielberg and screen story by Ian Watson were loosely based on the 1969 short story “Supertoys Last All Summer Long” by Brian Aldiss. The film stars Haley Joel Osment, Jude Law, Frances O’Connor, Brendan Gleeson and William Hurt. Set in a futuristic post-climate change society, A.I. tells the story of David (Osment), a childlike android uniquely programmed with the ability to love.
Development of A.I. originally began with producer-director Stanley Kubrick, after he acquired the rights to Aldiss’ story in the early 1970s. Kubrick hired a series of writers until the mid-1990s, including Brian Aldiss, Bob Shaw, Ian Watson, and Sara Maitland. The film languished in protracted development for years, partly because Kubrick felt computer-generated imagery was not advanced enough to create the David character, whom he believed no child actor would convincingly portray. In 1995, Kubrick handed A.I. to Spielberg, but the film did not gain momentum until Kubrick’s death in 1999. Spielberg remained close to Watson’s film treatment for the screenplay.
Kubrick’s original concept art for A.I. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (2001) via @TIFF_NET
A.I. is dedicated to Kubrick.
spacetime coordinates: 2044, 20 after solar flares irradiate the Earth, killing over 99% of the world’s population. The survivors gather in a network of safe cities and build primitive humanoid robots, called Pilgrims, to help rebuild and operate in the harsh environment.
Autómata is a 2014 English-language science fiction action film directed by Gabe Ibáñez and starring Antonio Banderas. The film is co-written by Ibáñez with Igor Legarreta and Javier Sánchez Donate, and co-stars Birgitte Hjort Sørensen, Melanie Griffith, Dylan McDermott, Robert Forster, and Tim McInnerny. (wiki)
The Machine is a 2013 British science fiction thriller film directed and written by Caradog W. James. It stars Caity Lotz and Toby Stephens as computer scientists who create an artificial intelligence for the British military. (wiki) / rottentomatoes
timespace coordinates: near future Los Angeles
Her is a 2013 American romantic science-fiction drama film written, directed, and produced by Spike Jonze. It marks Jonze’s solo screenwriting debut. The film follows Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix), a man who develops a relationship with Samantha (Scarlett Johansson), an artificially intelligent virtual assistant personified through a female voice. The film also stars Amy Adams, Rooney Mara, and Olivia Wilde.
TimeSpace Warps 