time machine // database // travel guide
INFINITY CHAMBER (aka Somnio) is an independent feature dystopian sci-fi thriller written and directed by Travis Milloy.
Locked up in an automated prison, Frank Lerner (Christopher Soren Kelly) undergoes an interrogation process that forces him to relive the same day over and over. When a war erupts on the outside, he must find a way to escape from a computer system that won’t let him go.
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
Europa (known as Zentropa in North America) is a 1991 Danish art drama film directed by Lars von Trier. It is von Trier’s third theatrical feature film and the final film in his Europa trilogy following The Element of Crime (1984) and Epidemic (1987). Europa was influenced by Franz Kafka‘s Amerika, and the title was chosen “as an echo” of that novel.
A young, idealistic American hopes to “show some kindness” to the German people soon after the end of World War II. In US-occupied Germany, he takes on work as a sleeping car conductor for the Zentropa railway network, falls in love with a femme fatale, and becomes embroiled in a pro-Nazi terrorist conspiracy.
Europa employs an experimental style of cinema, combining largely black and white visuals with occasional intrusions of colour having actors interact with rear-projected footage, and layering different images over one another to surreal effect. The voice-over narration uses an unconventional second-person narrative imitative of a hypnotist
The film’s characters, music, dialogue, and plot are self-consciously melodramatic and ironically imitative of film noir conventions.
spacetime coordinates: 2154. the ruins of Los Angeles / Elysium
Elysium is a 2013 American science fiction film produced, written and directed by Neill Blomkamp. It stars Matt Damon, Jodie Foster, Alice Braga, and Sharlto Copley. The film takes place on both a ravaged Earth, and a luxurious space habitat (Stanford torus design) called Elysium.
The film itself offers deliberate social commentary which explores political and sociological themes such as immigration, overpopulation, health care, worker exploitation, the justice system, and social class issues. Blomkamp has stated that it is a comment on the contemporary human condition.”Everybody wants to ask me lately about my predictions for the future,” the director has said, “No, no, no. This isn’t science fiction. This is today. This is now.” (The film’s Earth-bound scenes were shot in a dump in the poor Iztapalapa district on the outskirts of Mexico City, while the scenes for Elysium were shot in Vancouver and the wealthy Huixquilucan-Interlomas suburbs of Mexico City.)
director Neil Blomkamp expressed some regrets regarding Elysium, commenting: “I feel like I fucked it up, I feel like ultimately the story is not the right story.. I still think the satirical idea of a ring, filled with rich people, hovering above the impoverished Earth, is an awesome idea. I love it so much, I almost want to go back and do it correctly. But I just think the script wasn’t… I just didn’t make a good enough film is ultimately what it is. I feel like I executed all of the stuff that could be executed, like costume and set design and special effects very well. But, ultimately, it was all resting on a somewhat not totally formed skeletal system, so the script just wasn’t there; the story wasn’t fully there.”
“The only unbearable thing is that nothing is unbearable.“
Total Eclipse is a 1995 film directed by Agnieszka Holland, based on a 1967 play by Christopher Hampton, who also wrote the screenplay. Based on letters and poems, it presents a historically accurate account of the passionate and violent relationship between the two 19th-century French poets Paul Verlaine (David Thewlis) and Arthur Rimbaud (Leonardo DiCaprio), at a time of soaring creativity for both of them.
______
Existenz (stylized as eXistenZ) is a 1999 Canadian science fiction body horror film written, produced, and directed by Canadian director David Cronenberg. It stars Jennifer Jason Leigh and Jude Law.
As in Videodrome, Cronenberg gives his psychological statement about how humans react and interact with the technologies that surround them, in this case, the world of video games.
organic virtual reality game consoles known as “game pods” have replaced electronic ones. The pods are attached to “bio-ports”, outlets inserted at players’ spines, through biotechnological umbilical cords. Two game companies, Antenna Research and Cortical Systematics, compete against each other. In addition, a group of “realists” fights both companies to prevent the “deforming” of reality. wiki
TimeSpace Warps 