spacetime coordinates: the near future. Zone 414, a dark colony of humanoids known as “the city of robots.”
Tag: Sci-Fi
1961 – Old (2021)
spacetime coordinates: 2020 Dominican Republic
Old is a 2021 American mystery/horror/thriller film written, directed, and produced by M. Night Shyamalan. It is based on the French-language Swiss graphic novel Sandcastle by Pierre Oscar Levy and Frederik Peeters.
The film features an ensemble cast consisting of Gael García Bernal, Vicky Krieps, Rufus Sewell, Alex Wolff, Thomasin McKenzie, Abbey Lee, Nikki Amuka-Bird, Ken Leung, Eliza Scanlen, Aaron Pierre, Embeth Davidtz, and Emun Elliott. The plot follows a group of people who find themselves aging rapidly on a secluded beach. (wiki)
1960 – Prisoners of the Ghostland (2021)
spacetime coordinates: In a region in Japan devastated and quarantined years ago in an accident in which highly volatile nuclear waste was spilled after a crash between the waste transport and a prison bus, a settlement called Samurai Town is ruled by an unscrupulous Governor who has blended elements of Japanese society (both modern-day and pre-modern) and the old American West together at his whim, and is keeping a harem of adopted “granddaughters” as his sex slaves. The outside is a wasteland known as the Ghostland, inhabited by half-crazed outcasts and victims of the irradiated environment.
Prisoners of the Ghostland is a 2021 Japanese/American neo-noir Western action film directed by Sion Sono (first overseas production and English-language debut), from a script by Aaron Hendry and Reza Sixo Safai. The film stars Nicolas Cage, Sofia Boutella, Nick Cassavetes and Bill Moseley. (wiki)
1947 – EarthNight (2019 video game)
“Dragons have taken over the Earth, and humanity has fled to space. You must help Stanley and Sydney skydive back to Earth while careening across the backs of massive, snake-like dragons as they soar high above the planet, all while an original chiptune soundtrack pounds away in the background. Every moment is intense and layered with intricacy.
Explore five layers of the atmosphere all brought to life by artist Mattahan, who meticulously painted each of EarthNight’s 10,000+ frames of art and animation.
We intend to change the way you think about auto-runner games by designing on a much grander scale. EarthNight is currently available on Apple Arcade, Nintendo Switch, PS4 and Steam.” www.cleaversoft.com
1936 – Super Bunnyhop gaming videos (YT 2021)
Everyone regularly reading this blog knows that pnea is the gamer and explorer of these virtual worlds. I have very very low gaming skills, experience and knowledge relating to these spaces, the way devs make assemble and construct these games. So I am always grateful when someone is guiding me via their vast experience, POW, hard-gained wisdom. One can is hard pressed to at least try inhabit subjectivities and even worlds this way without ignoring the fact that one is led, guided. These videos by Super Bunnyhop are a revelation in that particular sense. Thanks to Alin Rautoiu I came across them, and well, I think they somehow managed to give me another kick and start making appreciate more the variety of games out there, or the shifts that animate game development. Probably these are not only some of my favorite gamers videos but YT youtuber videos per se in general! Videos and games that cross easily over into astronomy, anthropology or climatology, with various critical insights that do not diminish but enhance our constant delight. I love to be introduced this way to larger things.
This one is about an indigenous game called Umurangi Generation inspired by NGE. The game takes the whole fury about our current world, about the feeling of a lack of agency and the way everything gets subsumed under capitalism, transforming a shooter into a camera shooting exercise of journalistic proportions where the maori- developer included several ‘alien’ invasions, one worse than the last. But this is only the teaser towards a really a romp through the recent switch from UFO to UAP terminology and the way Pentagon and US conservatives such as Rubio are framing the narrative in regards to these recently released videos branding them as “threats”. There is not just a inkling of militarism and a possible investment incentive to up the ante of the military-industrial complex whenever such unexplained are branded as “threats”.
Invasions are a particular keyword favorite of mine – and there is always some reverse victimization involved. The invader is almost always – feeling invaded, very rarely acknowledging how our world has been shaped by migration routes or brutal gunboat colonialism. The European white male human, even if we take let us say Bram Stoker’s 1890s Dracula as the most obvious example – has deemed the immigrant from Eastern Europe as disease ridden and ‘foreign’, and a vampiric threat to women. My particular focus is about how biological invasions or what we call invasive species, tends to paste over these ravages of colonial and global capitalist histories, the way plants or animals were introduced, or have escaped introduction into new areas, new lands. This index of human ‘invasiveness’ – is a darling of the far right, and almost all current ethnopolitcs of the “the long counter-revolution” (in McKenzie Wark‘s terms) tends to collate dehumanizing, invasive swarming attributes to the immigrants coming from war-torn and climate crises affected areas. When this happens, most of the invasiveness of the Western powers and destabilizing economic effects are being muffled or skipped. Radical UFOlogy (in the sene of Dante Minazolli or MIR Men in Red collective) acts like a counter-strategy, declassifying such attempts at weaponzing and militarizing contact with other civilizations. It is very important to also see how first contact as cargo cults lies at the core of paleoastronautic contact narratives or how ‘advanced civilization’ is equated with a Western history steeped in exploitation of resources and the enslavement of others.
The colonial ghosts, they are not ghosts and not far away, since indigenous resistance is still at the forefront of resisting big oil and the depredation of capitalism. Extraterrestrial or exobiological that does not take this into account will end up on the poor side of an imagination that sees everything in terms of outside danger, alien invasions or colonizing ancient aliens. Most of the time we are the threat, and so any future contact with Mars will have to abide to Antarctica type of no-contact measures or even more stricter. Even as Bunnyhop mentions, discussions about parietal Aborigine art from Australia that presumably registers such paleo contact tend to ignore the way contact with the recent past white ‘alien’ invaders wielding foreign technologies also got registered. Since its inception science fiction’s emergence as a modern genre remains unthinkable outside the history of colonization and exploitation (see John Rieder) of others by European powers. Afrofuturism is at the forefront taking this history of slavery and exploitation and remaking it into something else, and of terming UFO abductions precisely in terms of slaveship Atlatic Trade abductions. It is easy to forget the way ‘colonization’ and space colonization tends to overlap for that matter or the terrestrial way we imagine aliens as alien ‘races’. Any alienism has to deal with the subjugation of others, their annihilation and continuous othering, including the was this history gets transmitted and communicated and how such occupation traumas are still around us and determine the “uneven development”, to use Marx’s words. Thus the histories of this planet are with us whenever we imagine us imponderable during flights of space exploration or the most recent trends of privatization of space travel. It is always helps going back to H G Wells War of the Worlds and the way it was critical on British Imperialism and Victorian racial hierarchies. Don’t want to overlap more with the incredible introduction to the Umurangi game, developed by a maori about kids that basically witness and document the depredation of their worlds.
And there is more to come – including Gamifiying Global Warming or doing the math and Newtonian physics for the whole of the solar system in a game or how one can be walk in the footsteps of your primate predecessors.
1935 – Waterworld (1995)
spacetime coordinates: In 2500, as a result of the sea levels rising over 7,600 metres (24,900 ft), every continent on Earth is now underwater. The remains of human civilization live on ramshackle floating communities known as atolls, having long forgotten about living on land. People believe that there is a mythological “Dryland” somewhere in the endless ocean.
Waterworld is a 1995 American post-apocalyptic action film directed by Kevin Reynolds and co-written by Peter Rader and David Twohy. It was based on Rader’s original 1986 screenplay and stars Kevin Costner as a nameless antihero, “The Mariner”, a drifter who sails the Earth in his trimaran., It is the most expensive film ever made at the time. (wiki)
1933 – The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008)
spacetime coordinates: 2000’s New York City
The Day the Earth Stood Still is a 2008 American science fiction drama film and a loose adaptation of the 1951 film of the same name. The screenplay by David Scarpa is based on the 1940 classic science fiction short story “Farewell to the Master” by Harry Bates and the 1951 screenplay adaptation by Edmund H. North.
Directed by Scott Derrickson and starring Keanu Reeves as Klaatu, this version replaces the Cold War theme of nuclear warfare with the contemporary issue of humankind’s environmental damage to the planet. It follows Klaatu, an alien sent to try to change human behavior or eradicate humans from Earth. (wiki)
TimeSpace Warps 