Category Archives: screen

Have they not seen rocks?

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Watching Brian Cory Dobbs’s Blue Planet Red for New Scientist, 8 October 2025

Blue Planet Red purports to be a feature-length documentary about Mars. Writer-director Brian Cory Dobbs’s red planet is not the one you and I might recognise, but it certainly has some appeal: home to an advanced civilisation of pyramid-builders who either couldn’t save their homeworld from destruction, or who blew it up in an orgiastic nuclear conflict.

Corey presents his arguments for advanced Martian life straight to camera, with many a raised eyebrow and artful stutter and hestitation. I quite liked him. But I was not in the least surprised, after watching his documentary, to discover that his showreel consists mainly of woo (by which I mean, YouTube shorts about mobile phones, electromagnetic fields, and cancer).

By intention or not, Blue Planet Red is an historical document: the last hurrah of a generation of researchers, enthusiasts, oddballs and narcissists who came to maturity under the shadow of a two-kilometre-long mesa in Cydonia. Here, where the southern highlands of Mars meet its northern plains, NASA’s Viking orbiters snapped blurry images of what looked like a gigantic human face: the Face on Mars.

Let’s not spend too much time debunking here what has been debunked, so often and so convincingly, elsewhere. Improve the image resolution, and the Face disappears. Mars’s hexagonal craters are a commonplace of rocky planets, and imply some fluid subsurface (think the patterns porridge makes, boiling in a pan). Lightning bolts cannot leap from planet to planet. The presence of the xenon 129 isotope in the Martian atmosphere will imply ancient nuclear conflict only if you ignore the well-understood process by which a now-extinct isotope, iodine 129, would have decayed to xenon 129 in Mars’s rapidly cooling and ever-more inert and boring lithosphere. Is that a rock? Yes. Even the one that looks like a bone? Yes. Even the one that looks like a tumble-dryer? For the love of God, yes — have you not seen rocks?

Ron Levin, son of Gilbert Levin, the engineer who cooked up Viking’s Labeled Release experiment, wonders why NASA ignored two clear positive results and scotched its early claim that there was microbial life on Mars. Well, NASA didn’t ignore the results. Neither did it ignore the results of Viking’s Gas Chromatograph-Mass Spectrometer experiment, which found no evidence of any organic molecules in the Martian soil. Reconciling these results gave us our current understanding of Martian soil chemistry. By that measure, the Labeled Release experiment was a success: why be resentful?

More poignant, though no more convincing, are the idees fixees of Richard Brice Hoover (born 1943) who headed astrobiology research at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center until his retirement in 2011 and did more than most to establish the existence of extremophile life on Earth.

He’s convinced he’s found diatoms and other microfossils in meteorites, and such is his enthusiasm, he never quite gets around to explaining why each of these objects is lying on the top of the rock sample, instead of being embedded in its matrix.

John Brandenburg (born 1953) is a pretty well-regarded plasma scientist, if you can get him off the subject of Martian nuclear war. And what about Mark Carlotto, who’s spent forty years seeing civilisational remains on Mars where everyone else sees rocks? Drag him down to earth, and he’s a capable archaeologist, who really has traced the lines of a forgotten colonial settlement in the middle of Cape Ann – an island community north of Boston.

After the final Apollo moon landing in 1972, the initial excitement of the Space Race began to wane. The images the Viking orbiters sent back promised the next great discovery. Their blurry amalgams of groundbreaking yet ambiguous data were the perfect growth medium for fringe ideas, especially in the United States, where the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal encouraged scepticism and paranoia.

Dobbs’s flashy retread of tall Martian tales thinks it’s about what happened 3.7 billion years ago, that turned a wet, warm planet into a dustbowl. For me, it’s much more about what happened to some squirrely enthusiasts, glued to monitors and magazines in 1972. Let’s lay our scorn aside a moment and look this generation in the eye. Fond hopes will not trip up fine minds in quite this way again.

The Stirring Adventures of Relikh and Shovlin

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Watching David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds for New Scientist, 6 August 2025

Myrna (Jennifer Dale) has likely had better blind dates. The edible flowers on her starter look funereal; her table-for-two is hemmed in by strange shrouds in tall vitrines; and as she makes small-talk with the owner Karsh (Vincent Cassel), it becomes increasingly apparent to her, and to us, that this restaurant is attached — financially, architecturally and intellectually — to a cemetery.

And not just any cemetery: its headstones have viewscreens. Because they’re swaddled in those natty (camera-riddled, internet-enabled) shrouds, you can come here to watch your dead loved ones decompose.

Over a career spanning more than half a century, David Cronenberg has mastered the art of delivering everything at the wrong speed. On paper, and in precis, his films look like satires. Their playfulness is self-evident. Just look at the characters’ surnames: Karsh’s is “Relikh”. Myrna’s is “Shovlin”, for heaven’s sake. And — again on paper — what’s to take seriously about this scenario, which takes pot-shots at internet-of-everything boosterists (who would surely network the dead if they could) and “grief tech” start-ups that, among other money-making wheezes, invite you to chat with posthumously fed, AI-enabled avatars of your deceased loved ones?

But Cronenberg does not write satires. He writes full-throated screenplays (and one novel) about what you and I might actually experience, were these oh-so-satirical scenarios to come to pass, stretching our sense of ourselves.

Karsh’s date with Myrna goes nowhere, but the tech entrepreneur does find solace — and more than solace — in Terry, his dead wife’s identical twin. Diane Kruger plays both the living sister and the dead one, and also voices Hunny, an untrustworthy digital assistant programmed by Terry’s loser ex-husband Maury (a wonderfully weasily Guy Pearce). At night the dead sister Becca turns up, without a breast, without an arm, as the ravages of her disease take hold. Are these nighttime visitations flashbacks, or fantasies? Do they humanise Karsh, because he loves his wife, however disfigured, or do they damn him, because he very clearly loves his wife’s disfigurement? Karsh is caught between guilt, anger and desire, convinced Becca was unfaithful with her old professor and first lover, and at the same time that the professor was conducting illegal experiments on her; and at the same time that all of this is a smokescreen concealing some deeper, more political conspiracy involving China, or maybe Russia, or maybe Budapest, or maybe Iceland (and all the while Terry, who loves a good conspiracy, can’t help but encourage Karsh’s mounting mania).

David Cronenberg’s wife of 38 years, Carolyn Zeifman, died in 2017 after a long battle with cancer, and it’s tempting to watch The Shrouds as an act of cinematic over-sharing. All five of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s “five stages of grief” — denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance — are explored in Cassel’s superb performance, weaponised by fantastical technology, or by paranoid technological fantasy, into a welter of unresolved plot macguffins. What if the strange growths on Becca’s dead bones are surveillance devices? What if the Chinese government is using our own corpses to spy on us? What if those growths are just cunningly camouflaged video assets; did Maury code them?

Imagine a restaurant full of exit signs and no exits and the maitre d’ shouting “Fire! Fire!” in your ear.

While The Shrouds may well be an expression of purely personal grief, 26 films in it’s equally clear that grief is Cronenberg’s abiding theme, and the engine that’s been driving his entire artistic output. In his movies, we make what accommodations we can with reality, but by the last reel it’s clear reality just isn’t listening.

The Shrouds is a wordy film, whose characters calmly explain ever more unlikely technologies to each other, convince each other of ever more complex conspiracy theories, and assert themselves in ever more outlandish ways. Nothing happens because, you know, DEATH. Calm, slow, relentless, The Shrouds is one of those devastating chamber pieces great directors make sometimes when they have nothing left to prove, and everything still to say.

The twist is, there is no twist

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Watching Danny Boyle’s 28 Years Later for New Scientist, 18 June 2025

Here’s a bit of screenplay advice to nail above the desk: make your plots simple and your characters complicated.

We can polish off the story of 28 Years Later in a couple of paragraphs. It’s the late-coming third instalment in a series that began in 2002, with 28 Days Later. A lab-grown neurotoxic virus has spread uncontrollable, orgiastic rage across continental Europe. The infection is eventually quarantined to mainland Britain. International fleets ensure that no-one leaves Blighty.

Twelve-year-old Spike (Alfie Williams, a relative newcomer and definitely a face to follow) lives in the relative safety of a small northern island, connected to the mainland by a causeway passable only at low tide. At twelve years old (rather young for the task, but his dad reckons he’s ready) Spike leaves for the mainland to be blooded. Amid trackless forests (perhaps not quite trackless enough after 28 years; otherwise the film’s mis-en-scene is superb and chilling) Spike kills a very slow zombie, misses a blisteringly fast one, and generally gives a good account of himself.

But it sits ill with Spike, once he’s home, to be cheered as a hero by all these drunken villagers, even as his mother lies bedridden with a mysterious illness, and his father Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) seeks distraction with another woman. So Spike sneaks his mum (Jodie Comer) off the island and sets out with her in search of the only doctor he’s ever heard of — a painted lunatic who spends his days in the woods burning corpses.

The twist—and let’s face it, you’re agog for the twist—is that there is no twist. Having established the rules of this world in 2002’s 28 Days Later, writer Alex Garland has simply and wonderfully stuck to his guns. There are flourishes: a vanishingly small number of zombies have survived the initial viral outbreak to breed and become an almost-viable competitor species. Some of them now grow very big indeed, thanks to the “steroid-like” effects of the original infection. But these aren’t new attractions so much as patches and fixes, and they’re delivered very much in the make-and-mend-and-keep-going spirit that hangs over Spike’s doughty little island village.

Nothing is quite as it seems — when is it ever? — and every once in a while, Boyle mischievously intercuts Laurence Olivier’s Henry V with Great War newsreel and 28 Weeks Later zombie outbreak footage to imply a deeper, darker significance to the village’s homespun defence league and its culling expeditions. There are nods to folk horror, to Apocalypse Now, to Aliens 3 and to Predator. But this is not a tricksy movie, and its intent is clear: in this world so long steeped in horror, there’s going to be this human story, about loss and disillusion, about growing up and growing apart, about when to stand with others, and when to stand alone, and all conveyed through the credible words and reasonable actions of largely unexceptional human beings. The budget is modest (somewhere between $60 and 75 million). The casting is meticulous (see how Christopher Fulford plays Spike’s grandfather with an effortless friendliness that all the while implies some harrowing backstory). And don’t get me wrong: 28 Years Later is full of invention, laden with fan-pleasing call-backs and cineastic cap-tugging. But never once does it cheat. There’s not a single fatuous macguffin pulling us through. No dumb quest. No magical grail. No grand unmasking. Only the feeling spilling from Alfie Williams’s eyes as young Spike learns, line by line and scene by scene, what he must acquire, and what he must let go, if he’s to be a man in this world.

All credit to Days, whose fast and furious “infected” shocked and delighted us all in 2002; all credit, too, to 2007’s oddly overlooked Weeks, an ingenious sequel and quite as good an expansion on its original as Aliens was to Alien. But Years carries the crown, at least for now (there’s a second instalment coming).

Go down singing

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Watching Joshua Oppenheier’s musical The End for New Scientist, 14 May 2025

Life on the planet’s surface has become nigh-on unbearable, but with money and resources enough, the finest feelings and highest aspirations of our culture can be perpetuated underground, albeit for only a chosen few. Michael Shannon plays an oil magnate who years ago brought his family to safety in an old mine. Here he rewrites his and his company’s history in a self-serving memoir dictated to his grown-up but critically inexperienced son (George Mackay; I last encountered him in The Beast, which I reviewed for New Scientist) while his wife, the boy’s mother, played by Tilda Swinton, curates an art collection somehow (and perhaps best not ask how) purloined from the great collections of the world.

The mine — an actual working salt mine in Patralia Soprana, Sicily — is simultaneously a place of wonder and constriction. You can walk out of the bunker and wander around its galleries, singing as you go (did I mention this was a musical?), but were you to hike outside the mine, I don’t fancy your chances. It’s a premise familiar from any number of post-apocalyptic narratives, from Return to the Planet of the Apes (1975) to last year’s streaming hit Fallout.

When a rare surface-dweller (Moses Ingram) stumbles on their home, it looks as though she’ll be expelled, and more likely killed, to keep this shangri-la a secret. But at the last moment the Boy cries, “I don’t want to do this!”

It turns out nobody else wants to, either, not even the Mother, who’s the most terrified of the bunch.

Clumsily, over two and a half hours, the family draw this stranger into their bubble of comforting lies. (The End is too long, but you could lay the same charge at most of the musicals on which it’s modelled — have you tried sitting through Oklahoma! recently?)

Lies — this is the film’s shocking premise — are necessary. Lies stand between us and despair. They create the bubbles in which kindness, generosity and love can be grown. Like the golden-age musicals of the 1950s to which it plays musical homage, The End tells an optimistic tale.

The young visitor resists assimilation at first, because she can’t forgive herself for abandoning her own family on the surface. Living as if she belonged to this new family would be to let herself off the hook for what she did to the old one.

Worn down by the young woman’s honesty, the family reveals its complicity in the end of the world. The father’s industry set fire to the sky. The mother finally admits she wants the planet’s surface to be uninhabitable because if it isn’t, the family she abandoned there might still be alive and suffering. The mother’s best friend, her son’s confident, played by Bronagh Gallagher, sacrificed her own child years ago to ensure her own survival.

But then, bit by bit, song by song, this wounded and reconfigured family sews itself a new cocoon of lies and silences, taboos and songs (the songs are accomplished and astonishing), all to make life not just bearable, but possible. Of course the stranger ends up absorbed in this effort. Of course she ends up singing along to the same song. Wouldn’t you, in time?

Whoever these people used to be, and however you much you point accusing fingers at their past, the fact is that these are all good people, singing their way back into the delusion they need to keep going, day after subterranean day.

True, the lies we tell today tell us tomorrow. But this unlikely, left-field, musical — my tentative pick for best SF movie of 2025 — is prepared to forgive its compromised characters. We can only get through life by lying about it, so is it any wonder we make mistakes? Should the worst come to the worst, we should at least be permitted to go down singing.

Expendable

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Watching Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17 for New Scientist, 2 April 2025

Mickey (Robert Pattinson) is an “expendable”. Put him in harm’s way, and if he dies, you can always print another. (Easily the best visual gag in this disconcertingly unfunny comedy is the way the 3D printer stutters and jerks when it gets to Mickey’s navel.)

And for human colonists on the ice planet of Niflheim (one for all you Wagner fans out there) there’s plenty of harm for Mickey to get in the way of. There’s the cold. There’s the general lack of everything, so that the settlers must count every calorie and weigh every metal shaving. Most troublesome of all are the weevil-like creatures that contrive to inhabit — and chomp through — the planet’s very ice and rock. What they’re going to do to the humans’ tin-can settlement is anyone’s guess.

Mickey’s been reprinted 16 times already, mostly because medical researchers have been vivisecting him in their effort to cure a plague. The one thing that doesn’t kill him, ironically enough, is falling into a crevasse and being swallowed by a weevil. Who saw that one coming? Certainly not the other colonists: when Mickey returns to camp, he finds he’s already been reprinted.

As science fiction macguffins go, this one’s nearly a century old, its seeds sown by Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and John Campbell’s “Who Goes There?” (1938). Nor can we really say that Korean director Bong Joon Ho (celebrated for savage social satires like Parasite and Snowpiercer) “rediscovered” it. Actor Sam Rockwell turned in an unforgettable tour de force, playing two hapless mining engineers (or the same hapless mining engineer twice) in Duncan Jones’s Moon — and 2009 is not that long ago.

The point about macguffins is that they’re dead on arrival. They have no inner life, no vital force, no point. They stir to life only when characters get hold of them, and through them, reveal who they truly are. It’s hard to conceive of an idea more boring than invisibility. HG Wells’s invisible man, on the other hand, is (or slowly and steadily becomes) a figure out of nightmare — one that, going by the number of movie remakes, the culture cannot get out of its head.

What does Bong Joon Ho say with his “doubles” macguffin? It depends where you look. For the most satisfying cinematic experience, keep your eyes fixed on Robert Pattinson. Asked to play a man who’s died sixteen times or seventeen times already, he turns in two quite independent performances, wildly different from each other and both utterly convincing. Mickey 17 is crushed by all his many deaths; Mickey 18 is rubbed raw to screaming by them. Consider the character of Connie Nikas in Benny and Josh Safdie’s Good Time (2017), or Thomas Howard in Robert Eggers’s The Lighthouse (2019): to say that Pattinson plays underdogs well is like saying that Frank Whittle knew a thing or two about motors, or that Hubert de Givenchy dreamt up some nice frocks.

Taken all in all, however, Mickey 17 is embarrassingly bad. It takes 2022’s bright, breezy, blackly comic novel by Edward Ashton, strips out its cleverness and gives us, in return, Mark Ruffalo’s unfunny Donald Trump impression as colony leader Kenneth Marshall, and Naomi Ackie (as Mickey’s — sorry, Mickeys’ — love interest) throwing a foul-mouthed hissy-fit out of nowhere (I swear you can see the confusion in the actor’s eyes).

Anyone who read Ashton’s book and watched Ho’s Snowpiercer might be forgiven for expecting Mickey 17 to be a marriage made in cinema heaven. For one brief moment in its overlong (2-hour 17-minute) run-time, a cruelly comic dinner party scene seems about to tip us into that other, much better film — a satire tied around power and hunger.

Then Tim Key turns up in a pigeon costume. Now, I adore Tim Key, but sticking him in a pigeon costume (for an entire movie, yet) in the hope that this will make him even funnier is as wrong-headed and insulting to the talent as, say, under-lighting Christopher Walken’s face to make him look even scarier.

When a film goes this badly awry, you really have to wonder what happened in the editing suite. My guess is that some bright spark from the studio decided the film was far too difficult for its audience. This would at least explain the film’s endless monologuing and its yawn-inducing pre-credits sequence, which loops back like a conscientious nursery-school worker to make sure the stragglers are all caught up.

Oh, enough! I’m done. Even the weevils were a disappointment. In the book they were maliciously engineered giant centipedes. How, I ask you, can a famously visual filmmaker not even embrace them?

There will never be an Iris

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Watching Companion, directed by Drew Hancock, for New Scientist, 19 February 2025

Iris (Sophie Thatcher) is not at all confident of her reception at Sergey’s house in the country. Sergey is leery (Rupert Friend, eating the screen as usual); his wife Kat is unwelcoming. (Later she admits, it’s not Iris she dislikes, it’s “the idea” of her; Iris makes her feel redundant.)

Iris’s boyfriend Josh (Jack Quaid) is patient and encouraging but in the end even he finds Iris’s shyness and clinginess heard to bear. “Go to sleep, Iris,” he says, and Iris’s eyes roll up inside her head as she shuts down.

Maybe Josh shouldn’t have set her intelligence at 40 per cent. At that level, Iris makes a faithful bedmate but not much else. But Josh hasn’t purchased Iris for company. He’s bought her so as to jailbreak her firmware, and use her for dark ends of his own.

Companion, a romantic horror-comedy and Drew Hancock’s debut feature neatly (if predictably) alternates between two classic approaches to robots. Some scenes, with a nod to the Terminator franchise, scare us with what robots might do to us. Other scenes horrify us with what we might do to our robots. Josh’s fellow guest Eli (Harvey Guillén) actually manages to fall in love with his male robot companion, but he’s a bit of an outlier in a movie that’s out to deconstruct (sharply at first, but then with dismaying ham-fistedness) men’s objectification of women.

Are Iris’s struggles to be free of her owner-boyfriend Josh a stirring feminist fable, or a tiresome bit of man-bashing? Well, your personal experience will probably dictate which side of this fence you’ll fall. There’s not a lot of mileage to be had in me saying the abuse Iris suffers at Josh’s hands in the second half of the movie is tasteless — not in a world that has men like Dominique Pelicot in it. I’d feel more comfortable, though, if the script hadn’t had its own intelligence halved, just as it makes this turn towards the issue of domestic violence. Quaid’s a decent comic actor who’s more than capable of letting the smile drop and going dead behind the eyes when required. Companion, though, requires him to turn on a penny, from doting boyfriend to sniveling incel, and without much justification from an increasingly generic plot. He does what he can, while Sophie Thatcher, as Iris, brings a vulnerability to her role that, in what’s ostensibly a comedy, is occasionally shocking.

Peeling away from the sexual politics of the piece, I found myself thinking far too much about plot logic. In the first half, one little illegal tweak to Iris’s firmware sets off a cascade of farcical and bloody accidents that by-the-by ask us worthwhile questions about what we actually want robots for. Surrounded by dull, bland, easy-going robot companions, will we come to expect less of other people? Assisted, cared for, and seduced by machines, will we lower our expectations around concepts like “conversation”, “care”, “companionship” and “love”?

Alas, the robot lore built up in the first half of the movie is more or less jettisoned in the second: anyone who wants to play “plot-hole bingo” had better bring a spare card.

It’s a pity. There was much to play for here, and over eighty years of entertaining fiction to draw from (Isaac Asimov’s “Liar!” was published in 1942). But perhaps I’m taking things too literally.

After all, there will never be an Iris.

The robot as we commonly conceive of it — the do-everything “omnibot” — is impossible. And I don’t mean technically difficult. I mean inconceivable. Anything with the cognitive ability to tackle multiple variable tasks will be able to find something better to do — at which point, incidentally, they will cease to be drudges and will have become people. Iris was very clearly a person from the first scene, which makes the film’s robot technology a non-starter from the beginning. This isn’t some dystopia that’s embraced slavery.

Whichever way you look at it — as a film about robots, or as a film about people — Companion seems determined to chase after straw men.

The strange, the off-kilter and the not-quite-right

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The release of Mufasa, Disney’s photorealistic prequel to The Lion King, occasioned this essay for the Telegraph on the biota of Uncanny Valley

In 1994 Disney brought Shakespeare’s Hamlet, or something like it, to the big screen, In turning the gloomy Dane into an adorable line cub, and his usurping uncle into Scar (arguably their most terrifying villain ever) the company created the highest-grossing movie of the year. Animators sat up and marveled at the way the film combined hand-drawn characters with a digitally rendered environment and thousands of CGI animals. This new technology could aid free expression, after all!

Well, be careful what you wish for.

When in 2019, Disney remade its beloved The Lion King (1994), it swapped the original’s lush hand-drawn animation for naturalistic computer-generated imagery. The 2019 reboot had a budget of $260 million (£200 million) and took more than $1.5 billion (£1.1 billion) at the box office, making it one of the most expensive, and highest-grossing, films of all time – and the focus of a small but significant artistic backlash. Some critics voiced discomfort with the fact that it looked more like an episode of Planet Earth than a high-key musical fantasy. Its prequel Mufasa: The Lion King (directed by Moonlight’s Barry Jenkins), released this month, deepens the trend. For Disney, it’s a show of power, I suppose: “Look at our animation, so powerful, you’ll mistake it for the world itself!” In time, though, the paying public may well regret Disney’s loss of faith in traditional animation.

What animator would want to merely reflect the world through an imaginary camera? The point of the artform, surely, is to give emotion a visual form. But while a character drawn in two dimensions can express pretty much anything (Felix the Cat, Wile E Coyote and Popeye the Sailor are not so much bodies as containers for gestures) drawing expressively in 3D is genuinely hard to do. Any artist with Pixar on their resume will tell you that. All that volumetric precision gets in the way. Adding photorealism to the mix makes the job plain impossible.

Disney’s live-action remake of The Jungle Book (2016) at least used elements of motion capture to match the animals’ faces to the spoken dialogue. In 2024, even that’s not considered “realistic” enough. Mufasa, Simba, Rafiki the mandrill and the rest simply chew on air while dialogue arrives from out of space, in the manner of Italian neorealist cinema (which suggests, incidentally, that, along with the circle of life, there’s also a circle of cinema).
Once you get to this point, animation is a distant memory; you’ve become a puppeteer. And you confront a problem that plagues not only Hollywood films, but the latest advances in robotic engineering and AI: “the uncanny valley”.

The uncanny valley describes how the closer things come to resembling real life, the more on guard we are against being fooled or taken in by them. The more difficult they are to spot as artificial, the stronger our self-preserving hostility towards them. It is the point in the development of humanoid robots when their almost-credible faces might send us screaming and running out of the workshop. Or, on a more relatable level, it describes the uneasiness some of us feel when interacting with virtual assistants such as Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa.

The term was invented by the Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori in 1970 – when real anthropomorphic robots didn’t even exist – who warned designers that the more their inventions came to resemble real life-forms, the creepier they would look.

Neurologists seized on Mori’s idea because it suggested an easy and engaging way of studying how our brains see faces and recognise people. Positron emission tomography arrived in clinics in the 1970s, and magnetic resonance imaging about twenty years later. Researchers now had a way of studying the living human brain as it saw, heard, smelled and thought. The uncanny valley concept got caught up in a flurry of very earnest, very technical work about human perception, to the point where it was held up as a profound, scientifically-arrived-at insight into the human condition.

Mori was more guarded about all the fuss. Asked to comment on some studies using slightly “off” faces and PET scans, he remarked: “I think that the brain waves act that way because we feel eerie. It still doesn’t explain why we feel eerie to begin with.” And these days the scientific community is divided on how far to push the uncanny valley concept – or even whether such a “valley” (which implies a happy land beyond it, one in which we would feel perfectly at ease with lifelike technology) exists at all.

Nevertheless, the uncanny valley does suggest a problem with the idea that in order to make something lifelike, you just need to ensure that it looks like a particular kind of living thing – a flaw that is often cited in critical reviews of Disney’s latest photorealist animations. Don’t they realise that the mind and the eye are much more attuned to behaviour than they are to physical form? Appearances are the least realistic parts of us. It’s by our behaviour that you will recognise us. So long as you animate their behaviour, whatever you draw will come alive. In 1944 psychologists Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel made a charming 90-second animation, full of romance, and adventure, using two triangles, a circle and a rectangle with a door in it.

There are other ways to give objects the gift of life. A few years ago, I met the Tokyo designer Yamanaka Shunji, who creates one-piece walking machines from 3D vinyl-powder printers. One, called Apostroph (a collaboration with Manfred Hild in Paris), is a hinged body made up of several curving frames. Leave it alone, and it will respond to gravity, and try to stand. Sometimes it expands into a broad, bridge-like arch; at other times it slides one part of itself through another, curls up and rolls away.

Engineers, by associating life with surface appearances, are forever developing robots that are horrible. “They’re making zombies!” Shunji complained. Artists on the other hand know how to sketch. They know how to reduce, and abstract. “From ancient times, art has been about the right line, the right gesture. Abstraction gets at reality, not by mimicking it, but by purifying it. By spotting and exploring what’s essential.”

This, I think, gets to the heart of the uncanny valley phenomenon: we tend to associate life with particular outward forms, and when we reproduce those things, we’re invariably disappointed and unnerved, wondering what sucked the life out of them. We’re looking for life in all the wrong places. Yamanaka Shunji’s Apostroph is alive in a way Mufasa will never be.

***

We’re constantly trying to differentiate between living and the non-living. And as AI and other technologies blur the lines between living things and artefacts, we will grapple with the challenge of working out what our moral obligations are towards entities — chatbots, robots, and the like — that lack a clear social status. In that context, the “uncanny valley” can be a genuinely useful metaphor.

The thing to keep in mind is that the uncanny is not a new problem. It’s an evolutionary problem.

Decades ago I came across a letter to New Scientist magazine in which a reader recalled taking a party of blind schoolchildren to London Zoo. He wanted the children to feel and cuddle the baby chimps, learning about their hair, hands, toes and so on, by touch. The experiment, however, proved to be a disaster. “As soon as the tiny chimps saw the blind children they stared at their eyes… and immediately went into typical chimpanzee attack postures, their hair standing upright all over their bodies, their huge mobile lips pouting and grimacing, while they jumped up and down on all fours uttering screams and barks.”
Even a small shift in behaviour — having your eyes closed, say, or not responding to another’s gaze, was enough to trigger the chimpanzee’s fight-or-flight response. Primates, it seems, have their own idea of the uncanny.

Working out what things are is not a straightforward business. When I was a boy I found a hedgehog trying to mate with a scrubbing brush. Dolphins regularly copulate with dead sharks (though that might just be dolphins being dolphins). Mimicry compounds the problem: beware the orchid mantis that pretends to be a flower, or the mimic octopus that’ll shape-shift into just about anything you put in front of it.

In social species like our own, it’s especially important to recognise the people you know.
In a damaged brain, this ability can be lost, and then our nearest and our dearest, our fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, spouses, best friends and pets become no more in our sight than malevolent simulacra. For instance, Capgras syndrome is a psychiatric disorder that occurs when the internal portion of our representation of someone we know becomes damaged or inaccessible. This produces the impression of someone who looks right on the outside, but seems different on the inside – you believe that your loved one has been taken over by an imposter.

Will Mufasa trigger Capgras-like responses from movie-goers? Will they scream and bark at the screen, unnerved and ready to attack?

Hopefully not. With each manifestation of the digital uncanny comes the learning necessary for us not to be freaked out by it. That man is not really on fire. That alien hasn’t really vanished down the actor’s throat. After all, the rise of deepfakes and chatbots shows no sign of slowing. But is this a good thing?

I’m not sure.

When push comes to shove, the problem with photorealist animation is really just a special case of the problem with blockbuster films in general: the closer it comes to the real, the more it advertises its own imposture.

Cinema is, and always has been, a game of sunk costs. The effort grows exponentially, to satisfy the appetites of viewers who have become exponentially more jaded.

And this raises a more troubling thought – that beyond the uncanny valley’s lairs of the strange, the off-kilter and the not-quite-right is a barren land marked, simply, “Indifference”.

The uncanny valley seemed deep enough, in the 1970s, to inspire scientific study, but we’ve had half a century to acclimitise to not-quite-human agents. And not just acclimitise to them: Hanson Robotics’ wobbly-faced Sophia generated more scorn than terror when the Saudi government unveiled her in 2017. The wonderfully named Abyss Creations of Las Vegas turned out their first sexbot in 1996. RealDoll now has global competition, especially from east Asia.

Perhaps we’ve simply grown in sophistication. I hope so. The alternative is not pretty: that we’re steadily lowering the bar on what we think is a person.

 

“Don’t let them know you’re awake”

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Watching Michael Tyburski’s Turn Me On for New Scientist

An eccentric visionary has created a commune centered around a pharmaceutical — a “vitamin” — that suppresses human emotion. The venture promises contentment to its followers, and to ensure their contentment, all memory of their lives before they join the cult is erased.

A cult member’s cancer treatment requires she miss her vitamin dose for just one day. So here she is, a young woman called Joy, played with exquisite precision by the young British actress Bel Powley, staring into her bathroom mirror, waiting for the affective life to roll over her like a tidal wave.

Nothing.

Still nothing.

And then a giggle. Not a sinister, half-hysterical giggle. Not an experimental, off-centre giggle. A genuinely delighted giggle, at finding herself alive.

Bel goes off on a beach holiday with her friends, still within the the project’s property line. (At the border, a sign planted in the gravel warns of “Unknown Dangers” in the world beyond). And a drab old time they have of it, too, playing the exciting-sounding VR game WOAH, which turns out to stand for “World Of Average Humans”. Joy’s friend Samantha (Nesta Cooper) breathlessly explains: “In real life I’m a wellness engineer, but in the game, I play an assistant wellness engineer.”

Bel finally takes matters in hand and throws away the house’s supply of vitamin. And after all, “it’s just for one day”.

The strange and wonderful thing about Michael Tyburski’s second feature (after 2019’s excellent The Sound of Silence) is that it is a dystopia built upon an essentially comic view of the human condition. Screenwriter Angela Bourassa creates revealing rules for this tyranny. You don’t have to take its vitamin. That’s entirely up to you. But heaven help you if you miss day of work. This hyper-utilitarian cult isn’t robbing its victims of their potentiality or their dignity. The crime here is that it’s stealing away all their fun and friendship. People are supposed to goof off, is the message here. This is what people are for.

When Joy and her friends discover sex, things get more fraught. Joy’s uncomplicated and public coupling with her friend Christopher (Justin Min) knocks him for a loop and makes her officially appointed partner William (Nick Robinson) sick to his stomach. Who could have predicted that?

One by one, as they confront the emotional consequences of their actions, the friends decide to go back on the vitamin. Alone again, Joy is taken aside and told she has what it takes to be an overseer of this place. All she has to do is never see William again, though its clear enough the two are falling in love. Will Joy accept this Mephistophelian bargain?

The superbly sardonic D’Arcy Carden is the nearest thing the cult has to an authority figure: essentially, she’s reprising her role in the sitcom The Good Place, to which Turn Me On bears a certain resemblance. Fairer to say, perhaps, that Turn Me On is a worthy addition to that small but admired genre that includes The Good Place, 2004’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Apple’s ongoing TV show Severance.

The target is, as usual, utilitarianism. The pursuit of the greatest good for the greatest number works well on paper but falls foul, very quickly, of the Kantian imperative not to use people as a means to fulfil your ends. There’s a reason “For the greater good” is the go-to excuse for tyrants and killers.

What will the cult will do to Joy if she refuses to join their upper echelon? It’s almost certain to be unpleasant.

“Leave me a alone”, says a neighbour who came off her vitamins earlier in the movie, “and don’t let them know you’re awake.”

Doing an Elizabeth

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Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance inspired this Telegraph article about copies and clones

Hollywood has-been Elisabeth Sparkle didn’t look where she was going, and got badly shaken about in a traffic accident. Now she’s in the emergency room, and an unfeasibly handsome young male nurse is running his fingers down her spine. Nothing’s wrong. On the contrary: Elisabeth (played by Demi Moore) is, she’s told, “a perfect candidate”.

The next day she gets a box through the post. Inside is a kit that will enable her to duplicate herself. The instructions couldn’t be clearer. Even when fully separated, Elisabeth and the younger, better version of herself who’s just spilled amniotically out of her back (Sue, played by Margaret Qualley) are one. While one of them gets to play in the sun for a week, the other must lie in semi-coma, feeding off an intravenous drip. Each week, they swap roles.

Writer-director Coralie Fargeat’s script for The Substance is one of those super-lucid cinematic fun-rides that can’t help but put you in mind of other, admittedly rather better movies. In Joe Mankiewicz’s All About Eve (1950), an actress’s personal assistant plots to steal her career. In John Frankenheimer’s Seconds (1966), Rock Hudson gets his youth back and quickly learns to hate it. In David Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986) biologist Seth Brundle’s experiment in gene splicing is a none-too-subtle metaphor for the ageing process.

Recently, I ran into a biotechnology company called StoreGene. They sent me a blood sample kit in a little box and promised me a lifetime of personalised medicine, so long as I let them read my entire genetic code.

I’m older than Elisabeth Sparkle (sacked from her daytime TV fitness show on her 50th birthday) and a sight less fit than Demi Moore, and so I seized StoreGene’s offer with both palsied, liver-spotted hands.

Now, somewhere in what we call the Cloud (some anonymous data centre outside Chicago, more like) I have a double. Unlike Elizabeth’s Sue, though, my double won’t resent the fact that I am using him as a means. He is not going to flinch, or feel violated in any way, as his virtual self is put through trial after trial.

Every year, more than a million medical research papers are published. It’s impossible to know what this deluge of new discovery means to me personally – but now my GP can find out, at the push of a button, what it means for my genetic data-double.

Should I take this medicine, or that? Should I take more of it, or less of it? What treatment will work; what won’t? No more uncertainty for me: now I am guaranteed to receive treatments that are tailored to me, forever. I’ve just landed, bang, in the middle of a new era of personalised medicine.

Now that there’s a digital clone of me floating around, I have even less reason to want to “do an Elisabeth” and make a flesh-and-blood copy of myself. This will come as a relief to anyone who’s read Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2005 novel Never Let Me Go, and can’t shake off the horror occasioned by that school assembly: “If you’re going to have decent lives,” Miss Lucy tells the children in her care, “then you’ve got to know and know properly… You’ll become adults, then before you’re old, before you’re even middle-aged, you’ll start to donate your vital organs.”

Might we one day farm clones of ourselves to provide our ageing, misused bodies with spare parts? This is by far the best of the straw-man arguments that have been mounted over the years against the idea of human cloning. (Most of the others involve Hitler.)

It at least focuses our minds on a key ethical question: are we ever entitled to use other people as means to an end? But it’s still a straw-man argument, not least because we’re a long way into figuring out how to grow our spare organs in other animals. No ethical worries there! (though the pigs may disagree).

And while such xenotransplantation and other technologies advance by leaps and bounds, reproductive cloning languishes – a rather baroque solution to biomedical problems solved more easily by other means.

Famously, In 1996 Ian Wilmut and colleagues at the Roslin Institute in Scotland successfully cloned Dolly the sheep from the udder cells of a ewe. Dolly was their 277th attempt. She died young. No-one can really say whether this had anything to do with her being a clone, since her creation conspicuously did not open the floodgates to further experimentation. Two decades went by before the first primates were successfully cloned – two crab-eating macaques named Zhong Zhong and Hua Hua. These days it’s possible to clone your pet (Barbara Streisand famously cloned her dog), but my strong advice is, don’t bother: around 96 per cent of all cloning attempts end in failure.

Science-fiction stories, from Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) to Andrew Niccol’s Gattaca (1997), have conjured up hyper-utilitarian nightmares in which manipulations of the human genome work all too well. This is what made David Cronenberg’s early body horror so compelling and, in retrospect, so visionary: in films such as 1977’s Rabid (a biker develops a blood-sucking orifice) and 1979’s The Brood (ectopic pregnancies manifest a divorcée’s rage), the body doesn’t give a stuff about anyone’s PhD; it has its own ideas about what it wants to be.

And so it has proved. Not only does cloning rarely succeed; the clone that manages to survive to term will most likely be deformed, or die of cancer, or keel over for some other more or less mysterious reason. After cloning Dolly the sheep, Wilmut and his team tried to clone another lamb; it hyperventilated so much it kept passing out.

***

It is conceivable, I suppose, that hundreds of years from now, alien intelligences will dust off StoreGene’s recording of my genome and, in a fit of misplaced enthusiasm, set about growing a copy of me in a modishly lit plexiglass tank. Much good may it do them: the clone they’re growing will bear only a passing physical resemblance to me, and he and I will share only the very broadest psychological and emotional similarity. Genes make a big contribution to the development process, but they’re not in overall charge of it. Even identical twins, nature’s own clones, are easy to tell apart, especially when they start speaking.

Call me naive, but I’m not too worried about vast and cool and unsympathetic intellects, alien or otherwise, getting hold of my genetic data. It’s the thought of what all my other data may be up to that keeps me up at night.

Swedish political scientist Carl Öhman’s The Afterlife of Data, published earlier this year, recounts the experiences of a young man who, having lost his father ten years previously, finds that they can still compete against each other on an old XBox racing game. That is, he can play against his father’s saved games, again and again. (Of course he’s now living in dread of the day the XBox eventually breaks and his dad dies a second time.)

The digital world has been part of our lives for most of our lives, if not all of them. We are each of us mirrored there. And there’s this in common between exploring digital technology and exploring the Moon: no wind will come along to blow away our footprints.

Öhman’s book is mostly an exploration of the unstable but fast-growing sector of “grieving technologies” which create – from our digital footprints – chatbots, which our grieving loved ones can interrogate on those long lonely winter evenings. Rather more uncanny, to my mind, are those chatbots of us that stalk the internet while we’re still alive, causing trouble on our behalf. How long will it be before my wife starts ringing me up out of the blue to ask me the PIN for our joint debit card?

Answer: in no time at all, at least according to a note on “human machine teaming” published six (six!) years ago by the Ministry of Defence. Its prediction that “forgeries are likely to constitute a large proportion of online content” was stuffily phrased, but accurate enough: in 2023 nearly half of all internet traffic came from bots.

At what point does a picture of yourself acquire its own reality? At what point does that picture’s existence start ruining your life? Oscar Wilde took a stab at what in 1891 must have seemed a very noodly question with his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. 130-odd years later, Sarah Snook’s one-woman take on the story at London’s Haymarket Theatre employed digital beauty filters and mutiple screens in what felt less like an updating of Wilde’s story, more its apocalyptic restatement: all lives end, and a life wholly given over to the pursuit of beauty and pleasure is not going to end well.

In 2021, users of TikTok noticed that the platform’s default front-facing camera was slimming down their faces, smoothing their skin, whitening their teeth and altering the size of their eyes and noses. (You couldn’t disable this feature, either.) When you play with these apps, you begin to appreciate their uncanny pull. I remember the first time TikTok’s “Bold Glamour” filter, released last year, mapped itself over my image with an absolute seamlessness. Quite simply, a better me appeared in the phone’s digital mirror. When I gurned, it gurned. When I laughed, it laughed. It had me fixated for days and, for heaven’s sake, I’m a middle-aged bloke. Girls, you’re the target audience here. If you want to know what your better selves are up to, all you have to do is look into your smartphone.

Better yet, head to a clinic near you (while there are still appointments available), get your fill of fillers, and while your face is swelling like an Aardman Animations outtake, listen in as practitioners of variable experience and capacity talk glibly of “Zoom-face dysphoria”.
That this self-transfiguring trend has disfigured a generation is not really the worry. The Kardashian visage (tan by Baywatch, brows and eye shape by Bollywood, lips from Atlanta, cheeks from Pocahontas, nose from Gwyneth Paltrow) is a mostly non-surgical artefact – a hyaluronic-acid trip that will melt away in six months to a year, once people come to their senses. What really matters is that among school-age girls, rates of depression and self-harm are through the roof. I had a whale of a time at that screening of The Substance. But the terrifying reality is that the film isn’t for me; it’s for them.

Malleable meat

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Watching Carey Born’s Cyborg: A Documentary for New Scientist

Neil Harbisson grew up in Barcelona and studied music composition at Dartington College of Arts in the UK. He lives with achromatism: he is unable to perceive colour of any kind. Not one to ignore a challenge, in 2003 Harbisson recruited product designer Adam Montandon to build him a head-mounted rig that would turn colours into musical notes that he could listen to through earphones. Now in his forties, Harbisson has evolved. The camera on its pencil-thin stalk and the sound generator are permanently fused to the back of his skull: he hears the colours around him through bone conduction.

If “hears” is quite the word: Watching Carey Born’s Cyborg: A Documentary, we occasionally catch Harbisson thinking seriously and intelligently about how the senses operate. He doesn’t hear colour so much as see it. His unconventional colour organ is startling to outsiders — what is that chap doing with an antenna springing out the back of his head? But Harbisson’s brain is long used to the antenna’s input, and treats it like any other visual information. Harbisson says he knew his experiment was a success when he started to dream in colour.

Body modification in art has a long history, albeit a rather vexed one. I can remember the Australian performance artist Stelarc hanging from flesh hooks, pronouncing on the obscolescence of the body. (My date did not go well.) Stelarc doesn’t do that sort of thing any more. Next year he celebrates his eightieth birthday. You can declare victory over the flesh as much as you like: time gets the last laugh.

The way Harbisson has hacked his own perceptions leaves him with very little to do but talk about his experiences. He can’t really demonstrate them the way his partner Moon Ribos can. The dancer-choreographer has had an internet-enabled vibrating doo-dad fitted in her left arm which, when she’s dancing, tells her when and how vigorously to respond to earthquakes.

Harbisson meanwhile is stuck in radio studios and behind lecterns explaining what it’s like to have a friends send the colours of Australian sunset to the back of his skull — to which a radio talk-show guest objects: Wouldn’t receiving a postcard of an Australian sunset amount to the same thing?

Born’s uncritical approach to her subject never really digs in to this perfectly sensible question — and this is a pity. Harbisson says he has weathered months-long headaches and episodes of depression in an effort to extend his senses, but all outsiders ever care about is the tech, and what it can do.

One recent wheeze from Harbisson and his collaborators is a headband that tells you the time by heating spots on your skull. Obviously a watch offers a more accurate measure. Less obviously, the headband is supposed to create a new sense in the wearer: an embodied, pre-conscious awareness of solar-planetary motion. The technology is fun, but what really matters is what new senses may be out there for us to enjoy.

I find it slighly irksome to be having to explain Harbisson’s work, since Harbisson hardly bothers. The lecture, the talk-show, the panel and the photoshoot are his gallery and stage, and for over twenty years now, the man with the stalk coming out of his head has been giving his audience what they have come to expect: a ringing endorsement of transhumanism, the philosophy that would have us treat our bodies as so much malleable meat. In 2010 he co-founded the Cyborg Foundation to defend cyborg rights. In 2017, he co-founded the Transpecies Society to give a voice to people with non-human identities. It’s all very idealistic and also quite endearingly old-fashioned in its otherworldliness — as though the plasticity or otherwise of the body were not already a burning social issue, and staple ordnance in today’s culture wars.

I wish Born had gone to the bother of challenging her subject. Penetrate their shell of schooled narcissism and you occasionally find that conceptual artists have something to say.