Tag Archives: science fiction

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.

“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.

The most indirect critique of technology ever made?

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Watching Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast for New Scientist

“Something or other lay in wait for him,” wrote Henry James in a story from 1903, ”amid the twists and turns of the months and the years, like a crouching beast in the jungle.”

The beast in this tale was (just to spoil it for you) fear itself, for it was fear that stopped our hero from living any kind of worthwhile life.

Swap around the genders of the couple at the heart of James’s bitter tale, allow them to reincarnate and meet as if for the first time on three separate occasions — in Paris in 1910, in LA in 2014 and in Chengdu in 2044 — and you’ve got a rough idea of the mechanics of Bertrand Bonello’s magnificent and maddening new science fiction film. Through a series of close-ups, longueurs and red-herrings, The Beast, while getting nowhere very fast, manages to be an utterly riveting, often terrifying film about love, the obstacles to love, and our deep-seated fear of love even when it’s there for the taking. It’s also (did I mention this?) an epic account of how everyone’s ordinary human timidity, once aggregated by technology, destroys the human race.

Léa Seydoux and George MacKay play star-crossed lovers Gabrielle Monnier and Louis Lewanski. In 1910 Gabrielle fudges the business of leaving her husband; tragedy strikes soon after. In 2014 an incel version of Louis would sooner stalk Gabrielle with a gun than try and talk to her. The consequences of their non-affair are not pretty. In 2044 Gabrielle and Louis stumble into each other on the way to “purification” — a psychosurgical procedure that heals past-life trauma and leaves people, if not without emotion, then certainly without the need for grand passion. By now the viewer is seriously beginning to wonder what will ever go right for this pair.

Somewhere in these twisty threaded timelines are the off-screen “events” of 2025, that brought matters to a head and convinced people to hand their governance over to machines. Why would humanity betray itself in such a manner? The blunt answer is: because we’re more in love with machines than with each other, and always have been.

In 1910 Gabrielle’s husband’s fortune is made from the manufacture of celluloid dolls. In 2014 — a point-perfect satire of runaway narcissism that owes much, stylistically, to the films of David Lynch — Gabrielle and Louis collide disastrously with warped images of themselves and each other, in an uncanny valley of cross-purposed conversations, predatory social media and manipulated video. In 2044 mere dolls and puppets have become fully conscious robots. One of these, played by Guslagie Malanda, even begins to fall in love with its “client” Gabrielle. Meanwhile Gabrielle, Louis and everyone else is undergoing psychosurgery in order to fit in with the AI’s brave new world. (Human unemployment is running at 67 per cent, and without purification’s calming effect it’s virtually impossible to get a worthwhile job.)

None of the Gabrielles and Louises are comfortable in their own skin. They take it in turns wanting to be something else, even if it means being something less. They see the best that they can be, and it pretty much literally scares the life out of them.

Given this is the point The Beast wants to put across, you have to admire the physical casting here. Each lead actor exhibits superb, machine-like self-control. Seydoux dies behind her eyes not once but many times in the course of this film; MacKay can go from trembling Adonis to store-front mannekin in about 2.1 seconds. And when full humanity is called for, both actors demonstrate extraordinary sensitivity: handy when you’re trying to distinguish between 1910’s unspoken passion, 2014’s unspeakable passion, and 2044’s passionless speech.

True, The Beast may be the most indirect critique of technology ever made. Heaven knows how it will fare at the box office. But any fool can make us afraid of robots. This intelligent, shocking and memorable film dares to focus on us.

What’s not to like?

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Watching Kiah Roache-Turner’s Sting for New Scientist

A bratty 12-year-old girl. A feckless stepfather who loses her trust and feels increasingly out of place in his own home. Oh, and a giant spider.

Kiah Roache-Turner, a relatively new director on the horror scene, understands that real originality has almost nothing to do with who and what you put in front of the screen. What matters how is you set those elements to dancing. Like 2023’s killer-doll hit M3gan, with which it shares a certain antic humour, Sting cares about its characters. Charlotte (Alyla Browne) hero-worships her absent father, and this is slowly driving her stepdad Ethan (Ryan Corr) up the wall, since he knows full well that Charlotte’s real dad lives only half an hour away “across the bridge”. (Sting is ostensibly set in Brooklyn, New York; actually it was shot in Sydney and aside from a couple of establishing shots its action takes place entirely within a brownstone apartment house, all drywall and ducts.)

Ethan’s a struggling comic book artist who finds himself borrowing (and spoiling) Charlotte’s own much livelier ideas. When Charlotte’s pet spider (it arrived in a meteor during an ice storm — never a good sign) grows to man-eating size and drags Ethan off through the air duct, Charlotte, plugged in to her earphones, her videogames and her anger, simply fails to notice. The scene tries to hit the sweet spot between horror and comedy that M3gan struck again and again, and if it doesn’t quite succeed, I think it may have less to do with the writing or direction as with the film’s basic premise, which is, when you come down to it, very thin.

Comparisons to the original Alien are inevitable, if only because of the spider’s break-neck growth rate and all those ducts. And as far as the special effects go, Sting the Spider stands up pretty well. Wisely, the film prefers glimpses, shadows and one or two very well-judged sight gags to full-on goo and muppeteering.

The house — a realistically over-stuffed gothic interior full of corners and cabinets — is the family in metaphor. The ducts connecting Charlotte’s bedroom to the sitting room of Helga, her senile grandmother (Noni Hazlehurst, having more fun than the rest of the cast put together), are the torturous lines of communication by which these good people struggle to maintain a sense of family. Sting favours suspense over surprise. We learn very early on that Charlotte’s fast-growing pet cannot bear the smell of mothballs and that Helga, wrapped in umpteen threadbare shawls, stinks of them. For a second we teeter on a fairytale in which an old woman and a young girl will save the “real” adult world.

True, nothing kills a good story faster than cleverness — but a few more touches of that sort wouldn’t have hurt. Instead we have an efficient, entertaining light-hearted script, very ably realised, and one and a half hours of light entertainment that, though not at all wasted, are not exactly filled to the brim, either.

Why, then, has Sting acquired global distribution and, even before its release, such glowing trade coverage?

Well, for one thing, it’s refreshing to see a movie that puts its characters through the wringer in psychologically believable ways. Charlotte saves Ethan from the spider. Ethan saves Charlotte. In the face of a Fate Worse Than Death (trust me on this), the pair learn to cooperate. A weak man gains strength, a lonely child learns there’s value in other people, a cowardly exterminator loses his head and a bitter landlady plummets down a lift shaft. What’s not to like? Storytelling this pure looks effortless, but if it was, films in general would be a lot better than they are.

An entirely predictable square-dance

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Watching Stefon Bristol’s Breathe for New Scientist

Zora (Quvenzhané Wallis) and Maya (Jennifer Hudson) live behind the hard-to-open bulkhead doors of a homemade bunker in East Flatbush, Brooklyn. If you can call it living: their every breath has to be calibrated and analysed, as the oxygen-producing machinery constructed by their missing husband and father Darius (a short, sweet performance by the former rapper Common) starts to fail.

The Earth’s oxygen has vanished. So has all its plant life. The oceans are all dried up. Survivors are few, and trust between them is a thing of the past.

Had Maya simply listened to her daughter and let in the two mysterious visitors who want to study their oxygen plant (Tess, played by Milla Jovovich, and Lucas, played by Sam Worthington) Breathe’s plot, such as it is, would have barely filled a quarter-hour. (Zora has been monologuing to her presumably dead dad over the shortwave radio for months now. If Tess has overheard her, then her claim to be Darius’s colleague may simply be a lie.)

As it is, no one trusts anyone and everybody shouts a lot, while performing an entire predictable square-dance around door codes, pass keys, key-cards, dead and dying batteries, cable ties, unreachable switches — we’ve been here before, oh, so very many times. Breathe’s sole highlight is Sam Worthington’s manic, dead-eyed Lucas — incapable, after a lifetime of horrors, of thinking more than thirty seconds into the future.

Low-budget science fiction favours the global catastrophe. What better alibi could there be for squeezing your cast into small, affordable sets? Though hardly one-room dramas, two recent sci-fi thrillers have shown what can be done with relatively few resources: 2018’s Bird Box (in which Sandra Bullock’s character Malorie must shield her and her children’s eyes from entities that prompt people to suicide) and, in the same year, A Quiet Place (whose gargoyle-like aliens chomp down on anything and anyone that makes a sound). Whether the world beyond that armoured door is as uninhabitable as we think fuels the paranoia of both 2016’s 10 Cloverfield Lane, and the rather more expansive Silo, a TV adaptation of Hugh Howey’s series of sf thrillers.

Still, it’s hard to think of a movie genre so resistant to innovation as this one. While it solves the problem of small budgets, the one-room scenario doesn’t at all play to genre’s manic strengths. The best one-room thrillers aren’t science fiction at all, but regular thrillers. In Geoffrey Household’s unforgettable 1939 novel Rogue Male, to take an extreme example, Hitler’s would-be assassin is foiled and has to go hide under a hedge.

The trick, when writing science fiction versions of such stories, is to treat seriously the macguffin that created your scenario in the first place. The psychocidal monsters of Bird Box, first invented by Josh Malerman for his 2014 novel, are a wonderfully insolent, high-concept proposition. The big-eared raptors of A Quiet Place are only marginally less convincing.

Come 2020’s The Midnight Sky however, and the scraping of the barrel has become almost deafening, as radiation (that’s it, that’s all you’re getting: “radiation”) comes to stand in for what we tuned in for: a display of malign and cackling inventiveness. 2021’s Tom Hanks vehicle Finch was a winningly goofy proposition on paper — a grumpy old man, dying in the End Times, invents a robot to look after his dog — but the entire enterprise had the charm sucked out of it by that cursory macguffin: a massive solar flare used merely to excuse a smorgasbord of unrelated bad-weather CGI.

In 2010 Breathe’s screenwriter Doug Simon co-wrote a low-budget film called Brotherhood. Tellingly enough, that was a far more successful one-room thriller, about a college fraternity initiation rite gone horribly wrong. Turning to science fiction, Simon seems to have made the frequent and fatal assumption that SF comes with all the necessary inventiveness somehow “built in”.

Why has the oxygen vanished, more or less overnight, from Breathe’s gasping Earth? Its not even as if we needed a rational explanation; we just needed a compelling one. In its place we get a story as sterile as the planet it’s set on.

Boo-hoo

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Watching Johan Renck’s Spaceman for new Scientist, 27 March 2024

Czech astronaut Jakub Procházka (Adam Sandler) is dying of loneliness, six months into a solo space mission to visit a mysterious purple cloud. His wife Lenka (Carey Mulligan) is pregnant and, being already a lot lonelier than Jakub (who’s been a wholly unsupportive husband), she decides to leave him. The mission controllers keep the news from Jakub, but he knows what’s going on, and it’s his sense of despair that, quite early in the film, draws in help from beyond — a telepathic spider who can pass through walls but is otherwise as real and solid as anything on Jakub’s spaceship (a sort of inside-out junkyard full of believably outdated but serviceable machinery, ducts, keyboards, lights, and a toilet pump that won’t stop screaming).

Spaceman is directed by former singer-songwriter and video maker Johan Renck, better known these days for his Emmy-winning direction of the 2019 docudrama Chernobyl. It’s an assured, wholly deliberate experiment in pacing that will frustrate many. This is a film delivered at a single, unvarying, trancelike pace — and entirely right for a story that’s not at all about a man losing his grip on reality, but rather the very reverse: Adam Sandler’s astronaut Jakub must come to grips with what reality turns out to be, after all — extraterrestrial clouds, telepathic spiders and all. “The universe,” his strange companion assures him, even as they both face extinction, “is as it should be”. And here’s the kicker: the alien spider is right.

Spaceman is monotonous only in the sense that time itself is monotonous, and the film’s transcendental aspirations are very well served by Hans Zimmer’s shimmering, shuddering score; it’s more sound art than music, and easily as powerful as anything he wrote for Villeneuve’s Dune films — which is saying a lot.

Since his lead turn in the Safdi Brothers’ 2019 crime movie Uncut Gems, Sandler the serious actor has little left to prove. Here, he embodies and expresses Jakub’s terror, melancholy, anger and self-hatred with absolute commitment and truthfulness — five years ago, who would have bet money that the words “egoless” and “Adam Sandler” would ever appear in the same sentence? Paul Dano voices Jakub’s arachnid companion, with a poetic pathos that would be cloying in a more regular movie, but works superbly well here — almost as if his every word were a prayer.

In its effort to be a spiritual experience — more church mass than movie — Spaceman simplifies the already fairly simple plot of its source material, Jaroslav Kalfař’s novel The Spaceman of Bohemia. This was a mistake.

Jakub is lonely. So is his wife. She leaves him. Counselled by his extraterrestrial friend, Jakub makes up with her (a neat trick, involving a wonderfully goofy faster-than-light phone called CzechConnect and a glowing purple fragment from the universe’s beginning). They reconcile, and Jakub begins his long return.

At which point, I must report I woke from my aesthetic trance and thought to myself: hang on, why does the story of a man reconciling with his wife six-months into a work assignment require a space mission, a mysterious cloud, quantum telephony and a telepathic spider?

Spaceman has many virtues but it is, when you come down to it, a film about someone trying to fix their work-life balance, and doing so in the most expensive, baroque, and portentous manner imaginable. He’s lonely? Boo hoo. She’s leaving him half way through his solo flight? What a lousy, selfish thing for her to do. Bang their heads together, I say, and to hell with the limitations of spacetime!

And this, just to spoil it for you, is pretty much what happens.

“We cannot save ourselves”

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Interviewing Cixin Liu for The Telegraph, 29 February 2024

Chinese writer Cixin Liu steeps his science fiction in disaster and misfortune, even as he insists he’s just playing around with ideas. His seven novels and a clutch of short stories and articles (soon to be collected in a new English translation, A View from the Stars) have made him world-famous. His most well-known novel The Three-Body Problem won the Hugo, the nearest thing science fiction has to a heavy-hitting prize, in 2015. Closer to home, he’s won the Galaxy Award, China’s most prestigious literary science-fiction award, nine times. A 2019 film adaptation of his novella “The Wandering Earth” (in which we have to propel the planet clear of a swelling sun) earned nearly half a billion dollars in the first 10 days of its release. Meanwhile The Three-Body Problem and its two sequels have sold more than eight million copies worldwide. Now they’re being adapted for the screen, and not for the first time: the first two adaptations were domestic Chinese efforts. A 2015 film was suspended during production (“No-one here had experience of productions of this scale,” says Liu, speaking over a video link from a room piled with books.) The more recent TV effort is, from what I’ve seen of it, jolly good, though it only scratches the surface of the first book.

Now streaming service Netflix is bringing Liu’s whole trilogy to a global audience. Clean behind your sofa, because you’re going to need somewhere to hide from an alien visitation quite unlike any other.

For some of us, that invasion will come almost as a relief. So many English-speaking sf writers these days spend their time bending over backwards, offering “design solutions” to real-life planetary crises, and especially to climate change. They would have you believe that science fiction is good for you.

Liu, a bona fide computer engineer in his mid-fifties, is immune to such virtue signalling. “From a technical perspective, sf cannot really help the world,” he says. “Science fiction is ephemeral, because we build it on ideas in science and technology that are always changing and improving. I suppose we might inspire people a little.”

Western media outlets tend to cast Liu — a domestic celebrity with a global reputation and a fantastic US sales record — as a put-upon and presumably reluctant spokesperson for the Chinese Communist Party. The Liu I’m speaking to is garrulous, well-read, iconoclastic, and eager. (It’s his idea that we end up speaking for nearly an hour more than scheduled.) He’s hard-headed about human frailty and global Realpolitik, and he likes shocking his audience. He believes in progress, in technology, and, yes — get ready to clutch your pearls — he believes in his country. But we’ll get to that.

We promised you disaster and misfortune. In The Three-Body Problem, the great Trisolaran Fleet has already set sail from its impossibly inhospitable homeworld orbiting three suns. (What does not kill you makes you stronger, and their madly unpredictable environment has made the Trisolarans very strong indeed.) They’ll arrive in 450 years or so — more than enough time, you would think, for us to develop technology advanced enough to repel them. That is why the Trisolarans have sent two super-intelligent proton-sized super-computers at near-light speed to Earth, to mess with our minds, muddle our reality, and drive us into self-hatred and despair. Only science can save us. Maybe.
The forthcoming Netflix adaptation is produced by Game of Thrones’s David Benioff and D.B. Weiss and True Blood’s Alexander Woo. In covering all three books, it will need to wrap itself around a conflict that lasts millennia, and realistically its characters won’t be able to live long enough to witness more than fragments of the action. The parallel with the downright deathy Game of Thrones is clear: “I watched Game of Thrones before agreeing to the adaptation,” says Liu. “I found it overwhelming — quite shocking, but in a positive way.”

By the end of its run, Game of Thrones had become as solemn as an owl, and that approach won’t work for The Three-Body Problem, which leavens its cosmic pessimism (a universe full of silent, hostile aliens, stalking their prey among the stars) with long, delightful episodes of sheer goofiness — including one about a miles-wide Trisolaran computer chip made up entirely of people in uniform, marching about, galloping up and down, frantically waving flags…

A computer chip the size of a town! A nine-dimensional supercomputer the size of a proton! How on Earth does Liu build engaging stories from such baubles? Well, says Liu, you need a particular kind of audience — one for whom anything seems possible.
“China’s developing really fast, and people are confronting opportunities and challenges that make them think about the future in a wildly imaginative and speculative way,” he explains. “When China’s pace of development slows, its science fiction will change. It’ll become more about people and their everyday experiences. It’ll become more about economics and politics, less about physics and astronomy. The same has already happened to western sf.”

Of course, it’s a moot point whether anything at all will be written by then. Liu reckons that within a generation or two, artificial intelligence will take care of all our entertainment needs. “The writers in Hollywood didn’t strike over nothing,” he observes. “All machine-made entertainment requires, alongside a few likely breakthroughs, is ever more data about what people write and consume and enjoy.” Liu, who claims to have retired and to have no skin in this game any more, points to a recent Chinese effort, the AI-authored novel Land of Memories, which won second prize in a regional sf competition. “I think I’m the final generation of writers who will create novels based purely on their own thinking, without the aid of artificial intelligence,” he says. “The next generation will use AI as an always-on assistant. The generation after that won’t write.”

Perhaps he’s being mischievous (a strong and ever-present possibility). He may just be spinning some grand-sounding principle out of his own charmingly modest self-estimate. “I’m glad people like my work,” he says, “but I doubt I’ll be remembered even ten years from now. I’ve not written very much. And the imagination I’ve been able to bring to bear on my work is not exceptional.” His list of influences is long. His father bought him Wells and Verne in translation. Much else, including Kurt Vonnegut and Ray Bradbury, required translating word for word with a dictionary. “As an sf writer, I’m optimistic about our future,” Liu says. “The resources in our solar system alone can feed about 100,000 planet Earths. Our future is potentially limitless — even within our current neighbourhood.”

Wrapping our heads around the scales involved is tricky, though. “The efforts countries are taking now to get off-world are definitely meaningful,” he says, “but they’re not very realistic. We have big ideas, and Elon Musk has some exciting propulsion technology, but the economic base for space exploration just isn’t there. And this matters, because visiting neighbouring planets is a huge endeavour, one that makes the Apollo missions of the Sixties and Seventies look like a fast train ride.”

Underneath such measured optimism lurks a pessimistic view of our future on Earth. “More and more people are getting to the point where they’re happy with what they’ve got,” he complains. “They’re comfortable. They don’t want to make any more progress. They don’t want to push any harder. And yet the Earth is pretty messed up. If we don’t get into space, soon we’re not going to have anywhere to live at all.”

The trouble with writing science fiction is that everyone expects you have an instant answer to everything. Back in June 2019, a New Yorker interviewer asked him what he thought of the Uighurs (he replied: a bunch of terrorists) and their treatment at the hands of the Chinese government (he replied: firm but fair). The following year some Republican senators in the US tried to shame Netflix into cancelling The Three-Body Problem. Netflix pointed out (with some force) that the show was Benioff and Weiss and Woo’s baby, not Liu’s. A more precious writer might have taken offence, but Liu thinks Netflix’s response was spot-on. ““Neither Netflix nor I wanted to think about these issues together,” he says.

And it doesn’t do much good to spin his expression of mainstream public opinion in China (however much we deplore it) into some specious “parroting [of] dangerous CCP propaganda”. The Chinese state is monolithic, but it’s not that monolithic — witness the popular success of Liu’s own The Three Body Problem, in which a girl sees her father beaten to death by a fourteen-year-old Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution, grows embittered during what she expects will be a lifetime’s state imprisonment, and goes on to betray the entire human race, telling the alien invaders, “We cannot save ourselves.”

Meanwhile, Liu has learned to be ameliatory. In a nod to Steven Pinker’s 2011 book The Better Angels of Our Nature, he points out that while wars continue around the globe, the bloodshed generated by warfare has been declining for decades. He imagines a world of ever-growing moderation — even the eventual melting away of the nation state.

When needled, he goes so far as to be realistic: “No system suits all. Governments are shaped by history, culture, the economy — it’s pointless to argue that one system is better than another. The best you can hope for is that they each moderate whatever excesses they throw up. People are not and never have been free to do anything they want, and people’s idea of what constitutes freedom changes, depending on what emergency they’re having to handle.”

And our biggest emergency right now? Liu picks the rise of artificial intelligence, not because our prospects are so obviously dismal (though killer robots are a worry), but because mismanaging AI would be humanity’s biggest own goal ever: destroyed by the very technology that could have taken us to the stars!

Ungoverned AI could quite easily drive a generation to rebel against technology itself. “AI has been taking over lots of peoples’ jobs, and these aren’t simple jobs, these are what highly educated people expected to spend lifetimes getting good at. The employment rate in China isn’t so good right now. Couple that with badly managed roll-outs of AI, and you’ve got frustration and chaos and people wanting to destroy the machines, just as they did at the beginning of the industrial revolution.”

Once again we find ourselves in a dark place. But then, what did you expect from a science fiction writer? They sparkle best in the dark. And for those who don’t yet know his work, Liu is pleased, so far, with Netflix’s version of his signature tale of interstellar terror, even if its westernisation does baffle him at times.

“All these characters of mine that were scientists and engineers,” he sighs. “They’re all politicians now. What’s that about?”