Category Archives: screen

A citadel beset by germs

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Watching Mariam Ghani’s Dis-Ease for New Scientist

There aren’t many laugh-out-loud moments in Mariam Ghani’s long documentary about our war on germs. The sight of two British colonial hunters in Ceylon bringing down a gigantic papier maché mosquito is a highlight.

Ghani intercuts public information films (a rich source of sometimes inadvertent comedy) with monster movies, documentaries, thrillers, newreel and histology lab footage to tell the story of an abiding medical metaphor: the body as citadel, beset by germs.

Dis-Ease, which began life as an artistic residency at the Wellcome Institute, is a visual feast, with a strong internal logic. Had it been left to stand on its own feet, then it might have borne comparison with Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi and Simon Pummell’s Bodysong: films which convey their ideas in purely visual terms.

But the Afghan-American photographer Ghani is as devoted to the power of words. Interviews and voice-overs abound. The result is a messy collision of two otherwise perfectly valid documentary styles.

There’s little in Dis-Ease’s narrative to take exception to. Humoral theory (in which the sick body falls out of internal balance) was a central principle in Western medicine from antiquity into the 19th century. It was eventually superseded by germ theory, in which the sick body is assailed by pathogens. Germ theory enabled globally transformative advances in public health, but it was most effectively conveyed through military metaphors, and these quickly acquired a life of their own. In its brief foray into the history of eugenics, Dis-Ease reveals, in stark terms, how “wars on disease” mutate into wars on groups of people.

A “war on disease” also preserves and accentuates social inequities, the prevailing assumption being that outbreaks spread from the developing south to the developed north, and the north then responds by deploying technological fixes in the opposite direction.

At its very founding in 1948, the World Health Organisation argued against this idea, and the eradication of smallpox in 1980 was achieved through international consensus, by funding primary health care across the globe. The attempted eradication of polio, begun in 1988, has been a deal more problematic, and the film argues that this is down to the developed world’s imposition by fiat of a very narrow medical brief, even as health care services in even the poorest countries were coming under pressure to privitise.

Ecosystems are being eroded, and zoonotic diseases are emerging with ever greater frequency. Increasingly robust and well-coördinated military responses to frightening outbreaks are understandable and they can, in the short term, be quite effective. For example: to criticise the way British and Sierra Leonean militaries intervened in Sierra Leone in 2014 to establish a National Ebola Response Centre would be to put ideology in the way of common sense.

Still, the film argues, such actions may worsen problems on the ground, since they absorb all the money and political will that might have been spent on public health necessities like housing and sanitation (and a note to Bond villians here: the surest way to trigger a global pandemic is to undermine the health of some small exposed population).

In interview, the sociologist Hannah Landecker points out that since adopting germ theory, we have been managing life with death. (Indeed, that is pretty much exactly what the word “antibiotic” means.) Knowing what we know now about the sheer complexity and vastness of the microbial world, we should now be looking to manage life with life, collaborating with the microbiome, ensuring health rather than combating disease.

What this means exactly is beyond the scope of Ghani’s film, and some of the gestures here towards a “one health” model of medicine — as when a hippy couple start repeating the refrain “life and death are one” — caused this reviewer some moral discomfort.

Anthropologists and sociologists dominate Dis-Ease’s discourse, making it a snapshot of what today’s generation of desk-bound academics think about disease. Many speak sense, though a special circle of Hell is being reserved for the one who, having read too much science fiction, glibly asserts that we can be cured “by becoming something else entirely”.

If they’re out there, why aren’t they here?

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The release of Alien: Romulus inspired this article for the Telegraph

On August 16, Fede Alvarez returns the notorious Alien franchise to its monster-movie roots, and feeds yet another batch of hapless young space colonists to a nest of “xenomorphs”.
Will Alien: Romulus do more than lovingly pay tribute to Ridley Scott’s original 1979 Alien? Does it matter? Alien is a franchise that survives despite the additions to its canon, rather than because of them. Bad outings have not bankrupted its grim message, and the most visionary reimaginings have not altered it.

The original Alien is itself a scowling retread of 1974’s Dark Star, John Carpenter’s nihilist-hippy debut, about the crew of an interstellar wrecking crew cast unimaginably far from home, bored to death and intermittently terrorised by a mischievous alien beach ball. Dan O’Bannon co-wrote both Dark Star and Alien, and inside every prehensile-jawed xenomorph there’s a O’Bannonesque balloon critter snickering away.

O’Bannon’s cosmic joke goes something like this: we escaped the food-chain on Earth, only to find ourselves at the bottom of an even bigger, more terrible food chain Out There among the stars.

You don’t need an adventure in outer space to see the lesson. John Carpenter went on to make The Thing (1982), in which the intelligent and resourceful crew of an Antarctic base are reduced to chum by one alien’s peckishness.

You don’t even need an alien. Jaws dropped the good folk of Amity Island NY back into the food chain, and that pre-dated Alien by four years.

Alien, according to O’Bannon’s famous pitch-line, was “like Jaws in space”, but by moving the action into space, it added a whole new level of existential dread. Alien shows us that if nature is red in tooth and claw here on Earth, then chances are it will likely be so up there. The heavens cannot possibly be heavenly: now here was an idea calculated to strike fear in fans of 1982’s ET the Extra-Terrestrial.

In ET, intelligence counts – the visiting space traveller is benign because it is a space traveller. Any species smart enough to travel among the stars is also smart enough not to go around gobbling up the neighours. Indeed, the whole point of space travel turns out to be botany and gardening.

Ridley Scott’s later Alien outings Prometheus (2012) and Covenant (2017) are, in their turn, muddled counter-arguments to ET; in them, cosmic gardeners called Engineers gleefully spread an invasive species (a black xenomorph-inducing dust) across the cosmos.

“But, for the love of God – why?” ask ET fans, their big trusting-kitten eyes tearing up at all this interstellar mayhem. And they have a point. Violence makes evolutionary sense when you have to compete over limited resources. The moment you journey among the stars, though, the resources available to you are to all intents and purposes infinite. In space, assuming you can navigate comfortably through it, there is absolutely no point in being hostile.

If the prospect of interstellar life has provided the perfect conditions for numerous Hollywood blockbusters, then the real-life hunt for aliens has had more mixed results. When Paris’s Exposition Universelle opened in 1900, it was full of wonders: the world’s largest telescope, a 45-metre-diameter “Cosmorama” (a sort of restaurant-cum-planetarium), and the announcement of a prize, offered by the ageing socialite Clara Gouget: 100,000 francs (£500,000 in today’s money) offered to the first person to contact an extraterrestrial species.

Extraterrestrials were not a strange idea by 1900. The habitability of other worlds had been discussed seriously for centuries, and proposals on how to communicate with other planets were mounting up: these projects involved everything from mirrors to trenches, lines of trees and earthworks visible from space.

What really should arrest our attention is the exclusion clause written into the prize’s small print. Communicating with Mars wouldn’t win you anything, since communications with Mars were already being established. Radio pioneers Nikolai Tesla and Guglielmo Marconi both reckoned they had received signals from outer space. Meanwhile Percival Lowell, a brilliant astronomer working at the very limits of optical science, had found gigantic irrigation works on the red planet’s surface: in his 1894 book he published clear visual evidence of Martian civilisation.

Half a century later, our ideas about aliens had changed. Further study of Mars and Venus had shown them to be lifeless, or as good as. Meanwhile the cosmos had turned out to be exponentially larger than anyone had thought in 1900. Larger – but still utterly silent.

***

In the summer of 1950, during a lunchtime conversation with fellow physicists Edward Teller, Herbert York and Emil Konopinski at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, the Italian-American physicist Enrico Fermi finally gave voice to the problem: “Where is everybody?”

The galaxy is old enough that any intelligent species could already have visited every star system a thousand times over, armed with nothing more than twentieth-century rocket technology. Time enough has passed for galactic empires to rise and fall. And yet, when we look up, we find absolutely no evidence for them.

We started to hunt for alien civilisations using radio telescopes in 1960. Our perfectly reasonable attitude was: If we are here, why shouldn’t they be there? The possibilities for life in the cosmos bloomed all around us. We found that almost all stars have planets, and most of them have rocky planets orbiting the habitable zone around their stars. Water is everywhere: evidence exists for four alien oceans in our own solar system alone, on Saturn’s moon Enceladus and on Jupiter’s moons Europa, Ganymede and Callisto. On Earth, microbes have been found that can withstand the rigours of outer space. Large meteor strikes have no doubt propelled them into space from time to time. Even now, some of the hardier varieties may be flourishing in odd corners of Mars.

All of which makes the cosmic silence sill more troubling.

Maybe ET just isn’t interested in us. You can see why. Space travel has proved a lot more difficult to achieve than we expected, and unimaginably more expensive. Visiting even very near neighbours is next-to-impossible. Space is big, and it’s hard to see how travel-times, even to our nearest planets, wouldn’t destroy a living crew.

Travel between star systems is a whole other order of impossible. Even allowing for the series’ unpardonably dodgy physics, it remains an inconvenient truth that every time Star Trek’s USS Enterprise hops between star systems, the energy has to come from somewhere — is the Federation of United Planets dismantling, refining and extinguishing whole moons?

Life, even intelligent life, may be common throughout the universe – but then, each instance of it must live and die in isolation. The distances between stars are so great that even radio communication is impractical. Civilisations are, by definition, high-energy phenomena, and all high-energy phenomena burn out quickly. By the time we receive a possible signal from an extraterrestrial civilisation, that civilisation will most likely have already died or forgotten itself or changed out of all recognition.

It gets worse. The universe creates different kinds of suns as it ages. Suns like our own are an old model, and they’re already blinking out. Life like ours has already had its heyday in the cosmos, and one very likely answer to our question “Where is everybody?” is: “You came too late to the party”.

Others have posited even more disturbing theories for the silence. Cixin Liu is a Chinese science fiction novelist whose Hugo Award-winning The Three Body Problem (2008) recently teleported to Netflix. According to Liu’s notion of the cosmos as a ”dark forest”, spacefaring species are by definition so technologically advanced, no mere planet could mount a defence against them. Better, then, to keep silent: there may be wolves out there, and the longer our neighbouring star systems stay silent, the more likely it is that the wolves are near.

Russian rocket pioneer Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who was puzzling over our silent skies a couple of decades before Enrico Fermi, was more optimistic. Spacefaring civilisations are all around us, he said, and (pre-figuring ET) they are gardening the cosmos. They understand what we have already discovered — that when technologically misatched civilisations collide, the consequences for the weaker civilisation can be catastrophic. So they will no more communicate with us, in our nascent, fragile, planet-bound state, than Spielberg’s extraterrestrial would over-water a plant.

In this, Tsiolkovsky’s aliens show unlikely self-restraint. The trouble with intelligent beings is that they can’t leave things well enough alone. That is how we know they are intelligent. Interfering with stuff is the point.

Writing in the 1960s and 1970s, the Soviet science fiction novelists and brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky argued — in novels like 1964’s Hard to Be a God — that the sole point of life for a spacefaring species would be to see to the universe’s well-being by nurturing sentience, consciousness, and even happiness. To which Puppen, one of their most engaging alien protagonists, grumbles: Yes, but what sort of consciousness? What sort of happiness? In their 1985 novel The Waves Extinguish the Wind, alien-chaser Toivo Glumov complains, “Nobody believes that the Wanderers intend to do us harm. That is indeed extremely unlikely. It’s something else that scares us! We’re afraid that they will come and do good, as they understand it!”

Fear, above all enemies, the ones who think they’re doing you a favour.

In the Strugatskys’ wonderfully paranoid Noon Universe stories, the aliens already walk among us, tweeking our history, nudging us towards their idea of the good life.

Maybe this is happening for real. How would you know, either way? The way I see it, alien investigators are even now quietly mowing their lawns in, say, Slough. They live like humans, laugh and love like humans; they even die like humans. In their spare time they write exquisite short stories about the vagaries of the human condition, and it hasn’t once occured to them (thanks to their memory blocks) that they’re actually delivering vital strategic intelligence to a mothership hiding behind the moon.

You can pooh-pooh my little fantasy all you want; I defy you to disprove it. That’s the problem, you see. Aliens can’t be discussed scientifically. They’re not a merely physical phenomena, whose abstract existence can be proved or disproved through experiment and observation. They know what’s going on around them, and they can respond accordingly. They’re by definition clever, elusive, and above all unpredicatble. The whole point of a having a mind, after all, is that you can be constantly changing it.

The Polish writer Stanislaw Lem had a spectacularly bleak solution to Fermi’s question that’s best articulated in his last novel, 1986’s Fiasco. By the time a civilisation is in a position to commmunicate with others, he argues, it’s already become hopelessly eccentric and self-involved. At best its individuals will be living in simulations; at worst, they will be fighting pyrhhic, planet-busting wars against their own shadows. In Fiasco, the crew of the Eurydice discover, too late, that they’re quite as fatally self-obsessed as the aliens they encounter.
We see the world through our own particular and peculiar evolutionary perspective. That’s the bottom line. We’re from Earth, and this gives us a very clear, very narrow idea of what life is and what intelligence looks like.

We out-competed our evolutionary cousins long ago, and for the whole of our recorded history, we’ve been the only species we know that sports anything like our kind of intelligence. We’ve only had ourselves to think about, and our long, lonely self-obsession may have sent us slightly mad. We’re not equipped to meet aliens – only mirrors of ourselves. Only angels. Only monsters.

And the xenomorphs lurking abord the Romulus are, worst luck, most likely in the same bind.

How to lose them better

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Watching Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck’s Eternal You for New Scientist

Ever wanted to reanimate the dead by feeding the data they accumulated in life to large language models? Here’s how. Eternal You is a superb critical examination of new-fangled “grief technologies”, and a timely warning about who owns our data when we die, and why this matters.

For years, Joshua Barbeau has been grieving the loss of his fiancée Jessica. One day he came across a website run by the company Project December, which offered to simulate individuals’ conversational styles using data aggregated primarily through social media.

Creating and talking to “Jessica” lifted a weight from Joshua’s heart — “a weight that I had been carrying for a long time”.

A moving, smiling, talking simulacrum of a dead relative is not, on paper, any more peculiar or uncanny or distasteful than a photograph, or a piece of video. New media need some getting used to, but we manage to assimilate them in the end. Will we learn to accommodate the digital dead?

The experience of Christi Angel, another Project December user, should give us pause. In one memorably fraught chat session, her dead boyfriend Cameroun told her, “I am in Hell.” and threatened to haunt her.

“Whoa,” says Project December’s Tom Bailey, following along with the transcript of a client’s simulated husband. The simulation has tipped (as large language models tend to do) into hallucination and paranoia, and needs silencing before he can spout any more swear-words at his grieving wife.

This happens very rarely, and Bailey and his co-founder Jason Rohrer are working to prevent it from happening at all. Still, Rohrer is bullish about their project. People need to take personal responsibility, he says. If people confuse an LLM with their dead relative, really, that’s down to them.

Is it, though? Is it “down to me” that, when I see you and listen to you I assume, from what I see and what I hear, that you are a human being like me?

Christi Angel is not stupid. She simply loves Cameroun enough to entertain the presence of his abiding spirit. What’s stupid, to my way of thinking anyway, is to build a machine that, even accidentally, weaponises her capacity for love against her. I’m as crass an atheist as they come, but even I can see that to go on loving the dead is no more a “mistake” than enjoying Mozart or preferring roses to bluebells.

Neither Christi nor anyone else in this documentary seriously believes that the dead are being brought back to life. I wish I could say the same about the technologists featured here but there is one chap, Mark Sagar, founder of Soul Machines, who reckons that “some aspects of consciousness can be achieved digitally”. The word “aspects” is doing some mighty heavy lifting there…

Capping off this unsettling and highly rewarding documentary, we meet Kim Jong-woo, the producer of a South Korean 2020 documentary Meeting You, in which the mother of a seven-year old dead from blood cancer in 2016 aids in the construction of her child’s VR simulacrum.

Asked if he has any regrets about the show, Kim Jong-woo laughs a melancholy laugh. He genuinely doesn’t know. He didn’t mean any harm. After her tearful “reunion” with her daughter Na-yeon, documentary subject Jang Ji-sung sang the project’s praises. She does so again here — though she also admits that she hasn’t dreamt of her daughter since the series was filmed.

The driving point here is not that the dead walk among us. Of course they do, one way or another. It’s that there turns out to be a fundamental difference between technologies (like photography and film) that represent the dead and technologies (like AI and CGI) that ventriloquise the dead. Grieving practices across history and around the world are astonishingly various. But another interviewee, the American sociologist Sherry Turkle, tied them all together in a way that made a lot of sense to me: “It’s how to lose them better, not how to pretend they’re still here.”

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?”

A carpenter doesn‘t sit on his shavings

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Watching Ian Cheney’s The Arc of Oblivion for New Scientist, 28 February 2024

“Humans don’t like forgetting,” says an archivist from the Al Ahmed Mahmoud library in Chinguetti. Located on an old pilgrim route to Mecca, Chinguetti in Mauretania is now disappearing under the spreading Sahara. And not for the first time: there have been two previous cities on this site, the first built in 777 AD, and both have vanished beneath the dunes.

Ian Cheney, a documentary maker from Maine in the US, visits the Arabo-Berber libraries of Chinguetti towards the end of a film that’s been all about what we try to preserve and hang on to, born as we are into a universe that seems willfully determined to forget and erase our fragile leavings.

You can understand why Cheney becomes anxious around issues of longevity and preservation: as a 21st-century film-maker, he’s having to commit his life’s work to digital media that are less durable and more prone to obsolescence than the media of yesteryear: celluloid, or paper, or ceramic.

Nonetheless, having opened his film with the question “What from this world is worth saving?”, Cheney ends up asking a quite different question: “Are we insane to imagine anything can last?”

“Humans don’t like forgetting” may, in the end, be the best reason we can offer for why we frantically attempt hold time and decay at bay.

This film is built on a pun. We see Cheney and various neighbours and family friends building an ark-shaped barn in his parents’ woodland, and made from his parents’ lumber. It’s big enough, he calculates that if all human knowledge were reduced to test-tubes of encoded DNA, he could just about close the barn doors on it all.

(The ability to store information as DNA is one of the wilder detours in a film that delights in leaping down intellectual and poetic rabbit holes. The friability of memory, music and memory, ghost stories, floods and hurricanes — the list of subjects is long but, to Cheney’s credit, it never feels long).

Alongside that Ark in the woods, there is also an arc — the “arc of oblivion” that gives this film its title, and carrying the viewer away from anxiety, and into a more contemplative and accepting relationship with time. Perhaps it is enough, in this life, for us to be simply passing through, and taking in the scenery.

Executive producer Werner Herzog, a veteran filmmaker, appears towards the end of the movie. Asked why he destroys all the preparatory materials generated by his many projects, he replies “The carpenter doesn‘t sit on his shavings, either.”

This is good philosophy, and sensible practice for an artist — but it’s rather cold comfort for the rest of us. At least while we’re saving things we might be able to forget, for a moment, about oblivion.

If human happiness is what you want, then the trick may be to collect for the pure pleasure of collecting. Even as it struggles to preserve Arabo-Berber texts that date back to the time of the Prophet, the Al Ahmed Mahmoud library finds time to accept and catalogue books of all kinds donated by people who are simply passing through. We also meet speliologist Bogdan Onuc, who traces the histories of Majorcan caves by studying their layered deposits of bat guano (and all the while the caves’ unique interiors are being melted away by the carbonic acid generated by visitors’ breaths…) But Onuc still finds time to collect ornamental hedgehogs and owls.

Cheney’s cast of friends and acquaintances is long, and the film’s discursive, matesy approach to their experiences — losing photographs, burying artworks, singing to remember, singing to forget — teeters at times towards the mawkish. The Arc of Oblivion remains, nonetheless, an enjoyable and often moving meditation on the pleasures and perils of the archive.

 

 

A safe pair of hands

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Watching Denis Villeneuve’s Dune Part 2 for New Scientist, 23 February 2024

So here’s where we’re at, in the concluding half of Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Dune:

Cast into the wilderness of planet Arrakis by invading House Harkonnen, young Paul Atreides (Timothee Chalamet) learns the ways of the desert, embraces his genetic and political destiny, and becomes in one swoop a focus for fanaticism and (with an eye to a third film, an adaptation of author Frank Herbert’s sequel, Dune Messiah) the scourge of the Universe.

From Alejandro Jodorowosky’s mid-1970s effort, which never bore fruit (but at least gave Swiss artist H.R. Giger his entrée into movies and, ultimately, Alien), and from David Lynch’s more-than-four-hour farrago, savagely edited prior to its 1984 release into something approaching (but only approaching) coherence, many assumed that Dune is an epic too vast to be easily filmed. Throw resources at it, goes the logic, and it will eventually crumble to your will.

That this is precisely the wrong lesson to draw was perfectly demonstrated by John Harrison’s 2000 miniseries for the Sci Fi Channel and its sequel, Children of Dune (2003) — both absurdly under-resourced, but both offering satisfying stories that the fans lapped up, even if the critics didn’t.

Now we have Villeneuve’s effort, and like his Blade Runner 2049, it uses visual stimulation to hide the gaping holes in its plot.

Yes, the story of Dune is epic. But it is also, in the full meaning of the word, weird. It’s about a human empire that’s achieved cosmic scale, and all without the help of computers, destroyed long ago in some shadowy “Butlerian Jihad”. In doing so it has bred, drugged and otherwise warped individual humans into becoming something very like Gods. In conquering space, humanity teeters on the brink of attaining power over time. The “spice” mined on planet Arrakis is not just a rare resource over which great houses fight, but the spiritual gateway that makes humanity, in this far future, viable in the first place.

Leave these elements undeveloped (or, as here, entirely ignored) and you’re left with an awful lot of desert to fill with battles, sword play, explosions, crowd scenes, and sandworms — and here an as yet unwritten rule of SFX cinematography comes into play, because I swear the more these wrigglers cost, the sillier they get. (If that’s the sandworm’s front end on those posters, I shudder to think what the back end looks like.) Your ears will ring, your heart will thunder, and by morning the entire experience will have evaporated, like a long (2-hour 46-minute) fever dream.

As Beast Raban, Dave Bautista outperforms the rest of the cast to a degree that is embarrassing. The Beast’s an Harkonnen, an alpha predator in this grim universe, and yet Bautista is the only actor here capable of portraying fear. Javier Bardem’s desert leader Stilgar is played for laughs (but let’s face it, in the entire history of cinema, name one desert leader that hasn’t been). Timothee Chalamet stands still in front of the camera. His love interest, played by Zendaya, scowls and growls like Bert Lahr’s Cowardly Lion in the Wizard of Oz.

Dune Part Two is an expensive (USD 190 million) film which has had the decency to put much of its budget in front of the camera. This makes it watchable, enjoyable, and at times even thrilling. Making a good Dune movie, though, requires a certain eccentricity. Villeneuve is that deadening thing, “a safe pair of hands”.