Last week there must have been 101 memes featured on your daily scroll down Facebook relating to the date (October 21, 2015) Back to the Future II took us to in 1989. ‘So, this is how we are meant to look in 2015’ was the implied joke in most of those memes. The film, however, made some predictions that came true, as well as depicting a future of sartorial chaos.

It’s closer to chaos – we’ve reviewed tech ‘reality’ enough lately with the series Mr. Robot and films such as The Martian – that we will stay today with our review of some tech/sci-fi genre specific films. Movies that perhaps were never meant to be blockbusters, and were more likely always going to appeal to people more inclined to figure out the technology, and why it exists, than merely see it in action.

Artificial intelligence 

It would be hard to refute that the best of the AI genre films were made back when most folks working on AI now were just children. Those films being Ridley Scott’s 1982 Blade Runner and Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 ‘2001: A Space Odyssey. AI technology may have improved, but our depiction of it hasn’t.

We’ve already written about Alex Garland’s Ex Machina, which again poses the question that if the technology is too advanced the line between machine and human becomes blurred to a fault. An AI film that you may not have seen, which follows a very similar vein to the aforementioned movies, is The Machine (2014).

The Welsh sci-fi – in itself that’s unusual – much like Ex Machina features a hot, lovable cyborg that doesn’t want to believe she is not human. The problem for the British Ministry of Defense (MoD) is that the scientist who created her is too good. As well as growing fond of people she has a conscience, which isn’t ideal for tearing the arms off Chinese spies. Perhaps for the first time in AI movies a conundrum pops-up: we want them good, but not that good. The film gets under your skin at times, and is directed well in spite of some platitudes in the script. The gadgets in the movie also align with certain trends in present computer technology. Is it any better than past AI films? No, but it’s one to watch if the genre interests you.

Time travel 

Arguably one of the hardest films to understand ever made, this $7,000 budget time travel piece confounded the general public so much there are 1000s of digital pages out there that attempt to unravel it. If you’ve seen it, and you are still baffled, TimeOut put together an excellent analysis with not-so-easy-to-understand diagrams.

Primer (2007) is definitive proof that to make a brilliant movie you don’t need much money. You need a fabulous script writer, a bunch of good actors, and in this case some scientists that I am told know what they are talking about. If you haven’t seen Primer be prepared to watch it three times…and later concede that either something doesn’t work, or you, like me, are just not that bright.

Space time 

Interstellar might have opened our eyes on the big stage to interdimensional travel, although a few years before the grand epic there was a far more nightmarish sci-fi (Donnie Darko – 2001) that takes place not in space but American suburbia. A suburbia where all is not what it seems – is it ever? – and like Primer has led to multiple explanations of its intended meaning.

There are plenty of sites on the net relating to understanding Donnie Darko, but like most David Lynch films for instance, maybe at times it’s just better to go along with an unclear, non-linear narrative and enjoy the ride. It’s much more than a film about time travel and alternate realities, but also an acerbic American satire. Like American Beauty, or Magnolia, it unearths some dirt from under the middle class, middling, white-picket-fence family reality. On its initial release it didn’t do well at the box office, but later gained cult-status.  You also get to see Patrick Swayze being the best he ever was doing things you never thought he would do.

Virtual reality 

David Cronenberg’s 1999 film Xistenz (1999) like many of the Canadian director’s films is at times visually repulsive and vaguely sexually charged. The theme of Xistenz is a virtual reality gaming nightmare where two worlds meld a little too easily so it’s hard to tell which one you are in. Whether Cronenberg meant this as a warning about a consumer driven, fetishized gaming world is hard to tell, because as well as the film telling us VR gaming could potentially be hazardous to our health, it’s also full of over-the-top horror and slapstick moments that lighten it up. One of those moments includes a dog and a bone, and is very similar to a gruesome scene in David Lynch’s Wild at Heart.

How does the VR work? There’s not much of an explanation, only that bio-ports are implanted into humans and they are hooked up to a game, the greatest ($38 million) game ever made. The hook-up is a little bloody, a little sexually distracting; and when the body is lubed-up with what looks like WD-40 to secure a connection to the plug it seems like Cronenberg’s way of telling us we should be disgusted.

The players are never quite sure when the game has ended, which has been the concern of many critics not enamored with VR and its future. After watching the film you might ask yourself if you’d join the game given the opportunity. And the answer would probably be yes, even though you’ve clearly been warned. I’d pop a hole into my spine right now to see that reality, and maybe that was the director’s point. No exegesis is needed for Xistenz, because you’ll never figure out exactly what happened.

Perpetual motion and non-starters

Although the film Snowpiercer was critically acclaimed and did well at the box office, it did seem to float under the radar somewhat. While movies such as The Martian or Interstellar are engraved into the public’s conscience through pervasive marketing, Snowpiercer could have be in and out of theaters without being noticed. This is a pity because it’s a beautifully realized piece of art, always original, and culturally relevant. The Weinstein Company wanted (didn’t succeed) to chop 20 minutes off the film for American release (and trust me you shouldn’t miss a moment) and it was only released in 8 theaters throughout the entire US.

Cinematically it’s captivating, but it’s also a profound statement about the way we live. The film is about a train, a self-contained machine that uses perpetual motion to carry the last people on earth around a great track after the apocalypse. The lowest of the occupants grind it out at the back of the train living in squalor and working like chimney sweeps, and the front contains the one percent of very rich people living with the technocrats. The middle is kind of empty, though faceless soldiers lurk there in order to prevent the low-lifes from seeing the other end. The journey through the train is at times mind-blowing, with each compartment showing us a state of peculiar privilege or downright decadence…and Tilda Swinton employed to stop the march forward by the proles plays one of the best villains ever created in film.

It’s hard to say just how politically motivated the film was, and whether that affected its US release. Its sentiments seem Marxist, yet the drive to dethrone the system looks like something from a comic book X-rated horror. It’s very similar to the films of Terry Gilliam, stylistically, but also because at the heart of the violence love wrestles to get to the surface. If there’s anything confounding about Snowpiercer it’s not the technology used, but how many metaphors you can draw from it. And as I said, it’s equally confounding that a critically acclaimed movie that did very well in Europe and Asia, with a well-known cast, should get silenced in the US. Doing so couldn’t have even been financially beneficial.

According to the Boston Globe Weinstein wanted to cut the film (my favorite of 2014) because it would be too difficult for some Americans to understand. The Globe writes that the Weinstein Company believed the, “film wouldn’t be understood by audiences in Iowa and Oklahoma.” This is somewhat of an insult to middle America, because it’s not hard to understand at all. The presidential debate is far more of a brain tax, and I bet they get that in Iowa. It’s a visual masterpiece that uses class struggle in the future to make us realize such a thing exists today. While utterly untransformative, product-placing, inane bling blockbusters such as Transformers get wide release, meaningful science fiction gets the cold shoulder. That in itself tells you there is something wrong with the system.

As for the ‘eternal machine’ in the train, we are never told how it works exactly. It breaks anyway; nothing is eternal.

Photo credit: Snowpiercer official