Alien Zone 2: The Spaces of Science Fiction Cinema
In his poem "Ozymandias," Percy Bysshe Shelley imagined discovering a stone torso from millennia past and reading the (ironic) inscription, "Look on me, ye mighty, and dread." According to most of the writers in this probing collection of essays, each generation gets hooked on the utopian and dystopian visions of the future for the same reason--because they offer the chilling insight that our worldisthe fragments of futures to come. Since Georges Melies'sVoyage to the Moon(1902), science fiction movies have speculated about what life in other places and times would be like. Under editor Annette Kuhn's direction, the contributors toAlien Zone 2have taken it upon themselves to think out loud about how "space" works in sci-fi movies likeBrazil,Blade Runner,Total Recall,Metropolis, and theAlienseries. The way these films structure cities, conceptualize culture, and imagine psyches generally falls, it turns out, into a category that UCLA professor Vivian Sobchak calls "future noir," featuring terrifying visions of cities in which a faceless multinational power sits atop thrillingly disenfranchised lumps of humanity. Distressing as this scenario sounds, most of the writers take it as an opportunity to reinvigorate our sense of the possibilities of the present, whether political, aesthetic, or otherwise. Writing about race, women, cyborgs, or consumer-culture, they key in on the genius in these movies that has at once invented a three-dimensional world and performed a kind of radical keratotomy on our own vision of things. Some academic jargon in the collection may be off-putting, but razor-sharp insights are here in abundance.--Lyall Bush