Mark.Kermode's.Secrets.Of.Cinema.S01e04.[Science.Fiction]
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00:00The year is 2019. Or maybe it's 2049. We're on a post-apocalyptic Earth ravaged by nuclear
00:27war or in a galaxy far, far away. I'll be travelling across time and space to discover
00:35what makes the perfect science fiction movie. I'll need a time machine and a spaceship complete
00:42with a homicidal computer. I'll land on strange planets where I'll have close encounters with
00:51terrifying aliens and friendly robots. But when I finally make it back home, will I discover that
01:00mankind's obsession with technology has gone too far, leaving a world conquered by machines where
01:06it's impossible to tell who's a cyborg and who's an alien. In this series, I've been looking at
01:12some of cinema's most enduring genres from the rom-com to the horror film. I'm exploring the
01:17conventions which underwrite the movies we love the most, and examining the techniques filmmakers
01:23use to keep us enthralled. And tonight, it's the turn of the most visionary of all genres.
01:29Science fiction, where the future is whatever we make it.
01:36I've seen things you people wouldn't believe.
01:51Science fiction movies take us to places that terrify and excite us. And from Metropolis to
01:58The Matrix, from B-movies to blockbusters, we keep coming back for more. Why? Well,
02:04for filmmakers, science fiction gives the imagination free reign. They can take the
02:09question, what if, and run with it until their own ideas or budgets run out. They can create
02:15new worlds or visions of the future. And if the technology isn't there to bring it to life,
02:20well, they invent new technology. So it's not surprising that science fiction films are full
02:28of scientists inventing ways to go places and see things people wouldn't believe.
02:36In fact, from its outset, cinema has been intimately bound to science fiction.
02:41In 1895, a British cinema pioneer named Robert Paul met with H.G. Wells and suggested a
02:46partnership in a new form of entertainment inspired by his recently published novel,
02:51The Time Machine. Paul had come up with the idea of creating a theme park ride-style contraption,
02:56not unlike a modern flight simulator, which would create the impression of being transported
03:01through time and space. One of the ways he would do this was through the projection of
03:05kinetoscope films. In the end, Paul never got further than applying for a patent,
03:11but you can get an idea of what his device may have looked like from George Powell's 1960
03:16adaptation of Wells' novel. Notice how much that spinning wheel looks like the reels of a film
03:22projector. Powell uses cinematic tricks to propel his hero into the future, all from the comfort of
03:28his seat. Speeded up images of the sky and stop-motion animation make the world move faster.
03:36The seasons change, the trees change, even fashion changes before our very eyes as cinema
03:42transports us through time. And note also how quickly the experiment starts to become slightly
03:48scary, to show us images of destruction and darkness, of fire and danger, as the machine
03:54seems to run away with itself, and with us. The irony, of course, is that while science fiction
04:01is forever exploring our fears and fantasies about technology, no other genre is quite so
04:06dependent on the technology of cinema. Whether it's time travel or space travel, great science
04:12fiction cinema is all about rendering the incredible credible. Filmmakers have deployed
04:17and developed a whole range of tools to achieve this, from set design, to sound, to visual effects.
04:26These tools enable them to explore profound ideas about our identity, values and society,
04:32using the unfamiliar to examine the familiar. Ultimately they take us to new worlds to make us
04:39look at ourselves, and they do this by returning to a number of key themes that range across time
04:47and space. Let's look at them in more detail.
04:55Two years before George Powell's adaptation of The Time Machine was made,
04:59a film which would have a big impact on time travel movies was released.
05:07Alfred Hitchcock's 1958 masterpiece Vertigo may not seem like a time travel movie.
05:12It's a suspenseful melodrama about James Stewart's detective
05:16trying to mould Kim Novak's character into the image of his lost love.
05:20The dark tower and the tawdry redhead that he tried to remake in her image.
05:24I need you to be mad at me for a while.
05:27There isn't a time machine in sight, but this is a film all about desire,
05:31regret and trying to recapture and reconfigure the past.
05:35Somewhere in here I was born, and there I died. It was only a moment for you. You don't notice.
05:52Midway through the film Hitchcock uses the image of a cross section of a tree to raise the idea
05:57that time and the beginnings and endings of life may not be linear. Now let's jump forward 37 years
06:05to 1995 and Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys. Bruce Willis plays a man sent back in time to save
06:12the future. Gilliam's film wears its homages to Hitchcock on its sleeve from its blonde disguises
06:19and snatches of Bernard Herman's score to this scene in which the protagonists actually watch
06:24and discuss a key moment from Vertigo.
06:27Now let's travel back in time to 1962.
06:55Here's that cross section of tree again.
07:06This is Chris Marker's La Jetée, the film upon which 12 Monkeys was based.
07:12It's an experimental French production made up almost entirely of black and white photographs.
07:18It tells the story of a prisoner in post-World War III Paris
07:22who's sent back in time to save the future and it takes inspiration from Hitchcock.
07:33La Jetée director Chris Marker was a huge fan of Vertigo. He said it wasn't about space and
07:39falling but about the vertigo of time. Hitchcock's film and its themes of regret, desire and a man's
07:46attempt to control time seep into La Jetée and in turn these themes drive the narrative of 12
07:52Monkeys, a big budget remake of La Jetée which has become its own cinematic time machine
07:57looking backward to the past and spiraling forward to the future.
08:17You can find echoes of La Jetée scattered throughout sci-fi cinema.
08:33Take James Cameron's 1984 hit The Terminator.
08:46Cyborg Arnie's mission to kill Sarah Connor is a nightmare version of La Jetée,
08:51going back in time and altering events not to save humanity but to destroy it.
08:58If time travel can be used to move or to scare us it's also rich in comedic potential. In 1985
09:05the highest grossing film of the year was a time-traveling sci-fi fantasy which spawned
09:09two blockbusting sequels, Robert Zemeckis' Back to the Future. In the first film Marty
09:15McFly accidentally ends up in 1955 where his task is not to change the future but to try to
09:21keep it the same by making sure his teenage parents get together so that he's born. Zemeckis built a
09:28commercial success by taking a science fiction foundation and adding elements of rom-com and
09:33adventure films plus an attention to detail that makes his past and future credible and fun.
09:40Time travel gives the Back to the Future movies their basic concept but it also allows these
09:45films to play with music, gadgets and fashion. Marty's futuristic self-tying Nike air shoes show
09:52the same kind of joy that George Pal showed with the time lapse of the mannequin in The Time Machine,
09:57the difference being that the makers of those flapper fashions in The Time Machine
10:01didn't have to pay for product placement to be seen in the future.
10:06What often trips up complex time travel films is confusion and the near impossibility of writing a
10:12storyline that makes sense. Obviously the time continuum has been disrupted creating this new
10:18temporal event sequence resulting in this alternate reality. English doc.
10:23In Back to the Future 2 Doc Brown tries to explain multiple timelines in a blackboard lecture. Prior
10:28to this point in time somewhere in the past the timeline skewed into this tangent creating an
10:35alternate 1985. It left most of the audience still puzzled while people who'd read pretty
10:40much any science fiction novel published since 1959 were impatiently thinking parallel alternate
10:46realities based on a point of divergence yes I know now get on with it. The huge commercial success
10:52of the Back to the Future trilogy perhaps proves that audiences don't have to understand the mind
10:57boggling complexities of time travel to enjoy a movie. But there's something about the very nature
11:03of cinema that makes it the perfect medium to explore this subject because as we saw earlier
11:09cinema itself is a time machine.
11:14In 2016's Arrival from a novella by Ted Chiang Amy Adams plays a linguist tasked with communicating
11:21with aliens who've arrived on earth. It's a film which like so many in the genre plays with the
11:25idea of memory and the inescapability of the future. But and this is a spoiler alert understanding
11:33their alien language also changes how she perceives the past present and future. Director
11:39Denis Villeneuve and screenwriter Eric Heisserer are very clever with their storytelling here.
11:48Look at the opening of the film. I used to think this was the beginning of your story.
11:54Taking its lead from Chiang's source Arrival starts with a monologue which questions the very
11:59notion of a linear beginning. Memory is a strange thing. It doesn't work like I thought it did.
12:08We are so bound by time. We see Louise's newborn baby a symbol of the beginning of life but it's
12:15only much later that we realize these images may not be memories but premonitions that the movie
12:20itself may be unspooling in reverse. There are some spectacular visual effects in Arrival but
12:29while George Powell pioneered visual trickery to move his audience back and forth in the time
12:33machine Villeneuve relies more on one of cinema's oldest and most basic tools
12:39editing to turn the conventions of flashbacks and flash forwards on their heads.
12:52Like Vertigo, La Jetée, Twelve Monkeys and so many other time travel movies before it
12:58Arrival questions the concept of a beginning and end and it asks one of the big what if
13:04questions that keep us coming back to science fiction. If you knew your future would you change it?
13:14Recent films like Arrival and Christopher Nolan's Interstellar have combined time travel
13:19and space travel to confront complex questions about how we experience the world.
13:24Nolan who has played with cinematic time in everything from Memento to Dunkirk
13:28even has characters aging at different rates on different planets in Interstellar
13:33as they learn that all time is relative. It's a down-to-earth lesson
13:37but to learn it we have to travel to strange new worlds.
13:41When Georges Méliès made Le Voyage dans la Lune in 1902 the idea of putting people in space was
13:47still pie in the sky but he took audiences into a new world of adventure in a way that only film
13:54could using weird and wonderful set design and cinematic tricks like spliced edits to
14:00create a new world of adventure.
14:11There was a time when science fiction was predominantly about space exploration.
14:19The days of Buck Rogers adventures with Flash Gordon flying around the galaxy and he's built
14:23in a shed spaceship. We often think of these movies as being led by Hollywood but it's worth
14:28remembering that Russia beat America in the race to put a man in space and there's a wealth of
14:33Soviet space travel movies which similarly outstripped their US counterparts often with
14:39overtly political overtones.
14:45In the 1924 short cartoon Interplanetary Revolution Red Army warrior Comrade Komintinov
14:50flies to Mars to vanquish the planet's capitalists. That same year saw the release of Aelita from the
14:57novel by Alexei Tolstoy which was one of the first feature films about space travel.
15:02An oddball trio traveled to the moon in a spaceship named Joseph Stalin in 1935's Cosmic
15:08Voyage on which a leading Soviet rocket scientist served as technical consultant.
15:22Perhaps the most influential Soviet science fiction director was Pavel Klyushantsev
15:28Perhaps the most influential Soviet science fiction director was Pavel Klyushantsev
15:32whose fans included George Lucas and Stanley Kubrick. His space epic Road to the Stars was
15:38made a decade before 2001 and it clearly served as an inspiration for Kubrick. Klyushantsev was
15:45a master of special effects and highly inventive. He suspended actors on wires like puppets to create
15:52zero gravity effects and he built revolving sets, a technique Kubrick went on to use in 2001.
16:042001 A Space Odyssey is also arguably closer in tone to many of its Soviet forerunners
16:10than to the American space opera tradition, dealing as it does with complex concepts about
16:15the evolution of mankind and its destiny in the stars. But with the Apollo mission set to put a
16:21man on the moon by the end of the decade, Kubrick could feel reality catching up with him. He wanted
16:272001 to look as believable as possible. This was partly achieved through painstaking visual effects.
16:35Detailed models were filmed with carefully selected and newly developed lenses to give
16:39the impression of scale. They're still remarkably convincing 50 years after the film was made.
16:45But Kubrick and writer Arthur C. Clarke were also imagining a near future of commercial space travel
16:51and along with a sense of wonder, they wanted their audience to feel that they really were
16:55just one step forward from the present. Kubrick approached numerous corporations
17:01like Pan Am and IBM for help to achieve that.
17:07Look at these scenes which show the space shuttle, the space shuttle, the space shuttle,
17:13Look at these scenes which cleverly combine the mundane with the literally out of this world.
17:18Hayward Floyd travels into space on a Pan Am shuttle.
17:26In the space station, which acts as a kind of airport, there's a Hilton hotel and a Howard
17:31Johnson's restaurant, brands familiar to Kubrick's earthbound audience. Elsewhere, a flight attendant
17:38walks around a ship with velcro shoes. It's at once routine and spectacular
17:43as she loops the loop to get to the pilot.
17:49But above all, it's the simple image of Dr Floyd asleep while his pen floats away
17:54that convinces us that we're looking at an era when space travel is commonplace.
17:59Throughout science fiction cinema, directors have worked with scientists to inject their films with
18:04authenticity. Fritz Lang consulted Willie Ley, a colleague of Nazi rocket scientist Wernher von
18:09Braun for Woman in the Moon. Scientists from NASA and colleagues of von Braun also worked on
18:15Kubrick's 2001. Danny Boyle enlisted Professor Boyle to work on Kubrick's 2001.
18:23Danny Boyle enlisted Professor Brian Cox as a specialist advisor on his underrated science
18:28fiction movie Sunshine, in which a team travel across space to deliver a bomb into the heart of the sun.
18:44For today's directors, working with scientists has become even more important.
18:48When Christopher Nolan made his mind-bending film Interstellar, he worked with theoretical physicist
18:53Kip Thorne, who had previously advised on the Carl Sagan-penned Contact to try to stay one
18:58step ahead of his audience. It's infinitely complex. They have access to infinite time and
19:04space, but they're not bound by anything. They can't find a specific place in time. They can't
19:11find a specific place in time. They can't communicate. As stories about space have evolved,
19:17so have the means of getting there, from the pointed rockets of the 1950s to the floating
19:22cathedrals of 2001 A Space Odyssey and close encounters of the third kind. These spaceships
19:29often mirror the preconceptions and scientific knowledge of the era in which the films were made.
19:35The iconic flying saucers of films such as Forbidden Planet reflect the UFO mania that
19:40emerged after sightings in the late 1940s. Psychoanalyst Carl Jung theorized that the
19:46circular shape of these UFOs suggested a protective sphere shape, which is present
19:51in many religions. He felt that UFO sightings were symptomatic of a time when people were
19:56looking for something to fill the void of God in a secular society. In fact, the first person
20:01to report a UFO said that the things were cigar-shaped but skipped like saucers thrown over
20:07a lake. Well, that got translated into flying saucers, and lo and behold, that's what people
20:12said they saw afterwards. If the name flying cigars had caught on, Jung might have looked
20:17to Freud for a rationale for their shape. Because they require the building of new worlds,
20:23science fiction movies have always been at the cutting edge. No other genre has pushed film
20:27technology further. George Lucas famously created his own special effects department,
20:34Industrial Light and Magic, in order to bring Star Wars to life.
20:42Spaceships were traditionally filmed by moving models in front of a camera while trying to light
20:46them so they didn't look tiny. In 2001, there'd been some use of a technique called motion control.
20:52This meant moving the camera, not the model. On Star Wars, the visionary special effects artist
20:58John Dykstra and his team developed new computerized motion control cameras, which allowed them to
21:03achieve unprecedented levels of speed and fluidity. It seemed as though cameramen had been sent into
21:09space in the same way that they were sent to Monument Valley to film the great western sequences.
21:21And in the vacuum of space, a spaceship is often the totality of our protagonist's environment,
21:26a place where all the drama unfolds. The spaceship is like a theatrical stage, and the way it's
21:32designed and filmed is crucial to the genre. With 2001, Stanley Kubrick was creating pure
21:41science fiction. His is a movie about big ideas and the science of space.
21:48In Alien, Ridley Scott was making a horror movie set in space,
21:52a project for which he prepared by re-watching the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
21:56Along with its endless industrial corridors and dank docking bays, the Nostromo boasts
22:05cavernous spaces in which chains hang from the ceiling and water drips in the darkness,
22:11recalling Leatherface's monstrous lair. In order to ensure that there was no crossover between the
22:17human and alien worlds, Scott employed two different designers to work on them independently.
22:23For the creature and its lair, Scott turned to artist H.R. Giger, whose biomechanical designs
22:29featured in the Necronomicon collection and became the film's design touchstone.
22:33The resulting creature looks part machine, part organic,
22:37wholly alien, as it picks off the crew one by one, trapped on their ship far away from hell.
22:47The poster for Alien famously warned that in space no one can hear you scream,
22:53and whether or not we might encounter monsters there,
22:55there's something primarily terrifying about that great expanse.
23:05For me, that fear is best expressed in exorcist author William Peter Blatty's psychological
23:10chiller The Ninth Configuration, in which an astronaut explains to his psychiatrist
23:15why he won't go to the moon, in the process explaining his central failure of faith.
23:23Sure, everyone dies.
23:27But I'm afraid to die alone, so far from home.
23:36And if there's no God, then that's really, really alone.
23:53Look at these shots from Silent Running and Gravity. They're filmed 40 years apart,
23:58but both shots dwarf their protagonist in the vastness of space.
24:02Only science fiction can pull out from the individual to that
24:06infinite wide. It's the perfect genre to explore the concept of loneliness.
24:11The novel Robinson Crusoe was written almost 300 years ago,
24:15and tells the story of a man stranded, seemingly alone, on a desert island.
24:19Since its publication, that figure of a lonely man surviving on
24:23just his wits and his thoughts has become a key myth in the movies.
24:28You can see traces of it in High Noon,
24:32in the film, and in the movie itself.
24:35Each generation of filmmakers has retold the Crusoe myth in space.
24:39In 1964, there was a literal translation, Robinson Crusoe on Mars.
24:43It may look dated compared to The Martian, but at their heart, both movies are making a drama
24:48out of the basic trope of a human traveling to the moon.
24:52The film is about a man who's lost his way, and he's trying to figure out how to get back to Earth.
24:56He's trying to figure out how to get back to Earth, and he's trying to figure out how to get back to Earth.
25:00At their heart, both movies are making a drama out of the basic trope of a human
25:04trying to stay alive on a distant planet.
25:08And placing someone alone in space takes the genre into philosophical, abstract areas,
25:13where outer space becomes inner space, and what's being explored is, in the end, the human mind.
25:21In his 1972 film Solaris, based on the novel by Stanislav Lem,
25:26Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky isn't interested in the spectacle of his space station.
25:31Instead, he concentrates on the characters inside it.
25:36A psychologist is sent into space to investigate why scientists orbiting a planet
25:40are sending strange messages back to Earth.
25:43He discovers that the planet can delve into the subconscious of humans,
25:47even recreating their dead loved ones.
25:50Here, the problem isn't just what we might encounter in space.
25:53It's the memories and emotions we carry with us wherever we go.
25:59More recently, Alfonso Cuaron's Gravity used 3D filming
26:03to capture the isolated, untethered experience of Sandra Bullock's stranded astronaut.
26:08I'll admit that I'm not normally a big fan of stereoscopy,
26:24but I think that Gravity is one of the very few films which it is worth seeing in 3D.
26:28You gotta admit one thing.
26:32Can't beat the view.
26:34Like Robert Paul's Time Machine theme park ride,
26:36Cuaron's movie is an immersive experience which transports the viewer through time and space.
26:42And unlike so many stereoscopic films,
26:44Gravity uses its 3D technology to help tell the psychological story of a solitary character,
26:50cast adrift in the vast expanse of space.
26:53What now?
26:58Gravity also cleverly employs sound design
27:01to balance an accurate depiction of space with a heightened sense of drama.
27:09Throughout his film, Cuaron uses realistic vibrations
27:12for the sounds that astronauts would hear.
27:21Brian, can you hear me?
27:22But other than that, it's only Stephen Price's musical score,
27:26not the sound effects that add drama.
27:29If you look at this scene of the shuttle being hit by debris,
27:32it's drastically different from a crash scene in an action movie set on Earth.
27:36Why?
27:37Well, you can't hear explosions or rocks smashing into metal.
27:41All you hear is the sonic booms of the dramatic music.
27:56So
28:08silence can be a powerful tool.
28:11In the most recent Star Wars film, The Last Jedi,
28:13the most striking moment occurs when director Rian Johnson
28:16cuts the sound dead during a moment of explosive impact.
28:27So
28:37but using silence to heighten drama isn't new.
28:40Kubrick was doing exactly the same thing nearly 50 years earlier.
28:57The fear of the unyielding emptiness of space is the opposite of the idea
29:01that we're not alone in the universe.
29:03That concept presents its own fears and fantasies.
29:15Throughout cinema's journey to the stars,
29:17there have been conflicting views about what awaits us out there.
29:22On the one hand, there's the happy fantasy of space opera,
29:25which portrays the great beyond as a colorful world of adventure.
29:29On the other hand, there's always the possibility of running into marauding aliens,
29:33whether it's the beasts of pitch black
29:38or the ever-evolving xenomorph of the Alien series.
29:44Sometimes we don't even need to go into space to face these dangers.
29:47The threat comes to us.
29:49Welcome to Earth.
29:51Like the shape-shifting entity of the Thing
29:54or the little green gribblies of Mars Attacks,
29:58usually with the nuclear firepower to blow up Hollywood's favorite landmarks.
30:05And then there are the invaders who come in peace,
30:08like Michael Rennie's Klaatu in The Day the Earth Stood Still,
30:11sent from afar to stop mankind from destroying its own world.
30:14Your choice is simple.
30:17Join us and live in peace
30:20or pursue your present course and face obliteration.
30:25So why are the movies obsessed by aliens?
30:28Science fiction movie makers use aliens to examine our own world,
30:32to look at humanity with fresh eyes and to explore themes of alienation.
30:36Each generation of movie makers have given us a new perspective.
30:40In 1956, Invasion of the Body Snatchers used the creeping takeover of humans
30:45to reflect McCarthy-ite paranoia.
30:55In the 60s, Planet of the Apes became an apocalyptic metaphor
30:59for social upheaval and self-destruction,
31:01the twist being that what appears to be a human being
31:04is actually an alien being.
31:06And in the 70s, there's a new kind of apocalyptic metaphor
31:09for social upheaval and self-destruction,
31:12the twist being that what appears to be an alien planet
31:15actually turns out to be our own.
31:18God damn you all to hell!
31:23More recently, Steven Spielberg reimagined H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds
31:28with scenes which deliberately evoke the horrors of 9-11.
31:32We've got it the worst, that's what I heard.
31:34The US mostly, South America and Asia some.
31:37There's nothing going on in Europe.
31:38Europe got the worst of it, that's what everybody's saying.
31:41Completely wiped out some of it.
31:43Drawing inspiration from contemporary events,
31:45Spielberg's films have been a great source of inspiration
31:49Drawing inspiration from contemporary events
31:52lent these potentially outlandish stories credibility and potency.
31:58And often, there's more similarity between us and our alien visitors
32:02than we might care to imagine.
32:04Take a look at this 1984 film from John Sayles,
32:07The Brother From Another Planet.
32:11Joe Morton plays the unnamed brother,
32:13an alien fleeing enslavement on a distant planet
32:16who finds himself on Earth.
32:18Although it's broadly a comedy fantasy,
32:21Brother From Another Planet uses a sci-fi setup
32:23to talk about serious down-to-earth issues of racism.
32:27In a museum, the brother uses an illustration of an African man
32:31running away from slave traders
32:32to explain his own plight to a young boy.
32:37And throughout, he's pursued by two men in black,
32:40white extraterrestrials,
32:41whose job it is to catch him and return him to slavery.
32:46What do you want with him?
32:48Immigration.
32:50Immigration? Give me a break.
32:5625 years later, director Neil Blomkamp
32:58would approach the alien racism theme
33:00using very different cinematic tools.
33:04District 9 adopts familiar science fiction tropes.
33:09Aliens, future technology, body horror and allegory.
33:15But it mixes them with the conventions of documentary.
33:18Vox Pops, expert interviews, news footage.
33:24And an observational camera team.
33:37Set in South Africa, it follows the story of stranded extraterrestrials
33:41who become earthbound refugees, literally alienated by humans.
33:46Prior to District 9,
33:47Blomkamp had made a short on a similar subject, Alive in Joburg.
33:51In this film, he'd recorded Vox Pops with members of the public,
33:54asking them how they felt about immigrant Nigerians.
33:57He then used those interviews in the context of an alien migration.
34:12We're seeing the convoy stop and the operation is about to begin.
34:16By using documentary techniques,
34:18Blomkamp made this alien arrival, and our reaction to it, feel real.
34:25Blomkamp was drawing on techniques developed by the pioneering
34:281960s British filmmaker Peter Watkins,
34:31whose mock documentary about a nuclear attack, The War Game,
34:35was deemed so shockingly realistic that the BBC refused to show it.
34:40And Watkins himself was, of course,
34:41following in the footsteps of Orson Welles,
34:44whose celebrated 1938 adaptation of The War of the Worlds
34:48took the form of a fake radio newscast.
34:56But to see Earth from an alien's perspective,
34:58filmmakers have used far more stylised techniques.
35:06Perhaps the most adventurous British science fiction movie of recent years
35:10is Jonathan Glazer's Under the Skin.
35:12It's a flawed yet fascinating film,
35:15a tale of an alien prowling the streets of Glasgow in search of raw flesh,
35:20which draws on many of the classic motifs of the genre
35:23whilst forging its own bold new pathways.
35:28Under the Skin, which stars Scarlett Johansson
35:30in her most adventurous role,
35:32opens with images that echo Kubrick's 2001.
35:37First come what look like aligning planets.
35:42From here, we move to an image of an eye,
35:46a constructed gaze, human on the outside, alien on the inside,
35:50inner space from outer space.
35:55With a brilliant blend of abstraction and precision,
35:57this sequence establishes a tension between the intergalactic and the earthly
36:01that underwrites the subsequent narrative.
36:05Thematically, Glazer's Under the Skin also owes a weighty debt
36:09to The Man Who Fell to Earth,
36:11Nick Rogue's 1976 adaptation of Walter Tevis's novel.
36:15David Bowie plays an alien who crosses the galaxy in search of a drink,
36:20only to wind up an earthbound drunk.
36:23Both Bowie and Johansson's aliens inhabit human form
36:27and, by doing so, become seduced or weakened,
36:30with the mysteries of sex and sympathy
36:33being contributing factors to their demise.
36:36And both have a key sequence in which they shed their human disguise
36:40to reveal their inner alien.
36:46The central idea which joins these two films
36:48is one which recurs throughout science fiction,
36:50that we are the alien and vice versa.
37:00Here, aliens aren't just on the receiving end of human attitudes like racism,
37:04but they're directly experiencing human emotions and frailties.
37:09Isolated from the rest of their kind,
37:11they too have become Robinson Crusoe figures.
37:14But science fiction's ability to recognise the human in the inhuman
37:18doesn't stop at aliens.
37:31Some of science fiction's most memorable characters
37:33are machines with very human qualities.
37:36Robot companions that help bring comedy or heart into the genre.
37:41Think of robots like Robbie in Forbidden Planet.
37:45Or C-3PO and R2-D2 in Star Wars.
37:48These are psychic figures that could appear in any genre.
37:51They can provide comic interplay with their human owners
37:54and embody human character types,
37:56such as the Fussy Butler or Slapstick Clown.
38:00Blurring the line between man and machine
38:01is crucial to science fiction storytelling,
38:04so moviemakers have to find powerful ways to give machines human qualities.
38:11For a masterclass in humanising machines,
38:14you need look no further than one of my favourite science fiction films,
38:17Silent Running.
38:19In this dystopian classic directed by Doug Trumbull,
38:22who did special effects for 2001,
38:25Bruce Dern plays Lowell Freeman,
38:27caretaker of the last of the Earth's forests,
38:29which are now floating around space in giant geodesic domes.
38:43Trumbull said that he made the unashamedly sentimental Silent Running
38:46as a response to the inhuman sterility of 2001,
38:50a film in which the most sympathetic character is a homicidal computer.
38:55In Silent Running, Trumbull set his hero alone in space
38:58with only three worker drones for company.
39:01The drones are robots who, during the course of the movie,
39:04come to exhibit strangely human characteristics,
39:07or perhaps to reflect the human characteristics
39:10which Freeman projects onto them.
39:14Crucially, the drones in Trumbull's film don't look like human beings.
39:18They're very short, they have no faces,
39:20they have only two limbs and they're unable to speak.
39:24Yet somehow Trumbull makes us think of them as children,
39:27as innocent characters in whom we can invest our emotions.
39:32One of the ways Trumbull gives the drones human characteristics
39:35is by using actors, rather than visual or mechanical effects,
39:39to bring them to life.
39:41Inside each of the drone costumes is a performer walking on their hands.
39:45The actors playing the drones convey their characters' inner lives
39:48through motion, through tiny gestures which signal great things.
39:53Trumbull had been inspired to seek out amputees to play the roles
39:56after seeing the athletic Johnny Eck
39:58walking on his hands in Todd Browning's Freaks.
40:01That's the gag I told you about.
40:02But he also looked to the silent cinema of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin
40:06to see how discreet physical gestures can convey emotions.
40:18Watch as one of the drones reaches out to tap the other
40:21before Freeman notices.
40:23See, you're already here.
40:24I bet you wonder why I gathered you here, haven't you, huh?
40:28It's a wonderful moment and it tells us so much about the drones' lives,
40:32not least that they have an inner life beyond Freeman's own projections.
40:36The gesture is tender and conspiratorial and profoundly human.
40:41For me, it's one of the most subtly affecting moments
40:44of science-fiction cinema.
40:47The final moments of Silent Running are utterly heartbreaking.
40:52A drone alone in the last geodesic dome,
40:54cast into space like a message in a bottle,
40:57tending to the last of the Earth's plants with a child's watering can.
41:21Silent Running has had a huge impact on later films,
41:24most notably Pixar's WALL-E.
41:27WALL-E takes both visual and plot inspiration from Trumbull's film,
41:31particularly in its strong environmentalist themes.
41:38Like the drones in Silent Running,
41:40WALL-E's human qualities are conveyed through movement.
41:43The first half of the movie plays almost like a silent film.
41:51SILENT RUNNING PLAYS
41:55Innocent, ever helpful,
41:57these box-like little robot companions feel unthreatening.
42:01But what happens when our creations begin to look more like us,
42:06or even think like us?
42:15The fear of what we've created is a convention
42:18as old as the science-fiction genre itself.
42:21It's there in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein,
42:23long an inspiration for sci-fi filmmakers.
42:26The prototypical science-fiction film Metropolis
42:29features a robot that takes on a human appearance
42:32with disturbing consequences.
42:36Robots and artificial intelligence technologies
42:39represent a race potentially more advanced than ours,
42:42yet unlike aliens, they're something we've created ourselves,
42:45but that could advance beyond us.
42:48A recent interesting example is Ava in Ex Machina,
42:51Alex Garland's chilling movie about an artificial being
42:54who outwits her creator to escape into the world.
42:58In the course of the movie,
42:59she uses her sexuality to draw a young programmer into her plot.
43:03In a way, she's a sort of femme fatale from a film noir in robot form.
43:12Robots, or more specifically cyborgs, who are part human, part machine,
43:16allow movie makers to examine human characteristics,
43:19like empathy and sexuality.
43:23Both Ex Machina and Ridley Scott's Blade Runner
43:26are based on the premise that humans and machines could become so similar
43:30that they might be hard to tell apart.
43:32Both have a central character
43:34who tests the human-like attributes of an android,
43:37and in doing so, both are forced to confront their own humanity,
43:41or lack of it.
43:42Mamoru Oshii's influential Japanese animation Ghost in the Shell
43:46is another movie which uses machines to question human identity.
43:50Recently the subject of a controversial live-action remake,
43:53it focuses on a character struggling with her identity.
44:00Ghost in the Shell is set in a future where the human body can be augmented
44:04or even completely replaced with cybernetic parts.
44:07The look of Ghost in the Shell was the inspiration behind The Matrix.
44:12In creating The Matrix, the Wachowskis conjured images
44:15that often resemble live-action analogues of Japanese anime,
44:19pushing the boundaries of new digital effects
44:21to mimic the forms of a still influential classic.
44:25The Matrix also draws on themes of cybernetic networks
44:28and technologically modified humans,
44:31which are often seen in films like Ghost in the Shell.
44:33The advent of computers and the subsequent accumulation of incalculable data
44:38has given rise to a new system of memory and thought,
44:41parallel to your own.
44:43Humanity has underestimated the consequences of computerization.
44:46Nonsense!
44:47This babble offers no proof at all that you're a living, thinking life-form.
44:52Mamoru Oshii explained that the blurred distinction between man and machine
44:55has become a natural part of the human experience.
44:58It's a natural part of the human experience,
45:00Oshii explained that the blurred distinction between man and machine
45:03has become a theme in Japanese culture,
45:05because nowadays technology is proven to be the thing that's actually changing people.
45:12And where does the newborn go from here?
45:16The net is vast and infinite.
45:21Transhumanism, the idea of evolving into something not human or beyond human,
45:26perhaps even a disembodied intelligence,
45:29features in 2001,
45:30but it's recently been revived in films like Lucy and the X-Men series.
45:34It's a trope I'd expect to see much more of in the future.
45:39But the desire to become human is a far more familiar theme.
45:43Epitomized by Pinocchio,
45:45this thread, which occurs time and again throughout the history of science fiction,
45:49can be seen most clearly in films like Steven Spielberg's AI,
45:53which Stanley Kubrick had intended to be his return to sci-fi after 2001.
45:59A sentimental tale which, like Silent Running, tugs at the heartstrings,
46:03the movie sympathises entirely with the android child David,
46:07who dreams only of becoming a real boy.
46:24HE SIGHS
46:25LAUGHTER
46:29LAUGHTER
46:44However, there's also been a recent trend for movies
46:47which feature technology that's possible in the near future.
46:50As we all fall increasingly in love with technology in our real lives,
46:54science fiction movie makers are questioning our interaction with tech
46:58on the big screen.
47:01It's a theme which appears in Spike Jonze's Her,
47:04as well as Blade Runner 2049 and Michael Almereda's Marjorie Prime.
47:10Ultimately a human drama, Marjorie Prime centres around the idea
47:13that science can provide people with holograms of their dead loved ones.
47:18For Lois Smith's Marjorie, that means that her husband Walter is back
47:22in the form of John Hamm, at the age when they first met.
47:27The film raises questions about memory and misremembering
47:31in a similar way to Vertigo or La Jetée.
47:34There are only a few brief moments where Almereda uses visual effects
47:38to remind us that John Hamm is a hologram.
47:41Other than that, the hologram is disconcertingly real.
47:44Stay with me a while.
47:45As is our attitude towards it.
47:49I don't want to get you in trouble.
47:51You'll learn I like that.
47:54I told you.
47:57What would you like to talk about now?
48:01We don't have to talk, we can just sit.
48:04Films like Marjorie Prime and Her feel real because they're set in the near future.
48:09They feature attitudes to technology that aren't so different from our own.
48:14Kevin and I had somebody we wanted you to meet,
48:17so we took it upon ourselves to set you up on a date with her.
48:21Next Saturday, she's fun and beautiful, so don't back out.
48:25Here's her email.
48:26Wow, this woman is gorgeous.
48:30She went to Harvard, she graduated magna cum laude in computer science,
48:33and she was on The Lampoon.
48:34So that means she's funny and she's brainy.
48:39Ah, she's back.
48:40These aren't the out-of-this-world backdrops of space.
48:44This isn't using the unfamiliar to examine the familiar,
48:47but using the tangibly familiar to question what's just around the corner.
48:56In 1927, HG Wells wrote a film review for The New York Times.
49:01He called the film the silliest he had ever seen,
49:04saying, I do not believe it would be possible to make one sillier.
49:09The film was Fritz Lang's Metropolis.
49:12Now, while it might be HG Wells' time machine that takes us to the future,
49:16though most of us would probably prefer to go in a DeLorean,
49:19the future we see when we get there is likely to be influenced by Fritz Lang.
49:26Metropolis is a silent German expressionist film set in the 21st century.
49:32In the titular city, an underclass works in a subterranean dystopia,
49:36while the rich live in a gleaming landscape of skyscrapers.
49:40At record-breaking expense, Lang created a vision of the future
49:44that took elements of Weimar Berlin and Jazz Age New York
49:47and transformed them using ambitious production design and cutting-edge effects,
49:53such as the innovative Schoeften process,
49:55which used mirrors to combine live-action shots with models and painted backgrounds.
50:01Lang's futuristic city had an immediate impact on other films.
50:05The 1930 Hollywood picture Just Imagine echoed the look of Metropolis.
50:11It's set in 1980, when people have numbers instead of names,
50:15but these dystopian ideas are played out in the form of musical comedy.
50:28When Jean-Luc Godard directed Alphaville in the mid-'60s,
50:31he took a radically different approach
50:33to the depiction of an Orwellian future city.
50:37Eschewing elaborate sets and designs,
50:39he simply shot his film on the streets of Paris,
50:42amid drab buildings often lit in noirish shadow.
50:48But it was in 1982 that the marriage of science fiction and film noir
50:52achieved its ultimate expression,
50:54in a movie that's come to equal Metropolis
50:56in its impact on how we imagine the future.
51:02That film, of course, is Ridley Scott's Blade Runner.
51:05It relies on the conventions of film noir.
51:08A world-weary detective, a femme fatale,
51:11figures silhouetted through blinds and high-contrast lighting.
51:15But by fusing these conventions with futuristic models and visual effects,
51:19Scott created a vision of Los Angeles in 2019 that was soon dubbed Tech Noir.
51:25A new life awaits you in the off-world colony.
51:29The chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure.
51:35The film excels in creating a claustrophobic mise-en-scene
51:38that evokes a society past the point of redemption.
51:43Blade Runner looks to Metropolis for its vision of a high-rise future,
51:47with vehicles flying in amongst the skyscrapers.
51:51But Scott's 2019 world is ruled by corporations,
51:54and we're surrounded by giant adverts and branding.
51:58It's the old trick of using product placement to add credibility to a future setting.
52:03Only here, the effect is neither playful nor reassuring.
52:07It's a vision which has informed numerous other films,
52:10from Japanese director Katsuhiro Otomo's animated 80s classic Akira,
52:15to a rival director Denis Villeneuve's recent Blade Runner sequel set in 2049.
52:24The film builds on the noirish design and atmosphere of the original,
52:28once again it portrays a polluted, corrupted future
52:31in which replicants are a kind of slave underclass,
52:34another clear link to Metropolis.
52:39Bring it to me.
52:41Yes, sir.
52:46Dystopian visions present an ideal vehicle for filmmakers
52:49with radical political and social agendas.
52:52Released in 1983, the year after Blade Runner,
52:55Lizzie Borden's Born in Flames looks more like a revolutionary documentary,
53:00a tough, gritty depiction of race and gender wars.
53:04Borden uses false newscasts and police surveillance tapes
53:07in a way that echoes the war game,
53:09and her diverse cast is made up of conceptual artists,
53:12civil rights activists, and even future Hollywood director Katherine Bigelow.
53:18Paul Verhoeven's cyborg action movie Robocop was released in 1987,
53:23the same year that Oliver Stone's Wall Street
53:25challenged the greed is good mentality of the era.
53:28But Robocop is an even more brutal attack on corporate greed.
53:32Verhoeven combines boardroom settings with blackly comic commercials
53:36to show a world not so different from Reagan's America.
53:40Red alert, red alert, red alert.
53:44You crossed my line of debt.
53:47You haven't dismantled your MX stockpile.
53:49Pakistan is threatening my border.
53:51That's it, Buster. No more military aid.
53:57Nuke them. Get them before they get you.
54:00Another quality home game from Butler Brothers.
54:04In the 21st century, dystopian futures have become a big attraction for younger movie fans.
54:10From the Hunger Games to the Maze Runner,
54:12gone are the fun hoverboards and self-lacing shoes.
54:16Perhaps in a world where technology makes teenagers
54:19more aware of the ineptitude of the adults running the world,
54:22it's simply a case of science fiction again asking the big what-if question.
54:30What if kids could do a better job than us?
54:41But not every vision of a future society has to be a cautionary tale.
54:46One of science fiction's greatest strengths is that it can help us
54:49imagine the future as we might like it to be.
54:53The ability to create alternate worlds can free filmmakers
54:56from the constraints of racial or gender stereotypes.
55:02Many sci-fi films of the 50s and 60s take place in futures where men and women
55:06and people of all races and nations are equal.
55:09They're all officers on spaceship crews,
55:11often because this was a shorthand for showing social progress in the JFK era.
55:16This is also true of the Eastern Bloc science fiction films like First Spaceship on Venus.
55:23But you can see it too in US movies like Project Moonbase and of course Star Trek.
55:29Although you've still got a white straight alpha male
55:32ordering the more diverse characters around.
55:34Correction. They're not casualties. They are.
55:41List them as missing.
55:43Vessel status? Fully operational.
55:46Recently there's been an encouraging rise in movies which broadly belong to the Afro-futurist genre.
55:52Films which put the experience of black characters at the centre of science fiction stories.
55:57Past examples include oddities like 1974's Space is the Place.
56:03Starring musician Sun Ra as the leader who set up a colony of black people here
56:07to see what they can do with a planet all of their own.
56:09They could drink in the beauty of this planet.
56:14It would affect their vibrations. For the better, of course.
56:18But in 2018, Ryan Coogler's celebrated Marvel hit Black Panther
56:23brought Afro-futurism firmly into blockbuster territory.
56:35Look at the vision of Wakanda.
56:37Look at the vision of Wakanda, the imaginary African state.
56:41Coogler wanted to depict an ancient African kingdom that had continued to be built on over time,
56:47acquiring incredible technology and avoiding exploitation by the West.
56:52Black Panther isn't set in the future but it vividly portrays a futuristic society
56:58and it uses the science fiction genre yet again to ask a big what-if question.
57:03What if the most technologically advanced society on Earth was African?
57:13The enormous and welcome success of Black Panther has the potential to widen the scope
57:18of science fiction even further by encouraging a new generation of diverse filmmakers.
57:24So, where does all this leave us now?
57:26Well, if science fiction cinema is anything to go by,
57:29mankind is very likely to be superseded by a superior race,
57:33whether it's apes or, more probably, robots or cyborgs.
57:40And if we're not headed for a dark destiny at the hands of machines,
57:44then an environmental catastrophe might wipe us out.
57:47At least science fiction movies will have prepared us for all the potential doom
57:51and if not, a director from the future may come back in time to save us.
57:55And amid all the impending catastrophes, there remains a glimmer of hope,
58:00a still thriving strain of science fiction which embraces change
58:04and suggests that the best is yet to come,
58:08and that it's not just a matter of time before we're all going to die.
58:11Which embraces change and suggests that the best is yet to come to a cinema near you.
58:21Next time, my favourite genre of all.
58:25I'll unlock the secrets of horror films.