Tuesday, July 24, 2007

3 examples of technology artifacts found in SF movies

Click
Click is a 2006 comedy/drama/fantasy film directed by Frank Coraci and written by Steve Koren and Mark O'Keefe. Click tells the story of Michael Newman (Adam Sandler), an overworked architect so wrapped up in his job because of his boss (David Hasselhoff) that his family is forced to take the backseat. He gets a "universal remote" from an eccentric engineer named Morty (Christopher Walken), and finds he can literally control the universe around him. It began filming in late- 2005 and was finished by early- 2006. The film was nominated for an Academy Award or Best Makeup.

Run Lola Run
Throughout the film, Lola bumps into people, talks to them, or passes them by entirely. Details of that person's future are subsequently shown in a series of still frames. The futures are widely divergent from encounter to encounter. In one scenario, a woman whom Lola accidentally bumps into wins the lottery and becomes rich; in a different scenario, she remains poor and kidnaps an unattended baby after her child was taken away by social workers. In yet another scenario, the woman experiences none of the above and becomes a Jehovah's Witness.

Several moments in the film allude to a supernatural awareness of the characters. For example, in the first reality, a nervous Lola is shown by Manni how to use a gun by removing the safety, whereas she does this as if remembered from a previous experience in the second reality. Lola's encounters with Schuster also contain an air of the supernatural, with strong hints that the two share a father-daughter relationship, even if only on a subconscious level.

The movie itself begins by posing questions pertaining to the unpredictability of the world and the unknowable nature of its meaning. It suggests that drastically disparate consequences can alter the fates of different people from a one second change in the time of one person's running.


Back to the Future
Back to the Future is a 1985 science fictioncomedy film directed by Robert Zemeckis and produced by Steven Spielberg. Zemeckis wrote the story, along with Bob Gale. It stars Michael J. Fox as teenager Marty McFly and Christopher Lloyd as mad scientist Doctor Emmett L. Brown. Sent thirty years back in time in a De Lorean time machine, Marty inadvertently interferes with his parents' courtship and is forced to try and make them fall in love, or he will never be born.

No comments: