Tag Archives: Movies

How do we power the future?

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What makes us human?

This is one of the fundamental questions Science fiction has asked and explored since it’s inception. From Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein to the far flung post-singularity future of  Iain M. Banks’ culture novels our humanity is at the core of these stories. In some cases that exploration of humanity is not apparent until the end of the story. Such is the case in Duncan Jones first movie Moon.

Moon is the story of Sam Bell, played by Sam Rockwell, the lone operator of a mining facility on the moon. He is on a three year contract to be the caretaker of the facility along with an A.I. named GERTY voiced by Kevin Spacey. The product he is mining is Helium-3, an energy source that revolutionizes clean energy back on earth. As he nears the end of his three year contract a series of accidents start to reveal the truth of Sam’s situation on the moon. There is an accident and Sam wakes up in the infirmary. After healing Sam heads out to fix a broken harvester and finds a body. The body is his.

Sam slowly puts together that the company he works for has decided it is more cost effective to create a clone to continuously take care of the facility than it is to replace the caretaker every few years.

Is a life less valuable when it is a tool?

While Moon is not directly about how technology mediates or is mediated by society it explores mans relationship to technology from another vantage point; what will we do to maintain the advanced technology we have? Is even a single life too much to pay for safe and abundant energy source?

Cloning technology is nowhere near the capability to do what it does in Moon but the ethical questions surrounding human cloning are explored in a unique, intelligent, and thought provoking script. Jones does not make any judgements but he does present a situation that is not overly outlandish.

One of my favourite mysteries of Moon is that the plot is one that may or may not have happened before or could happen again. Does the world know or care what is enabling the energy needed to power their devices?

Movie #26: Minority Report

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Blog #3

Sonya beat me to this film, but I want to take a slightly different spin on how Minority Report works tech and society.  Instead of looking at a world without crime, I want to look a world without interface.

For those of you that haven’t seen the film, Minority Report‘s most recognizable scenes involve eyes and hands: your eyes (inadvertently) control advertising billboards and can be used like a debit card and your hands can control your fancy new computer as if you’re conducting an orchestra.  This is amazing technological imagination…for 2002.

There are some issues with the tech the film showcases.  For one, I don’t think the world would ever like to be controlled by our eyes.  We’d love something (like Google Glass) that we could control WITH our eyes, but having companies base ads on our retinas would never fly.  We’re close enough with tailored Facebook ads (based, in a way, on what our eyes see) and that already causes some problems.  For Tom Cruise, the problems of being tracked through his own eyes are worth replacing them.  With the help of a homeless guy.  With eyes he found in the rankest fridge ever…

Ok, so the eyes might be a bit far-fetched and probably (hopefully) won’t be a viable reality anytime soon, but the computer interface could happen today.  People have already created wavy-handy interfaces.  They guy who brought the idea to Spielberg brought an actual working model, and he later went on to design the Kinect XBox 360 platform.  The idea has been used in countless movies before and since, but I think Minority Report shows the most realistic version of this impractical technology because Cruise has to wear gloves.  While the Kinect uses cameras and our own class’ guest speakers have used cameras for creating interactive art installations, wired tech is still the most reliable.  So Tommy puts on his gloves and starts waving, avoiding any spatial or visual issues they still seem to be having in 2054…

It’s like Star Wars Force control meets steam punk, future that has collided with a world’s imagination that still can’t imagine things without touch…even though it is an interface without touch.  While the film has amazing futuristic cars, jetpacks and even mind reading thingies that can stop crimes before they happen (how cool and future is that?!) they still need gloves.  Maybe 2002 was a pessimistic year, but they just couldn’t go gloveless.

Now, how this movie didn’t crack the top 20 of the Top 100 Sci-Fi movies list David posted astounds me.  I definitely thought this was better than Star Wars V (everyone knows A New Hope is better than Empire!), but the awesome yet impractical technology is probably keeping it where it is because the script doesn’t help.

Apparently Tom Cruise had a lot of trouble acting with that computer.  The movements made him so tired (yes, that’s real sweat) that he needed to take breaks from filming every five minutes.  Reminds me of GMail Motion…

Now while someone fixes the coding issues on this site, excuse me while I go watch Serenity and weep.