All language subtitles for Cies Fic

The year is 2019,
or maybe it's 2049.

We're on a post-apocalyptic Earth,
ravaged by nuclear war,

or in a galaxy, far, far away.

I'll be travelling across time and
space to discover what makes the

perfect science fiction movie.

I'll need a time machine and a
spaceship

complete with a homicidal computer.

The 9000 series is the
most reliable computer ever made.

I'll land on strange planets where
I'll have close encounters with

terrifying aliens and friendly
robots.

But when I finally make it back
home, will I discover

that mankind's obsession with
technology has gone too far,

leaving a world conquered by the
machines,

where it's impossible to tell who's
a cyborg and who's an alien?

In this series, I have been looking
at some of cinema's most enduring

genres, from the rom-com to the
horror film.

I'm exploring the conventions which
underwrite the movies

we love the most and examining the
techniques film-makers

use to keep us enthralled.

And tonight, it's the turn of the
most visionary of all genres...

..science fiction,

where the future is whatever we
make it.

I've seen things
you people wouldn't believe.

Science fiction movies take us to
places that

terrify and excite us.

And from Metropolis to The Matrix,

from B movies to blockbusters, we
keep coming back for more.

Why? Well, for film-makers,

science fiction gives the
imagination free rein.

They can take the question,

"What if?" and run with it until
their own ideas or budgets run out.

They can create new worlds or
visions of the future,

and if the technology isn't there to
bring it to life,

well, they invent new technology.

So it's not surprising that
science fiction films

are full of scientists
inventing ways

to go places and see
things people wouldn't believe.

In fact, from its outset,

cinema has been intimately bound to
science fiction.

In 1895, a British cinema pioneer
named Robert Paul

met with HG Wells and suggested

a partnership in a new form of
entertainment

inspired by his recently
published novel, The Time Machine.

Paul had come up with the idea of
creating a theme park ride-style

contraption, not unlike a modern
flight simulator, which would

create the impression of being
transported through time and space.

One of the ways he would do
this was through the projection of

kinetoscope films.

In the end, Paul never got further
than applying for a patent,

but you can get an idea of what his
device may have looked like from

George Powell's 1960 adaptation of
Wells' novel.

Notice how much that spinning wheel
looks like

the reels of a film projector.

Powell uses cinematic tricks to
propel his hero into the future,

all from the comfort of his seat.

Speeded up images of the sky and
stop motion animation

make the world move faster.

The seasons change, the trees
change,

even fashion changes
before our very eyes,

as cinema transports us through
time.

And note also how quickly the
experiment

starts to become slightly scary,

to show us images of destruction and
darkness, of fire and danger,

as the machine seems to run away
with itself and with us.

The irony of course is that while
science fiction is

forever exploring our fears and
fantasies about technology,

no other genre is quite so dependent
on the technology of cinema.

Whether it is time travel or space
travel, great science fiction cinema

is all about rendering the
incredible credible.

Film-makers have deployed
and developed a whole range of tools

to achieve this, from set design to
sound to visual effects.

These tools enable them to explore
profound ideas about our identity,

values and society, using the
unfamiliar to examine the familiar.

Ultimately, they take us to new
worlds to make us look at ourselves.

And they do this by returning to a
number of key themes

that range across time and space.

Let's look at them in more detail.

Two years before George Powell's
adaptation of The Time Machine was
made,

a film which would have a big impact
on time travel movies was released.

Alfred Hitchcock's 1958 masterpiece,
Vertigo,

may not seem like a time travel
movie.

It's a suspenseful melodrama about
James Stewart's detective trying to

mould Kim Novak's character into the
image of his lost love.

And the tawdry redhead that he tried
to remake in her image.

I need you to be Marilyn for a
while.

There isn't a time machine in sight,
but this is a film all about desire,

regret and trying to recapture and
reconfigure the past.

Somewhere in here I was born.

And there I died.

It was only a moment for you.

You took no notice.

Midway through the film,

Hitchcock uses the image of a
cross-section of a tree

to raise the idea that time and the
beginnings and endings of life

may not be linear.

Now let's jump forward
37 years to 1995

and Terry Gilliam's Twelve Monkeys.

Bruce Willis plays a man sent back
in time to save the future.

Gilliam's film wears its homages to
Hitchcock on its sleeve,

from its blonde disguises and
snatches of Bernard Herrmann score,

to this scene in which the
protagonists actually watch

and discuss a key moment
from Vertigo.

It's on TV. Don't talk.
I did see it before.

Have you been here before?

Yes. When?

I don't... When were you born?
..recognise this...

ON SCREEN: Long ago. Where?

What's the matter?

Tell me. Madeline, tell me. No!

It's just like what's
happening with us.

Now let's travel back in time to
1962.

Here is that cross-section
of tree again.

This is Chris Marker's La Jetee,

the film upon which Twelve Monkeys
was based.

It's an experimental French
production

made up almost entirely
of black and white photographs.

It tells the story of a prisoner in
post-World War III Paris,

who's sent back in time to save the
future,

and it takes inspiration from
Hitchcock.

La Jetee director Chris Marker was a
huge fan of Vertigo.

He said it wasn't about space and
falling, but about the vertigo of
time.

Hitchcock's film and its themes of
regret,

desire and a man's attempt to
control time, seep into La Jetee.

a big budget remake of La Jetee,

which has become its own cinematic
time machine,

looking backwards to the past and
spiralling forward to the future.

You can find echoes of La Jetee
scattered throughout sci-fi cinema.

Take James Cameron's 1984 hit,
The Terminator.

Cyborg Arnie's mission to kill
Sarah Connor is a nightmare version

of La Jetee, going back in time and
altering events,

not to save humanity,
but to destroy it.

If time travel can be used to move
or to scare us,

it's also rich in comedic potential.

In 1985, the highest grossing film

of the year was a time travelling
sci-fi fantasy

which spawned two blockbusting
sequels -

Robert Zemeckis' Back to the Future.

In the first film, Marty McFly
accidentally ends up in 1955,

where his task is not to change the
future,

but to try to keep it the same,

by making sure his teenage parents
get together so that he's born.

Zemeckis built a commercial success
by taking a science fiction
foundation

and adding elements of rom-com
and adventure films,

plus an attention to detail that
makes his past

and future credible and fun.

Time travel gives the
Back To The Future movies

their basic concept, but it also
allows these films

to play with music, gadgets and
fashion.

Marty's futuristic self-tying Nike
Air shoes show the same kind of joy

that George Powell showed with the
time-lapse of the mannequin in
The Time Machine.

The difference being that the makers
of those flapper fashions in

The Time Machine didn't have to pay
for product placement to be seen in

the future.

Checking landing gear.

What often trips up complex time
travel films is confusion

and the near impossibility of
writing a storyline

that makes sense.

Obviously, the time continuum has
been disrupted creating this new

temporal event sequence resulting in
this alternate reality.

English, Doc. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

In Back To The Future 2,

Doc Brown tries to explain multiple
timelines in a blackboard lecture.

Prior to this point in time,

somewhere in the past the timeline
skewed into this tangent creating an

alternate 1985.

It left most of the audience still
puzzled,

while people who'd read pretty much
any science fiction novel published

since 1959 were impatiently
thinking,

"Parallel alternate reality's based
on a point of divergence,

"yes, I know, now get on with it."

The huge commercial success of the
Back To The Future trilogy perhaps

proves that audiences don't have to
understand the mind-boggling

complexities of time travel to enjoy
a movie.

But there's something about the very
nature of cinema that makes it the

perfect medium to explore this
subject, because, as we saw earlier,

cinema itself is a time machine.

In 2016's Arrival, from a novella by
Ted Chiang,

Amy Adams plays a linguist tasked
with communicating

with aliens who have arrived on
Earth.

It's a film which, like so
many in the genre, plays with

the idea of memory and the
inescapability of the future.

But, and this is a spoiler alert,

understanding their alien language
also changes how she perceives the

past, present and future.

Director Denis Villeneuve and
screenwriter Eric Heisserer

are very clever
with their storytelling here.

Look at the opening of the film.

I used to think this was the
beginning of your story.

Taking its lead from Chiang's
source,

Arrival starts with a monologue
which questions the very notion of a

linear beginning.

Memory is a strange thing.

It doesn't work like I thought
it did.

We are so bound by time.

We see Louise's newborn baby, a
symbol of the beginning of life,

but it's only much later that we
realise these images

may not be memories but
premonitions.

That the movie itself may be
unspooling in reverse.

There are some spectacular visual
effects in Arrival,

but while George Pal

pioneered visual trickery to move
his audience back and forth

in The Time Machine,
Villeneuve relies more

on one of cinema's oldest and most
basic tools - editing -

to turn the conventions of
flashbacks and flash-forwards on
their heads.

Like Vertigo, La Jetee,

Twelve Monkeys and so many other
time travel movies before it,

Arrival questions the concept of a
beginning and end.

And it asks one of the big

"What if?" questions that keep us
coming back to

science fiction.

If you knew your future, would you
change it?

Recent films like Arrival and
Christopher Nolan's Interstellar

have combined time travel and space
travel

to confront complex questions
about how we experience the world.

Nolan, who has played with cinematic
time in everything from

Memento to Dunkirk,

even has characters ageing at
different rates on different

planets in Interstellar, as they
learn that all time is relative.

It's a down-to-earth lesson,

but to learn it we have to travel to
strange new worlds.

When Georges Melies

made Le Voyage Dans La Lune in 1902,
the idea of

putting people in space was still
pie in the sky.

But he took audiences into a new
world of adventure

in a way that only film could,

using weird and wonderful set
design and cinematic tricks like

spliced edits to create a playful
and exotic tale.

There was a time when
science fiction was predominantly

about space exploration.

The days of Buck Rogers adventures
with Flash Gordon flying

around the galaxy in his
built-in-a-shed spaceship.

We often think of these movies as
being led by Hollywood but it's
worth

remembering that Russia beat America
in the race to put a man in space,

and there's a wealth of Soviet space
travel movies which similarly

outstrip their US counterparts.

Often with overtly political
overtones.

In the 1924 short cartoon
Interplanetary Revolution,

Red Army warrior Comrade Cominternov

flies to Mars to
vanquish the planet's capitalists.

That same year saw the release of
Aelita

from the novel by Aleksey Tolstoy,

which was one of the first feature
films about space travel.

An oddball trio travel to the moon
in a spaceship named Joseph Stalin

in 1935's Cosmic Voyage, on which a
leading Soviet rocket scientist

served as technical consultant.

Perhaps the most influential Soviet
science fiction director was

Pavel Klushantsev, whose fans
included George Lucas

and Stanley Kubrick.

His space epic Road To The Stars was
made a decade before 2001,

and it clearly served as an
inspiration for Kubrick.

Klushantsev was a master of special
effects and highly inventive.

He suspended actors on wires like
puppets

to create zero gravity effects.

And he built revolving sets,

a technique Kubrick went on to use
in 2001.

2001: A Space Odyssey is also
arguably closer in

tone to many of its Soviet
forerunners

than to the American space opera
tradition.

Dealing, as it does, with
complex concepts about the evolution

of mankind and its destiny in the
stars.

But with the Apollo mission set to
put a man on the moon

by the end of the decade, Kubrick
could feel reality catching up with
him.

He wanted 2001 to look as believable
as possible.

This was partly achieved through
painstaking visual effects,

detailed models were filmed with
carefully selected

and newly developed lenses to give
the impression of scale.

They're still remarkably convincing
50 years after the film was made.

But Kubrick and writer
Arthur C Clarke were also imagining

a near future of commercial space
travel.

And along with a sense of wonder
they wanted their audience to feel

that they really were just one step
forward from the present.

Kubrick approached numerous
corporations,

like Pan Am and IBM, for
help to achieve that.

Look at these scenes which cleverly
combine

the mundane with the
literally out of this world.

Heywood Floyd travels into space on
a Pan Am shuttle.

In the space station, which acts as
a kind of airport,

there's a Hilton hotel and a
Howard Johnson's restaurant -

brands familiar to Kubrick's
earthbound audience.

Elsewhere, a flight attendant walks
around a ship with Velcro shoes.

It's at once routine and
spectacular,

as she loops the loop to get to the
pilot.

But above all it's the simple image
of Dr Floyd asleep

while his pen floats away that
convinces us

that we're looking at an era when
space travel is commonplace.

Throughout science fiction cinema,

directors have worked with
scientists

to inject their films with
authenticity.

Fritz Lang consulted Willy Ley,

a colleague of Nazi rocket scientist
Wernher von Braun,

for Woman In The Moon.

Scientists from NASA and colleagues
of Von Braun also worked on

Kubrick's 2001.

Danny Boyle enlisted

Professor Brian Cox as a specialist
advisor on his

underrated science fiction movie,
Sunshine,

in which a team travel across space

to deliver a bomb into the heart of
the sun.

For today's directors,

working with scientists has become
even more important.

When Christopher Nolan made his
mind-bending film Interstellar,

he worked with theoretical physicist
Kip Thorne

who had previously advised on the
Carl Sagan-penned Contact

to try to
stay one step ahead of his audience.

It's infinitely complex.

They have access to infinite time
and space,

but they're not bound by anything.

They can find a specific
place in time.

They can communicate.

As stories about space have evolved,
so have the means of getting there.

From the pointed rockets of the
1950s to the floating cathedrals of

2001: A Space Odyssey and
Close Encounters Of The Third Kind.

These spaceships often mirror

the preconceptions and scientific
knowledge

of the era in which the films were
made.

The iconic flying saucers of films
such as Forbidden Planet reflect

the UFO mania that emerged after
sightings in the late 1940s.

Psychoanalyst Carl Jung theorised
that the circular shape of these
UFOs

suggested a protective sphere shape
which is present in many religions.

He felt that UFO sightings were
symptomatic of a time

when people were looking for
something to fill the void of God

in a secular society.

In fact, the first person to report
a UFO said that the things were

cigar-shaped, but skipped like
saucers thrown over a lake.

Well, that got translated into
flying saucers.

And, lo and behold, that's what
people said they saw afterwards.

If the name "flying cigars" had
caught on,

Jung might have looked to Freud for
a rationale for their shape.

Because they require the building of
new worlds,

science fiction movies have always
been at the cutting edge.

No other genre has pushed film
technology further.

George Lucas famously created his
own special effects department,

Industrial Light And Magic, in order
to bring Star Wars to life.

I got him. I got him!

Great, kid. Don't get cocky.

Spaceships were traditionally filmed
by moving models in front of a
camera,

while trying to light them so they
didn't look tiny.

In 2001, there'd been some use of a
technique called motion control.

This meant moving the camera,
not the model.

On Star Wars, the visionary special
effects artist John Dykstra and his

team developed new computerised
motion control cameras,

which allowed them to achieve
unprecedented levels of speed and
fluidity.

It seemed as though cameramen had
been sent into space,

in the same way that they were sent
to Monument Valley to film the great

Western sequences.

And in the vacuum of space,

a spaceship is often the totality of
our protagonist's environment,

a place where all the drama unfolds.

The spaceship is like a theatrical
stage, and the way it's designed and

filmed is crucial to the genre.

With 2001, Stanley Kubrick was
creating pure science fiction.

His is a movie about big ideas and
the science of space.

In Alien, Ridley Scott was making a
horror movie set in space,

a project for which he prepared by
re-watching

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Along with its endless industrial
corridors and dank docking bays,

the Nostromo boasts cavernous spaces

in which chains hang from the
ceiling

and water drips in the darkness,

recalling Leatherface's monstrous
lair.

In order to ensure that there was no
crossover between the human and
alien worlds,

Scott employed two different
designers

to work on them independently.

For the creature and its lair,

Scott turned to artist HR Giger,
whose biomechanical designs

featured in the Necronomicon
collection

and became the film's
design touchstone.

The resulting creature looks part
machine, part organic, wholly alien,

as it picks off the crew one by one,

trapped on their ship far away from
help.

The poster for Alien famously
warned that,

"In space no-one can hear you
scream."

And whether or not we might
encounter monsters there,

there's something primally
terrifying about that great expanse.

For me, that fear is best expressed
in Exorcist author

William Peter Blatty's psychological
chiller The Ninth Configuration,

in which an astronaut explains to
his psychiatrist

why he won't go to the moon.

In the process, explaining his
central failure of faith.

Sure, everyone dies.

But I'm afraid to die alone.

So far from home.

And if there's no God...

..then that's really...

..really...alone.

Look at these shots from
Silent Running and Gravity.

They're filmed 40 years apart,
but both shots

dwarf their protagonists in
the vastness of space.

Only science fiction can pull out
from the individual

to that infinite wide.

It's the perfect genre to
explore the concept of loneliness.

The novel Robinson Crusoe was
written almost 300 years ago,

and tells the story of a man
stranded seemingly alone on a desert
island.

Since its publication, that figure
of a lonely man

surviving on just his wits
and his thoughts

has become a key myth in the movies.

You can see traces of it in
High Noon.

In Taxi Driver.

And, of course, in Castaway.

Each generation of film-makers has
retold the Crusoe myth in space.

In 1964, there was a literal
translation Robinson Crusoe On Mars.

It may look dated compared to
The Martian,

but, at their heart, both movies

are making a drama out of the basic
trope

of a human trying to stay alive
on a distant planet.

And placing someone alone in space
takes the genre into philosophical

abstract areas, where outer space
becomes inner space,

and what's being explored is, in the
end, the human mind.

In his 1972 film, Solaris, based on
the novel by Stanislaw Lem,

Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky
isn't interested in the spectacle of
his space station.

Instead, he concentrates on the
characters inside it.

A psychologist is sent into space to
investigate why scientists orbiting

the planet are sending strange
messages back to Earth.

He discovers that the planet can
delve into the subconscious of
humans,

even recreating their dead loved
ones.

Here, the problem isn't just what we
might encounter in space,

it's the memories and emotions we
carry with us wherever we go.

More recently, Alfonso Cuaron's
Gravity used 3D filming to capture

the isolated untethered experience
of Sandra Bullock's stranded
astronaut.

Come on.

I'll admit that I'm not normally a
big fan of stereoscopy,

but I think that Gravity is one of
the very few films which it is worth

seeing in 3D.

Got to admit one thing...

Can't beat the view.

Like Robert Paul's time machine
theme park ride,

Cuaron's movie is an immersive
experience,

which transports the
viewer through time and space.

And unlike so many stereoscopic
films,

Gravity uses its 3D technology to
help tell the psychological story of

a solitary character, cast adrift in
the vast expanse of space.

What now?

Gravity also cleverly employs sound
designed to balance an accurate

depiction of space with a heightened
sense of drama.

Throughout his film, Cuaron uses
realistic vibrations

for the sounds
that astronauts would hear.

Hi, can you hear me?

But other than that, it's only
Steven Price's musical score,

not the sound effects, that add
drama.

If you look at this scene of the
shuttle being hit by debris,

it's drastically different from a
crash scene in an action movie set
on Earth.

Why? Well, you can't hear
explosions or rocks smashing into
metal.

All you hear is the sonic booms of
the dramatic music.

Silence can be a powerful tool.

In the most recent Star Wars film,
The Last Jedi, the most striking

moment occurs when director Rian
Johnson cuts the sound dead

during a moment of explosive impact.

But using silence to heighten drama
isn't new.

Kubrick was doing exactly the same
thing nearly 50 years earlier.

The fear of the unyielding emptiness
of space is the opposite of the idea

that we're not alone in the
universe.

And that concept presents its own
fears and fantasies.

Throughout cinema's journey to the
stars, there have been conflicting

views about what awaits us out
there.

On the one hand, there's the happy
fantasy of space opera

which portrays the great beyond as a
colourful world of adventure.

On the other hand, there's always
the possibility of running into
marauding aliens.

Whether it's the
beasts of Pitch Black...

..or the ever evolving Xenomorph of
the Alien series.

Sometimes we don't even need to go
into space to face these dangers.

The threat comes to us...

Welcome to Earth.

..like the shape
shifting entity of The Thing.

Or the little green gribblies of
Mars Attacks.

Usually with the nuclear firepower

to blow up Hollywood's favourite
landmarks.

And then there are the invaders who
come in peace, like Michael Rennie's

Klaatu in
The Day The Earth Stood Still.

Sent from afar to stop mankind from
destroying its own world and others.

Your choice is simple.

Join us and live in peace.

Or pursue your present course and
face obliteration.

So, why are the movies obsessed by
aliens?

Science fiction movie-makers use
aliens to examine our own world,

to look at humanity with fresh eyes
and to explore themes of alienation.

Each generation of movie-makers have
given us alien stories

that reflect our time.

In 1956, Invasion Of The Body
Snatchers used the creeping takeover

of humans to reflect McCarthyite
paranoia.

They're here already!

You're next!

In the '60s, Planet Of The Apes
became an apocalyptic metaphor

for social upheaval and
self-destruction.

The twist being that what appears to
be an alien planet actually turns
out to be our own.

God damn you all to hell!

More recently, Steven Spielberg
reimagined

HG Wells' War Of The Worlds with
scenes

which deliberately evoke the
horrors of 9/11.

We've got it the worst, that's what
I've heard.

The US, mostly.

South America and Asia.

There's nothing going on in Europe.

Europe got the worst of it, that's
what everybody's saying.

Completely wiped out some of it.

Drawing inspiration from
contemporary events lent

these potentially outlandish stories
credibility and potency.

And often there's more similarity
between the us and our alien
visitors

than we might care to imagine.

Take a look at this 1984 film from
John Sayles,

The Brother From Another Planet.

Joe Morton plays the unnamed
brother,

an alien fleeing enslavement on a
distant planet, who finds himself on
Earth.

Although it's broadly a comedy
fantasy,

The Brother From Another Planet uses
a sci-fi set-up to talk about
serious

down-to-earth issues of racism.

In a museum, the brother uses an
illustration of an African man
running

away from slave traders to explain
his own plight to a young boy.

And throughout he's pursued by two
men in black,

white extraterrestrials whose job it
is to catch him

and return him to slavery.

What do you want with him?

Immigration. Immigration.

Give me a break.

25 years later,

director Neill Blomkamp would
approach the alien racism

theme using very different cinematic
tools.

District 9 adopts familiar
science fiction tropes.

Aliens, future technology,
body horror and allegory.

But it mixes them with the
conventions of documentary,

vox pops, expert interviews, news
footage...

..and an observational camera team.

Hello. OK.

We are here to
serve you an eviction notice.

You just put your scrawl there.

OK, all right. Hold it.

Set in South Africa, it follows the
story of stranded extraterrestrials

who become earthbound refugees,
literally alienated by humans.

Prior to District 9, Blomkamp had
made a short on a similar subject,

Alive In Joburg.

In this film he'd recorded vox pops

with members of the public,
asking them

how they felt about immigrant
Nigerians.

He then used those interviews in the
context of an alien migration.

We're seeing the convoy stop and the
operation is about to begin.

By using documentary techniques,

Blomkamp made this alien arrival and
our reaction to it feel real.

Blomkamp was drawing on techniques
developed by the pioneering 1960s

British film-maker Peter Watkins,

whose mock documentary about a
nuclear attack, The War Game,

was deemed so shockingly realistic
that the BBC refused to show it.

And Watkins himself was, of course,

following in the footsteps of
Orson Welles

whose celebrated 1938 adaption

of The War Of The Worlds took the
form of a fake radio newscast.

RUMBLING

But to see Earth from an alien's
perspective, film-makers have used

far more stylised techniques.

Perhaps the most adventurous British
science fiction movie of recent

years is Jonathan Glazer's
Under The Skin.

It's a flawed, yet fascinating film.

A tale of an alien prowling the
streets of Glasgow

in search of raw flesh.

Which draws on many of the classic
motifs of the genre, whilst forging

its own bold new pathways.

Under The Skin, which stars
Scarlett Johansson in her most

adventurous role, opens with images
that echo Kubrick's 2001.

First come what look like aligning
planets.

From here we move to an
image of an eye.

A constructed gaze, human on the
outside, alien on the inside.

Inner space from outer space.

With a brilliant blend of
abstraction and precision,

this sequence establishes a tension
between the intergalactic and

the earthly that underwrites the
subsequent narrative.

Thematically, Glazer's Under The
Skin also owes a weighty debt to

The Man Who Fell To Earth,
Nick Roeg's 1976 adaptation

of Walter Tevis' novel.

David Bowie plays an alien who
crosses the galaxy

in search of a drink,

only to wind up an earthbound drunk.

Both Bowie and Johannson's aliens
inhabit human form,

and by doing so become seduced or
weakened,

with the mysteries of sex and
sympathy

being contributing factors
to their demise.

And both have a key sequence in
which they shed their human

disguise to reveal their inner
alien.

The central idea which joins these
two films is one which recurs

throughout science fiction -

that WE are the alien,

and vice versa.

Here, aliens aren't just on the
receiving end of human attitudes,
like racism,

but they're directly experiencing
human emotions and frailties.

Isolated from the rest of their
kind, they, too,

have become Robinson Crusoe figures.

But science fiction's ability to
recognise the human in the inhuman

doesn't stop at aliens.

Some of science fiction's most
memorable characters are machines

with very human qualities.

Robot companions that help bring
comedy or heart into the genre.

Think of robots like Robby in
Forbidden Planet.

BELCH

Or C-3PO and R2-D2 in Star Wars.

These are sidekick figures that
could appear in any genre.

They can provide comic interplay
with their human owners

and embody human character types,

such as the fussy butler or
slapstick clown.

Blurring the line between man and
machine

is crucial to science fiction
storytelling,

so movie makers have to find
powerful ways to give machines

human qualities.

For a masterclass in humanising
machines, you need look no further

than one of my favourite science
fiction films, Silent Running.

In this dystopian classic directed
by Doug Trumbull,

who did special effects for 2001,
Bruce Dern plays Lowell Freeman,

caretaker of the last of the Earth's
forests which are now floating

around space in giant geodesic
domes.

Trumbull said that he made the
unashamedly sentimental

Silent Running as a response to the
inhuman sterility of 2001,

a film in which the most sympathetic
character is a homicidal computer.

In Silent Running,
Trumbull set his hero alone

in space with only three worker
drones for company.

The drones are robots who, during
the course of the movie,

come to exhibit strangely human
characteristics,

or perhaps to reflect the human
characteristics

which Freeman projects onto them.

Crucially, the drones in Trumbull's
film don't look like human beings.

They're very short, they have no
faces,

they have only two limbs and they're
unable to speak.

Yet somehow Trumbull makes us think
of them as children,

as innocent characters in whom we
can invest our emotions.

One of the ways Trumbull gives the
drones human characteristics is by

using actors rather than visual or
mechanical effects to bring them to
life.

Inside each of the drone costumes is
a performer walking on their
hands.

The actors playing the drones
convey their characters' inner lives

through motion, through tiny
gestures which signal great things.

Trumbull had been inspired to seek
out amputees to play the roles after

seeing the athletic Johnny Eck
walking on his hands

in Tod Browning's Freaks.

But he also looked to the silent
cinema of Buster Keaton

and Charlie Chaplin

to see how discrete physical
gestures can convey emotions.

Watch as one of the drones reaches
out to tap the other before Freeman
notices.

I see you're already here.

I'll bet you wonder why I gathered
you here, haven't you? Huh?

It's a wonderful moment and it tells
us so much about the drones' lives,

not least that they have an inner
life, beyond Freeman's own
projections.

The gesture is tender and
conspiratorial and profoundly human.

For me, it's one of the most subtly
affecting moments of science fiction
cinema.

The final moments of Silent Running
are utterly heartbreaking.

A drone, alone in the last geodesic
dome, cast into space like a message
in a bottle.

Tending to the last of
the Earth's plants

with a child's watering can.

# Like a forest is your child.

# Growing wild

# In the sun... #

Silent Running has had a huge impact
on later films,

most notably Pixar's Wall-E.

Wall-E takes both visual and plot
inspiration from Trumbull's film,

particularly in its strong
environmentalist themes.

Like the drones in Silent Running,

Wall-E's human qualities are
conveyed through movement.

The first half of the movie plays
almost like a silent film.

# A moment

# To be loved... #

Innocent, ever helpful,

these boxlike little robot
companions feel unthreatening.

But what happens when our creations
begin to look more like us,

or even think like us?

The fear of what we've created is a
convention as old as the

science fiction genre itself.

It's there in Mary Shelley's
Frankenstein,

long an inspiration for sci-fi
film-makers.

The prototypical science fiction
film Metropolis features a robot

that takes on a human appearance
with disturbing consequences.

Robots and artificial intelligence
technologies represent a race

potentially more advanced than ours,

yet unlike aliens they're something
we've created ourselves,

but that could advance beyond us.

A recent interesting example is Ava
in Ex Machina,

Alex Garland's chilling movie about
an artificial being who outwits her

creator to escape into the world.

In the course of the movie, she uses
her sexuality to draw a young

programmer into her plot.

In a way, she's a sort of femme
fatale from a film noir in robot
form.

Robots, or more specifically
cyborgs, who are part human, part
machine,

allow movie-makers to examine human
characteristics

like empathy and sexuality.

Both Ex Machina and Ridley Scott's
Blade Runner

are based on the premise
that humans and machines

could become so similar that they
might be hard

to tell apart.

Both have a central character who
tests the humanlike

attributes of an android,

and in doing so, both are forced to
confront their own humanity,

or lack of it.

Mamoru Oshii's influential Japanese
animation Ghost In The Shell is

another movie which uses machines to
question human identity.

Recently the subject of a
controversial live-action remake,

it focuses on a character struggling
with her identity.

Ghost In The Shell is set in a
future where the human body can be

augmented or even completely
replaced with cybernetic parts.

The look of Ghost In The Shell was
the inspiration behind The Matrix.

In creating The Matrix,
the Wachowskis

conjured images that often resemble

live-action analogues of Japanese
anime,

pushing the boundaries of new
digital effects to mimic the forms

of a still influential classic.

The Matrix also draws on themes of
cybernetic networks

and technologically
modified humans -

themes previously
explored in Ghost In The Shell.

The advent of computers and the
subsequent accumulation of

incalculable data has given rise to
a new system of memory and thought,

parallel to your own.

Humanity has underestimated the
consequences of computerisation.

Nonsense!

There's no proof at all that you're
a living, thinking life form.

Mamoru Oshii explained that the
blurred distinction between man and

machine has become a theme in
Japanese culture, because nowadays
technology

has proven to be the thing that's
actually changing people.

And where does the newborn go from
here?

The net is vast and infinite.

Transhumanism,
the idea of evolving into something

not human or beyond human -

perhaps even a disembodied
intelligence - features in 2001.

But it's recently been revived in
films like Lucy and the X-Men
series,

and it's a trope I'd expect to see
much more of in the future.

But the desire to become human is a
far more familiar theme.

Epitomised by Pinocchio,

this thread which occurs time and
again throughout the history of

science fiction, can be seen most
clearly in films like Steven
Spielberg's AI,

which Stanley Kubrick had
intended to be his return to sci-fi
after 2001.

A sentimental tale which, like
Silent Running,

tugs at the heart strings,

the movie sympathises entirely with
the android child David, who dreams

only of becoming a real boy.

HE LAUGHS LOUDLY

HE LAUGHS LOUDLY

However, there's also been a recent
trend for movies which feature

technology that's possible in the
near future.

As we fall increasingly in love with
technology in our real lives,

science fiction movie-makers are
questioning our interaction with

tech on the big screen.

It's a theme which appears in
Spike Jones' Her, as well as

Blade Runner 2049 and Michael
Almereyda's Marjorie Prime.

Ultimately a human drama,

Marjorie Prime centres around the
idea that science can provide people

with holograms of their dead loved
ones.

For Lois Smith's Marjorie, that
means that her husband Walter is

back in the form of Jon Hamm at the
age when they first met.

The film raises questions about
memory and misremembering

in a similar way
to Vertigo or La Jetee.

There are only a few brief moments
where Almereyda uses visual effects

to remind us that Jon Hamm is a
hologram.

Other than that, the hologram is
disconcertingly real...

Stay with me awhile.

..as is our attitude towards it.

I don't want to get you in trouble.

You'll learn I like that.

I told you.

What would you like to talk about
now? We don't have to talk.

We can just sit.

Films like Marjorie Prime and Her
feel real

because they are set in the
near future.

They feature attitudes to technology
that aren't so different

from our own.

Kevin and I had somebody we wanted
you to meet.

So, we took it upon ourselves to set
you up on a date with her.

Next Saturday.

She's fun and beautiful, so don't
back out.

Here's her e-mail. Wow.

This woman is gorgeous.

She went to Harvard,

she graduated magna cum laude in
computer science and she was on the

Lampoon, so that means she's funny
and she's brainy.

Ah, she's fat.

These aren't the out
of this world backdrops of space.

This isn't using the unfamiliar to
examine the familiar,

but using the tangibly familiar to
question what's just around the
corner.

In 1927, HG Wells wrote a film
review for the New York Times.

He called the film the silliest he
had ever seen, saying,

"I do not believe it would be
possible to make one sillier."

The film was Fritz Lang's
Metropolis.

Now, while it might be HG Wells'
Time Machine that takes us to the

future, when most of us would
probably prefer to go in a DeLorean,

the future we see when we get there
is likely to be

influenced by Fritz Lang.

Metropolis is a silent German
expressionist film

set in the 21st century.

In the titular city,

an underclass works in a
subterranean dystopia

while the rich live in a
gleaming landscape of skyscrapers.

At record-breaking expense,

Lang created a vision of the future
that took elements of Weimar Berlin

and Jazz-age New York and
transformed them using ambitious

production design and cutting-edge
effects.

Such as the innovative Schufftan
process,

which used mirrors to
combine live action shots

with models and painted backgrounds.

Lang's futuristic city had an
immediate impact on other films.

echoed the look of Metropolis.

It's set in 1980, when people have
numbers instead of names,

but these dystopian ideas are played
out in the form of musical comedy.

When Jean-Luc Godard directed
Alphaville in the mid-60s,

he took a radically different
approach

to the depiction of an
Orwellian future city.

Eschewing elaborate sets and
designs,

he simply shot his film on the
streets of Paris,

amid drab buildings often lit in
noirish shadow.

But it was in 1982 that the marriage
of science fiction and film noir

achieved its ultimate expression,

in a movie that has come to equal
Metropolis in its impact on how we

imagine the future.

That film, of course, is
Ridley Scott's Blade Runner.

It relies on the conventions of film
noir: a world-weary detective, a
femme fatale,

figures silhouetted through blinds
and high contrast lighting.

But by fusing these conventions with
futuristic models and visual
effects,

Scott created a vision of Los
Angeles in 2019 that was soon dubbed
"tech noir."

A new life awaits you in
the Off-World colonies.

The chance to begin again,

in a golden land of opportunity and
adventure.

The film excels in creating a
claustrophobic mise en scene

that evokes a society past the point
of redemption.

Blade Runner looks to Metropolis for
its vision of a high-rise future,

with vehicles flying in amongst the
skyscrapers.

But Scott's 2019 world is ruled by
corporations

and we're surrounded
by giant adverts and branding.

It's the old trick of using product
placement to add credibility to a

future setting, only here, the
effect is neither playful nor
reassuring.

It's a vision which has informed
numerous other films,

from Japanese director
Katsuhiro Otomo's

animated '80s classic, Akira,
to a rival director

Denis Villeneuve's
recent Blade Runner sequel

set in 2049.

The film builds on the noirish
design and atmosphere of the
original.

Once again it portrays a polluted,
corrupted future,

in which replicants are a kind of
slave underclass,

another clear link to Metropolis.

Bring it to me.

Sir.

Dystopian visions present an ideal
vehicle for film-makers with radical

political and social agendas.

Released in 1983, the year after
Blade Runner,

Lizzie Borden's Born In Flames,

looks more like a revolutionary
documentary.

A tough, gritty depiction of race
and gender wars.

Borden uses false newscasts and
police surveillance tapes

in a way that echoes The War Game,

and her diverse cast is made up of
conceptual artists,

civil rights activists and even
future Hollywood director

Kathryn Bigelow.

Paul Verhoeven's cyborg action
movie, Robocop, was released in
1987,

the same year that Oliver Stone's
Wall Street

challenged the "greed is good"
mentality of the era.

But Robocop is an even more brutal
attack on corporate greed.

Verhoeven combines boardroom
settings

with blackly comic commercials

to show a world not so different
from Reagan's America.

Red alert! Red alert! Red alert!

You crossed my line of deck!

You haven't dismantled your MX
stockpile!

Pakistan is threatening my border!

That's it, Buster! No more military
aid!

Nukem.

Get them before they get you!

Another quality home game from
Butler brothers.

In the 21st century,

dystopian futures have become a big
attraction for younger movie fans.

From The Hunger Games to
The Maze Runner,

gone are the fun hover boards and
self-lacing shoes.

Perhaps in a world where technology
makes teenagers more aware of

the ineptitude of the adults running
the world,

it's simply a case of science
fiction again

asking the big, "What if?"
question.

What if kids could do a better job
than us?

But not every vision of a future
society has to be a cautionary tale.

One of science fiction's greatest
strengths is that it can help us

imagine the future as we might like
it to be.

The ability to create alternate
worlds can free film-makers from the

constraints of racial or gender
stereotypes.

Many sci-fi films of the '50s and
'60s take place in futures where men

and women and people of all races
and nations are equal,

they're all officers on spaceship
crews,

often because this was a shorthand
for showing social progress in the
JFK era.

This is also true of the
Eastern Bloc science fiction films,

like First Spaceship On Venus.

But you can see it, too, in US
movies like Project Moonbase

and, of course, Star Trek.

Although you've still got a white,
straight alpha male ordering the

more diverse characters around.

Correction. They're not casualties.

They, um...

..list them as missing.

Vessel status, fully operational.

Recently there's been an
encouraging rise in movies

which broadly belong
to the Afrofuturist genre.

Films which put the experience of
black characters at the centre of

science fiction stories.

Past examples include oddities like
1974's Space Is The Place,

starring musician Sun Ra as the
leader who set up a colony of black
people here,

to see what they can
do with a planet all of their own.

They could drink in the beauty of
this planet.

It would affect their vibrations.

For the better, of course.

But in 2018,

Ryan Coogler's celebrated Marvel hit
Black Panther brought Afrofuturism

firmly into blockbuster territory.

Look at the vision of Wakanda,
the imaginary African state.

Coogler wanted to depict an ancient
African kingdom

that had continued
to be built on over time,

acquiring incredible technology and
avoiding exploitation by the West.

Black Panther isn't set in the
future,

but it vividly portrays a futuristic
society and it uses the

science fiction genre yet again to
ask a big "What if?" question.

What if the most technologically
advanced society on earth was
African?

The revolution will be live.

The enormous and welcome success of
Black Panther has the potential to

widen the scope of science fiction
even further,

by encouraging a new generation of
diverse film-makers.

So, where does all this leave us
now?

Well, if science fiction cinema is
anything to go by,

mankind is very likely to be
superseded by a superior race,

whether it's apes...

..or, more probably, robots or
cyborgs.

And if we're not headed for a dark
destiny at the hands of machines,

then an environmental catastrophe
might wipe us out.

At least science fiction movies will
have prepared us for all the

potential doom and if not,

a director from the future may come
back in time to save us.

And amid all the impending
catastrophes,

there remains a glimmer of hope,

a still thriving strain of
science fiction

which embraces change

and suggests that the best is yet to
come to a cinema near you.

Get out!

Next time...

My favourite genre of all.

I'll unlock the secrets of
horror films.