Scifi Methods

Justice has a price. The price is freedom. Judge Dredd is no human rights lawyer. In fact, Dredd lives in a world without lawyers, because all the lawyers are dead and now the law is created, interpreted, and enforced by the same people. No elected politicians, no trained and meticulous judges, no carefully reigned-in police officers – just black spandex [...]

Films based on lesser-known graphic novels (ie the ones that aren't Batman, Spiderman and The Avengers) can be a sticky thing to handle. Taking a story from a medium based overwhelmingly on visual style and depicted action, and transplanting it into a medium where it is easy to over-depend on visual style and action brought us creations like Sin City, 300 and The Crow. Not necessarily a bad thing, and the fact that this film is directed by the author of the graphic novel on which it as based gives it a good start, but if you summarise the other information you have about Oblivion before seeing it, it starts to become a lot more worrying...

The machines are malfunctioning. Images aren't loading correctly, data is being corrupted and some downright shitty pixels are being chucked up on screen. Fortunately though for those who can appreciate Glitch Art, this is not only a beautiful fault, but a manageable process which can be used to create thought-provoking works of high-tech art.

The 2010s are a popular decade in science fiction, and according to Hollywood the next few years are going to be turbulent. Never mind the nuclear holocaust of 1997, or the exciting bureaucracy of the ‘late 20th century’: it’s the latter half of this decade in which the blackened skies of dystopia shall descend. After all, we have...

Our first film review this year is for a film which I very nearly passed by. I was aware that the 2004 novel “Cloud Atlas” by David Mitchell had been a success amongst scifi readers (and the literary world in general) but was cynical about a film adaptation, believing it would be messy, convoluted and confusing. If I left the review there, it would be pretty accurate, but in retrospect it has made much more of an impact than I initially thought.

Like every westerner in their twenties with no imagination, I want to live in Japan. Not just any Japan – I don’t want to spend 60 hour weeks teaching English as a foreign language whilst coked-up business executives try to grope me (even if it is my fantasy). No, I want to live in dark, corrupt cyberpunk Japan.