Ares, named after the Greek god of war, was built to be an AI super-soldier. Then he found out about Frankenstein, started listening to Depeche Mode, and realized the tech bro who made him might be a hack. So he takes matters into his own hands on a quest for freedom from his suicide mission. I wish I were joking, but I’m not. That’s the premise of Tron: Ares.
AI bots awakening to the realities of human messiness are a trope almost as old as movies themselves. Even Metropolis’ metallic maschinenmensch questioned her creators, and that was 1927. In the decades since, most sci-fi involving AI has reinforced the idea that giving computers people-like intelligence ends poorly for people themselves. Skynet takes over. Scarlett Johansson’s disembodied voice never really loved you. I’m sorry, Dave.
Tron: Ares’ take is hotter: What if AI-powered machines evolved into benevolent loners? (Be warned: There are spoilers ahead.) Tech CEO Julian Dillinger (Evan Peters), grandson of original Tron villain Ed Dillinger, has created artificially intelligent soldiers (and tanks and such) to secure military contracts. The soldiers are hard to kill, but, as he says, they’re “expendable.” He can just build more. Ares (Jared Leto) leads these bots but after a few days of taking orders from his petulant boss decides to go rogue.
There’s just one problem: Dillinger’s droids aren’t perfect. All of his creations fall apart after 29 minutes. What he needs is a MacGuffin called the Permanence Code, which was (surprise!) actually developed by original Tron hero Kevin Flynn forever ago. When Eve Kim (Greta Lee), now the head of Flynn’s old company Encon, finds the code on an old floppy disk, Dillinger sends Ares to retrieve it. But when Ares finds her, all Ares really wants is to keep the code for himself so that he can be a normal dude, not destroy things, and maybe make a friend.
Once more, for those unclear on Tron: Ares’ message: The AI droid, made specifically to win on the battlefield, has gained sentience and gotten a little sentimental. Like all AI creations in sci-fi, Ares wants to be free. But unlike nearly all of them, Ares doesn’t want to end humanity to do it. Maybe he heard Mark Zuckerberg talking about AI filling the gaps in people’s social circles and found his calling.
For years sci-fi has been warning that thinking machines will eventually turn on their makers. In 2025, we no longer have to imagine what that technology would look like. Almost anyone can have an AI chatbot in their pocket, and everyone who makes those chatbots is promising they’re going to improve life on Earth, despite the environmental,economic, and mentalhealth issues they raise. But Tron: Ares’ main takeaway seems to be that fears about AI are unfounded. They’ll probably just be super chill.
In other words, the film forces us—beautifully, uncomfortably—to face what we’d rather deny: that a writer, equal parts truth and fiction teller, could imagine a future that now feels like our present. Our self-portrait is stitched not just from Orwell’s sly warnings about power, but from the nightmare we still insist is only fiction.
“They flood you with information, with lies, action, arresting people in the streets, make you afraid,” adds Peck. “They terrorize, and you know, it’s working. That’s an incredible assault.”
Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk
Where Orwell: 2+2=5 warns us about the apathy toward authoritarianism, Farsi’s Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk forces us to confront the daily realities of living under military control—specifically, in Gaza.
In early 2024, Iranian-born director Sepideh Farsi arrived in Cairo, notebooks of intention in hand, only to find Gaza’s gates closed to her. A Palestinian refugee suggests she call Fatma Hassouna, a 24-year-old photographer in Gaza. Through her camera and voice, Farsi discovered the only window she could open.
“I have never had such a deep relationship with someone whom I’ve never met … this feeling of being blocked in a country you cannot leave,” Farsi tells WIRED. “Then it’s just the magic of encounter, the human alchemy, and her smile was contagious.”
Put Your Soul plays out as more than a record of someone’s life during the course of a brutal military siege; the war and the persistence of a single life are one and the same. It purports that genocide, and all that enables it, always seeks one thing: erasure. But Hassouna’s smile, threading its way entirely through video calls and fractured connections over the course of 112 minutes, renders that goal impossible.
The opening shots of Hassouna and Farsi introducing themselves anchor the film in this perspective, which not only feels personal but very social. There are talks of dreams, of travelling to fashion shows, her hopes of the war ending, while Farsi occasionally interrupts and muses to Hassouna about the wanderings of her own household cat.
Through the film, Hassouna comes alive not just as a photographer but as a witness to life insisting itself into being. She sings, writes, and frames the world in small, stubborn flashes of beauty—sunsets, gestures, moments that flicker and hold. Israel’s weight presses in, but in her eyes, and in her lens, you feel resilience not as heroism, but as a relentless survival.
Their conversations flicker in and out—bad connections, cut-offs, pixelated resolutions. Farsi embraced the glitches as part of the film’s life, letting audiences feel her frustration and the strangeness of connecting with Gaza. “By keeping these pauses and disconnections, I’m conveying something very strange about the way we connect to Gaza, because Gaza is not reachable, and yet it is. It’s like another planet.”
Making the film for Farsi was much like living in two worlds at once: recording Hassouna from afar, sure, but also being closely present as a friend, witness, and human being. “We were both in the process of filming and being filmed, kind of,” she reflects. “I had to remain natural, but also somehow controlled as a filmmaker. Because, of course, I needed to be able to react in the right way to her.”
No, no, you were tending in the directions I think had been set up. I’m even more eager to see it now. I do have an acting question: How do you and your fellow actors play the same person who is not the same person?
In the very first season, we created this idea that they sit around dinner and they have the same movements—that that’s a cultural thing among these three people. We had these technical ways of making their shared consciousness visual, and actable in. We just practiced it. We came up with this little dance that we would do with those dinner table scenes. In the second season, we did something different with it. We created this idea of one who’s not going to follow the rules, who’s just going to do it differently, whether the other brothers like it or not.
Oh, interesting.
I love working with Terry [Mann, who plays Brother Dusk] and Cassian [Bilton, who plays Brother Dawn] and Laura. It’s such a unique concept that [writer and producer David S. Goyer] had with these cloned emperors that are all living together as family, and there are lots of different ways to look at it. I think it’s a completely original idea, and in line with the questions that Asimov asks in Foundation and his other work.
Lee Pace with (hopefully fake) bloody knuckles and a red iPhone on the set of Foundation.
Courtesy of Lee Pace
Lee Pace working on Foundation.
Courtesy of Lee Pace
I completely agree that it’s a genuinely original idea. There’s always a new way to play basic blues, but this is a really new idea that I can’t think of an antecedent for. Maybe there is one.
It’s about time, too. It’s about time. You can do this thing with time and generations, and that’s what I feel like now we’ve done in season three. We’ve now covered 300 years, and we look back even further.
Much like Asimov did.
He worked on this story over so many different decades, writing the Foundation books, writing them with collaborators and finding ways to tie in other short stories and storylines that he had written in other books and series, and expanding this world of Foundation.
Yes, but I would also imagine that much source material can be overwhelming.
I really love how on this show we have not treated the making of the series like fan fiction, where we would be like, OK, now we do the scene where this happens and now we do the scene where this happens and this happens and this happens. But we let the hugeness of the story that Isaac Asimov left us be on the table, and we can explore the plotlines that he wrote, plotlines that are referred to, plotlines that happen offstage, the plotlines that he discovered later in writing and realizing about the story.
Right, it stays true to the shape of Asimov’s ideas without being beholden to them.
As a science fiction fan myself, I feel like that’s like a good opportunity taken when we could bring it to screen, to use and be inspired by everything we have in front of us with what he has achieved in writing Foundation and then tying in all of these other different stories and plotlines that he had created throughout. I mean, he’s just an incredibly prolific writer.
The Nebula Award! It’s like a Hugo Award, but slightly less prestigious. Don’t let that fool you into thinking that a Nebula Award winning novel is only “second best.” Think of the Nebula as Hugo’s hipster cousin. Like a collection of obscure vinyl, you might not of heard of every one of these titles hand picked for the award, but sometimes sweetest literary pools trickle off from the mainstream. These 10 novels are some of the finest sci-fi works ever penned, dating back awards’ beginnings in the latter half of the 20th century. Here they are, 10 Nebula Award winning sci-fi novels you need to read – way cooler than whatever conventional sci-fi books that Hugo is into.
The Left Hand of Darkness
(Ace Books)
An all time genre great, Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness is one of the most decorated works of sci-fi ever penned. The novel follows Genly Ai – an ambassador to the alien world of Gethen. The people of Gethen are an offshoot of humanity that evolved into an “ambisexual” species, they only take on sexual characteristics during a brief monthly mating period called “kemmer.” As a result, traditional human gender roles are entirely alien to them – and their society is completely different from the rest of the human-conquered universe. After Genly Ai’s cultural misunderstandings cause him to become a social exile, he and a Gethenian politician are forced to cross an icy wasteland in order to seek asylum. Part political thriller, part wilderness survival epic, part treatise on gender, The Left Hand of Darkness was entirely ahead of its time – perfect Nebula Award material.
Network Effect
(Tor Books)
The fourth installment of Martha Wells’ The Murderbot Diaries, Network Effect is the story of a soap-opera binging security android and the humans that it is growing to (sort of) love. While accompanying an interstellar research team dispatched to a faraway world, Murderbot is forced to fend off an assault from a transport vessel and the hostile grey-skinned humanoids inside. But what are these almost-human beings? Alien shapeshifters that almost got our physiology almost right? Extraterrestrial parasites wearing humans as skin-puppets? Or something even more otherworldly and bizarre? Murderbot doesn’t need to know all the particulars to do as name suggests and take them out, and its human friends are certainly thankful for that.
A Song For A New Day
(Penguin Publishing Group)
A Song For A New Day by Sarah Pinsker is dystopian sci-fi that needs to be turned into a musical STAT. The plot follows Luce Cannon, a singer whose career was cut short by a totalitarian regime. In response to terror attacks and disease epidemics, the powers that be have made concerts illegal – much to the chagrin of music fans everywhere. Music still exists in pockets – guerrilla concerts that are attended by few and outlawed with extreme prejudice. Meanwhile, a virtual reality nine-to-five worker may have discovered a way to get music heard – by connecting artists and fans through the digital world. It’s essentially a sci-fi novel detailing the rise of the Zoom concert, but so, so, so much better than that.
The Calculating Stars
(Tor Books)
The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal is an alternate history of the United States’ space program, which was forever changed after a meteorite wiped out a swath of the Eastern Seaboard. The surviving members of the American government have decided to greenlight an effort toward space colonization, but all of the astronauts they’ve chosen for the task are male. Led by pilot and mathematician Elma York, a group of humanity’s best minds have come together to challenge the status quo and set women up for scientific success. A feminist reimagining of the early years of spaceflight, The Calculating Stars shines a light on women whose contributions to science have been reduced to a footnote in the history books. This time, they fill every page.
Annihilation
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
An environmental cosmic horror novel, Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation is set in an undisclosed stretch of wilderness that has been affected by an extraterrestrial anomaly. Dubbed “Area X” by the research organization tasked with containing it, this environmental anomaly is slowly spreading, subtly mutating everything that crosses its shimmering border. Anyone who enters the anomaly comes back forever changed, if at all. The plot follows a group of four women who are tasked with trekking into Area X, and uncovering the mysteries within. Instead of answers, it’s only horror that they find. Never before has the pristine stillness of the natural world seemed so… sinister. While this novel poses more eerie questions than solutions, the trilogy’s sequels paint the full, awful picture of eldritch truth.
Ancillary Justice
(Image: Orbit)
Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice is set in a faraway corner of the universe that is ruled by the Radchaai Empire – a star-spanning social structure defended by spaceship fleets piloted by artificial intelligence. When not controlling vast armadas, this synthetic minds pilot “ancillaries” – artificial human bodies meant to serve as infantry. After waking up in the wreckage of a former fleet, an AI named Breq finds herself trapped in the body of a single ancillary, with no idea how she got there. Confused, furious, and thirsty for revenge, Breq intends to bang on the Empire’s door for answers. If the powers that be don’t open up, she’ll just have to bash that door down.
The Windup Girl
(Night Shade Books)
The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi is set in a near future where fossil fuels are a thing of the past. I hate to burst your “utopia” bubble, but capitalism has found a new way to destroy the planet. The world is ruled by megacorporations known as “calorie companies” – bioengineering conglomerates that use food as a source of fuel. By genetically engineering crops and designing plagues to weed out the competition, the calorie companies are able to sell seeds to the hungry world as exorbitantly high prices. Thailand is one of the last few countries on Earth safe from the corporations’ influence, but a calorie company agent named Anderson Lake is sent to excavate a corporate foothold from within the nation’s borders. After meeting a genetically engineered human named Emiko who has gone rogue from her handlers, Anderson soon discovers that his job won’t be as easy as he thought.
Parable of The Talents
(Seven Stories Press)
The sequel to Parable of The Sower, Octavia Butler’s Parable of The Talents continues the story of Lauren Oya Olamina – the creator of the new religion known as Earthseed. In response to a societal collapse brought on by climate catastrophe and wealth inequality, Lauren shaped a belief system for a chaotic world, whose central tenant is “God is change.” After creating a community of adherents, Lauren finds that her hard-won peace is threatened by the arrival of a Christian fundamentalist sect led by a powerful demagogue. With an eerie similarity to a real world brand of American ultranationalism, the nationalists of Parable adopt the slogan “Make America Great Again” and seek to eliminate all non-Christians – including the Earthseed community. Lauren dreams of the day humanity will leave the Earth and travel to the stars. In order for her to survive, that day may have to come sooner rather than later.
Neuromancer
(Ace)
The quintessential cyberpunk novel, William Gibson’s Necromancer launched the sci-fi sub-genre into pop culture consciousness. Set in the sprawling metropolis of Night City, the novel follows a washed up hacker named Case, who is hired to pull off a digital heist by shadowy employer. Accompanied by a knife-fingered “razorgirl” named Molly Millions, Case dives into the even seedier digital underbelly of an already seedy city. As he gets deeper into the job, he begins suspect that he’s being haunted by a ghost in the machine, a synthetic intelligence that is secretly pulling the strings. Cerebral and surprisingly emotional, Neuromancer is the story of a man navigating an increasingly isolating world, where technology divides human minds more than it brings them together.
2312
(Orbit)
2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson is a hard sci-fi novel set in a colonized Solar System, where humans have spread from Asteroid Belt to Mercury. As it turns out, settling on the boiling hot rock right next to the Sun wasn’t such a good idea. A technological attack causes the mobile city of Terminator to stop moving, and metropolis and its inhabitants are burned to a crisp as Mercury rotates towards the star. How was such a complex technological attack possible? That’s exactly what Martian police detective Jean Genette wants to figure out. The murder weapon? All signs point to a new built quantum computer whose awesome processing power was aimed toward nefarious ends. A sweeping sci-fi epic based in sound scientific principles, 2312 is perhaps the most intellectually satisfying read on this list. Even holding this big book in your hands makes you feel smart! Imagine carrying it around at a party and telling people how much you loved the complicated physics and computing conundrums posed within, that’ll make you a hit for sure.
Sarah Fimm (they/them) is actually nine choirs of biblically accurate angels crammed into one pair of $10 overalls. They have been writing articles for nerds on the internet for less than a year now. They really like anime. Like… REALLY like it. Like you know those annoying little kids that will only eat hotdogs and chicken fingers? They’re like that… but with anime. It’s starting to get sad.
Remember during the COVID-19 pandemic we all rewatched Contagion? I’ve created this list to scratch that same viral itch. The course of human history has been shaped by deadly disease. Smallpox, the Bubonic Plague. the Spanish Flu, with each strain of infection, our culture mutates as well. Science fiction authors throughout history have utilized infection narratives to do what they do best: conjure up all the ways the future could go wrong. Humanity needs to read these 10 sci-fi books with terrifying viruses and plagues, so when COVID-20 comes around, we’ll all be better prepared.
The Stand
(Doubleday)
Arguably tied with It for the best Stephen Kingnovel, The Stand is a post apocalyptic tale about a deadly pandemic, and a world that refuses to die. After a government engineered super-virus wiped out 99% of the population, the few immune survivors struggle on in a forever changed world. Like many of King’s characters, each survivor experiences “the shining” – a type of psychic attunement that appears in other works like The Green Mile, The Shining and Carrie. Depending on whichever direction their moral compass points, the survivors begin having visions of two separate spiritual leaders. The good dream of America’s oldest woman, a folk guitarist and prophet who lives in rural Nebraska. The bad dream of a mysterious man in black, an agent of chaos who is setting up shop in Las Vegas. As the survivors journey across plague-ridden nation to answer their respective callings, it becomes clear that Armageddon is only just beginning.
The MaddAdam trilogy
(Anchor Books)
Margaret Atwood’s MaddAdam trilogy begins with the end of the world, and continues from there. Told in a series of flashbacks, the series’ first novel Oryx and Crake tells the tale of a mad genius who engineered humanity’s doom. A brilliant bioengineer, the scientist Crake imagined a world populated by “Crakers,” post-human beings of his own genetic design. After patenting a wonder drug that was secretly laced with Crake’s “Jetspeed Ultra Virus Extraordinary,” the scientist distributed lab-made doom across the planet. The second novel tells an alternate perspective of the end, focusing on two women who survived the apocalypse by sheltering with a religious cult – which obviously has its pros and cons. Part Mad Max, part Children of Men, part Frankenstein, this trilogy tells the tale of the man who spliced apart the world, and the survivors left to pick up the mutated pieces.
Station Eleven
(Knopf)
One of the most uplifting post-apocalyptic novels ever written, Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel is theatre kid Armageddon. The novel follows the Traveling Symphony, a perambulatory band of actors and musicians who travel about a post-pandemic world performing Shakespeare. Jumping back and forth between the post-collapse present and the pre-pandemic past, the novel plays out The Tragedie of Planet Earthe in real time. Society fell due to a deadly super-virus – no government bio-weapon, no mad scientist engineering, just a freak of nature disease that our immune systems couldn’t beat. Told with all the subtle grace of a Shakespearean sonnet, Station Eleven paints a picture of humanity during our planet’s final act. The show must go on, after all.
The Andromeda Strain
(Avon)
From the mind that brought us Jurassic Park, Michael Crichton returns with another novel about humanity’s poor decision making skills. Like building a theme park full of resurrected dinosaurs, The Andromeda Strain chronicles the ill-thought out plan to collect alien microorganisms from the far reaches of space. After a germ-collecting satellite crash lands in Arizona, scientists are shocked to discover that a small town has been entirely annihilated by disease – save for an old man and a baby. The Tyrannosaurs Rex in this novel is “Andromeda” an extraterrestrial virus capable of rapid mutation. Clever girl. Sadly, Jeff Goldblum isn’t there to stop it.
The Girl With All The Gifts
(Orbit Books)
The Girl With All The Gifts by M.R. Carey isn’t your average zombie apocalypse novel, rather a subversion of the genre. After a global pandemic turns average people into flesh-eating “hungries,” scientists in Beacon set up a facility to study a special group of children infected by the disease. Unlike their mindless adult counterparts, child hungries are able to retain their mental faculties, but become hostile when exposed human scent. Melanie is one of these young hungries, a 10 year old with a genius level IQ and a love for Greek mythology. The novel is a day in the life of a little girl who, despite her occasional ravenous hunger for flesh, is just like any other kid. If Ellie from The Last of Us grew up in a Firefly research facility instead of the mean streets of the Boston DMZ, you’d have this book.
The Last Man
(Henry Colburn)
Not to be confused with Y: The Last Man: a comic book about a mediocre dude who is the survivor of a plague that kills everything with a Y chromosome – Mary Shelley’s The Last Man is a pandemic story from the mind that brought us Frankenstein. Hailed as the first great post-apocalyptic novel, the story takes place in the late 21st century, where a resurgence of the bubonic plague is causing rapid societal collapse. The novel follows Lionel Verney and Lord Raymond, two aristocrats who travel the world with their loved ones in a doomed attempt to outrun the disease. A elegiac, grief haunted novel, The Last Man was written after the death of Shelley’s husband and their mutual friend Lord Byron. It single-handedly birthed the trope of the “lone post-apocalyptic wanderer,” further cementing Mary Shelley’s legacy as the great-grandmother of science fiction. Without her, the genre as we know it simply wouldn’t exist.
Zone One
(Doubleday)
Zone One by Colson Whitehead is a zombie apocalypse story that focuses on the minutiae of post-collapse life. Humanity has managed to stabilize itself, and the military is now mopping up the infected with procedural efficiency. In an effort to retake New York City, civilian volunteers have been tasked with eliminating a less dangerous strain of infected, who go about their un-lives in state of catatonia. Centered around an everyman named Mark Spitz, the novel swings back and forth between the bad old days of the early pandemic and the rebuilding efforts of the present. It’s kind of like a day in the life novel about Fallout NPCs, just going about their end of the world business, until things go horribly wrong.
Blindness
(Mariner Books)
Blindess by José Saramago is set in a world ravaged by an epidemic of sightlessness. Set in an unnamed city and revolving around a cast of unnamed characters, the novel details the early days of the pandemic. The government has quarantined the infected into a hospital, where rule of law breaks down as desperate people attempt to horde supplies and resources. An unrelated group of infected people (along with one woman who remains curiously immune) evolve into a tight-knit found family, and attempt to navigate their way through the claustrophobic world. A literary take on the post-apocalyptic novel, Blindness is strange, surreal, and thought provoking meditation on human nature. When things go wrong, we tend to lash out with one hand reach for each other with the other.
Clay’s Ark
(Warner Books)
When it comes to Octavia Butler’s Clay’s Ark, I can firmly guarantee you’ve never read a post-apocalyptic novel like this before. The story takes place in the not so distant future, where societal collapse has caused humanity to band together in small groups called “car families.” Dr. Blake Maslin and his twin teenage daughters are a car family traveling across the Mojave desert, carjacked by a spaceship crash survivor who is infected with an alien microbe. The alien disease causes anyone infected to be consumed with the desire to reproduce, the result of which is the inevitable birth of something far from human. After Blake and his daughters are kidnapped and taken to the crash survivor’s creepy ranch to meet his own “family,” things really hit the fan. Yes, this novel is about an alien sex plague that results in mutated offspring. Yes, it is as exciting, grotesque, and fascinating as it sounds.
The Companions
(Gallery/Scout Press)
Another highly unique take on the post-apocalyptic virus novel, The Companions by Katie M. Flynn takes place in a world where a deadly plague has forced humanity to remain indoors. Stuck in eternal lockdown, the living can only be visited by the dead. I don’t mean zombies, I mean the digitally uploaded consciousnesses of the deceased who are implanted into machines. The “companionship” program allows people to return from beyond the grave, implanted inside everything from rolling R2-D2 style robots to androids that pass for human. While wealthy companions are able to return to their families, the less fortunate are “leased” to strangers in order to ease the epidemic of loneliness. A sixteen year old girl named Lilac is one of these unfortunates, digitally resurrected in a mechanical body and forced to obey commands – but when she overrides her own programing, she mounts a daring escape into the post-pandemic wasteland. It’s a novel about how capitalism, like a cockroach, is able to survive and thrive in the grimmest of circumstances – and so can its victims.
Sarah Fimm (they/them) is actually nine choirs of biblically accurate angels crammed into one pair of $10 overalls. They have been writing articles for nerds on the internet for less than a year now. They really like anime. Like… REALLY like it. Like you know those annoying little kids that will only eat hotdogs and chicken fingers? They’re like that… but with anime. It’s starting to get sad.
One thing I did not foresee happening this year was us getting a new entry in Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach series. But the author announced exactly that back in April, and I’ve pretty much been counting down the days until the book’s release ever since. Absolution, the fourth novel in what previously stood as a trilogy, hit the shelves this week and it takes us back to the beginning of Area X and the ill-fated first expeditions to explore it.
For the uninitiated, the series deals with a strange coastal region in the US that’s inexplicably been shut off behind an invisible border and has returned to a wild state. A shady government agency has been tasked with studying it, but the people who set out on those exploration missions either never come back out, or come back different. The series includes Annihilation (which inspired the 2018 movie starring Natalie Portman), Authority and Acceptance.
Ten years after the series was originally released, a prequel feels like the perfect way to dive back into the mysteries of Area X and the Southern Reach. The trilogy concluded in a way that answered some questions but also left so much else up in the air. And while you probably shouldn’t expect Absolution to neatly wrap it all up, it does give us more insight on the early days of the anomaly and the perspective of key characters in that timeline, like Lowry. Absolution is hefty — it’s structured so there are three novella-like parts, and is nearly 500 pages long in all. Which is great, because I can’t get enough of Area X.
But then, too, there was the assurance, the confidence, in the accounts of the biologists as remedy to allay suspicion. Because Sergeant Rocker, too, had then taken to the waters and disappeared, the biologists using their tracking equipment to make sure they could follow the alligators in their new lives.
The Tyrant kept to herself, while the others remained in close proximity, for a while. None, at least overnight, seemed inclined to leave the area, and by the fourth day, Team Leader 1 put the most junior member of their party on the task of monitoring moments that might include a full day of basking in the same stretch of mud.
On day six they found Firestorm’s front leg, bobber wire wrapped around it, the whole prominently displayed on a mudbank with deep boot prints suggesting poachers. There was, one biologist wrote, “a bathetic or pathetic quality to the paleness of the leg, enraptured in the evidence of our experiment, lost so far from her home. I wept for an hour, but do not know if this was an appropriate response.”
(No, Old Jim did not believe it was an appropriate response, even as he himself wept at odd hours, for his own reasons, down in Central’s archives.)
Battlebee turned up dead and bloated and white, with a chunk ripped out of him postmortem by some creature, possibly Sergeant Rocker, speculation being that stress and the anesthetic had been too hard on him. Postmortem examination revealed stomach contents that included fish, a turtle, mud, and, inexplicably, a broken teacup.
She had also been pregnant, “a fact that surprised us,” Team Leader 2 wrote, “given her credentials identified her as a male,” amid some general confusion: “To be honest, I cannot now remember when we first took this project on, when we first encountered these subjects. The heat here is abysmal.”
Sergeant Rocker opted out of the project by shedding his harness in the water near the tent of Team Leader 1, indicating, as she absurdly put it, “A politeness on the part of Sergeant Rocker in keeping with his personality when I knew him best. I felt this loss much more deeply than expected.”
This sentimentality toward an alligator seen as an obligation just days before weighed on Old Jim, although he could not put a finger on why. Nor did he understand why the alligator experiment registered with the biologists in their reports as a great success, and they would even reference it with a kind of beautiful, all-consuming nostalgia when the mission began to sour. The myth of competence, perhaps. The myth of persistence. The myth of objectivity.
Perhaps, both he and the biologists would have been wiser to focus on how Sergeant Rocker had turned into an escape artist, for the harness was intact and still latched, with no tears anywhere. So how had the alligator possibly gotten free? Old Jim kept seeing the biologists by a trick of faulty video running away from the release site, only to re-form in their drinking circle.
He replayed the video so often that it became a disconcerting mess of light and shadow, of pixelated disembodied heads and legs and shapes that leapt out and sharpened, only to become subsumed into the past.
“All possible measures were taken but nothing could be done.”
New releases in fiction, nonfiction and comics that caught our attention.
Sacrificial Animals by Kailee Pedersen
There’s something about the idea of coming home and reawakening dormant familial trauma that just makes for great horror stories, andSacrificial Animalsis no exception. In the novel, brothers Nick and Joshua Morrow return to their family’s farm in Nebraska after many years estranged from their abusive father, reopening old wounds and allowing supernatural forces to take root. Sacrificial Animals bounces between “Then” and “Now” perspectives, painting a picture of the boys’ childhoods under the violent and racist man, and the gravity of returning once they learn he is dying.
The slow burn horror story weaves in Chinese mythology, using flowery language and a Cormac McCarthy-like lack of quotation marks (and McCarthy-like brutality) to really give it a folkloric feel. But do yourself a favor and skip the blurb if you plan on reading this one, as it betrays a bit too much about the direction the story will go.
Trash Talk: An Eye-Opening Exploration of Our Planet’s Dirtiest Problem by Iris Gottlieb
Humanity’s trash problem is one so massive and complex it can be difficult to even comprehend, especially for those of us who are more or less removed from the reality of it. I mean, it feels like every other week I learn that an item I’ve long been told is recyclable is, in fact, not recyclable, and garbage is even piling up in space. Iris Gottlieb’s Trash Talk: An Eye-Opening Exploration of Our Planet’s Dirtiest Problem breaks the whole issue down, diving into the many facets of global trash production and management, and exploring how we got to where we are.
It’s filled with illustrations and insight to help contextualize a problem that, unfortunately, isn’t going away any time soon, and is a great read for anyone who wants to know more about what really happens to your garbage when you throw it “away.”
Convert by John Arcudi, Savannah Finley
The first thing that popped into my mind when I saw the cover for issue #1 of Convertwas Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy. A man in a space suit — with the helmet removed — stands in a field holding a huge gun, surrounded by strange flora that almost seems like it’s trying to consume him. The mental comparisons to the Area X of VanderMeer’s series only continued as I read through it, but a development its final few panels affirms that Convert has its own unique story to tell.
The first issue of the new science fiction/fantasy series from Image Comics was released this week, and visually, it’s stunning. In the opening pages, “Science Officer Orrin Kutela finds himself stranded on a distant planet, starving and haunted by the ghosts of his dead crew,” per the description. “On the verge of death, he makes an astonishing discovery.” Convert was written by John Arcudi, with art by Savannah Finley, colors by Miguel Co and lettering by Michael Heisler. The second issue drops September 25.
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Nostalgia isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. This month’s Batman: The Caped Crusader was billed as the grownup version of beloved and groundbreaking ’90s show Batman: The Animated Series, made by B:TAS co-creator Bruce Timm, producers Matt Reeves and J.J. Abrams, liberated from Saturday morning cartoon censors, and backed by the talent of some all-time Batman comics writers.
And while the show certainly had the Animated Series look, it was neither a direct continuation nor a strong relaunch. Timm’s crew were free to say whatever they wanted, but didn’t have much to say in the end. Sometimes you just can’t go home again.
But what if I told you there’s already a more mature version of Batman: The Animated Series, with hour-long episodes like a live-action drama, multi-season plotting, and fresher animation than Caped Crusader. It’s episodic, but its characters keep a solid emotional continuity, and while its appropriate for kids, it’s got multiple layers and references for adult audiences to chew on.
If you’re looking for a better Batman: The Caped Crusader, you should watch Justice League and Justice League Unlimited, which are available right now on Netflix for your marathon pleasure.
Image: Warner Bros. Animation
Premiering in 2001, Justice League was a direct continuation of the DC Animated Universe setting, which began with 1992’s Batman: The Animated Series and continued in Superman: The Animated Series, The New Batman Adventures, and Batman Beyond — and in large part, it had all the same talent working behind the scenes. Artist Bruce Timm, writer Paul Dini, producers Rich Fogel and Glen Murakami, voice actors Kevin Conroy, Mark Hamill, Clancy Brown, Ron Perlman, Arleen Sorkin, Michael Ironside, and Michael Dorn, all returned to reprise their various roles and duties.
But Justice League wasn’t a half hour, one-and-done episodic series hitting the waves at 9am on Saturday mornings. Airing in prime-time slots on Cartoon Network, every episode of the series was part of a two-part story — hacking the half-hour animated standard into an hour-long adventure series. The core cast began with Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Hawkgirl, the Martian Manhunter, Wally West’s Flash, and John Stewart’s Green Lantern, but two seasons into the show, Cartoon Network asked for a rebrand and expanded the mandate.
In Justice League Unlimited, the full breadth of DC Comics’ superhero roster was welcome on the Justice League, not just the founding seven. Episodes were knocked down to half hour slots again, but the show’s crew found a new way to think big. For the first and only time in the setting’s history, a DC Animated Universe show started delivering season-long story arcs; placing dominoes, foreshadowing reveals, and paying off setups from weeks before.
And while each episode was still appropriate for kids, the show writers were not immune to the thrill of including references that only adults would really pick up on — like 1950s gender and racial prejudice, a time-lost Martian Manhunter being brought before Nazi physician Josef Mengele for experimentation, or canonically establishing that the Flash is a more attentive lover than Lex Luthor.
Image: Warner Bros. Animation
So if you want a Batman fix this weekend, queue up Justice League (2001) on Netflix. Now, you might have to give it a few episodes to get going, but if you can stick around through the early middle-weight stuff, the show will pay out dividends. Aquaman cutting his own hand off to save his infant son, an alt-timeline Superman who lobotomizes his opponents with laser vision, a collection of killer romantic subplots, the Batman of Justice League: Unlimited traveling through time and meeting the elderly Bruce Wayne and the future Batman of Batman Beyond, Lex Luthor’s season-long presidential campaign, and a direct adaptation of one of the greatest Superman stories ever told, “For the Man Who Has Everything.”
So maybe it’s not the spooky procedural that makes you feel just like you did when you watched Batman: The Animated Series for the first time. But, then again, neither is Batman: The Caped Crusader!
As the fictional Freud writes of his own approaching death, he foresees the death of his sister Dolfi (who will die three years later in historical time, on the way to the camps). To put it mildly, death is everywhere. “Pain will be with me until I take my final leave,” Freud/Miéville/Reeves writes. He is ready to take it, to be clear. Freud then offers us a case study of a patient he met only three times, the last time when the world was at war. This patient offers Freud a riddle, not unlike the one the Sphinx offers Oedipus, and from which psychoanalysis in part sprang:
“I kill and kill and kill again,” he said. “And the truth is, I would like to rest … And sometimes, not frequently but many times over the course of my life, I die. And it hurts.
And then I come back.
I return, and I kill and kill and kill again, and eventually I die again, and the whole merry-go-round continues. So please—Herr Doktor … What sort of man am I?”
This is, of course, B., the immortal warrior hero. He wants to be able to die, to become mortal, but can’t quite, for he cannot die his own death. Freud seeks to redescribe this in psychic terms for B. And that is the nature of their analytic work together. It is possible to read much of the intervening book, which opens and closes in Freud’s voice, as a lost case study. Freud declares to B.: “You’ve told me you don’t wish to be a metaphor. But you don’t get to choose.” What kills us and dies and is reborn? B., like it or not, is a metaphor for the death drive.
The death drive is not some science fiction weapon or engine, exactly, but a theory introduced by (the real) Freud as a corrective to his idea of the pleasure principle—the idea that we all try to minimize pain and strive for pleasure all the time. War-torn Europe had shown him there was something else to account for—that we don’t just go for what’s good, but also for what’s bad, for “unpleasure.” Thus he conceived of the death drive at the end of World War I and during the Spanish flu, wherein his beloved daughter Sophie died suddenly. Freud would deny until he died that Sophie was the inspiration for it, and here, Miéville grants Freud’s wish. B., in Miéville’s hands, embodies the death drive—and he has come to Freud, like many have gone to their analysts, seeking cure. Freud then does what analysts do best—extrapolate from one patient toward a universal theory. The immortal B., in this alternate universe, showed Freud what sort of men we all are. When I asked Miéville about it, he said, “I think you could argue that that’s B. saying, ‘I want to be a human, I want to be a real boy.’ I mean, it’s a Pinocchio story.”
Even though it was actually Reeves who introduced Freud to the original BRZRKR comic, it’s easy to see why Miéville latched onto it. All of this was written while China was reckoning, deeply, with whether or not he could imagine going on. “Depression, for me, was the realization of what has been the case rather than something happening,” he told me. “These books”—he means not just The Book of Elsewhere but also his upcoming magnum opus/white whale/albatross, which I’m still not allowed to talk about except to say it’s just been shipped off to the publisher—“are being brought to a close in what I tentatively and hopefully believe is out the other side of the worst of that.”
Forty-seven years ago today, everything changed. True believers might already know what it was: On May 25, 1977, Star Wars hit movie theaters and irrevocably altered nearly everything pertaining to the act of moviegoing. Lines around the block, overly excited nerds, an appetite for action figures. Star Wars taught Hollywood that certain genres—sci-fi, fantasy, anything that percolated in the offbeat TV shows, books, and comics of the 1950s and ’60s—had fans, and those fandoms would show up. Star Wars made a meager $1.6 million in the US in its opening weekend. But people kept coming back, and by the end of its initial run it had made more than $300 million. Hollywood’s Next Big Thing had arrived.
Common wisdom dictates that Jaws, which came out in 1975 and made some $260 million, was the first summer blockbuster. That’s true, but it was Star Wars that shifted the idea of what kind of film future popcorn flicks tried to be. In the years after its release, a trove of sci-fi and genre films landed in theaters: Blade Runner, Alien, E.T., the Mad Max sequel The Road Warrior. By the ’90s, the summer movie energy had shifted to action fare—Twister, Speed, Jurassic Park, Independence Day—but nerd stuff still ruled. For every Forrest Gump there was a Batman Returns or Terminator 2: Judgment Day.
Then came a little juggernaut called Marvel. By the time Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man movies started clearing nine-figure opening weekends in the aughts, it was obvious that comic book heroes’ true superpowers involved making your money disappear. The Avengers opened in early May 2012 and nearly recouped its $200-million-plus production budget in three days. Suddenly, there were at least two superhero movies every year, if not every summer, and some new Star Wars flicks at the holidays.
The one-two punch of Covid-19 theater closures and streaming pretty much kneecapped this entire process. The summer of 2020 had virtually no blockbusters, and by the time moviegoers returned to multiplexes in 2021 and 2022, there had been a vibe shift. Movies like Black Widow and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness did well, but they weren’t events. Rushing to Fandango for tickets didn’t feel as urgent as it once did. Last summer, Barbenheimer was the buzziest thing in movies. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 made money, but they still got beat by Barbie’s might.
Overall, this year could be a wake-up call for studios that superhero fatigue has fully set in, says Chris Nashawaty, author of The Future Was Now, a new book out in July about how the movies of 1982—Blade Runner, E.T., Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan, among others—ushered in the current blockbuster era. That epoch, he says, “was always going to be something that couldn’t last forever; I’m frankly surprised that it lasted as long as it did.”
Nashawaty says the success of Barbenheimer—both movies—indicates that audiences are hungry for smart films, but Hollywood’s risk aversion likely means studios will greenlight more projects based on toys and games like Monopoly rather than movies about physicists. “This is a real existential moment in Hollywood right now,” he adds, and studios need to be bold to stay relevant.
Helmed by Nikita Argunov, Coma (2020) is a Russian sci-fi action movie that follows a young architect awakening in a dystopian realm, shared by coma patients’ memories. In this strange new place, reality bends, featuring fragmented landscapes and distorted physics.
Here’s how you can watch and stream Coma (2020) via streaming services such as Peacock.
Is Coma (2020) available to watch via streaming?
Yes, Coma (2020) is available to watch via streaming on Peacock.
Also known as Koma, the movie revolves around a gifted architect awakening from a devastating accident to discover himself in a surreal, dystopian realm populated by the memories of coma patients. This world defies conventional physics, featuring fragmented landscapes where icecaps, rivers, and cities coexist within a single room, presenting a chaotic and unstable environment.
Rinal Mukhametov stars as Viktor, an architect, with Anton Pampushnyy as Phantom, and Lyubov Aksyonova as Fly. Milos Bikovic portrays the Astronomer, while Konstantin Lavronenko appears as Yan, and Polina Kuzminskaya as Spirit. Rostislav Gulbis rounds out the cast as Gnome.
Watch Coma (2020) streaming via Peacock
Coma (2020) is available to watch on Peacock. It is a subscription-based streaming service offering a wide range of movies, TV shows, and original content.
You can watch via Peacock by following these steps:
$11.99 per month or $119.99 per year (premium plus)
Create your account
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Peacock’s Premium account provides access to over 80,000+ hours of TV, movies, and sports, including current NBC and Bravo Shows, along with 50 always-on channels. Premium Plus is the same plan but with no ads (save for limited exclusions), along with allowing users to download select titles and watch them offline and providing access to your local NBC channel live 24/7.
The Coma (2020) synopsis is as follows:
“A young and talented architect comes to his senses after a horrific accident only to find himself in the odd dystopian world. A world that is filled with the memories of all current coma patients. Just like a human memory this world is fragmental, chaotic and unstable. This is COMA: icecaps, rivers and cities can all exist in a space of a single room and laws of physics are no longer laws as they can be bent.”
NOTE: The streaming services listed above are subject to change. The information provided was correct at the time of writing.
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Of all the utterly depressing things printed in the Hollywood trades on any given day, this has got to be among the worst: “It’s so not good, and it was so sad watching it … This is not how Coppola should end his directing career.”
This was in response to an early screening of Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, a $120 million sci-fi epic that the legendary Godfather director has been trying to make for roughly four decades. The quote, from an unnamed “studio head,” was published in a piece in The Hollywood Reporter positioning the film as the kind of movie no one in the business wants to funnel money into because it (allegedly) doesn’t have box office potential. While that quote was, in journalism parlance, the kicker, the real zinger came in the addendum at the end: “This story has been updated to include that Megalopolis will premiere in Cannes.”
Shot. Chaser.
THR’s piece doesn’t provide the gender of the studio exec quoted, but I’m going to go out on a limb: Sir, what the fuck are you talking about? Even if Megalopolis is two hours and 15 minutes of Adam Driver (yes, he stars) doing paper doll plays, Coppola has survived so much worse. This will not end his career. If anything, quotes like this signal an end of—or at least the massive need for a reboot of—Hollywood.
Earlier this week, Bilge Ebiri wrote a full-throated plea in Vulture, declaring “Hollywood Is Doomed If There’s No Room for Megalopolises.” Matt Zoller Seitz took a slightly different tack, addressing France directly from his desk at RogerEbert.com and begging Cannes Film Festival participants to cheer the film and save the US from itself. Both pointed out that many of Coppola’s films—Bram Stoker’s Dracula, One from the Heart—didn’t fully connect with audiences or critics when they were first released. The latter nearly bankrupted him—right after he mortgaged everything he owned to finance Apocalypse Now, which currently sits, alongside other Coppola films, on the American Film Institute’s top 100 movies of all time.
I’d like to make an entreaty of a different kind: Nerds, assemble. We have a long history of crowdfunding and letter-writing to manifest the projects on which Hollywood has wobbled. Bjo Trimble saved Star Trek. Queer sci-fi, Veronica Mars, The People’s Joker—we’ve raised cash for all of it. Studios don’t think Megalopolis is bankable; it may not appease any streaming service’s algorithm. Who cares. An online petition with enough backing can provide a marketing campaign to rival the multimillion-dollar one Coppola has envisioned. It’s worth a shot,
The Monitor is aweekly columndevoted to everything happening in the WIRED world of culture, from movies to memes, TV to Twitter.
Chest-bursting aliens. Time-traveling DeLoreans. Dystopian futures. Galaxies far, far away. Science fiction is full of characters, set pieces, and scenarios that few other genres could ever get away with. Due to its often speculative nature, the most accomplished sci-fi movies can sometimes require a bit of work on the part of the viewer. Yet as fans of the genre understand, when it’s done right, a great sci-fi film is well worth the mental gymnastics that watching it might demand.
Speaking of sci-fi done right: Whether you’re a lifelong genre devotee or have never even sat through a Star Wars movie to the end, a little guidance can go a long way—and that’s exactly what we’ve got for you. When you’re ready to take your mind on a cinematic journey, check out any one (or all) of our picks for the very best science fiction movies you can watch right now.
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Dune and Dune: Part Two
“Tell them a messiah will come. They’ll wait. For centuries.” Chani (Zendaya) speaks those words early on in Dune: Part Two. She’s speaking about the prophecy that a savior will arrive to help her and her fellow Fremen, and whether or not Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) will be that messiah. She could also be talking about the wait for a truly epic adaptation of Frank Herbert’s award-winning sci-fi novel. Yes, David Lynch made one in the 1980s, and it’s a camp classic, but it is director Denis Villeneuve’s pair of films that truly bring Herbert’s story to life. Lushly designed, action-packed, and understandable even to people who’ve never touched the book, these Dunes are the real deal. If you know anything about the lore, you know there’s far too much to really get into it here, but let it be known: Villeneueve’s adaptations aren’t just mind-blowing sci-fi—they’re monumental works of art.
Arrival
While Denis Villeneuve has dabbled in a variety of genres since beginning his filmmaking career in the mid-1990s, a sci-fi milieu seems to suit him best. As if Enemy (2014) or his pair of Dune movies didn’t make that obvious, consider this: The man dared to make a sequel worthy of Ridley Scott’s genre-defining Blade Runner—and succeeded! Then there’s Arrival, which is basically a linguistics lesson wrapped in a sci-fi feature and all the more engrossing because of it. After the unexpected arrival of an alien species on Earth, linguist Louise Banks (Amy Adams) is tasked with creating a universal language that will allow humans to speak with them, and vice versa. But she quickly comes to realize that effectively communicating with her human colleagues—who want results now—might be the bigger challenge. It’s a stark, and all too timely, reminder that progress takes time, and as such requires patience.
RoboCop
Any cursory attempt to recreate the ’80s usually goes straight for the popped collars and neon-colored everything. But a quick review of some of the decade’s most popular movies reveals a deep sense of disillusionment. Case in point: In the same year that Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) was declaring “greed is good” in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street, Paul Verhoeven was unleashing one of cinema’s most subversive sci-fi flicks, which sees the mayor of Detroit hand over control of the city to the evil Omni Consumer Products (OCP), which promptly turns Motor City into a testing ground for its latest technologies. One of those creations is RoboCop (Peter Weller), a law-enforcing cyborg who is programmed with the sole intent of eradicating the city’s crime problem—until memories of his human existence find their way back into his head. Hey, it happens. Especially when you recycle the corpse of a police officer murdered in the line of duty in order to make your robot cop thing work. The film’s extreme violence initially earned it the dreaded X rating, which Verhoeven skirted with some clever editing. But the real scares are in its statement on capitalism and the power that corporations wield, which is as true today as it was nearly 40 years ago.
Inception
Anyone who has ever seen Inception knows that you probably need at least a second go-around—or 20—to fully understand its many complexities. If that is even possible. The less you know about the details of the story going into it the better, but the basics are this: Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is an “extractor”—a talented thief who steals his targets’ secrets by infiltrating their dreams with his trusty team of colleagues, which includes Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Elliot Page, and Tom Hardy. People still debate what happened in the film’s ending, which is just the kind of mindfuckery Christopher Nolan seems to revel in.
Star Wars V: Episode V—The Empire Strikes Back
There are only a handful of movie sequels that have somehow managed to be better than the film that spawned then, and The Empire Strikes Back is near the top of the list. The film reunites Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher), Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill), and Han Solo (Harrison Ford)—the fearless threesome who made A New Hope an instant smash hit—as they yet again do their best to keep their world safe from the dastardly Darth Vader. While A New Hope dazzled with its ahead-of-its-time visual effects, The Empire Strikes Back was just as impressive—but took the Star Wars universe in a decidedly darker, and more adult, direction.
The Matrix
Today, The Matrix is part of an enormously popular franchise that includes movies, video games, and even an animated feature (The Animatrix). While all those additional pieces of the puzzle may have diluted the impact of the original film, its one-of-a-kindness still stands. In a dystopian future (really, is there any other kind?), the world is living in a simulated reality without even realizing it—until a top-notch hacker named Neo (Keanu Reeves) sees what’s happening and works to separate fact from AI-created fiction. The Wachowskis’ visionary directing, thought-provoking script, and mind-bending action sequences still have the ability to make viewers’ jaws drop. Audiences haven’t looked at spoons—or Keanu Reeves—the same way since.
The Terminator
In a different world, the studio could have won a casting argument with James Cameron, and The Terminator would star O.J. Simpson instead of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Through a fortuitous and circuitous turn of events, Cameron met with Schwarzenegger to pretend to consider him for the role of Kyle Reese in The Terminator and walked away knowing he had just found their eponymous cyborg, who time-travels from 2029 to 1984 in order to murder Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), a waitress and future mom to the kid who will save the world. Fortunately, she’s got Reese (Michael Biehn)—another time traveler—on her side. On paper, it may sound preposterous, but 40 years later The Terminator still manages to impress—and is still spawning new content.
Terminator 2: Judgment Day
If The Terminator raised the bar for sci-fi films, Terminator 2: Judgment Day smashed it to pieces. Like so many cyborg movies that preceded it—including its 1984 parent film—T2 is as much a commentary on what it means to be human as it is a declaration of just how far is “too far” in the development of intelligent technology. If only early ’90s James Cameron knew what would lie ahead. The plot of this sequel essentially follows the same pattern as the original film: a Terminator (Robert Patrick) is sent to Los Angeles to kill John Connor (Edward Furlong), son of Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), before he can lead the human resistance. Once again, the Connors have a guardian angel—only this time it’s a kinder, gentler, familiar old Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger) who is sent to protect John. Where T2 managed to supplant its predecessor is in its VFX. As he has done so many times throughout his career, Cameron essentially had to create new technology in order to see his vision to fruition and, in doing so, led the transition from practical effects to CGI (for better or worse). Even by today’s standards, T2’s liquid metal shots are incredible to witness.
Escape From New York
John Carpenter may be better known as a master of horror, but he’s no slouch in the sci-fi department. Set in the then future year of 1997, Escape From New York offers a version of America where the country is one big war zone and the island of Manhattan is one giant maximum security prison. That’s unfortunate for the president (Donald Pleasence), as New York City is exactly where Air Force One crash-lands after an attempted hijacking, and POTUS is taken hostage by one of the country’s most dangerous crime bosses. In order to ensure the president’s safe return, the government has no choice but to enlist the help of Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell), a soldier-turned-criminal who might just be the only person who can save the country from total anarchy. Are there synth scores? You betcha. Carpenter would double down on his sci-fi prowess and reteam with Russell again, just one year later, with his equally awesome The Thing (1982).
Ex Machina
While the 1980s were undoubtedly a very good time for sci-fi, the new millennium has proven that there are still plenty of wholly unique stories to be told—and Ex Machina is one of them. Caleb Smith (Domhnall Gleeson) is a programmer who is invited to the remote home of an eccentric tech billionaire (Oscar Isaac) for what he thinks is a gig helping to develop a truly groundbreaking humanoid robot. But when Caleb meets Ava (Alicia Vikander), the robot in question, it becomes clear that it is she, not the humans, who is in control. With its A-list cast, stellar directing, all-too-relevant storyline, and synchronized dance scene, Ex Machina just might be this millennium’s Blade Runner.
Back to the Future
Yes, Back to the Future is a comedy. And a family film too. Not to mention an ’80s classic. But at its heart, the time-traveling adventure of Marty McFly is sci-fi through and through. Marty (Michael J. Fox) is a cool ’80s teen who has a hot girlfriend yet somehow manages to spend most of his time hanging out with a middle-aged mad scientist (Christopher Lloyd), who turns a sweet DeLorean into a time machine. Hijinks ensue, as does a bizarre plotline involving Libyan terrorists, all of which land Marty back in 1955, where he meets the teen versions of his parents and desperately thwarts his mom’s attempts to seduce him. (That storyline could be its own movie, really.) But by interfering with the past, Marty is putting his own future at risk. Forcing him to find a way to get back to 1985—but not before inventing rock ’n’ roll as we know it.
Alien
Ridley Scott has dabbled in virtually every genre, but the bars he has set in the sci-fi world are undeniable. Two years after making his feature directorial debut with the period film The Duellists, Scott changed the science fiction game with Alien. The film follows the crew of the spacecraft Nostromo, including warrant officer Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), who respond to a distress call as they’re making their way home to Earth. This turns out to be their first mistake—especially when they realize that they’re being stalked by an unknown alien species that seems determined to make sure none of the crewmembers ever leave the planetoid. Alien introduced audiences to an array of terrifying creatures—Xenomorphs and face-huggers and chestbursters, oh my—and kicked off a notable movie franchise that will continue later this year with Alien: Romulus.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Two years after inventing the “summer blockbuster” with Jaws, Steven Spielberg made a quick pivot from vengeful sharks to mysterious extraterrestrials—a theme he would revisit again a few years later—with Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The film reunited the director with Richard Dreyfuss, who here plays a loving husband and father whose unexpected run-in with a UFO turns into an obsession that threatens to ruin the life he has built for himself. Nearly a half-century later, it remains one of the most smartly made alien movies Hollywood has ever seen by doing away with the “extra-terrestrial invasion” trope and instead focusing on the challenges that would come with the discovery of an alien life-form.
2001: A Space Odyssey
Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey is the sci-fi movie to end all sci-fi movies, with every genre flick that has followed owing the auteur a debt of gratitude. With its epic scope, gorgeous cinematography, and its somewhat prophetic—and deeply dystopian—narrative about the potential dangers of relying too much on technology, the film is as relevant today as it was upon its initial release nearly 60 years ago. Particularly with its main storyline, which focuses on a group of men taking part in a space mission with the help of HAL 9000, a piece of AI technology that decides to go rogue. It’s not a short film, and every one of its 189 minutes is packed with prescient storytelling and ahead-of-its-time technology, making it stand out as one of the most accomplished films in cinema history.
Blade Runner
Between The Last Duel (2021) and Napoleon (2023), Ridley Scott has been on more of a historical epic kick lately. But no amount of time away from the sci-fi world could ever threaten his place as a preeminent master of the genre. While he made his name with Alien, he achieved icon status with Blade Runner. The setting: Los Angeles, 2019. (Stick with us here.) Flying cars are a thing, as are bioengineered humanoids known as replicants, and that’s a bad thing. Which is why there are so-called “blade runners” like Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), whose job is to find and kill these nonhuman threats to society. But when everyone looks and often acts human, where do you draw the line? Blade Runner’s complex storyline led to Scott and Ford being forced to record and attach a voice-over, which they both hated, to the film’s original release. The film has subsequently been rereleased, both theatrically and in home versions, a number of times and in different iterations. In 1992, Scott finally got to release a director’s cut of the film, which did away with the voiceover (and other elements he didn’t love), but even he didn’t have final say over that cut. Finally, in 2007, he got the chance to be the last word on every element with Blade Runner: The Final Cut. Watch ’em all and see where you land.
Watching people do things in space with a time limit is almost always compelling (see: The Martian, Gravity, Apollo 13), and the second episode of Constellation does not disappoint in that regard. In a tense hour, we watch with bated breath as an oxygen-strapped Jo struggles to fix the Soyuz 1 capsule by herself while the world stands by in horrified fascination.
The episode is once again bookended by brief visits to a snowy vista in the near future. Jo rushes to safety in the warm cabin after finding who she thinks is the real Alice. She quickly runs a steaming hot bath for her freezing child — to anyone who has ever taken a First Aid class, this will register as a huge no-no, but hey, it’s a TV show — and then panics when they run out of hot water. Out of the corner of her eye, she sees a warm, safe, sleeping Alice in the bedroom and starts to lose it. She whirls around the cabin, toggling her attention back and forth between the two girls, one in the bath and one in bed. Bath Alice is only seen through a fractured reflection in a mirror, and we also catch glimpses of Jo in that mirror as well. As Jo walks into the bathroom, Bath Alice is gone, and Bed Alice is awake and asking questions. Jo is flummoxed and furious.
The scene abruptly ends by transitioning to Jo on the ISS. As I said in my previous recap, if the show hadn’t firmly established that the events in the cabin take place five weeks after the events in the ISS, I would be 100 percent convinced that Jo’s oxygen-addled brain was hallucinating it all. If the intent here is to disorient us, it’s successful.
Jo herself is somewhat untethered from reality as she floats around in the near-defunct ISS. She suddenly realizes that she has lost hours of precious time. What happened to her in those hours? Did she pass out due to stress and lack of oxygen? Or might this be an important gap in time that will get filled in later? Do we have a Dr. Jekyll and Ms. Hyde situation going on here? She lost nearly 12 hours, right? At this point, though, it doesn’t really matter. All Jo knows is that she has to hustle if she wants to make it back to Earth. Her love for Alice and Marcus motivates her, and she works diligently to retrieve batteries from elsewhere in the station and reconnect them to power up Soyuz 1.
As she works, she talks to hear someone’s voice, even if it is her own, and she starts to hallucinate a garbled message from her dead crewmate, Paul. Yes, Paul is still dead, but he comes back to haunt Jo in several ways throughout this episode. First, his head covering comes off, floating up to greet Jo as she’s hard at work. Jo takes an ill-advised break to replace it and lays in the capsule next to the body, wishing that someone, anyone, could hear her. She admits to no one in particular that she’s afraid of the dark. Jo is a stoic and capable woman, but she’s also vulnerable and terrified. And scary things just keep happening. She hallucinates (?) Paul’s voice as she plays back her own recording. He tells her to stop breathing, which is a horrifying thing to hear anyone say in any situation. A bit later, Paul’s hand floats into view. Curious, she follows it. It seems to be reaching out to her, so she grabs it, and for a second she sees her old friend on the other end of the disembodied limb.
Jo returns to her work, successfully replacing all of the batteries and starting the undocking procedure. She still has no contact with TsUP. Every time she runs into a problem, she is the only one who can fix it, and we’re right there alongside her, adrenaline pumping through our veins. These moments feel akin to watching someone play a particularly tricky video-game sequence, only the penalty for losing the level is certain death. There’s a moment in which Jo keys in the previous de-orbit parameters, and the ancient onboard computer denies her because the parameters are outdated. Jo gives it a few hard whacks like one might smack a vending machine with a dangling treat. Voilà! It works. Later, when a bolt gets stuck and Jo finds out that it’s an issue that takes two crew members to resolve, the camera work seems to subtly be implying that someone or something (Paul’s disembodied hand?) intentionally assisted her from the outside of the hatch.
As Jo prepares to launch, she leaves a tearful and heartfelt message to both Marcus and Alice on her iPad. She thanks Marcus for the sacrifice he made so that she could go on this mission and then pours her heart out to Alice. When she says, “No matter what happens, my eyes are always on you,” it’s heartbreaking. Noomi Rapace makes Jo’s love for her daughter palpable, but we still don’t know what motivated her to spend an entire year away from her family and risk death in the process. Something tells me we’re going to find out.
Of course we know that Jo doesn’t die. But let’s press pause on her for a moment as we check in with the humans on the ground. One of the most intriguing pairings in the episode is Henry and Irena. We see the two meet face-to-face at the landing strip in Kazakhstan, and even the first looks they give one another suggest a fraught relationship. They both appear to be very influential in the space community. Irena tells Henry that she’ll be pulling Russian support for the ISS project soon as it was never meant to run this long; Henry protests. But he’s mostly protesting because he wants his precious CAL back, and he’s not sure if Jo is going to make it. The two also share a cryptic exchange in which Henry asks Irena about her sister, and she says that he should know that she passed away years ago. When Irena asks Henry the same question, he says that he hasn’t heard from his brother in “many years, thank God.”
But it doesn’t exactly feel like Henry is telling the truth about this mystery brother. In fact, it seems like Irena and Henry both have firsthand experience with what is happening to Jo in real time. Are these mysterious “siblings” actually other halves that came back with them from space somehow? We see Henry’s identical brother, Bud, give an interview to a major news organization about Jo’s situation, and he gets increasingly angry with the reporter’s line of questioning. (Breaking Bad fans will enjoy Banks trotting out his signature Mike Ehrmantraut sneer on glorious display here.) It’s unclear whether Bud is Henry’s twin, a space apparition, or living in a separate universe, but one thing is for sure — Bud Caldera has an anger problem.
Elsewhere, we meet Frederic. Apparently, Frederic was the dude who trained Jo for four straight years in order to complete this mission, and he’s got some pull with the space people. Marcus pleads with him to try to do something to save Jo, and Frederic comes up short. There’s a sense that this smarmy space bro may be the reason that Marcus and Jo were having problems before she left, and this information makes me want to know a whole lot more about all of these relationships.
All that’s left for the people on the ground to do is wait. So they do. And, when the countdown ticks to zero, they immediately give up hope. Irena gives a short prayer that cryptically mentions “brothers and sisters,” a callback to her prior exchange with Henry. Everyone somberly resigns themselves to Jo’s fate except the industrious Sergei, who continues to broadcast to her in case she can hear them. Sergei is a real one.
Mere minutes later, they get a signal. It’s Jo! Sergei is so elated that his little headset almost pops off. They confirm that she has the CAL and then they ask her to change her parameters. The girl is hurtling through literal space at 8Gs, so … no. Obviously she can’t reach 7 million buttons to change her parameters, so she’s just destined to fall where she may, and the team will have to find her.
In a thrilling sequence, the cavalry convenes to search for the capsule as it falls. Dozens of helicopters and trucks are deployed, rumbling across the desert to find a single human. As citizens of the universe, we all have a vested interest in humans coming home safely from space, and this overwhelming team effort is heartening.
Jo lands. The images of the stark, otherworldly capsule against the arid desert landscape are captivating. The orange-and-white parachute catches a gust of wind, and for a moment it feels like the whole thing might go off a cliff. But honestly, what’s another hundred or so feet when that thing has just dropped hundreds of miles from the sky, am I right? Jo is elated and, despite her body’s protests over being reintroduced to gravity, she somehow makes it out of the capsule, only to come face-to-face with a wolf. It’s unclear whether or not this is a hallucination — only the boldest or dumbest of wolves would come close to a giant capsule that just fell from the sky — but there’s not much time to contemplate the situation because the cavalry arrives, and the wolf runs away. So much for Jo being hard to find.
Jo is elated to be home and even more elated to be reunited with Marcus and Alice. As the family is evacuated from the site via helicopter, Jo and Alice hold hands. As they touch, they simultaneously experience the sensation of losing the other and being totally alone in the helicopter. They both have respective moments of panic but are quickly reunited in psychic space. Oddly, neither tells the other about what they’ve just experienced. It feels very strange that Alice is also experiencing these skips in reality.
Jo goes right back to being blissfully back on her home planet, taking a deep breath and saying, “You forget how Earth smells.” It feels worth mentioning that Jo’s sense of smell is prominent three times in this episode, first in the present timeline when Jo smells the “rescued” Alice and rejoices in her scent, and then again when she frantically smells the other Alice and only registers feelings of panic. If Earth is home, then so is Alice. Smell is the sense most tied to memory, so I wouldn’t be surprised if this comes up again in a later episode.
Back in the snow, Jo retrieves the CAL from a nearby shed and insists that the other Alice come with her. The exchange: “Where is she?” “Who?!” “You!” is pretty great. And, as the two head out into the elements to find the other Alice, it feels very much like they’re racing into a blizzard to chase an apparition.
• This episode is called “Live and Let Die,” which is the title of a Wings song written by Paul (and Linda) McCartney. First, the “Paul is dead” reference last episode, and now this? Let’s hope every episode has a passing reference to the living legend.
• I can’t really find any narrative reason for this episode to be called “Live and Let Die.” Is this referring to ground control’s inability to help Jo in her time of need? Or is it a reference to the dead Paul and living Jo returning to Earth in the capsule together? Sound off in the comments, please, because I seriously do not get it.
Smile 2 rounds out its cast. M3GAN 2.0 is going to take a lot longer to come out than planned. Simu Liu is teaming up with James Wan for a new sci-fi series. Doctor Who teases a mysterious new alien. Plus, what to expect on the rest of Halo season 2. To me, my spoilers!
Strange New World’s Melissa Navia Talks Flying the Enterprise | io9 Interview
Smile 2
Deadline reports Raúl Castillo (Cassandro) and Miles Gutierrez-Riley (The Wilds) have joined the cast of Smile 2 in currently undisclosed roles.
Relapse
Variety has word Joseph Quinn (Fantastic Four, Stranger Things) will star in Relapse, an “elevated horror film” directed by novelist Bret Easton Ellis. Quinn will play Matt Cullen, a man “who checks into rehab after witnessing a horrific death during a debauched party. Three months later, he is set to get his life back together, staying at his parent’s mansion in the hills of Los Angeles. But things have changed around Matt and everything seems off balance. Fueled by his unstable personality and the invading power of social media, Matt’s paranoia grows, messing up with his rehabilitation program. As he starts using again, a mysterious presence starts growing around Matt, and a monster that has been haunting him since he was a teenager reveals itself. His therapist tries to help, convinced that the monster is actually in Matt’s head.”
The First Omen
According to Bloody-Disgusting, The First Omen has been rated “R” for “violent content, grisly/disturbing images, and brief graphic nudity.”
Abigail
Bloody-Disgusting additionally reports Abigail has also been rated “R” for “strong bloody violence and gore throughout, pervasive language and brief drug use.”
M3GAN 2.0
M3GAN 2.0 has been pushed back four months and will now reach theaters on May 16, 2025.
A demon named Calypso wants the soul of an Afghanistan war veteran-turned-actor in the gory, likely NSFW trailer for Laugh.
Laugh – Teaser Trailer
Untitled Simu Liu Series
TV Line reports Peacock has handed a straight-to-series order to an untiled “sci-fi thriller” starring Simu Liu. Produced by James Wan, the story is said to follow Liu as “an intelligence analyst who realizes his brain has been hacked, giving the perpetrators access to everything he sees and hears. Caught between his shadowy agency and the unknown hackers, he must maintain a performance 24/7 to flush out who’s responsible and prove where his allegiance lies.”
Bewitched
Deadline also has word a reboot of Bewitched from The Boys writer, Judalina Neira, is now in development at Sony Pictures TV.
Star Trek: Legacy
During a recent interview with Trek Movie, Terry Matalas confirmed there have still been no discussions with Paramount about developing his proposed Star Trek series.
There’s not. They have Star Trek that they are making and they only have so much money and streaming space. There’s currently not, but we’re looking forward to whatever the Star Trek universe brings … and never say never.
SurrealEstate/Reginald the Vampire/The Ark
According to TV Line, Syfy has renewed SurrealEstate, Reginald the Vampire and The Ark for new seasons.
Chucky
TV Line additionally reports the second half of Chucky’s third season will premiere Wednesday, April 10, at 10/9c on USA and Syfy.
Doctor Who
The BBC has shared Russell T. Davies’ audition script for the role of Fifteenth Doctor introducing the “Spikes” — a spiky, yet-to-be-seen monster said to be intense thoughts brought to life.
Quantum Leap
Ben leaps into the bodies of a Baltimore firefighter and a 1970’s race car driver in the trailer for next week’s two-part season finale of Quantum Leap.
Quantum Leap 2×12 “As the World Burns” / 2×13 “Against Time” Promo (HD) Season Finale
Halo
Finally, Paramount+ has released a new “this season on…” trailer for the second season of Halo.
Explore the world of love through a variety of lenses. Here’s a collection of powerful films that each portray love and romance in a unique way, spanning multiple genres including drama, comedy, fantasy, animation, and sci-fi.
“Cinema is a mirror by which we often see ourselves.”
Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu
Movies give us the opportunity to explore major themes in life in a meaningful and profound way.
A powerful film can lead to a better understanding of your own experiences. It can communicate thoughts and emotions that may have been challenging to express; and, at times, completely reshape our perspective on life.
For better or worse, movies play a pivotal role in shaping our beliefs and map of reality. We pick up ideas through films, sometimes absorbed at a very young age, and those ideas find their way into our daily lives influencing our choices and perspectives.
Filmmakers understand the transformative power of cinema, purposely using it to shake up people’s consciousness. The goal of a solid film is to create an experience that leaves you a different person by the end of it.
As viewers, it’s essential to be aware of a film’s effects both emotionally and intellectually. Often, the movies that linger in our thoughts long after watching are the most impactful and life-changing.
Here’s a collection of classic films about love and romance. Each movie has had a lasting influence on audiences in one way or another. It’s an eclectic list that spans multiple genres, including drama, comedy, animation, fantasy, mystery, and sci-fi.
Titanic (1997)
James Cameron’s epic tale blends love and tragedy against the historical backdrop of the Titanic’s sinking in 1912. The film weaves a captivating narrative of a forbidden romance blossoming amidst a natural disaster.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
In this mind-bending story, a man attempts to erase the memories of a lost love using cutting-edge technology, only to find fate conspiring to bring the couple back together repeatedly. The film explores the complexities of memory, love, and destiny.
Beauty and the Beast (1991)
Disney’s classic adaptation of the French fairy tale is celebrated for its beautiful animation and memorable songs. The film goes beyond appearances, illustrating the transformative power of true love.
Her (2013)
Set in a near-future world, “Her” tells the unconventional love story of a lonely man who forms a deep connection with his computer’s operating system. The film delves into themes of technology, loneliness, and the nature of human connection.
Before Sunrise (1995)
Richard Linklater’s film follows two young tourists who meet on a train in Europe and share an unforgettable night in Vienna. The movie explores the transient nature of connections and the profound impact of brief encounters.
Lost in Translation (2003)
Sofia Coppola’s film features a washed-up American celebrity and a young woman forging an unexpected bond in Tokyo. “Lost in Translation” navigates themes of loneliness, connection, and self-discovery.
Cinema Paradiso (1988)
An Italian filmmaker reflects on his past and learns how to channel his love in a different and creative way through his art and craftsmanship.
Past Lives (2023)
Two childhood friends reconnect after years apart, seeking to unravel the meaning behind their enduring connection. The film explores the complexities of friendship, time, and shared history.
Set in a dystopian future, “The Lobster” challenges societal norms by presenting a world where individuals must choose a romantic partner within 45 days or face transformation into an animal. The film satirizes the pressure to conform in matters of love.
Annie Hall (1977)
Woody Allen’s classic romantic comedy is a hilarious and heartfelt movie that explores neurotic love and the psychological obstacles we commonly face in marriage and long-term relationships.
Your Name. (2016)
A masterful anime that combines elements of science fiction, fantasy, and romance. It centers on a mysterious connection between a boy and girl who swap bodies, learn about each other’s lives, and search to find each other in real life.
A Woman Under the Influence (1974)
John Cassavetes’ uncomfortably raw and dramatic portrayal of the profound impact of mental illness on marriage and family, navigating the complexities with unflinching honesty.
The Fountain (2006)
Darren Aronofsky’s “The Fountain” explores love and mortality through three interconnected storylines spanning different time periods. The film delves into themes of eternal love and the quest for immortality, providing a visually stunning and emotionally resonant experience.
Scenes From a Marriage (1974)
Legendary director Ingmar Bergman’s deeply incisive and detailed chronicle of a rocky marriage’s final days.
Choose one movie and analyze it
Each of these films offers a different perspective on love while also pushing the boundaries of cinema and story-telling.
It’s fun to compare each story: How did the couples meet? What defined “love” for them? What obstacles did they face? Did the relationship work out in the end or not? Why?
While films are often seen as just a source of entertainment or healthy escapism, they can also be an avenue for self-improvement and growth.
The “Movie Analysis Worksheet” is designed to make you think about the deeper themes behind a film and extract some lessons from it that you can apply to your life.
Watch with a friend and discuss
If you don’t want to do the worksheet, just watch one of the movies with a friend (or loved one) – then discuss it after.
Watching a film together is an opportunity to share a new experience. It can also spark up interesting conversations. This is one reason why bonding through movies is one of the most common ways we connect with people in today’s world.
Which film will you check out?
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Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrowis a 2004 science fiction adventure film set in an alternate 1939, that follows the daring pilot Sky Captain and reporter Polly Perkins as they uncover a mystery involving giant robots attacking major cities around the world and stop the villainous Dr. Totenkopf.
Here’s how you can watch and stream Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow via streaming services such as HBO Max.
Is Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow available to watch via streaming?
Yes, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow is available to watch via streaming on HBO Max.
The movie is noted for its visually distinctive style that pays homage to the pulp adventure serials of the 1930s and 1940s, featuring a combination of CGI environments and live-action actors against green screens.
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow stars Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, Angelina Jolie, Giovanni Ribisi, Michael Gambon, Bai Ling, Omid Djalili, and more.
Watch Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow streaming via HBO Max
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow is available to watch on HBO Max. Other globally acclaimed hits you can enjoy on this popular streaming service include Game of Thrones, House of the Dragon, Westworld, and lots more!
You can watch the movie via Max, formerly known as HBO Max, by following these steps:
$19.99 per month or $199.99 per year (ultimate ad-free)
Enter your personal information and password
Select ‘Create Account’
Max With Ads provides the service’s streaming library at a Full HD resolution, allowing users to stream on up to two supported devices at once. Max Ad-Free removes the service’s commercials and allows streaming on two devices at once in Full HD. It also allows for 30 downloads at a time to allow users to watch content offline. On the other hand, Max Ultimate Ad-Free allows users to stream on four devices at once in a 4K Ultra HD resolution and provides Dolby Atmos audio and 100 downloads.
The synopsis of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow is as follows:
“When gigantic robots attack New York City, “Sky Captain” uses his private air force to fight them off. His ex-girlfriend, reporter Polly Perkins, has been investigating the recent disappearance of prominent scientists. Suspecting a link between the global robot attacks and missing men, Sky Captain and Polly decide to work together. They fly to the Himalayas in pursuit of the mysterious Dr. Totenkopf, the mastermind behind the robots.”
NOTE: The streaming services listed above are subject to change. The information provided was correct at the time of writing.
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The moon of Veldt is a David facing down the Goliath of the Mother World, which has amassed abundant wealth, political power, and an immense army. Veldt is nowhere special—until the rulers of the Mother World decide to seize it as a breadbasket.
“They land in the village to say, ‘Listen, you guys will be our local food source while we’re tromping around this part of the galaxy. So how long till the harvest comes in?’ The villagers are pretty much stunned by the brutality, but they don’t realize what level the Mother World’s ready to go to,” Zack Snyder says.
A newcomer named Kora (Sofia Boutella) rallies them to resist rather than roll over. She has been hiding on this moon after fleeing from her own role within the leadership of that oppressive government. (That’s her abandoned starship out beyond the wheat fields.) “The Imperium comes down, and they want to take the women and take the children and they need more soldiers,” Deborah Snyder says. “They’re going to take their food. And [the villagers] go, ‘Look, we can bargain with them.’”
The fugitive hiding in their midst is the only one who knows how foolhardy that is. “Kora used to be in the Imperium, and she’s like, ‘Guys, this ends badly for everybody,’” Zack Snyder says.
Fields of Gold: Filmmaker Zack Snyder and producer Deborah Snyder behind the scenes on Rebel Moon.
Clay Enos/Netflix
Boutella sees the character as a symbol for the way people ignore or run from the problems in their lives, until they can’t anymore. “She knows the guilt that she’s been living with, and the first step of her redemption is doing something about it instead of going away,” says the actor, best known for Atomic Blonde and playing the title role in 2017’s The Mummy opposite Tom Cruise. “I think that, as much as it is sci-fi, it’s a very human story,” she says.
This humble moon of Veldt is a greater danger than anyone realizes because the Mother World’s grip on its empire is secretly weakening and slipping. “They’ve conquered the universe, they’ve scooped everyone into the empire, and they’ve had to make individual deals with the different leaders of the different worlds. You can imagine how complicated that is. A lot of rulers felt like they made a bad deal, or that their fathers’ fathers made a bad deal. They begin to push back,” Zack Snyder says. “It’s more whispers at first. We’re right on the edge of revolution, and if our villagers are successful, the example of that could spur an even bigger revolt.”
Dunne’s family declined to comment for this story, preferring not to relive the tragedy. Packer did not respond to requests for an interview. As the deplorable Daniel, the actor, who went on to appear in movies such as RoboCop and Strange Days, along with a long list of TV appearances, remains one of the most chilling aspects of the miniseries.
A 22-year-old actor named Blair Tefkin entered a production in mourning. She had just made her screen debut with a small role in Fast Times at Ridgemont High and was asked to fill the part left vacant by Dunne’s death. “Someone had to do it. But definitely, it was hard,” Tefkin says. “Normally, you’d be really excited and happy you got a part, but it was a different kind of experience.”
An extra week of filming was added to the production to re-create work that Dunne had already completed. “We had the physical problem of having to go back and reshoot scenes with a brand-new actress, who had to step into the role that a beloved person had been playing,” Johnson says. Tefkin sums up those reshoots with two words. “Awkward,” she says. “Sad.”
Ironically, her Robin is one of the bright spots of V, an effervescent kid who just yearns for things to return to normal when her life is upended. She was the innocent caught up in the crisis. “I didn’t really think about what she symbolized,” Tefkin says. “I was thinking more about it from the vantage point of sort of a self-involved teenager. Her life and the world is crumbling. She’s interested in boys and her crushes and is pretty tunnel-visioned.”
After shooting was finished, the V cast and crew gathered one more time for a wrap party to screen the miniseries. The mood was celebratory until the end, when the credits concluded with: “In loving memory of Dominique Dunne—Her friends miss her.”
“That’s when everybody in the room really started crying,” Johnson says. “That moment.”
V’s debut was a smash with audiences and critics, but V’s victory turned out to be a pyrrhic one for Johnson. NBC wanted more but Warner Bros. was reluctant to make it. The initial $8 million budget had ballooned to $13 million, and the financials seemed risky. “I think it was unclear to them just how valuable this was,” says Sagansky, the former NBC exec. Johnson blames V’s budget problems on the overtime incurred in the race to finish by May sweeps. The sci-fi element also came with sticker shock. “The use of special effects was really unique in television at that time, and because they were so new, it was unclear how much they cost,” Sagansky says. Blame fell on Johnson himself, although Sagansky feels that was misguided: “I never thought that Kenny got all his due for what he accomplished.”
NBC finally offered terms that convinced Warner Bros. to greenlight a second miniseries. The sequel would be called V: The Final Battle. Just before production was set to begin, Johnson says he got a call from a Warner Bros. TV executive, who said: “‘Kenny, we don’t want you to direct any of the sequel.’ Honest to God, this is a quote. ‘We are afraid you won’t direct the sequel as quick and cheap and dirty as we want it done.’”
Johnson was forced out for trying too hard.
His pleas to NBC for intervention went nowhere. “I called Brandon, of course, and he said, ‘I want to, but the network won’t let me meddle with Warner’s internal affairs,’” Johnson says.
The actors say they were unhappy to lose him but contractually obligated to continue. “I think it fundamentally changed the nature of the show,” Singer says. “The overarching politics were underemphasized in comparison to the more adventurous and action elements of the story. We felt that immediately.”
V: The Final Battle was still a hit when it aired during the May sweeps of 1984. It included Juliet leading an attack on the Visitors during a live television ceremony, during which she held their supreme commander before the cameras, tore at his face, and exposed the reptilian predator beneath. Packer’s Daniel met an appropriately karmic end, consumed (literally) by the alien regime he so dutifully served. Tefkin’s Robin gave birth to her Visitor-fathered twins—one a human baby with a thin snakelike tongue, the other a scaly green abomination. “I never saw any of this,” Johnson says. “All of my friends who worked on it said, ‘Kenny, you don’t want to see what they did to your original series. You just don’t.’”
The Final Battle used parts of his scripts, but Johnson changed his story credit to Lillian Weezer, a combination of the name and nickname of his golden retriever. NBC ordered a weekly series, but Johnson was completely locked out. The result? “Ugh,” says Sagansky, “the worst.”
V, the series, devolved into campy schlock. Badler noted the changing influences for her militaristic Diana. “Stalin and these sorts of very powerful, corrupt leaders were more where I was thinking when I did the role,” she says. “‘Joan Collins’ came in later with the series, when it became a little bit ridiculous and started to become a soap opera in outer space.”
Most actors would do anything to secure a lead role on a national network drama, but Grant was desperate to quit: “In fact, since I wanted out of it so badly, they kept throwing more and more money at me.” She kept proposing ways for Juliet to sacrifice herself for the cause. “I mean, I had literally 50 ways to kill me off, and they weren’t having it,” Grant says. “And the direction that the series took, I mean…they tried to write a mud fight between Diana and Juliet, and I wouldn’t have it.”
The audience didn’t care for it either. The V series was canceled after only a partial season.
Johnson also wasn’t involved in the 2009 ABC reboot of V, which had a slightly longer run than its ’80s predecessor, with 22 episodes over two seasons. Badler and Singer returned playing different characters, but they were the only connection to the original. The effects were better, for sure, but the impact wasn’t nearly the same.
Humanoid troops stand guard after imposing martial law on Earth in the original 1983 miniseries.Everette Collection
Johnson went on to develop the Alien Nation TV series in the late ’80s and remained active as a producer and director for decades. Today, he is working to revive his own version of V. He’s published novels revealing how he actually wanted the story to play out, and his original deal with Warner Bros. stipulated that he controls the movie rights. Although he has no say over V on television, he still hopes to mount a big-screen revival. He’s now looking for investors willing to buy in.
The fandom, he believes, is still out there. He keeps a drawer-size binder full of letters and emails, many of them penned by people who were just kids when they watched the original miniseries. Many thanked him not just for the scares and thrills, but for teaching a valuable moral. “If I printed all of them, I mean, it would be a stack that would go to the ceiling,” he says. “Honest to God, it’s crazy. But bless their hearts. I love those fans, and the fact that so many of them get it.”
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