Week 4: Children of Men & Blade Runner

Week 4:

Children of Men & Blade Runner

The first time I saw Children of Men I was probably too much of a teenager to really understand how scary and realistic a world the film created. Children of Men definitely takes a page from Handmaid’s Tale with the whole no-one-can-have-babies thing. As far as I’m concerned this is not something that is a negative. Having the entire human race become barren is something that probably could happen since we use all kind of crazy chemicals every day without even realizing or, for the most part, caring. The most interesting part to me is how much the culture in Children of Men celebrates youth since 

Blade Runner is a whole different story. The human race seems to have continued to survive long enough for science to advance to the point where they can create any food or creature thus allowing anyone to enjoy culinary delicacies and giant naturally poisonous snakes that have been created to be harmless but outwardly identical to their original image. Of course the replicants of humans don't work out as well as animals, even though the human replicants have only so many years to live due to a fail safe in their data. This is where Harrison Ford is brought in to wrangle a group of replicants that escaped their colony on a developing planet and made it back to Earth in order to try and get a longer life span from their creator.

This kind of story is almost the same as any other robot with human emotions and feelings plot. Every time they’re interesting to me because it could go so many different ways. We could be destroyed and the robots could take the throne as the dominant being. The robots could just live on another planet and leave Earth. Or the robots or replicants could live peacefully amongst the human race instead of being enslaved. History has told us time and time again that enslaving anything or any one never ends well for the owner. I’d like to hope that the replicants eventually are seen as “people” and not just objects to do our bidding. That might be a bit too positive though.

Unmaking the Real? Critique and Utopia in Recent SF Films

Failure of the utopian movement starting in the 1960s to current times, seems to have pushed culture to be more focused on dystopian or darker futures rather than more pleasant outcomes of societies current actions. Commonly I miss being able to fully relate to an assigned text due to it referencing media that I am unfamiliar with, with this text I find it a much more enjoyable read since the references made are to pretty recent movies for the most part. This text definitely has me questioning why most Sci-Fi movies are more negatively angled. Is it because our society is actually concerned with our actions? Or is it merely a trend that will fade out over time?