I've had debates with myself trying to rationalize adding it to my top 15 list, but I just can't do it...too many flaws. I do enjoy several parts of it very much though.
RAMA
Best science fiction film of the 21st century (so far)
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I've had debates with myself trying to rationalize adding it to my top 15 list, but I just can't do it...too many flaws. I do enjoy several parts of it very much though.
RAMA
lol
Sure, but there's been great Sci-Fi where the characters talk to each other and act like human beings. Take Farscape.....the relationship between John and Aeryn is a very good example of how a romance with all it's ups and downs can be portrayed in a Sci-Fi story/setting.
With Eternal Mind (which I really enjoyed, by the way) was set in our current time and place with our current level of technology with the one exception being the "forgetting machine". The only reason they even had any sci-fi elements at all in the first place was because they wanted to tell a romantic story about what it would be like if you could voluntarily forget the person you used to love so much. Solution: Invent dues ex machine to enable the actual story to be told, none of which is really concerned with the technology or setting they're in. It's a great idea for a story, but it could have just as easily been a pill, hypnosis or eve amnesia or something. While the machine did play an important part in allowing the story to be told, it was not central to the story by any means.
I think most good Sci-Fi requires the technology and setting to be significantly different than our own and I just never felt like the world they were living in was really any different than the one I'm living in.
Someone else mentioned how inception was different......for me it was hugely different in that the technology used played such a central part in the actual story itself and was so far removed from anything that we currently have that it clearly belongs in the Sci-Fi genre.
I dunno......could just be me, but if I were online renting the movie I sure wouldn't think to look under "Sci-Fi" for Eternal Mind......Drama....sure........romance or even comedy.....sure, in a million years I wouldn't think to look under "Sci-Fi" for it.
Lots of short stories in SF anthologies were set like this...in worlds that were exactly like ours except for one central thing that set the story in motion...a lot of these stories wound up in Twilight Zone and Outer Limits, and while not about robots and spaceships are very much "SF" because they explore the changes that happen when this "paradigm shift" happens...sociological or otherwise.
RAMA
How do you figure that a machine that can erase memories is plausible in the real world?
Well there IS a lot of work going on in mapping how human memory works, so I don't find it implausible that we could control it, manipulate it, and even expand it with cybernetic tech.
http://www.rxpgnews.com/memory/Human_Memory_Gene_Identified_5091_5091.shtml
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8653097
But the machine in the movie is a long way off...it is speculative and definitely "Sci fi".
RAMA
No, but I do expect you to skim around for a discussion if you're going to ask a specific question in reply to a post.
The fantasy was that all Earth's women could suddenly become infertile. It's as ludicrous a notion as Eternal Movie's brain-damager, but the fact that that film showed the tech makes it SF, whereas Children of Men's blithe disregard for any kind of explanation of its central conceit makes it fantasy.
Mind, I think Children of Men is a wonderful, near-perfect film. It ain't SF is all.
The fantasy was that all Earth's women could suddenly become infertile. It's as ludicrous a notion as Eternal Movie's brain-damager, but the fact that that film showed the tech makes it SF, whereas Children of Men's blithe disregard for any kind of explanation of its central conceit makes it fantasy.
Mind, I think Children of Men is a wonderful, near-perfect film. It ain't SF is all.
I did!No, but I do expect you to skim around for a discussion if you're going to ask a specific question in reply to a post.
Mind, I think Children of Men is a wonderful, near-perfect film. It ain't SF is all.
Oh, sure it is. It can be both.
Of course Children of Men doesn't have an explanation as to why all the women are infertile. Where would we learn such information? Certainly none of the main characters are a position to do anything but wildly speculate about the problem.
If the movie said that God did it, or that it was a curse on humanity, or other such nonsense, then it would be fantasy. But it didn't. It's also indicative of the film's leanings when the pregnant women is handed over to a group of scientists in the end. It's SF.
If the movie said that God did it, or that it was a curse on humanity, or other such nonsense, then it would be fantasy. But it didn't. It's also indicative of the film's leanings when the pregnant women is handed over to a group of scientists in the end. It's SF.
If we say that Children of Men isn't science fiction but fantasy than wouldn't we also have to class other dystopia movies/novels such as Nineteen-Eighty-Four and Fahrenheit 451 as fantasy as well?
Since, as I seem to recall, it's the men who are suddenly infertile in Children of Men, the disinterest in Daddy in the movie is inexplicable. The movie is playing around with a New Virgin Birth. The resistance group, the Fishes, is a Christian group of some sort. And they are the ones, basically who get the ambulatory Madonna and Child.
Perhaps I'm over influence by reading the book first, but the story essentially attributes the sterility to God. It just doesn't hit you over the head with it. That's why there's no question of cloning or devising parthenogenesis, even to create somebody to keep an economy going to support the elderly. The movie is an excellent action film, but in the end it's not very interested in its premise, which functions almost entirely as a MacGuffin.
Perhaps I'm over influence by reading the book first, but the story essentially attributes the sterility to God. It just doesn't hit you over the head with it. That's why there's no question of cloning or devising parthenogenesis, even to create somebody to keep an economy going to support the elderly. The movie is an excellent action film, but in the end it's not very interested in its premise, which functions almost entirely as a MacGuffin.
District 9 would be a great choice. Inception's pretty damn good too.
In the movie it was the women that were unable to have babies. Miriam described that at first women who were already pregnant started to miscarriage and afterwards no woman became pregnant. Unable to carry the baby to term explained why cloning and parthenogenesis were not the answer and is probably why the problem of infertility was charged from being men being the infertile ones to the women being unable to get pregnant.
I don't think the movie attributed it to God at all - that was only one of the suggestions made in the movie.
Why does it need technology we don't already have to make it sci-fi? Certain genres of science fiction do not necessarily have new technology - genres such as those that deal with dystopian worlds, alternative timelines, post-apocalyptic worlds and yet can still be regarded as science fiction.
I had read the book just a few days before the movie. It seems it did influence my perception, a lot more than I thought. Thanks for the correction. Ectogenesis, fetal development in an artificial womb, would then still be a possible solution. I think the real reason there had to be no hope is that the whole situation is meant to parallel a human being living without hope of salvation by God.
The backgrounds are wonderfully sketched, which added enormously to the believability of the movie. Throw in what seems like real people in a more restrained portrayal of violence, it was one of the most compelling action movies I've ever seen. Still can't think it explored its themes very much.
Battlestar Galactica mini series.
