Sci Fi on the Screen

I was going to write about the upcoming Elysium by Neill Blomkamp, but with some other movie/tv sci fi turning up I decided to simply expand this post. For me District 9 is one of the best sci fi movies of the past ten years. Granted, that might not be such a great feat considering the competition - the Transformers and the Avatars might be somewhat entertaining here and there, but great movies they are not.

There have been a few other great sci fi films (Moon, Children of Men, Rise of the Planet of the Apes) as well as some good ones (Dredd, Contagion, Source Code) but I think District 9 stands out the most as something completely different to what we've seen before. Neill Blomkamp has a visual sense of concept that I would liken to a young Ridley Scott. While Star Wars introduced the idea of the lived-in future Scott perfected it in Alien and Blade Runner. I get a similar feel when watching both District 9 and the new trailer for Elysium, except Blomkamp has updated the lived-in future to fit better with the 21st century.

As for the more futuristic aspects of Blomkamps movies I get a strong feel of Chris Foss and Syd Mead. Their work during the seventies and eighties had a great impact on me as a kid and Blomkamp just being a year younger than me probably grew up with these images as well. I'm very happy for it as I think a lot of today sci fi designs have become... almost standardized. The same design elements pop up again and again in tv, film and games and while they might look cool they soon get lost in a sea of similar designs. I think bringing back some of the concepts from the seventies and eighties is a great way to bring something new to the table. Especially since technological limitations during that time meant they could rarely be represented well when they were created. This has of course changed since then.

Anyway, what about Elysium? Well, the story is basically that Earth has succumbed to our misshandling of it and has become hot, dirty and over-crowded. The rich people have simply fled the planet and are living in a space station called Elysium - which is a beutifully realized Stanford Torus, yet another nod to the seventies - where they frollick in the artificial gravity and enjoy privileges like machines that can instantly detect (and cure!) cancer. Back on Earth Max De Costa (Matt Damon) has just been told he's got a terminal disease and don't have long to live, so he decides to try and get into Elysium. Jodie Foster plays the government official on Elysium who try to keep him out with the help of a bounty hunter named Kruger, played by Sharlto Copley - the lead of District 9. And that's the basic premise of the movie, but don't listen to me... watch the trailer:

Yepp... looks pretty neat, right? Looking forward to August are we? So that's Elysium. Definitely the movie to look forward to for me personally. 

What I also wanted to mention was SyFy's new series Defiance. It's a science fiction melange mixing Firefly, Mad Max and Babylon 5 with some interesting ideas crammed in. Perhaps I should have put Mad Max first as the show takes place on Earth that was inadvertently ruined by an alien fleet 30 years ago. It's not clear exactly what happened but it seems like there was a big battle that pretty much ensured mutual destruction and now a bunch of different alien races are stranded on a post-apocalyptic or post-terraform (although that's not the correct word since it was alien technology... extraforming?) Earth. 

While the Mad Max angle is obvious with the jury-rigged vehicles, evil raiders and a lack of resources I think SyFy really wants to grab the Firefly fans with this series. Besides the sci fi cowboy style that is fairly prevalent in the pilot it's a lot more than that, the backstory of the main character (a rogueish ex-military man who now make a living through salvage) and the general feel of struggling against the odds certainly make my Firefly bell ring. The city the show takes place in (and the name of the show itself) is even named after that fateful battle and there seems to have been some kind of military unit called yellow jackets. Hmm..

The B5 feel comes from the great mix of aliens and uplifted animals that live in Defiance. The Votans who came with the alien fleet was an alliance of different races and although they're all pretty much of the rubber forehead kind, and fairly stereotypical at that, I enjoyed the variety. I really liked the uplifted (?) orangutans though! Made me want to paint my ape gang for Jude Dredd. Here's a trailer:

In the pilot we get to know the main character, Nolan, and his feisty sidekick/adopted ailen daughter Irisa. They scavenge stuff from the alien spaceships that periodically crash down on Earth (quite often I assume) but after a run-in with raiders they find themselves in Defiance, which is very much a futuristic version of the frontiers town. We get to see the main factions in town and the obvious (at first, but probably more grayscale as the series goes on) bad guy is a scheming alien Castithan who also owns the local bar. His antagonist is a rich human who owns most of the mines in the area. Naturally they both have children and the human girl is in love with the Castithan boy... I see a lot of Capulet/Montague stories in the future, even though they fastforwarded it and changed the ending.

There's a betrayal and the towns energy shield is sabotaged just as they learn that an army of Volge are Theo Jansens's Strandbeest. It looks like the town is going to get wiped out, but luckily Nolan saves the bacon with some kind of alien power source that he scavenged in the beginning of the episode. He becomes the new town sheriff (I bet noone saw that one coming!) and at the end we get to see who the real bad guys are, including a bearded guy with some seriously silly looking glasses.
marching their way. I kind of liked the Volge although they pretty much looked like more cybered up locust from Gears of War. They had some neat walkers though, including one that reminded me of

The pilot was very much that, a pilot. And in my experience sci fi or fantasy tv pilots are rarely good in and of themselves as they have too much stuff to cover and get the audience hooked on. Neither plot nor character development is given enough time as there is an entire world to establish. This lends itself to one-dimensional characters and a very cliché script, but this is not anything I hold against Defiance. While some series, like Firefly, succeeds brilliantly in making an actual good pilot I think that is the exception rather than the norm.

All in all I think Defiance has potential, as long as SyFy actually dares to do something new. Right now the show is dangerously close to the cliché cliff but there are still enough interesting things in it for it to be able to break new ground. It'll be interesting to see the next few episodes.

Oh, and the series also ties in to a new MMO by the same name and apparently the tv show will affect what happens in the game and vice versa. Yepp. Here's another (live-action) trailer that shows more of the gaming side of the setting. Big bugs etc.

There we go.... some of my ramblings regarding sci fi on the screen. See ya!

EDIT: Well then... look what just popped up! AMC is apparently developing Ballistic City, described as Blade Runner meets Battlestar Galactica, taking place on a generation ship and being about crime. It sounds absolutely spectacular!