Category: Media Reviews

Review of Poor Things

Jess Maginity

Poor Things. Dir. Yorgos Lanthimos. Searchlight Pictures, 2023

Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things offers a rich field of possibilities for scholars of science fiction, especially when considering the film alongside the novel from which it was adapted. Both are interested in the question of perspective and narrative framing; both thoughtfully interrogate the relationship between gender, power, and science; both are engaged with the history of speculative genres and with gothic tropes and Victorian scientific culture in particular. The film would be an interesting object of analysis for projects about the history of science fiction as a genre or a mode or the relationship between contemporary science fiction and history. In the classroom, looking at Poor Things as an adaptation would provide the opportunity to think through the aesthetic strategies each artist uses to convey similar thematic concerns in different media, in particular the different toolkits that novels and films have to shape narrative around a distinct perspective or set of perspectives. It could work particularly well in a class dedicated to adaptations of gothic fiction, or even specifically Frankenstein adaptations.

The story begins when mad scientist Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Defoe) fishes the corpse of the pregnant Victoria Blessington from a river and implants the fetus’s brain into her skull. This procedure creates Bella Baxter (Emma Stone). As Bella’s brain rapidly grows into its adult body, we watch her learning how to be a person by following the scientific model of her father-figure, which demands a radically open mind and a willingness to endure socially uncomfortable or even physically painful experiences for the sake of knowledge. This is important as a gendered commentary on the history of science, where women have been explicitly considered objects of scientific inquiry and not itssubjects. This scientific mindset often sets her at odds with the irrational patriarchal expectations of the men in her life who both love and seek to imprison her to varying degrees, from the paternal imprisonment of Dr. Baxter to the ineffective policing of her social and sexual behavior by her lovers (Ramy Youssef and Mark Ruffalo) to the ultimately murderous marital imprisonment of Alfie Blessington (Christopher Abbott). The focus follows Bella as she expands her world and experiences it freely in the face of all this attempted male control and finally decides to follow in the footsteps of her more-or-less creator and become a doctor herself.

The movie is adapted from the 1992 novel of the same name by Scottish author Alasdair Gray. The crucial difference between the two is perspective. In a self-conscious nod to a longstanding convention of the genre, the book channels its story through multiple levels of framing which support or contradict each other on the authority derived from social standing, scientific authority, and lived experience. Poor Things is “edited” by Alisdair Gray against the wishes of the local historian he’s been working with and “written” by Archibald McCandless against the wishes of his wife. The historian invoked in the introduction validates the perspective of Victoria McCandless, whose afterword informs the reader (to the protestations of the “editor”) that the entire story (whose events are essentially the same as those in the movie) consists of lies and gross exaggerations. Essentially, Gray hints to his reader that the story is a male fantasy, gives the reader said male fantasy, and then has the female protagonist inform the reader that this was indeed a male fantasy. The formal structure interestingly mirrors that of its Romantic foremother: the framing narrative (“editor” and “author”) is sympathetic with the scientist-creator while the authorial framing is ultimately sympathetic with the “creation” by giving the “creation” a chance to demonstrate that in fact she creates herself and to cast doubt on the self-importance of the scientist figure (afterword).

The movie accomplishes the same critical orientation towards male scientific authority using cinematic rather than structural techniques. Whereas the book questions science’s (and scientists’) ability and inclination to liberate society from arbitrary or oppressive social protocols by undercutting the pulpy, fantastical narrative framing, the movie is able to make the same critical intervention while investing even more deeply in the fantastical by taking on the perspective of Bella and using a set of tools unique to film. Lanthimos explains that in the novel, “she’s basically seen through other people’s eyes, and she’s described by other people” and in order to give the driving narrative agency to Bella, the film would need a world embellished from our own (Ari Aster & Yorgos Lanthimos 24:31-25:17). The evolution of the color palette over the course of the film, from its black and white beginning to its hypersaturated middle to its photorealistic conclusion, and the elaborately constructed sets and painted backdrops (inspired by the grand painted backdrops of midcentury films like The Red Shoes) are a mode of presenting the story from Bella’s perspective. The film’s sense of reality evolves with Bella’s.

The book asks its reader to think about the politics of gender, authority, and objectivity in the context of science fiction; the movie asks its viewer to think about the politics of gender, power, and science in the construction of a self. As an adaptation, the movie participates in the history of science fiction as a political genre, a genre thinking about the place of science in society and whether it makes us more or less free. As a standalone example of science fiction cinema, it modifies and innovates cinematic conventions of gothic science fiction, taking the potential of the fantastic to deal with the human condition very seriously.

REFERENCES

Ari Aster & Yorgos Lanthimos. Variety, 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXYD3UISwCs.

Gray, Alisdair. Poor Things. Mariner Books, 2023.

Jess Maginity (they, zi, he) is a PhD candidate at the University of Delaware. They research science fiction (particularly in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and particularly by either marginalized or highly politicized authors), Indigenous studies, and Right-Wing Studies and they teach classes about writing, literature, genre, and politics. Their dissertation project looks comparatively at right-wing and American Indian speculative fiction on the theme of violence and civilization, highlighting the centrality of settler-colonialism to the continued flare-up of global (but particularly, American) right-wing extremism.

Review of Ms. Marvel

Jeremy Brett

Ali, Bisha K., creator. Ms. Marvel, Marvel Studios, 2022

Let’s be honest. It’s not really the brown girls from Jersey City who save the world. But let’s be truly honest; despite what Kamala Khan posits, it sometimes is. Therein lies the fundamental value and purpose of the Marvel limited series Ms. Marvel, which introduced fan favorite Kamala to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Kamala (Iman Vellani), a high-spirited Muslim high school student, Pakistani-American and child of immigrants, Avengers fangirl, and a living legacy of familial survival of devastating historical trauma, isa hero unlike any other the MCU has produced. I submit that Kamala is the beautifully positive heroic definition of the MCU going forward, her own experiences, character, and set of ethical values corresponding with her infectious enthusiasm for being a superpowered person, as Tony Stark and Steve Rogers were the guiding and shaping forces of superheroic identity in the MCU’s first phases.

It is altogether fitting in this modern multidimensional world, that we move from white male billionaires and blond blue-eyed soldiers as the central poles around which the first generation of Avengers revolved, into a new iteration of heroes marked by youth in all its insecurity, impulsiveness, and confidence, and by the existential dilemma of grappling with world-shattering events and personalities. They face this struggle while still enmeshed in the complex processes of physical, mental, and emotional maturing. Kamala’s journey signifies new approaches to televised superhero media, and her introduction to the MCU suggests a definite break with its traditional frame of superhero origins and evolutionary development.

What makes Kamala, and by extension Ms. Marvel, different from previous examples of MCU heroes is, above all, her youth and her position at a particular point in time and societal space—Kamala is a young woman who has come of age in a world where superhumans are not only known to exist but frequently interact with society at large beyond the occasional cataclysmic Earth-threatening event. Superpowers are increasingly normalized in these later phases of the MCU, and we start to see the commodification of superheroes not only as pop cultural worship but as sources of attainable merch.

Shots of Kamala’s room reveal her devotion to Carol Danvers/Captain Marvel, marked not only by her own fan art but by professionally made posters and other objects; Carol, like her fellow Avengers, has become less a god-like being wielding incredible abilities and more a high-level human celebrity with all the mundane fan devotion fueled by social media that modern fame inspires. It’s a bringing down to Earth of powerful people, a new imagining of them, and the formation of new social communities based around their popularity. It’s something we see frequently in our reality, and which carries on the Marvel tradition of “real-worlding” heroes and instilling in them human concerns and problems in a realistic New York City.  It also reinforces the more sobering societal phenomenon that everything in our modern lives is subject to commercialization and leveraging for somebody’s profit, though if we accept the idea that the heroes we make reflect our values, that frame seems sadly appropriate.

In the show’s first episode, “Generation Why”, we see this new level of popular, more intimate interaction with heroes when Kamala and her genius friend Bruno (Matt Lintz) travel to AvengerCon, a fannish event where fans cosplay as their favorite heroes, merch of all kinds is sold, and fans engage in discussions about different Avengers. Kamala’s powers of energy projection reveal themselves at the con—fittingly, while she is dressed as Captain Marvel for a cosplay contest—and the response by congoers is less fear and awe and more instant online popularity through recording on cellphones and uploads to social media. These kinds of responses to heroes have been normalized in the MCU by this point in time, and Kamala herself reacts with enthusiasm to her new abilities. One of the great charms of the series is Vellani’s charismatic performance as Kamala, infused with infectious joy and excitement at her new world, which mirrors the actress’ own identity as a Marvel fangirl. Vellani’s performance defines and centers the series in a way that few other MCU efforts have.

Kamala’s singular presence in the evolving MCU is also marked by her identity as a Muslim and a member of an active religious and cultural community. Her interactions with her family, faith, and the ummah at large form important parts of the series and her own heroic journey, in a way that most other MCU heroes have not. They tend to, rather, stand isolated from society at large and not utilize their families (with exceptions such as T’Challa, Sam Wilson, Scott Lang, and Jennifer Walters) as sources of strength and support. Ms. Marvel, though, is marked by caring and loving (sometimes lovingly adversarial) relationships between Kamala, her parents Yusuf and Muneeba (Mohan Kapur and Zenobia Shroff), older brother Aamir (Saagar Shaikh), and friends Bruno and Muslim feminist Nakia (Yasmeen Fletcher), as well as her fellow community members and her kindly imam Sheikh Abdullah (Laith Nakli).

Ms. Marvel signals a new familial and multicultural focus for superheroes as active members of the local communities they serve rather than powerful forces standing aloof, apart and above. A good deal of the series involves the daily life of the Jersey City Muslim community in which Kamala lives and performs her early heroics—important scenes take place during a Muslim wedding, during a street festival at Eid, and in and around the local mosque. And family connections are crucial to Kamala’s heroism—the climactic battle against Department of Damage Control (DODC) agents at her high school is accomplished not by Kamala alone, but by cooperating with her friends and brother. Ms. Marvel opposes the tradition of the lone hero, instead choosing to embrace the idea of heroic collaboration and the sharing of intellectual and emotional resources. It is a conceptual strand we see in Kamala again in the 2023 film The Marvels, where she excitedly adopts the prospect of allying with Carol Danvers and Monica Rambeau. There is a good deal of research potential in Ms. Marvel for exploring the intersection of Islam and popular culture as well as how family and community dynamics play out in      superhero media specifically as well as in the larger sphere of Western sf film and television—which so often focuses on individual heroic achievement rather than cooperative problem solving.

As a superheroine of color, a member of a cultural community frequently targeted for hate crimes and state harassment, Kamala becomes invariably entangled in the sociopolitical concerns of the world around her, and those, in turn, become entangled with her sense of identity. Much of the series, in fact, turns on the question of identity and the creation of self. Above all, teenage Kamala is at a stage of life where she starts deciding who and what she will become and constructing an independent identity (note how in the first episode Kamala stands in front of her mirror dressed as Carol Danvers, but in one of her final scenes, we see her at the mirror in the same pose, this time clad in her new costume that reflects her origins and new sense of heroic selfhood).      

Kamala is unable and unwilling to hide her ethnic origins—the mask she wears cannot hide her skin color, and even before her superhero career has truly begun she is racially profiled by DODC, which under obsessed Agent Deever (Alysia Reiner) launches an assault on the civil liberties of the community. The neighborhood is blocked off by government agents, and Deever and her thugs disrespect the mosque leaders with both contempt and warrantless raids, a clear reflection of the American post-9/11 environment and an increasingly surveilled society. Kamala is in and of the world around her in a way that other nonwhite MCU heroes thus far are not. Without, for example, downplaying the hope and inspiration that Black Panthers T’Challa and Shuri create in viewers from Africa and the African Diaspora, it should be noted that they live in a fictional country that deliberately isolated itself from the historical legacies of Western colonialism, avoiding the sorts of harmful outcomes of hostility and prejudice that Kamala and her community must exist within and alongside.    

Historical legacy is another vital aspect tothe series and to Kamala’s identity and character development, again in a way that differs from previous iterations of MCU heroes. Kamala’s life and the revelation of her powers (which are channeled through a mysterious bangle passed down from her great-grandmother Aisha (Mehwish Hayat), a ‘Clandestine’ or ‘djinn’—an exile from the Noor Dimension) are tied intimately to the experiences of her family during the displacements of the 1947 Indian Partition, that drove Kamala’s grandmother Sana and Sana’s human father from their Indian home to the newly created Muslim state of Pakistan. Their escape via a train station jammed with fleeing refugees results in Aisha’s death at the hands of her fellow Clandestine Najma (Nimra Bucha), who is desperate to use Aisha’s bangle to return home. The series captures well the long shadow of generational trauma that Partition produced, and which resulted in separated families, dead innocents, and lasting religious and political enmities. A rich mine of potential research exists that could use the series as an example of the ways in which pop culture integrates historical events into story.

Kamala is a recipient of this specific historical fallout, not only in her existence as a Muslim whose family came from Karachi to America and whose grandmother still bears intense memories of Partition, but also in the nature of her powers. The bangle she inherits from Sana lets Kamala wield her abilities through access to the Noor, but Bruno discovers that Kamala possesses a genetic mutation that may lie at the foundation of those abilities. Thus, Kamala’s powers are likely innate to her as the living product of a union between human and Clandestine, a union forged in the context of a significant historical event. She is tied to her roots, heritage, and community experiences in a unique way, and Ms. Marvel sets the stage for a new conception of heroism that considers the multicultural world in which we live and utilizes the lives and values of underrecognized cultures or those traditionally unrepresented in superhero media. As it turns out, brown girls from Jersey City can, and do, save the world.

Jeremy Brett is a librarian at Cushing Memorial Library & Archives, where he is, among other things, the Curator of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Research Collection. He has also worked at the University of Iowa, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, the National Archives and Records Administration-Pacific Region, and the Wisconsin Historical Society. He received his MLS and his MA in History from the University of Maryland – College Park in 1999. His professional interests include science fiction, fan studies, and the intersection of libraries and social justice.

Review of Fallout, season 1

Mehdi Achouche

Fallout. Wagner, Graham and Geneva Robertson-Diworet, creators and showrunners. Amazon Prime Video, 2024.

Although Fallout is based on a successful series of role-playing video games (the first one launched in 1997), no prior knowledge of the franchise is necessary to watch the highly enjoyable TV adaptation of the same name. Set within the same narrative continuity but based on an original story, the series takes place (mostly) in the post-apocalyptic year 2296 (farther than any of the games has reached so far), 219 years after a nuclear war wiped out most of humanity. The plot follows three different protagonists as they amble along the customary radioactive, mutant-infested wasteland, each on a quest for the same gruesome object—a severed head—which holds a mysterious secret and will be the opportunity for them to cross paths. 

Since their ascension to prominence in the late 1960s, post-apocalyptic narratives have become a fully-fledged genre in their own right, with literally hundreds of films and TV series (not least of which 2023’s The Last of Us, also based on a video game) released since 2020 alone (the pandemic might have helped boost the genre, although it hardly needed the encouragement). Despite this crowded context, Fallout manages to feel both different and fresh, notably because of its self-reflective nature as well as its highly unsettling tonal shifts. The show’s trademark might in fact be the way it unexpectedly veers from poignant character drama to sardonic comedy to surrealistic, slow-motion musical flourishes, sometimes within the same scene, as exemplified in the opening of the first episode.

The presence of Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, the brains behind Westworld, as executive producers (and as the director of the first three episodes in the former’s case), partly explains both the tone and the metafictional nature of the show, along with its complex network of storylines weaving interrelated stories across differing timelines. Like Westworld, the TV adaptation borrows heavily from both science fiction and the Western genres (with ghouls and zombies for good measure), and like them and much of Nolan and Joy’s work, it interrogates, in a macabre but highly entertaining manner, the nature of our relationship to science, technology and utopianism.

A series of flashbacks interspersed in each of the eight episodes of season one brings us back to a uchronic 21^st century society that looks a lot like a retrofuturistic 1950s America. This is the show’s main opportunity to give full expression to its satirical take on “the American Way of Life,” as a Clint Eastwood-like Western actor is hired by a major conglomerate for their latest advertising campaign. The (soon to be revealed evil) corporation is selling fallout shelters designed as self-enclosed micro-societies (projects that were actually proposed in the 1950s and 1960s) in which its customers can survive and thrive when the nuclear Armageddon inevitably occurs.

What Fallout builds from this premise is a thoughtful commentary not so much on the evils of capitalism (“the spirit of competition” is equated to corporate-friendly Social Darwinism) but on the nature of technological utopianism. As described by Howard P. Segal in his classic study of this ideology, technological utopianism consists of “the belief in the inevitability of progress and in progress precisely as technological progress […] equat[ing] advancing technology with utopia itself” (Segal, p. 1). The essentially capitalistic and consumerist nature of such a belief is slowly deconstructed by the show, which implicitly contrasts the marketing cant of the pre-apocalyptic past (the show uses witty parodies of 1950s TV ads in the same way as the game) with the reality of the post-apocalyptic Wasteland and its ruined billboards. Typically for the genre, utopian intentions are equated with murderous results and with the advent of elitist underground communities masquerading as subterranean utopias (a staple of the genre since the 1970s).

One of the protagonists, Lucy McLean (Ella Purnell), lives in such a sheltered community, Vault 33, a community governed by scientists where homely, uniformed dwellers’ belief in science, technology and the need “to keep the candle of civilization lit” makes them feel straight out of a Gene Roddenberry TV series (including the post-apocalyptic show he tried to produce in the early 1970s, Genesis II). But because this is 2024, the association of technology and the need to create “the perfect conditions for humanity”, as another character puts it, is a strongly ironic one that
can only foreshadow disaster.

This is also made clear by the visual association of the shelter with a typical suburban community, where conformity and a naïve belief in science and progress prevail. Likewise, the camera often films the characters in front of retro-looking propaganda posters, while their ideal pastoral world is soon revealed to be an image screened from a video projector. The series is full of such ideas, inviting audiences to make sense of its deconstruction of techno-utopianism on their own. 

The fact that this clanky subterranean world is so close to yet another recent post-apocalyptic TV show, 2023’s Silo, again shows how omnipresent the genre and its themes have become in cinema and on television. But few TV series have managed to offer such an ambitious, thoughtful and hilarious reimagining of the genre as Fallout. The series, which has been renewed for a second season, offers fascinating avenues to study the popularity of post-apocalyptic narratives (and their evolution since the 1960s), the combination of different genres (including the so-called Weird Western) as well as the treatment of nuclear-age techno-utopianism—or utopianism in general—
in our anti-utopian times. The future of the post-apocalypse has never looked (radioactively) brighter.

Mehdi Achouche is an Associate Professor in Anglophone Film and TV Studies at Sorbonne Paris Nord University. He works on the representations of techno-utopianism, transhumanism and ideologies of progress in science fiction films and TV series. He is currently working on a monograph on such representations in films and series from the 1960s and 1970s.

Review of Dune: Part Two

Mark McCleerey

Dune: Part Two. Dir. Denis Villeneuve. Warner Brothers/Legendary, 2024.

Denis Villeneuve’s eagerly awaited second half of his adaptation of Frank Herbert’s novel Dune lives up to the anticipation. Like his first Dune (2021), Part Two combines captivating images and sounds with equally compelling thematic content. I will present here a broad synopsis of it, along with some remarks about what it has to say about the history of colonialism, and then consider the film’s engagement with religion, particularly messianic faiths.

Villeneuve’s first Dune, set thousands of years in the future, traces the arrival of House Atreides on the planet Arrakis to take over the mining of its enormously valuable spice. This leads to the House’s fall and near-annihilation at the hands of traitors, including the Emperor (Christopher Walken). The Atreides’ scion, Paul (Timothée Chalamet), and his mother, Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), survive—aided by Fremen Fedaykin, the formidable warriors of the wasteland. Dune: Part Two picks up the story shortly afterwards. Paul and Jessica help the Fremen fend off and destroy a platoon of Harkonnen troopers, the latter House having re-taken control of mining operations.

With this sequence, the movie aligns itself with science fiction films that advance certain perspectives on a specific aspect of Western colonialism. The difference between the combat methods in Part Two, here and in other scenes, strongly evokes the French and U.S. failures in Vietnam to subdue resistance fighters from the 1950s to the early 1970s. We see this clearly in the contrast between the Harkonnens’ overreliance on technology, including full body armor, and the natives’ superior guerilla tactics, rooted in intimacy with their environment. Other films have similarly reconstructed this, including Return of the Jedi (Richard Marquand 1983) and Avatar (James Cameron 2009). Peter Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers (1997) touches on it too, albeit with a satirical bent: The film indicates in its conclusion that the overequipped imperialists will ultimately triumph. Such metaphorical constructions of past wars in movies are not uncommon; more broadly, many films “provide allegorical representations that interpret, comment on, and indirectly portray aspects of an era” (Kellner 14). The Vietnam War in particular has left a complicated legacy, within both U.S. culture at large (Isserman and Kazin 67) and science fiction cinema.

Afterwards, Paul and Jessica join the Fremen community of Sietch Tabr, one of many Fremen underground redoubts. Jessica succeeds the sietch’s Bene Gesserit reverend mother by surviving a dangerous ritual. In time, the Harkonnens find themselves continually thwarted by further Fremen attacks—even more so after Paul, now known as a messianic prophet called Muad’Dib, becomes the Fedaykin’s chief strategist.  Eventually, Paul cements his status as the Fremen’s messiah at a formal gathering of sietch leaders. Exploiting newly acquired powers of historical and prescient vision, he declaims himself the supreme ruler of Arrakis. Alarmed at the disruption of spice flow, the Emperor comes to Arrakis, as do representatives of the other Great Houses. The Fremen defeat the Emperor’s troops and Paul ascends to the throne. As the other Great Houses refuse to accept this forced succession, the Fremen Fedaykin prepare to attack them as an act of holy war (the word “jihad” appears frequently in the novel). Paul’s last words in the film are the chillingly ironic “Take them to paradise.”

SFRA Review editor Ian Campbell has argued that the 2021 Dune’s critique of the white savior narrative is, although admirable, not especially noteworthy: Even mainstream commentators easily discerned it. As I agree with this, I will mention only that Part Two continues this worthwhile critical interrogation. I will, however, offer some thoughts about a related yet more compelling dimension of the film: its strong critique of messianic religion. Villeneuve takes this from the novel andbuilds on it in several ways, three of which I will briefly explore.

The first is Paul’s prescient visions of a future jihad that will spread throughout the galaxy and claim billions of lives in his name. These begin in the first Dune and become more vivid and terrifying in Part Two. The key moment comes when the survivors of a Harkonnen assault on Sietch Tabr prepare to seek safety in the south, and Paul refuses to accompany them—knowing that to do so will be to invite the genocide of his visions. He later relents, and the jihad begins shortly afterwards. The power of messianic thinking and its appeal to the messianic figures themselves, even an enlightened one such as Paul, is overwhelming.

The appeal is not so great to Chani (Zendaya), Paul’s Fremen mentor and lover, which leads us to a second way in which Part Two challenges messianic faith. Early on, the film establishes Chani’s skepticism toward the prophesies, and she remains steadfast. Moreover, her skepticism flows logically from one of the most notable improvements that Villeneuve and co-screenwriter Jon Spaihts have made to Herbert’s novel. Though the book paints Chani as a skilled and ruthless warrior in her right, she nevertheless submits almost completely to Paul’s will once the two begin their personal relationship. Villeneuve’s films, however, endow her with far more agency—which includes, among other things, adamant resistance to Paul’s status as the Fremen’s messianic leader. She expresses nothing but contempt for the very notion of the Lisan al-Gaib, the “voice from the outer world.” She insists that the Fremen must free themselves from their oppressors, should never rely on help from any outsider.

Not even Stilgar (Javier Bardem), the leader of Sietch Tabr, can convince her. For example, when he adduces Jessica’s success in the reverend mother ritual as partial fulfilment of the Fremen’s messianic prophecy, Chani angrily rejoins, “Her people wrote that!” Later she remarks, “You want to control people? You tell them a messiah will come. Then they’ll wait…for centuries!” She maintains this resistance to the end of the movie—indeed, to the very last shot. The film bolsters all this with other Fremen’s skepticism; for example, one of the elders admonishes Stilgar, “Your faith is playing tricks on you.”

Finally, Part Two critiques messianic faith in a third way with its compelling (if somewhat oblique) integration of the novel’s Missionaria Protectiva, an ancient Bene Gesserit program designed to plant myths and prophesies on worlds throughout the Imperium with the goal of making their populations receptive—and vulnerable—to the Bene Gesserit’s grand designs for humanity. Although never mentioned by name, both of Villeneuve’s Dune movies allude to it, via several characters, including the Emperor’s daughter Irulan (Florence Pugh), Paul, the Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother Mohiam (Charlotte Rampling), and Chani. The latter’s aforementioned claim (“her people”) is an example of this. Another example comes when Paul, speaking to Jessica, refers to “your Bene Gessert propaganda.” By using this element of the novel in conjunction with Chani’s and other characters’ skepticism, and with Paul’s visions, Dune: Part Two positions messianic faith as a dangerous and manipulative falsehood.

In sum, Dune: Part Two joins the tradition of science fiction cinema’s discursive interaction with human history—specifically, with explorations of Western colonialism and certain forms of religion. If Villeneuve makes a third Dune film, it too will be highly anticipated, due in part to how he might expand on all this.

WORKS CITED

Isserman, Maurice, and Michael Kazin. America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s. 2^nd ed., New York, Oxford UP, 2004.

Kellner, Douglas. Cinema Wars: Hollywood Film and Politics in the Bush-Cheney Era. Chichester, Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.

Mark McCleerey is a Visiting Lecturer at Indiana University Bloomington.

Review of Scavengers Reign

Phoenix Alexander

Sofia Samatar. The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain. Tordotcom, 2024. Trade paperback. 128 pg. $18.99 Print, $4.99 EBook. ISBN 9781250881809. EBook ISBN 9780756415433.

Scavengers Reign marks an exciting and all-too-seldom new arrival in science fiction television: one that enfolds DNA from familiar SF narratives to create something fresh, and vibrant, and unsettling. The twelve-part series follows a group of survivors from the Demeter, a damaged cargo ship, who find themselves stranded on a planet populated by creatures that resemble the love-children of the imaginations of Salvador Dalí and Moebius. The trope of stranded colonists is a familiar one, but Scavengers Reign distinguishes itself through strong visual storytelling that manages to avoid the sometimes exposition-heavy world-building of science fiction, as well as through its convoluted and at times grotesque ecology. Boundaries are porous in this world; everything can and may be used as fuel, or food, or an aid to traverse the diverse environs of Vesta—that is, unless it kills you first.

The cast of characters is strong and manages to avoid clichés. Azi (Wunmi Mosaku) and Levi (Alia Shawkat), an automaton, try to maintain a self-sufficient encampment on Vesta. However, Levi’s circuitry becomes infiltrated with rhizomatic organic matter that begins to affect their behavior in odd ways (they bury a spanner in the opening episode: a small act that has a wonderful pay-off, later). Another pair, Sam (Bob Stephenson) and Ursula (Sunita Mani), are attempting to contact the still-orbiting Demeter to bring it down to the planet, and are similarly adept at using the flora and fauna, often in quite gruesome ways, to their advantage.

The show is not without its antagonists;  as well as the predatory and bizarre lifeforms of Vesta, the characters find themselves in a race against time to reach the Demeter before Kamen (Ted Travelstead)—a pitiful figure responsible for the fate of the ship, and one who falls under the sway of  the ‘Hollow,’ a malevolent telekinetic creature—and Kris (Pollyanna McIntosh), a ruthless mercenary. Indeed, after the first few episodes that introduce the ecology of Vesta, the drama wisely centers on the always-compelling human characters. As their storylines converge, the series starts to show its influences more nakedly in a largely satisfying manner—right up to the resolution, wherein the creators shy away from the murderous dream-logic of their world-building.

The surreal visuals (and discordant and often startling sound design) owe much to the disturbing classic from René Laloux, La Planète Sauvage, as well as the technicolor marvels and gentle ecological subtexts of Spirited Away or Princess Mononoke. These influences do not always work harmoniously. The resolution of Kamen and the ‘Hollow’s’ storyline, for instance, is particularly jarring, and feels disingenuous to the brutality of the world-building established in the former half of the show. Kamen’s and the creature’s redemptions feel odd, and unearned, almost exactly paralleling the character of ‘No Face’ in Spirited Away, wherein a monstrous, gluttonous creature finds peace and rehabilitation. There, it worked because the creature is a spirit; in the SF universe of Scavengers Reign, the conceit falls a little flat. Lurching from violence to rehabilitation seemingly for the sake of it, the narrative here starts to unsettle the integrity of Vesta and raises questions such as: Are its creatures truly malevolent, or are they just inscrutable? What do they ‘want?’ Why does everything function so symbiotically, on the one hand, and so violently on the other? Why do some human characters die, while others are changed?      

These questions bring to mind yet another science-fiction/horror text: Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation. There, again, ambiguity is maintained more successfully, with Area X seeming a truly alien intelligence (both in the novel and its cinematic adaptation) that nonetheless operates with parameters and rules that both viewers and the in-world characters are not privy to. Scavengers Reign plays with similar themes but loses some of its ambiguity, and thematic consistency, as the episodes progress.

It’s a problem exaggerated by the short film the series started life as. ‘Scavengers’ (2015) sees an unnamed (and unspeaking) man and woman manipulate alien lifeforms in increasingly elaborate and convoluted ways that culminates in an orb of blue liquid excreted from a flying titan; upon submerging their heads in it, the characters experience powerful visions of something I won’t spoil here. Whereas the ecology of the series-length Scavengers Reign is far more convincing, it still at times comes across as science fictional Tetris, drawing attention to visual pattern and interplay in a way that is deeply satisfying on a sensory, if not a narrative, level.

If I’m seeming overly critical, it’s because I truly do love Scavengers Reign and the genres it combines (the epilogue hints at a larger and more terrifying universe, and promises to shift the show, should it have a second season, into a far different tonal register). Make no mistake: this is first-rate science fiction and top-tier animation, of any standard: one that manages to synthesize its references into something truly unique. It has much to say about the labor of space, for instance, in the way that Alien is tale of ‘truckers in space’ and their concomitant mis/treatment as expendable capital by world-spanning organization (the opening of Scavengers Reign sees a tense, but brief, exchange between the larger fleet, remorsefully leaving the stricken Demeter to its fate as an acceptable loss) In contrast, the world of Vesta shows us that nothing is truly lost, in strikingly un-Capitalist and irrational logic. Nothing is wasted: it is ingested, transfigured, or consumed. If the series doesn’t quite reach the nihilism of something like Joanna Russ’s We Who Are About To…, which fiercely refuses any and all attempts of human life trying to situate itself and flourish in unfamiliar kingdoms, it also avoids the anti-colonial message of something like The Word for World is Forest. Instead, it poses a challenge: by all means, make contact with other, make planetfall—just know that the colonizer/colonized dynamic is short-circuited, here, and if the characters want to survive on Vesta, they will have to make peace with the undoing of categories of every kind (the biological and the mechanical, the living and the dead, the hostile and the peaceful).A love letter to the genre (the final episode alone contains references to Aliens and 2001:A Space Odyssey), Scavengers Reign will, I hope, lean further into the uniqueness of its vision as it continues, making landfall on new, and stranger, worlds.

Phoenix Alexander is a queer, Greek-Cypriot author and curator of SF/F. He stewards the Eaton Collection of Science Fiction and Fantasy at the University of California, Riverside—one of the world’s largest collections of genre materials—and also serves as the Editor-in-Chief of Vector: the Journal of the British Science Fiction Association. His fiction and academic writing has been published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Escape Pod, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and the Journal of Fantasy and Science Fiction, among others. He is represented by Angeline Rodriguez at WME Books.

Review of Nope

Victoria Carl

Tesh, Emily. Some Desperate Glory, Tor Publishing Group, 2023.

Nope is, at first glance, a classic alien invasion/abduction movie. Jordan Peele, in an interview with GQ, described his intent as being to create a “summer blockbuster spectacle film” that reflected his perspective on the genre (Kennedy).While Nope’s critical and commercial success qualify it as a blockbuster, its categorization as an “alien invasion,” “alien abduction,” or even just an alien movie is less straightforward. Nope draws on tropes from these SF subgenres, consciously engaging with prior alien works and themes, but resists categorization assuch a movie, subverting expectations by revealing its alien icons as artifice and deception—costumes whose similarity to the SF conceptualization of the alien is exploited by the movie’s characters for the sake of spectacle. In doing this, Peele builds out of the legacy set by prior SF works and criticism but defines a new space for Nope. It’s a movie with the aesthetic of an alien invasion narrative, but with the plot of a creature feature flick.

Nope is Jordan Peele’s third film as director, released in the summer of 2022. There are three POV characters: Otis Jr (OJ) and Emerald (Em) Haywood, played by Daniel Kaluya and Keke Palmer respectively, who have inherited the family business, Haywood Hollywood Horses, after their father’s untimely death; and Ricky “Jupe” Park, a traumatized child star turned mini-theme park owner portrayed by Steven Yeun. There are two storylines: the primary plot follows OJ and Em in their attempts to capture compelling footage of a UFO—specifically one that OJ has witnessed—to sell for fame and fortune and stabilize Haywood Hollywood Horses. The secondary plot is much shorter and features Jupe—first, as a child aboard the set of sitcom Gordy’s Home, on the day that one of the chimps who played Gordy, snapped and attacked the rest of the cast; and second, in the present day, as he unveils a new, special show called the “Star Lasso Experience” at the mini-theme park he owns, Jupiter’s Claim.

In general, Nope is a movie that’s very conscious about alien tropes and its place in science fiction. Only, in Nope, these familiar icons are never what most audiences would be      expecting; they’re always something else, wearing the familiar SF icon as a deception. The movie wants its audience to think they’re watching another alien invasion or alien abduction movie, something so known as to now be tameable, and then it twists that expectation back on the viewer. The “little green men” in the movie are only Jupe’s sons, dressed in costumes. The flying saucer is not a spaceship, nor is it piloted by an “alien species…call[ed] the Viewers” as Jupe is convinced. Instead, it is a creature, an animal, as we can tell from the way the Gordy’s Home subplot parallels the current-day encounter between the Haywoods and Jean Jacket. Both the characters and the movie recontextualize that UFO icon as animal, like Gordy, rather than alien.

Themes of exploitation and spectacle are also central to Nope, and this self-consciousness of genre allows the movie to meditate on how these familiar SF icons have been exploited and reduced to mere spectacle over time. It would make for an interesting study of how SF tropes came to be, and how our views of these tropes have changed over time, especially paired with War of the Worlds—especially the original novel and its 1953 and 2005 film adaptations—and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. These movie pairings provide a way into contemporary perspectives of the alien, the monstrous, and colonialism/postcolonialism. Nope provides a clearexample of contemporary Western culture reckoning with these tropes and their histories, attempting to contextualize and revision them into something new and useful for the post-Internet, post-COVID world.

Animal studies scholars and monster theorists would also find interesting fruit here. Joan Gordon wrote about the potential for greater collaboration between animal studies and SF studies in The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, and Nope is well-situated to consider the relationship between monster, “creature,” and “animal” in SF more broadly. Jean Jacket is a fictional creature, dressed to look like an alien spaceship, explicitly contextualized as behaving like an animal. Jupe and Holst both refuse to see Jean Jacket as an animal instead of as an alien or, even better, as a spectacle, and that fact gets them both killed. On the other hand, Em and OJ survive and succeed because they recognize Jean Jacket’s behaviors as animalistic and adjust accordingly; this dichotomy could be seen as the movie endorsing Em and OJ’s behavior and condemning Jupe and Holst’s. Of course, they are still using Jean Jacket, exploiting its novelty and resemblance to SF conceptions of UFOs and aliens for their own benefit, i.e., for spectacle. The movie ends before it can explore the consequences, if any, of this last exploitation. Nope’s interrogation and representation of the “alien” creature is complex and ambitious and presents interesting avenues for further research to those interested in the intersection between the Alien, the Animal, and the Other in SF.

The critical takeaways from Nope aren’t as clear cut as those from War of the Worlds or Get Out, but the movie is nonetheless rich with meaning to mine for. It’s not “just another alien invasion movie,” and its reflective take on both the alien and the Alien will appeal to scholars across science fiction studies.

WORKS CITED

Gordon, Joan. “Animal Studies.” In The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, edited by Mark Bould, Andrew M. Butler, Adam Roberts, and Sherryl Vint, Routledge, 2009, pp. 331-340.

Kennedy, Gerrick D. “Jordan Peele and Keke Palmer Look to the Sky.” GQ, 20 July 2022, www.gq.com/story/gq-hype-jordan-peele-and-keke-palmer. Accessed 21 April 2024.