SCIENCE-FICTION cinema is enjoying a boost, thanks to the digital technologies that allow Hollywood to render fantasy visions that would have been impossible for previous generations of directors. But since Hollywood is also in the business of giving the public what it wants, its sci-fi isn’t just about spaceships, aliens, cool gizmos and showy effects but also reflects our collective fears, dreams and desires: technology run amok, fear of the unknown, hope for a better world. So what do the forthcoming sci-fi films say about us now? Soon after the release of George Lucas’s latest Star Wars saga (see page 11) comes his pal Steven Spielberg’s remake of War of the Worlds. The film draws on H. G. Wells’s original novel, but its New Jersey setting also nods to Orson Welles’s panic-inducing 1938 Mercury Theatre radio adaptation, the last remaining script of which Spielberg bought in an auction 12 years ago.

Here is a chance to comment on our current culture of fear and worries of border invasion (as well as to have some grandiose special effects). But what is a Spielberg blockbuster without a dose of domestic drama in the midst of mass terror and destruction? Tom Cruise stars as a deadbeat New Jersey dad who is forced to face up to his responsibilities when he has to save his family from the Earth’s impending annihilation by aliens, who this time aren’t Martians but something more mysterious.

The focus of the film, says Spielberg, is not about the strategy of scientists and the military but “more about a parent just trying with all his might to save his own family”. That also suggests a lack of faith in the military and their high-tech hardware, a distrust reflected in the thriller Stealth. Here Jamie Foxx plays a US Navy pilot faced with an unmanned aerial combat vehicle that becomes sentient and threatens to launch a war.

I, Robot displayed mixed feelings towards technology: on the one hand it was sympathetic towards robotic intelligence developing human feelings; on the other it had armies of killer machines running riot. Yet more films are speculating, as did Spielberg’s AI: Artificial Intelligence, about what it means to be human in a future where intelligence, memory and feeling can be decoupled from the individual and moved around like existential spare parts.

Such themes resurfaced in the recent remake of The Stepford Wives, with its “humanoids among us” satirical plot set in a stockbroker America turned idyllic dystopia. Jonathan Demme’s reworking of The Manchurian Candidate is eerily similar to Spielberg’s Minority Report with its story of conspiracy and mind-policing in a free world that may be less free than we think.

Such paranoia may find its ultimate expression in Richard Linklater’s forthcoming adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly. Keanu Reeves stars as an undercover cop of the future who is hooked on a drug that has given him the split personality of the drugs dealer he’s chasing. For Linklater, who has digitally “painted” over live-action footage, “the paranoid world that Dick was writing about in the Seventies has become our reality to a large extent”.

Cloning human beings will not in reality lead to armies of slave babies growing up to become glazed-eyed automata. But dramas or thrillers about the near future are worst- scenario fantasies; it’s their job to exercise or exorcise anxieties which we wouldn’t admit to having in daylight but are free to indulge in the darkness of the cinema.

So George Lucas’s previous Star Wars episode, Attack of the Clones, has already given us a cosmos in which designer armies clash for control of the universe. The cartoon Robots usurped humans entirely. And, after the cloning thriller Godsend (message: if you play God by designing your children, you make a Faustian pact with the Devil), now comes The Island, with Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson as clones who go on the run once they discover that they’re nothing more than spare parts.

And what better way in an uncertain world to reconsider one’s options and make life more worthwhile than to travel in time? Hollywood’s temporal tripping, seldom governed by science and logic and more by American ideals of self-determination and the pursuit of happiness, is well suited to this.

Among the more recent examples, The Jacket has Adrien Brody as a veteran of the Gulf War who uses his drug- induced ability to travel into the future to rescue friends and family. In The Fountain Hugh Jackman traverses centuries — as a 17th-century conquistador, modern-day scientist and 26th-century astronaut — to save the dying love of his life.

Whether you’re divided by alien battle fleets, mind-bending technologies or the expanse of history, love, it seems, is the answer.

FUTURE VISIONS: NEW RELEASES

Aeon Flux Based on an MTV cartoon with Charlize Theron fighting tyranny in a walled “city state” (October 21).

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