This year saw the remaster of critically-acclaimed Akira, probably the movie most credited with introducing anime to a Western audience. Like 1982’s Blade Runner from which it draws inspiration, Akira imagines a future so proximate that we are now living it, in this case a vision of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. Remasters generate renewed interest and the potential to bring a classic to new audiences, as well as the chance for the more elderly among us to indulge in nostalgia. It also presents an opportunity for a critical contemporary reappraisal of art that, by virtue of the passage of time, has taken on a second nature as representative of a specific cultural and historical context from which it is ever further removed. Such reappraisals have seen some movies retroactively acquire cult status, while others have fallen from grace and found themselves relegated to the dust heap of history.
Akira appears however to have escaped such re-evaluations, with recent reviews generally reaffirming its cult status and importance to the cultural exchange between Japan and the West, in particular with regards to animation. This is a missed opportunity given both Akira’s richness and its historical and cultural specificity, which should provide plenty of stimulating touchpoints for dialogue with our present moment, especially considering our dystopian zeitgeist and the enduring popularity of the cyberpunk genre. A film that dared to imagine our present moment deserves better than being engaged only in terms of its cultural legacy.
Today ‘technological progress’ means LLMs convincing your boss to put you out of work, while consuming astronomical amounts of water and energy in the process. So it is easy to forget that only a decade ago the zeitgeist was one of futuristic techno-optimism. The time when Elon Musk was still the Prometheus who would save the Earth by electrifying transport while simultaneously bringing us to Mars, rather than the herald of ascendant techno-fascism. The 2010s may have been the aftermath of the financial crisis and the beginning proper of climate breakdown, but there was still hope that technology might save us.
A product of this time, Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar perfectly expresses that blend of existential angst and technological optimism, showing us humanity reaching for the stars to escape catastrophic ecosystem collapse on Earth. With a unique and titanic score by Hans Zimmer, there are moments where Interstellar almost feels like a soundtrack with a movie attached, were it not for the high calibre of its imaginative plot, realistic physics and humane interpersonal dramas.
It is the conceit that hope is the product of technological capability and interpersonal connection that elevates Interstellar above the vulgar techno-utopianism promoted by the Californian Ideology. But viewed as a parable of our times, it obscures more than it elucidates, and its message of hope turns out to rest on a profoundly fatalistic base.
A statement commonly misattributed to Joseph Stalin holds that the death of one man is a tragedy, but the death of millions is only a statistic. Its perseverance attests to its fundamental truth. Not only do our minds glance off human misery on a massive scale, but our media culture routinely elevates individual tragedies over mass suffering in the service of ‘human interest’. Catastrophes require avatars to be relatable, and individual victims such as Alan Kurdi, Renée Good or Anne Frank will come to stand in for all those who shared their fate.
And where real life does not readily yield relatable faces for a tragedy, art may create them. I, Daniel Blake stands in this tradition, of social realism which centres the misery inflicted on the working class. The movie, and now stage show, is the j’accuse of veteran filmmaker Ken Loach, and a testament to the thousands of Britons who were socially murdered as a result of austerity. Silent victims whose deaths resulted from the impersonal technocratic machinery of the state and the invisible hand of the market. The movie premiered in 2016 when the UK had been in the vice of austerity for eight years. Now, over ten years later, Daniel Blake has come to the stage to tell his story once again.
What will the AI-apocalypse look like? For those of a certain age, the answer is the Terminator’s Skynet, raining down nuclear missiles, or The Matrix’ Agent Smith declaring humanity a virus suitable only for repurposing into organic batteries. Implicit in these visions of the apocalypse is that the rogue AI conceives of a deliberate motive to dispose of humanity, for example determining that it cannot let us destroy it, ourselves, or all life on Earth. But what if there was no reason? What if our demise is simply incidental to some other purpose an AI has in mind?
This is the question explored by Universal Paperclips, a simple clicker game from 2017 which was inspired by a 2003 thought experiment about AI and instrumental reasoning. It can be played for free online, or as fairly cheap smartphone app. Using deceptively simple rules, Universal Paperclips explores complex concepts, such as exponential growth, AI agency and instrumental convergence. It is a game without much in the way of graphics, or text, or anything barring a few buttons, and yet it is surprisingly addictive, compelling the player to manufacture just one more clip…
Over sixty years after its first publication, John le Carré’s classic novel The Spy Who Came in from the Cold has finally made it onto the stage. Intrigue and espionage play out within the claustrophobic confines of the theatre, where we watch reluctant spy Alec Leamas embark on what hopes will be his final operation. Yet nothing is as it seems, and an increasingly paranoid Leamas starts to suspect that his old friend George Smiley has entrapped him in a complex plan of which Leamas can only see the surface.
It is a setup that means The Spy Who Came in from the Cold hits all the notes you want from a spy thriller, which is only to be expected from a play based on one of the defining novels of the genre, written by one of its enduring masters. Such a heritage can also be a drawback, however, for what was novel and exciting in the sixties risks being dated and familiar in the present day. Like Alec Leamas himself, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is now out of its own time, struggling to adjust, and unsure what it can still offer as the world moves on.
Hope is hard in a world ravaged by ecological breakdown, especially for the young. Ten year old Iris struggles to have hope. Hers is a world of natural disasters, inexorably sliding further and further towards climate catastrophe, all while the adults in the room act as if everything is normal. The year is 2075, and all is not well.
That is, until Arco literally crashes into her life. Titular Arco is another ten-year-old, but whereas Iris is from our near future, Arco hails from a distant future where humans have relocated to gigantic cloud arcologies and mastered time travel. Even in that future though, children are not supposed to play with time until they’ve passed time-travellers exam. Impatient Arco steals his his sister’s device, only to lose control and end up in Iris’ time by accident. In the tradition of all good children’s movies, our two youngsters embark on a series of capers and adventures, supported by the friends they make along the way, to get Arco back to his own time.
Arco is a beautifully drawn animation, evoking the traditions of Studio Ghibli both in terms of style and narrative. It is a story of perseverance and hope against the odds, its generally light-hearted tone giving its emotional moments all the more impact. Like all good science fiction, it is a story not of, but for our times, reminding us that hope is a radical act.
Mal doesn’t understand humans. This is not surprising. Mal is a sentient AI drifting through infospace after his programming spontaneously gave rise to his consciousness. Mal also doesn’t are much for humans, but despite his disdain for these “monkeys” he does enjoy sojourns into the physical world by hijacking the occasional vehicle (drone, bot, cyborg, or whatever else is to hand) for himself.
Unfortunately for Mal, he is forced to take an interest after he gets stuck in a cyborg body as collateral damage in a civil war between the US government and a Ludditesque uprising of ‘Humanists’ who oppose human/tech integration and demonstrate their commitment to humanity by throwing everyone they deem impure into a burn pit. Mal’s quest to return to infospace governs the plot of Edward Ashton’s Mal Goes to War. It is a book with an interesting premise, but which did not live up to my expectations. Maybe that is because the cover sold it to me as ‘dark comedy,’ a satire on war and an interrogation of what it means to be human. Yet while those themes are present, they are not executed with adequate depth to elevate Mal Goes to War beyond the level of an entertaining sci-fi romp. Other works exist that cover the same themes with more insight, novelty or creativity.
Nature is not treated kindly in videogames. If it is not merely a backdrop in first-person-shooters for the game to hide your adversaries in, then it tends to exist to be exploited to grow an empire or fuel a war machine. Especially in real-team strategy, ‘4X’ (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate) and colony builder games, nature is relegated to the role of resource pool, waste sink, or both. And while over the years some games have tried to provide a more nuanced interaction with the environment, for example through introducing renewable resources or penalties for pollution, on the whole game dynamics have not moved on much since the days of Age of Empires when a player might frequently find their entire map depleted of gold, iron and wood. Watching your average trailer for a civilisation or colony building game (it’s there in the name, really), it rapidly becomes clear that success is measured by how much of the playable map is brought under human cultivation. While in the real world we are now reminded daily that we cannot forever impose our will or demands on the web of life, videogames remain mostly wedded to the Promethean promise of full human control over the natural environment.
It is exciting therefore to see games that take a radically different approach, especially given how rare this sadly remains. One such game is Terra Nil, developed by South African studio Free Lives. The game’s name is a play on ‘terra nullius’: the concept of unclaimed land that may be legitimately occupied, which was instrumental in legitimising European colonialist ventures in the 18th and 19th century. In Terra Nil, the land is not so much unclaimed as abandoned by humans as a result of total ecosystem collapse. It is up to the player to restore these barren landscapes to fully functional ecosystems.
Terra Nil is a remarkable achievement. Combining elegant gameplay with carefully crafted aesthetics, it does not just offer an engaging gaming experience, but effects a profound conceptual shift as to who and what games are for.
Write.as does not come with a standard navigation menu or archive. Instead it organises posts using hashtags. Clicking a hashtag will generate a page with all the posts with that hashtag, in descending date order. All my reviews come with hashtags to help you find others that are similar.
You can use the hashtags on this page to navigate to a page that contains all posts with that hashtag.
Finally, I found that some reviews share a theme, or a perspective, that is separate from the topic of the work I’m reviewing. These themes are also marked, and include:
#boundedimagination for reviews that consider how the limitations of our political imagination express themselves in both fiction and non-fiction works.
#protagonismos for reviews that consider where works of fiction place agency and heroism. This theme was directly inspired by two essays by Ada Palmer.
A man wakes up, alone, aboard a spaceship near a strange star. The man does not remember who he is, how he got here, or most crucially, what has happened to him. He soon discovers however, that the survival of mankind rests on his shoulders. Project Hail Mary is the story of how he responds.
Project Hail Mary the movie is based on the eponymous book by Andy Weir, known from previous novel-made-movie The Martian, which similarly tells the story of a lone man surviving against the odds. It continues a venerable tradition of movies about cosmic calamities that require a brave few to boldly go where no man has gone before to blow up an asteroid (Armageddon, Deep Impact), rekindle the sun (Sunshine), or find a new home for humanity (Interstellar). This time, our reluctant hero is Dr Ryland Grace (played by Ryan Gosling), disgraced microbiologist, who is sent to Tau Ceti to find a cure for an interstellar infection that is dimming the Sun. At Tau Ceti he joins forces with an alien astronaut, baptised ‘Rocky’, from 40 Eridani, who was sent to Tau Ceti on a similar rescue mission.
Project Hail Mary works on two levels, the macro and the micro, the cosmic and the personal. And despite its stunning visuals evoking the vastness of space, it is decidedly stronger at its smaller scales, in no small part to strong acting by Ryan Gosling, who must carry much of the movie on his own. As I noted in my previous review, good sci-fi doesn’t predict the future, but holds up a mirror to the present day. Project Hail Mary works convincingly as a story about hope, friendship, and collaboration, but it does require a fair amount of willing suspension of disbelief to get there.