Call me a sucker for good sci-fi. Good thing I’m not that big a sucker, though, because good sci-fi is rare. Rarer still is sci-fi that takes place in the future, yet looks like our present (or near present). Here’s a nice slideshow of the films in this Unofficial Trilogy:
This already feels like I’m entering film school snob territory. This is a French sci-fi noir film starring an ex-patriot American as a secret agent that carries around an Instamatic camera. Yeah. The thing like the app. Back when it was brand new and seemed futuristic. Anykodak, I remember this film being really cool… so cool it was even referenced in an episode of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex.
I can tell I’ve lost you, so I won’t bring up that Alphaville’s Forever Young was my graduating class song, and I was pissed about that because I never heard of the group or the song, and then when I saw this film in college, it reminded me of how much I hated that song, and then The O.C. re-popularized it with a remake, and the rage returned, and…
- CHILDREN OF MEN (2006)
When I first viewed this film, I had no expectations. So my expectations weren’t blown away – my mind was. I still maintain that this is the Citizen Kane of our time… an under-appreciated classic in every sense that will one day get its due. It’s a film directed by a Mexican based on a book by a Brit about America now. At least that’s what I thought when I watched it years ago. Considering it’s about a world where no one can have children anymore, and Clive Owen has to protect a pregnant woman while wearing flip-flops, I don’t know why I thought that. I really need to watch this film again.
- NEVER LET ME GO (2010)
Ever see Parts: The Clonus Horror The Island? Well, this isn’t that movie. But it’s similar, at least in its premise if not its time period. The idea is simple – there’s a clone race of people who exist solely to provide organs for their original. Where the similarities end is in the bittersweet acceptance of those fates. Since The Island was directed by Michael Bay and Never Let Me Go is a British film, guess which one is about the clones fighting for their right to be free individuals and which one is a simple love story between people resigned to dying young?
(SIDENOTE: I just realized this are all technically foreign flicks. Go figure.)
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