This assembly of short (and some really short) films by Neill Blomkamp is not a series so much as an assemblage set of cinematographic thought experiments that gives some insights into what moves Blomkamp as an artist.
A software developer testing an advanced AI program gets kidnapped by gangsters looking to hack police robots for a heist – and end up raising the AI they accidentally captured.
A mothership full of aliens in desperate plight arrives on earth, and society responds as it always has to the arrival of outsiders: the aliens end up in a slum on the edges of Johannesburg..
The people living in slums on a polluted earth enviously look up to Elysium, the space station retreat of the ultra-wealthy, were all their illnesses could be cured at the wave of a hand. After a work accident, Max da Costa, a factory labourer on probation, joins forces with a smuggler with an altruistic streak in order to get to Elysium and save himself.
In ‘Enchanted’, former storybook princess Giselle leaves her fairy tale life behind to find a happily ever after in the real world with a single dad and his pre-teen daughter. In this movie, Giselle has a baby of her own and a now gloomy teenage stepdaughter. To try and escape an existence in a rut, Giselle makes her family move to a small suburban village. Furthermore, she uses a magic wand to wish a fairy tale life for her family. Alas, as often tends to happen with wishes, things don’t work out as she intends…
Cora Sabino is a recent college dropout who has returned to her family home. A leak shows that the US government has made first contact with an alien species, and Cora’s estranged father, in hiding somewhere in Europe, is the one driving the controversy against the government. The Sabino’s want nothing more to do with him, and while their home is kept under surveillance, Cora herself makes contact with a member of the alien species. They strike up an alliance that eventually blossoms into an unlikely friendship.
When Caleb, a nobody programmer at a Big Tech firm is invited to the isolated home of the company’s CEO, he has no idea that he will serve as the examiner in a test of an advanced artificial intelligence developed by the CEO. Will Caleb believe that AI is capable of thoughts, feelings and consciousness even though he is aware it is artificial? As Caleb and the AI get to know each other, a bond forms that will set in motion a sequence of events going much further than the CEO had anticipated.
Major Mira Kilian is a cyborg, a human ghost in an android shell, who hunts for terrorists as part of Section 9, a shady special ops force of the Japanese government. She remembers little of her past before her brain was transplanted, but when she goes after a cybercriminal who is hunting the very scientists who created her, Major is confronted with some uncomfortable questions on who she really is.
In this visual spectacle, a disabled marine, travels to the distant moon of Pandora to join a corporate mining operation. He will enter the avatar-programme, whose members transfer their consciousness to human-alien hybrid clones to communicate with the local population.
Part one of the Murderbot Diaries – All Systems Red is the the story of a robot-human hybrid indentured security unit that hacked its governor module so it could watch the future equivalent of Netflix instead of paying attention to its assigned duties – until mysterious equipment failures threaten the safety of the planetary exploration mission it is attached to and force it to take its job (at least a bit more) seriously.
Peter’s update for May 2022!
© 2023 – Escape Velocity – A Curated Collection of Fantasy and Science Fiction Media
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