A harbinger of our future

Entertainment and science have been strange bedfellows for over a century since the dawn of the silver screen. One of the earliest films ever made, the French Lumiere brothers’ silent short film The Mechanical Butcher (1895) showed an impressive machine that converted a live pig into various pork products. Today, the conveyor belt production system is part of our life; but no machine remotely close to what was depicted in the film was ever put to commercial use. On the other hand, in 1902, another French filmmaker Georges Méliès made a silent short film, A Trip to the Moon, utilising trick photography. Several decades after the film was made, human beings did land on the moon.

One of the earliest American silent films was J Searle Dawley’s Frankenstein (1910). Many subsequent Frankenstein films dealt with products of “mad scientists”. A century later, an excellent, sophisticated British feature film Ex Machina (2015), another “Frankenstein-like film,” did not present us with a monster or an insensitive robot but an adorable intelligent woman. The focus of Ex Machina was no longer limited to creating life, but exploring new frontiers of artificial intelligence and post-human life forms. 

Films have stepped ahead of scientific achievements in every decade since the first sci-fi short film made by the Lumiere brothers. Subsequent films used sci-fi literature from Jules Verne (novel Mysterious Island and short story Shape of Things to Come) to HG Wells (novel The Invisible Man) to Robert Louis Stevenson (novella Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde) to speculate on future scientific developments that could improve our lives.

The first known robot film, André Deed’s The Mechanical Man (1921), came from Italy, ages before the robots were produced. Over time part human, part mechanical concept of cyborgs — later called replicants in Blade Runner (1982) — became popular figures in films worldwide, sometimes appearing as superheroes. 

While the bulk of the films with science fiction tags dealt with speculative forms, including imaginary horrifying aliens, alien worlds, fearsome robots, monsters, superhumans, dinosaurs, space travel, time travel, and cyborgs, some sci-fi films dealt with concepts closer to realistic science. Science fiction writer Arthur C Clarke had observed that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. What was close to real breakthroughs in science, continued to appear far-fetched and “magical” initially. The range of subjects shown on screen was vast. It included medicine (anti-aging serums in the 1940 film Before I Hang), biotechnology (cloning in Jurassic Park and the 2009 British film Moon, and genetic transformation in the 1986 David Cronenberg’s Canadian film The Fly), reforestation (the 1972 film Silent Running), computer technology (the smart supercomputer HAL in the 1968 seminal sci-fi film 2001-A Space Odyssey), cryogenics (the 1984 film Iceman), virtual reality (the 1969 film The Illustrated Man) and the rapidly developing science of artificial intelligence (Ex Machina). Cronenberg delved into the world of telekinetic and telepathic powers in his 1981 film Scanners, which few viewers accept as human abilities, to this day. 

Are films able to continue to show us glimpses of future reality, initially dismissed as unrealistic? The TV series Star Trek and its later film avatar showed the viewers Personal Access Display Devices (PADDs) that proved to be the harbinger of today’s smartphone. Today, we think a selfie stick is a recent concept but in 1969, a Czech sci-fi film I Killed Einstein, Gentlemen had already conceived the gadget.

If one agrees that sci-fi films could get it right, it would be worthwhile to look at sci-fi films that had got it almost right. The notable Japanese director Hiroshi Teshigahara made a film The Face of Another (1966), based on a novel by Kobo Abe, which looked at two separate individuals who are forced to adopt new faces as their original faces were disfigured. Their lives alter dramatically after they adopt their new faces. Hollywood put a new spin on that concept in the film Face /Off (1997) involving a face transplant of two enemies. Even the James Bond film Die Another Day suggests similar surgical outcomes. With cosmetic surgery getting more sophisticated each day, can real face transplants be far away? Brain transplants are presently ruled out by doctors but several films were centred on this distant possibility. A 1963 US film Monstrosity (aka The Atomic Brain) conceptualised an elderly rich woman replacing a young good-looking woman’s brain with her own. A yet-to-be-released US film Criminal, with Kevin Costner, Gary Oldman and Tommy Lee Jones, revives that concept by implanting memories of a dead person in another living person’s mind!

Forget brains, think of eyes. The amazing French director Bertrand Tavernier’s film Death Watch (1980) pushed the “suspension of disbelief” to a new level when a TV news reporter gets a camera and transmitters implanted behind his natural eye to record a live TV show surreptitiously.

Two of the most respected sci-fi films Stanley Kubrick’s 2001-A Space Odyssey (1968) and the Russian Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 film Solaris dealt with space stations that were still on the drawing boards when those two films were made and released. Both films were based on literary works of famous sci-fi authors Arthur C Clarke and the Polish writer Stanislaw Lem, respectively. Today manned space stations do exist in real life. 

Filmmakers today continue to make feature films on scientific subjects that may prove to be real. A yet-to-be-released 2016 US film is called Passengers, which deals with the subject of transporting human beings to distant habitable planets. Another US film under production is Geostorm, likely to be released in 2017, about satellites that control climates on earth. Yet another soon-to-be-released film from USA is a Stephen King penned tale Cell, on controlling human minds with cell phones/mobile phones as a tool. Finally, there is a feature film being made with the title God Particle, not far removed from the exciting experiments at the CERN, the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. Canadian director Denis Villeneuve (of Sicario fame) is presently working on a sci-fi drama Story of Your Life, a tale centred on communicating with alien life forms, reprising aspects of the 1972 film Solaris. The recent sci-fi film Interstellar was close to recent scientific revelations on black holes and gravitational waves. It even got eminent scientist Stephen Hawking to approve its science. 

All of these reflect one fact — not all sci-fi films might get its science right but some certainly do. And they can and do throw light on our future.