philoscifiz

Johnny Mnemonic (1995) [#19 – winter solstice special 2021]

Join Matt and Dave for a winter solstice special with this last chance to explore 2021 via 1995 in 2021. Based on a William Gibson short story and script, this genre defining cyberpunk noir is a prescient foretelling of a global pandemic, information wars, and the internet/metaverse. At the hollow centre is Johnny (Keanu Reeves), a mnemonic courier exposing the fragility of truth and revealing – after psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan – the subject barred from itself.

Sorry to Bother You (2018) [#18 - autumn 2021]

Never look a gift horse in the mouth? What would you do if offered everything you’ve been told you ever wanted? Matt and Dave check out Boots Riley’s utterly hilarious and deadly serious counter cultural and visually inventive sci-fi dystopia. So, will Cassius Green stick to the later-than-late-capitalism script? Find out in our season finale as the present, past, and future of slavery collide amidst worker unions, big tech, performance art, and Hegel’s dialectic.

When Worlds Collide (1951) [#17 - autumn 2021]

The end of the world is nigh! Join Matt and Dave for a magnificent sci-fi take on the Noah’s Ark myth, the Earth facing destruction from a rogue sun and its orbiting planet: Bellus and Zyra. There’s eight months to build a spaceship in a last-ditch attempt to save something of the human race, and carry 40 people to Zyra. Who will go? Will they get there? Is the planet inhabitable? And what can Sartre tell us about our desires to conjure tales of existential apocalypse?

Strange Days (1995) [#16 - autumn 2021]

Boot up your SQUID for the millennium, and join Matt and Dave as they tread the streets of Kathryn Bigelow’s apocalyptic vision of end-of-days Los Angeles. Lenny is a sleazy dealer in illicitly recorded memories - Mace is trying to save him, mostly from himself. Together they discover some tapes that will expose centuries of racism and misogyny. A movie as true today as when made. [CW: film and episode explore themes of sexual violence and racist violence.]

Super Mario Bros. (1993) [#15 - autumn 2021]

What if there are parallel worlds? Our human dominated world, and another, where dinosaurs survived and so evolved a reptile dominated world? And what if you could pass between them? Matt and Dave go portal diving with the first ever film adapted from a video game: the big concept extravaganza of Super Mario Bros. Along the way they explore the intertextuality of games, movies, and comics, and philosopher Gilles Deleuze on incompossible worlds.

Slaughterhouse-Five (1972) [#14 - autumn 2021]

Where's Billy Pilgrim? In his American lakeside home? A WW2 Prisoner of War camp in Dresden? Or on the planet Tralfamadore? Matt and Dave go time tripping in this classic countercultural scifi movie from the novel by Kurt Vonnegut. In so doing, they encounter a narration that disrupts temporality and can be explored through Henri Bergson’s theory of memory. Is this an anti-war film concerning PTSD and mental health? Or a weird alien abduction movie?

Dune (1984) [#13 - autumn 2021]

Matt and Dave are back for the third season of philoscifiz with as complex a scifi movie as is imaginable! The young nobleman Paul Atreides encounters his destiny on the planet Arrakis, the only source of the drug melange, aka spice. Director David Lynch adapts the original novel in his own way, accentuating the psychedelic enactivism and Nietzschean themes of will to power while playing with temporality and framing the story as propaganda told from the future.

Arrival (2016) [#12 - summer 2021]

Jeff Gomez – transmedia pioneer and CEO of Starlight Runner – invites Matt and Dave on a collective journey toward first contact with aliens. Along the way we encounter Nietzsche’s love of fate and an ungrounding of mathematics as a universal language. Yet the true ‘beauty of Arrival’ – for Jeff – is how Louise ‘understands something fundamental’, that ‘to know others is to perceive the world differently’, as a collective journey. And so concludes our second season.

eXistenZ (1999) [#11 - summer 2021]

Matt and Dave get trapped in a Cronenberg film! Because – it seems – you have to play the game to find out why you’re playing the game. Follow us as we tumble down a mole hole and enter the world of eXistenZ with the demoness Allegra Geller. Or do we? Technophobia becomes realist terror for the anti-gamer resistance while the film seen through the lens of Zola’s naturalism uses gaming to critique the reality of the real world. Or does it?

Ghost in the Shell (1995) [#10 - summer 2021]

Matt and Dave are dropped head-first into a world where Descartes was right. Yet - proclaims the polyonymous entity from the shadows of this cyberpunk anime - 'neither science nor philosophy can explain what life is'. Set in future Japan, Motoko Kusanagi is a cyborg security agent, pondering such intangibles while fighting terror. From Gilbert Ryle to Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, we explore accounts of the mind-body problem, and the problem of machine reproduction.