🎬 SF in the Time of Real Dystopia

What the newer SF unequivocally tells us is that we are living in the time of real dystopia. That there is no need to look into the future, but we can simply look around. It also tells us about the inability to think utopia, to think outside the framework of the existing world, to question its basic rules - in other words, it tells us that there is no alternative.

It seems that dystopia has finally penetrated into "real life" this year. The world has long since been not so much disintegrated (or at least not so obviously) - ecological catastrophes, refugee crises, destructive imperial wars, rehabilitation and the rise of fascism, terrorism, fundamentalism, are just some of the symptoms of this rather normalized permanent "extraordinary" state.

It's no surprise then that the previous year was also the year of dystopia in the SF, but also in film and television production in general: Handmaids Tale, The Leftovers, The Black Mirror, and The Girl with all the Gifts are just a few examples. In the SF, a genre that has invented dystopia, but which lately has almost completely took over the genre, dystopia has been sovereign for decades. In fact, it's difficult to enumerate all the dystopian SF that emerged in recent years, and for utopian barely find one example. This disproportion is certainly neither new nor unusual; moreover, it's very understandable: dystopia is certainly a much better material for filling up cinema halls than it would be with utopia, in which everything is fine and everyone is happy.

However, what distinguishes a new SF dystopia from the old one is that it doesn't speak of a distant, unrealistic future somewhere there, which, if there is anything to say about an existing world, is (only) metaphorically, which inevitably only remains, that, fiction. The new SF shows the future that is already here, laughs from the screen, looks us in the eye, and almost breathes our neck, telling us more about our present than about a possible, distant tomorrow.

A series of dystopian SF production is precisely this: surviving the future in the present, approaching dystopia, as Cyberpunk did in literature. Movies such as The Circle (a very bad movie based on an even worse book), Advantageous (very good) and a similar Congress (correct) for this are the best indicators. Both for the starting points take very pristine tendencies of the existing world, leading them to their inevitable dystopian region. The Circle thus speaks of the totalitarian nature of the ideology of transparency, and the Adventegeous and Congress about the ultimate commodification of man, that is, of women.

FALL IN THE PRESENT

This "fall in the present" is also present in the The Expanse series, located at the beginning of the 23rd century, when the mobile phones have been slightly changed but still exist, and humanity has settled the Solar System. Earth and Mars are a state of permanent Cold War: Mars is a militarized and authoritarian red planet, while the Earth is a postmodernist neoliberal paradise / hell (as for anyone) who mercilessly exploits the rest of the universe, among others the Belt in which is the lowest strata of humanity, human waste. In this setting, we can relatively easily identify the outlines of the new Cold War world, divided between China / Russia and the West, in which the main threat to survival is the consequence of the arbitrariness of the intergalactic capitalist, whose research, of course, is financed by Earth and Mars, and ready to commit even genocide (of course in colonies, where human life is not worth anything) in order to develop a new ultimate weapon. Also, there is a problem with the elites that fills our everyday life - the decisive factor in the emerging chaos of The Expanse will be a mere case of the crew of the stolen Marin ship Rocinante, made by earthlords, martyrs and whalers - no leaders, but what could we call ordinary people, or people.

This year is also significant in that at least three cult SF achievements - Star Trek, Blade Runner and Ghost in the Shell - have experienced their long-awaited reboot. This is exactly another feature of the newer SF, but also of cultural production in general.
According to authors such as Franco Berardi Bifo and Mark Fisher, the last decades have been decades of "slow cancellation of the future," a recycling time that failed to bring out anything radically new. While Ghost in the Shell is literally only a remake of the original animated film, Blade Runner 2049 pretends to be a continuation of this cult accomplishment. However, this doesn't work well. In addition to being truly maestrally faithful to the originality of the original, Blade Runner 2049, and ideally, remains at the level of its predecessor. Again, there's Blade Runner, the names of K. (Ryan Gosling) who doesn't doubt this time as a replicant, but he certainly asks equally whether he's a person, either. Again, at the outset, the remaining replicants are being exterminated, in the end, decided to join them. Like the original, Blade Runner 2049 raises the question of what it means to be a person, a person or perhaps the most precise subject, and it does it pretty well, albeit in an almost identical way to the first film.

Things with Star Trek in that sense are a lot worse. While the films were released in the past few years only modernized and incomparably dumb remake of the first experiences of Captain Kirk and others, the new Star Trek: Discovery series is another prequel to the original of the '66, which, like the previous Enterprise, is in a timeline canon before this time, or some ten years earlier. So, the last thing we saw from the future in Star Trek (at the end of the 24th century) occurred in the early 2000s when the series Next Generation (1994), Deep Space Nine (1999) and Voyager (2001) Insurrection (1998) and Nemesis (2002).