Full Description
Contemporary American Science Fiction Film explores and interrogates a diverse variety of popular and culturally relevant American science fiction films made in the first two decades of the new millennium, offering a ground-breaking investigation of the impactful role of genre cinema in the modern era.
Placing one of the most popular and culturally resonant American film genres broadly within its rich social, historical, industrial, and political context, the book interrogates some of the defining critical debates of the era via an in-depth analysis of a range of important films. An international team of authors draw on case studies from across the science fiction genre to examine what these films can tell us about the time period, how the films themselves connect to the social and political context, how the fears and anxieties they portray resonate beyond the screen, and how the genre responds to the shifting coordinates of the Hollywood film industry.
Offering new insights and perspectives on the cinematic science fiction genre, this volume will appeal primarily to scholars and students of film, television, cultural and media studies, as well as anyone interested in science fiction and speculative film.
Contents
Introduction: The Fears and Fantasies of Science Fiction Film: Genre as Cultural Artefact
Terence McSweeney and Stuart Joy
1. A Tale as Old as Time: Steven Spielberg's A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001)
Christine Muller
2. Through the Lens of 9/11: Reflections of Bush Era Politics and the Post-9/11 Milieu in Minority Report (2002) and V for Vendetta (2006)
Fran Pheasant-Kelly
3. Precarious Lives, Human Rights, and 'the sense of today': The Continuing Resonance and Relevance of Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men (2006)
Terence McSweeney
4. Seeing and Touching the Bodies of Others: Evolving the Male Animal toward Secular Moral Enlightenment in the Planet of the Apes Reboot Franchise
Carol Donelan
5. Time Travel, Trauma, and the Futility of Revenge in Looper (2012)
Stuart Joy
6. Science Fiction Cinema between Arthouse and Blockbuster: From Stanley Kubrick's 2001 to Christopher Nolan's Interstellar (2014)
Steffen Hantke
7. Twenty-first-Century Star Wars: Profiles in (Female) Courage
Stacey Peebles
8. Rationality, emotionality, and geopolitics in Arrival (2016): From structural oppositions and reconciliations to mixed modalities and claims to "quality" status
Geoff King
9. 'The World Is Built on A Wall': Deconstructing Blade Runner 2049 (2017)
Will Brooker
10. Speculative Anger and Collective Economic Strength in Boots Riley's Sorry to Bother You (2018)
Paul Petrovic
11. Coping with the Deconstruction of American Identity: Hybridization and Self-destruction in Alex Garland's Annihilation (2018)
Andrew Schopp
12. Wakanda Forever? On Ryan Coogler's Black Panther (2018)
Gerry Canavan
