Film
The Automaton Sequence: 4.0: ‘If a male god created the world, then he certainly created woman first’; The Female Robot in Metropolis
For the past four weeks, I’ve taken you on an exciting robotic adventure. From defining what the robot is, to understanding the anxiety that comes from facing one’s creation. For my penultimate articl...
The Automaton Sequence: 3.0: ‘You are my creator, but I am your master’; Robot Anxiety
And so here we are, the dreaded Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus week. For the purpose of this article, I am referring to Mary Shelley’s opus, and to a lesser extent Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shell...
The Automaton Sequence: 2.0: ‘Go, Adam, go, Eve. The world is yours’; Rebellion of the Robot People
Moving on from last week, we’ll be delving deep into one of my favourite roboty texts, and analysing specific themes and motifs about the representation of the robot. I mentioned that I’d be usi...
The Automaton Sequence: 1.0: What is a robot?
To ask the question, what is a robot, may, to some people, indeed sound overly simplistic, or even pointless. We all know what a robot is; it is a mechanical tool used to alleviate the human from bana...
On Sprawls and Metropolis
The term sprawl is more commonly associated with Gibson’s Sprawl series, and his imaginings of a highly technological cityscape that swathes the populous, still hyper-Orientalised; a mixing pot of a m...
Why Blade Runner Changed the World
‘I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe…’ Roy Batty, Blade Runner 1982 Many of us understand that with George Lucas’ Star Wars, SF became Hollywood’s new thing, and was something that roused com...
Ex Machina: A Movie Of Machines About Human Ambition
I took a long time to finally watch to Alex Garland’s debut film Ex Machina (2015), but when I was finally able to see it, I had so much high hopes that I ended up being a little bit disappointed. How...
Brazil – The Cyberpunk Christmas Movie
Brazil is a cyberpunk Christmas movie if there ever was one. The movie is born out of the same social anxiety that the cyberpunk movement was. There is an unfortunate lack of dystopian Christmas stori...
Get Up-To-Date With The Deus Ex Franchise
With news about the new Deus Ex: Universe starting to pick up and the original Deus Ex: Human Revolution team at Eidos-Montreal now working on the next game, it seems a good time to get everyone up-to...