Science fiction is a broad church. From the dizzying derring-do of space opera to the cerebral ruminations of Isaac Asimov and his cohort, to the cynical post-modern worlds of cyberpunk and the 70s New Wave, all the way back to the scientific romances of the 19
th century – it’s a big, sprawling genre.
SBS World Movies knows this, that’s why we’re getting Sci-Fi Week from Monday, August 31, a cavalcade of mind-bending masterpieces including
Under the Skin,
Transcendence,
Marjorie Prime and more. But science fiction is too vast a genre to be contained to one week – SBS has a wealth of speculative drama on offer.
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25 Years Ago: ’12 Monkeys’ Predicts the Pandemic
It could be the plot of a Terry Gilliam movie. In 2020, a pandemic threatens humanity’s survival. Faced with the reality that society’s own constructs are helping spread the virus, desperate minds travel back in time to 1996, watching a film that predicted how society’s constructs would help a pandemic threaten humanity’s survival. Of course, that’s entirely fictional. Isn’t it?
When Gilliam was offered the director’s role on
12 Monkeys in 1994, he was immediately attracted to the seemingly simple story that relied on so many different people’s perceptions of life that it could carry almost endless interpretations. All of them hinged on whether the protagonist, James Cole, is sane – something even Cole himself is unsure of.