Allusions in her spike jonze movie#
But as I argue in my review, that’s exactly what the movie is: an intimate portrait of an entity that looks human, but isn’t.
Allusions in her spike jonze skin#
The trend in these movies is toward hazy atmosphere and abstract ideas, with the fantastical elements so faint that the films barely register as science fiction.īy contrast, the fantastical elements in Under The Skin are so foregrounded that the film doesn’t immediately register as a character sketch. The difference is that they aren’t effects-heavy, unlike most of the good recent SF films you mention. Over the past five years, there’s been a sizable number of smaller indie films with a strong science-fiction component: Another Earth, Sound Of My Voice, Upstream Color, and more.
Noel: Actually, Scott, I’m going to push back a bit on your impression of the current state of science-fiction movies. They both feel true, in that respect, to what it’s like to live in 20, and they both make it seem like science fiction as a genre is due for a serious revitalization. Yet a Venn diagram of the two overlaps at alienation, that desire to make a connection that never quite happens, for one reason or another. Under The Skin is abstract and discordant, with an aggressive soundtrack and disturbing revelations both about what Scarlett Johansson’s alien is doing on Earth, and what pretending to be human does to her. Her and Under The Skin don’t have much in common tonally, either: Her is earnest, open-hearted, and almost emo in the way it makes the relationship between a human being and an operating system plausible. The latter is about an alien in contemporary Scotland, and it feels like a companion to (and departure from) the great 1976 Nicolas Roeg film The Man Who Fell To Earth. Her and Under The Skin are vastly different animals: The former is a 21st-century love story set in the not-too-distant future, and it’s as much about relationships and divorce as it is about changing times.
We live in an era when technology has quickly, dramatically altered the way we communicate (he said, typing these words into a shared Google document), and it’s in times like these that science fiction can comment on how it feels, and perhaps speculate on the road ahead. There are plenty of relatively recent exceptions worth exploring- Primer, Moon, Inception, and Steven Soderbergh’s Solaris immediately leap to mind-but maybe the two best films I’ve seen in the last year, Spike Jonze’s Her and Jonathan Glazer’s Under The Skin, suggest a possible trend in development. It’s more common-on a big scale, anyway-to see effects-driven space adventures rather than think-pieces. Scott: We’re far removed now from the glory days of science-fiction filmmaking-which Keith has been covering so thoughtfully in his Laser Age column-and the persistent gripe I’ve heard over the years is the paucity of good, true science fiction onscreen.
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