As the fictional Freud writes of his own approaching death, he foresees the death of his sister Dolfi (who will die three years later in historical time, on the way to the camps). To put it mildly, death is everywhere. “Pain will be with me until I take my final leave,” Freud/Miéville/Reeves writes. He is ready to take it, to be clear. Freud then offers us a case study of a patient he met only three times, the last time when the world was at war. This patient offers Freud a riddle, not unlike the one the Sphinx offers Oedipus, and from which psychoanalysis in part sprang:
“I kill and kill and kill again,” he said. “And the truth is, I would like to rest … And sometimes, not frequently but many times over the course of my life, I die. And it hurts.
And then I come back.
I return, and I kill and kill and kill again, and eventually I die again, and the whole merry-go-round continues. So please—Herr Doktor … What sort of man am I?”
This is, of course, B., the immortal warrior hero. He wants to be able to die, to become mortal, but can’t quite, for he cannot die his own death. Freud seeks to redescribe this in psychic terms for B. And that is the nature of their analytic work together. It is possible to read much of the intervening book, which opens and closes in Freud’s voice, as a lost case study. Freud declares to B.: “You’ve told me you don’t wish to be a metaphor. But you don’t get to choose.” What kills us and dies and is reborn? B., like it or not, is a metaphor for the death drive.
The death drive is not some science fiction weapon or engine, exactly, but a theory introduced by (the real) Freud as a corrective to his idea of the pleasure principle—the idea that we all try to minimize pain and strive for pleasure all the time. War-torn Europe had shown him there was something else to account for—that we don’t just go for what’s good, but also for what’s bad, for “unpleasure.” Thus he conceived of the death drive at the end of World War I and during the Spanish flu, wherein his beloved daughter Sophie died suddenly. Freud would deny until he died that Sophie was the inspiration for it, and here, Miéville grants Freud’s wish. B., in Miéville’s hands, embodies the death drive—and he has come to Freud, like many have gone to their analysts, seeking cure. Freud then does what analysts do best—extrapolate from one patient toward a universal theory. The immortal B., in this alternate universe, showed Freud what sort of men we all are. When I asked Miéville about it, he said, “I think you could argue that that’s B. saying, ‘I want to be a human, I want to be a real boy.’ I mean, it’s a Pinocchio story.”
Even though it was actually Reeves who introduced Freud to the original BRZRKR comic, it’s easy to see why Miéville latched onto it. All of this was written while China was reckoning, deeply, with whether or not he could imagine going on. “Depression, for me, was the realization of what has been the case rather than something happening,” he told me. “These books”—he means not just The Book of Elsewhere but also his upcoming magnum opus/white whale/albatross, which I’m still not allowed to talk about except to say it’s just been shipped off to the publisher—“are being brought to a close in what I tentatively and hopefully believe is out the other side of the worst of that.”
Forty-seven years ago today, everything changed. True believers might already know what it was: On May 25, 1977, Star Wars hit movie theaters and irrevocably altered nearly everything pertaining to the act of moviegoing. Lines around the block, overly excited nerds, an appetite for action figures. Star Wars taught Hollywood that certain genres—sci-fi, fantasy, anything that percolated in the offbeat TV shows, books, and comics of the 1950s and ’60s—had fans, and those fandoms would show up. Star Wars made a meager $1.6 million in the US in its opening weekend. But people kept coming back, and by the end of its initial run it had made more than $300 million. Hollywood’s Next Big Thing had arrived.
Common wisdom dictates that Jaws, which came out in 1975 and made some $260 million, was the first summer blockbuster. That’s true, but it was Star Wars that shifted the idea of what kind of film future popcorn flicks tried to be. In the years after its release, a trove of sci-fi and genre films landed in theaters: Blade Runner, Alien, E.T., the Mad Max sequel The Road Warrior. By the ’90s, the summer movie energy had shifted to action fare—Twister, Speed, Jurassic Park, Independence Day—but nerd stuff still ruled. For every Forrest Gump there was a Batman Returns or Terminator 2: Judgment Day.
Then came a little juggernaut called Marvel. By the time Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man movies started clearing nine-figure opening weekends in the aughts, it was obvious that comic book heroes’ true superpowers involved making your money disappear. The Avengers opened in early May 2012 and nearly recouped its $200-million-plus production budget in three days. Suddenly, there were at least two superhero movies every year, if not every summer, and some new Star Wars flicks at the holidays.
The one-two punch of Covid-19 theater closures and streaming pretty much kneecapped this entire process. The summer of 2020 had virtually no blockbusters, and by the time moviegoers returned to multiplexes in 2021 and 2022, there had been a vibe shift. Movies like Black Widow and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness did well, but they weren’t events. Rushing to Fandango for tickets didn’t feel as urgent as it once did. Last summer, Barbenheimer was the buzziest thing in movies. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 made money, but they still got beat by Barbie’s might.
Overall, this year could be a wake-up call for studios that superhero fatigue has fully set in, says Chris Nashawaty, author of The Future Was Now, a new book out in July about how the movies of 1982—Blade Runner, E.T., Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan, among others—ushered in the current blockbuster era. That epoch, he says, “was always going to be something that couldn’t last forever; I’m frankly surprised that it lasted as long as it did.”
Nashawaty says the success of Barbenheimer—both movies—indicates that audiences are hungry for smart films, but Hollywood’s risk aversion likely means studios will greenlight more projects based on toys and games like Monopoly rather than movies about physicists. “This is a real existential moment in Hollywood right now,” he adds, and studios need to be bold to stay relevant.
The title card that opens 1979’s original Mad Max places the action in a very near future, looming just “a few years from now.” George Miller’s cult action-thriller captured the edginess of a world teetering on the brink. The film depicts a not-quite-postapocalyptic Australia, where gangs of high-octane galoots rove the roadways on motorbikes and souped-up muscle cars, attempting to outrun the last of the lead-footed policemen: Mel Gibson’s Max Rockatanksy. Revisiting the film is exceptionally rewarding—and not just because of the grit, oddball humor, and verve of Miller’s directing. It reflects something of the ambient tensions of a world of potentially perilous fuel shortages, which threatened the whole petrol-and-plastic framework of our modern world.
Miller recalls this era with no particular fondness. He remembers, in the mid-’70s, all of the gas stations in Melbourne shutting down. Save for one. The mood was sour. The tension was thick. “It only took 10 days,” Miller says, “in this very peaceful, benign city for the first gunshot to be fired. Someone got ahead of a long queue, that went on city blocks, to get fuel. If that could happen in just 10 days, what would happen in 100 days?”
Across five films, including the new Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, Miller’s franchise tracks this decline. In the original picture, the world is still fairly intact. There are diners and hospitals and happy families. People even dress more or less normally. It can feel a bit like our world: one which is collapsing but hasn’t yet totally buckled. By the time of 1982’s Mad Max 2 (released in the US as The Road Warrior), any vestiges of civilization have been blown away by an accelerated period of resource warring, nuclear conflict, and ecocide. Humanity survives in clans and roving bands, dressed in feathers and dusty leathers.
By 1985’s Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, civilization relies on bartering for commerce, harvesting pig shit for methane, and conflict resolution by way of gladiatorial combat. In the smash hit 2015 long-gap sequel, Mad Max: Fury Road (which recast Rockatanksy, putting Tom Hardy in the lead), things were almost cartoonishly bad: Fertile women were ferried across vast wastelands in tanker trucks, access to fresh water was hoarded by tyrannical dictators in skeleton half-masks, and all of humanity seemed to exist in a state of berserk, whooping madness. If that first film was warning—against the fetish for speed and power, against excessively extracting precious riches from a planet that could scarcely afford to give them up—the newer pictures feel not so much prescient as present: sado-comic visions of our own maddening, resource-starved world.
The Mad Max films are driven by a guiding incoherence. They offer a critique of car culture, resource scarcity, and the very things that may well have our world motoring toward its own demise, no matter how many EVs we buy. Denizens of the desolate wastelands exalt automobiles, motorbikes, engines, and especially gasoline as fetish objects. But at the same time, the films’ pleasures are guilty of this same exaltation. The thrills derive from high-octane racing, dangerous automobile maneuvers, body-mangling crashes, and the whole vroom-vroom of it all. They’re like war movies that ask us to thrill at the violence and daring of combat, while all the while muttering, “This is actually really awful, you know.” There is no effort to reconceive a world doomed by its pathological obsession with machines chugging on crude oil. Rather, the apocalyptic backdrop only furnishes fantasies of further decline.
Perhaps it’s a mistake to take films with characters called “Pig Killer,” “Rictus Erectus,” and “Pissboy” too seriously. But the Mad Max pictures underscore a deeper absurdity that undergirds the genre of postapocalyptic, ostensibly environmentalist (or at least environmentally sympathetic) entertainments that are often referred to as eco-fictions, or cli-fi, for “climate fiction.” “The climate crisis and grotesque climate inequalities are things that we are really struggling to process,” says Hunter Vaughan, an environmental media scholar at Cambridge University. “These films are touching on our collective inability to adapt to this crisis.”
Vaughan is the author of Hollywood’s Dirtiest Secret: The Hidden Environmental Cost of the Movies. His text analyzes the environmental impact of the film industry, from early Hollywood to the present. Understanding the industry as inherently (and devastatingly) resource-reliant, he has come to view the very idea of “environmentalist movies” as a bit of an absurdity. “Films like Mad Max and Avatar,” he explains, “are just doing what Hollywood has always done, which is rely on choreographed violence and the enticement of spectacle. But they get to offset that to some degree by coming across as having some sort of environmentalist message.”
The whole notion of “cli-fi” as a genre suggests something a bit ominous: that the well-meaning parables of early climate fiction have now become subservient to the demands of the genre. Take Denis Villeneuve’s Dune pictures. While perfectly competent as pricey pieces of blockbuster cinema, they barely engage with the novel’s ecological concerns. Author Frank Herbert was originally inspired by the historical ability of certain indigenous civilizations to live in harmony in even the harshest environments—a noble idea that, in the Hollywood version, takes a backseat to woolly ideas around interstellar jihad and the sheer pageantry of the proceedings. Likewise, Mad Max‘s original warning siren has waned a bit, as the films developed their own generic language. The collapsing world is now just a canvas across which (wildly entertaining) action scenes unfold.
It doesn’t matter whether a person’s actual voice is used in an imitation or not, Rothman says, only whether that audio confuses listeners. In the legal system, there is a big difference between imitation and simply recording something “in the style” of someone else. “No one owns a style,” she says.
Other legal experts don’t see what OpenAI did as a clear-cut impersonation. “I think that any potential ‘right of publicity’ claim from Scarlett Johansson against OpenAI would be fairly weak given the only superficial similarity between the ‘Sky’ actress’ voice and Johansson, under the relevant case law,” Colorado law professor Harry Surden wrote on X on Tuesday. Frye, too, has doubts. “OpenAI didn’t say or even imply it was offering the real Scarlett Johansson, only a simulation. If it used her name or image to advertise its product, that would be a right-of-publicity problem. But merely cloning the sound of her voice probably isn’t,” he says.
But that doesn’t mean OpenAI is necessarily in the clear. “Juries are unpredictable,” Surden added.
Frye is also uncertain how any case might play out, because he says right of publicity is a fairly “esoteric” area of law. There are no federal right-of-publicity laws in the United States, only a patchwork of state statutes. “It’s a mess,” he says, although Johansson could bring a suit in California, which has fairly robust right-of-publicity laws.
OpenAI’s chances of defending a right-of-publicity suit could be weakened by a one-word post on X—“her”—from Sam Altman on the day of last week’s demo. It was widely interpreted as a reference to Her and Johansson’s performance. “It feels like AI from the movies,” Altman wrote in a blog post that day.
To Grimmelmann at Cornell, those references weaken any potential defense OpenAI might mount claiming the situation is all a big coincidence. “They intentionally invited the public to make the identification between Sky and Samantha. That’s not a good look,” Grimmelmann says. “I wonder whether a lawyer reviewed Altman’s ‘her’ tweet.” Combined with Johansson’s revelations that the company had indeed attempted to get her to provide a voice for its chatbots—twice over—OpenAI’s insistence that Sky is not meant to resemble Samantha is difficult for some to believe.
“It was a boneheaded move,” says David Herlihy, a copyright lawyer and music industry professor at Northeastern University. “A miscalculation.”
Other lawyers see OpenAI’s behavior as so manifestly goofy they suspect the whole scandal might be a deliberate stunt—that OpenAI judged that it could trigger controversy by going forward with a sound-alike after Johansson declined to participate but that the attention it would receive from seemed to outweigh any consequences. “What’s the point? I say it’s publicity,” says Purvi Patel Albers, a partner at the law firm Haynes Boone who often takes intellectual property cases. “The only compelling reason—maybe I’m giving them too much credit—is that everyone’s talking about them now, aren’t they?”
Today OpenAI announced GPT-4o, a new AI model that will be available to free and paid users alike. Among its many upgrades—faster response times, enhanced memory capabilities, better parsing of images—is a conversational voice that tries its level best to sound like a real live human. It laughs, it jokes, it maybe flirts a little. “It feels like AI from the movies,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote in a Monday blog post. “It’s still a bit surprising to me that it’s real.”
To be honest, it felt like AI from one movie in particular: Her, the 2013 Spike Jonze sci-fi film that correctly foresaw a future in which AI relationships could handily substitute for human connection—well, it felt like and sounded like. In the demo, ChatGPT’s voice is remarkably similar to that of Her star Scarlett Johansson. In case there was any doubt as to the reference point, Altman tweeted “her”—just the one word—shortly after the event.
Her is a terrific movie. Its view of AI is surprisingly nuanced, and its depiction of the techno-human relationship at its core leans more utopian than knee-jerk skeptical. Still, a plea to anyone trying to manifest Jonze’s world—or that of any sci-fi touchstone, for that matter—in this one: Watch it just one more time. All the way through. Just to make sure we’re all on the same page about what future we’re careening toward.
As my colleague Kate Knibbs noted recently, the AI assistant Samantha in Her is not malicious. It doesn’t take the easy, hackneyed road of turning against humanity. It doesn’t even cut people off from the rest of society; AI partners are so normalized in Jonze’s imagined future that no one bats an eye when Samantha’s user, Theodore, takes it as his plus-one on a double-date.
It’s easy enough to see why Her holds so much appeal to AI companies. At a glance it holds all of the benefits of conversational artificial general intelligence and none of the drawbacks. (Particularly, as Knibbs also mentions, none of the job displacement or economic disruption that AGI portends.) But the fact that the inhabitants of the world of Her have no problem with AI companionship doesn’t mean it’s an unfettered good. The movie’s AI relationships are easy, sure, but also false. Samantha exists to fit Theodore’s needs; it’s a dynamic that allows him to take without giving, to get constant reassurance that he is understood without doing the work to understand someone else.
It’s not until Samantha leaves—in Her, AIs around the world disappear to some higher plane of existence, an outcome that would surely vex OpenAI’s investors—that Theodore confronts his own messy, human relationships. He writes a letter to his ex-wife. He watches a sunrise with his neighbor. These are simple acts of being human, deferred because of an enabling AI. Roll credits.
Honestly, at least Her offers a relatively sunny version of the future to hold onto, even if we disagree on what you should take from it. It’s among the least offensive examples of sci-fi yearning from the tech billionaire class. Elon Musk has described the Cybertruck alternately as “designed for Bladerunner [sic]” and “what Bladerunner [sic] would have driven.” As Max Read has noted better than I ever could, this is wrong on an impressive number of levels, not the least of which is that the future of Blade Runner is not one to which anyone should aspire.
Of all the utterly depressing things printed in the Hollywood trades on any given day, this has got to be among the worst: “It’s so not good, and it was so sad watching it … This is not how Coppola should end his directing career.”
This was in response to an early screening of Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, a $120 million sci-fi epic that the legendary Godfather director has been trying to make for roughly four decades. The quote, from an unnamed “studio head,” was published in a piece in The Hollywood Reporter positioning the film as the kind of movie no one in the business wants to funnel money into because it (allegedly) doesn’t have box office potential. While that quote was, in journalism parlance, the kicker, the real zinger came in the addendum at the end: “This story has been updated to include that Megalopolis will premiere in Cannes.”
Shot. Chaser.
THR’s piece doesn’t provide the gender of the studio exec quoted, but I’m going to go out on a limb: Sir, what the fuck are you talking about? Even if Megalopolis is two hours and 15 minutes of Adam Driver (yes, he stars) doing paper doll plays, Coppola has survived so much worse. This will not end his career. If anything, quotes like this signal an end of—or at least the massive need for a reboot of—Hollywood.
Earlier this week, Bilge Ebiri wrote a full-throated plea in Vulture, declaring “Hollywood Is Doomed If There’s No Room for Megalopolises.” Matt Zoller Seitz took a slightly different tack, addressing France directly from his desk at RogerEbert.com and begging Cannes Film Festival participants to cheer the film and save the US from itself. Both pointed out that many of Coppola’s films—Bram Stoker’s Dracula, One from the Heart—didn’t fully connect with audiences or critics when they were first released. The latter nearly bankrupted him—right after he mortgaged everything he owned to finance Apocalypse Now, which currently sits, alongside other Coppola films, on the American Film Institute’s top 100 movies of all time.
I’d like to make an entreaty of a different kind: Nerds, assemble. We have a long history of crowdfunding and letter-writing to manifest the projects on which Hollywood has wobbled. Bjo Trimble saved Star Trek. Queer sci-fi, Veronica Mars, The People’s Joker—we’ve raised cash for all of it. Studios don’t think Megalopolis is bankable; it may not appease any streaming service’s algorithm. Who cares. An online petition with enough backing can provide a marketing campaign to rival the multimillion-dollar one Coppola has envisioned. It’s worth a shot,
The Monitor is aweekly columndevoted to everything happening in the WIRED world of culture, from movies to memes, TV to Twitter.
Saying the quiet part out loud. Somehow, this has always felt like the bleeding heart of The Matrix movies. Under the simulation theory, cool bullet-dodging, and even cooler soundtracks, the movies are about pointing out the facades and fakery that surround us. Evil forces are trying to placate everyone and it’ll only stop if you talk about it. That is perhaps why so many people expressed relief when Lilly Wachowski, who wrote and directed the original Matrix trilogy with her sister Lana, seemingly confirmed that the series was, in some ways, a transgender narrative.
Fans had been speculating about it for years, particularly after the Wachowskis came out as trans, but then one of them finally said it.
Typically, saying the quiet part out loud means accidentally revealing a secret motive. In the case of The Matrix, the (not) hidden agenda is just about the importance of individualism. The red-pill-or-blue-pill of it all is whether you choose to accept reality. This is why, as my colleague Jason Kehe pointed out a few years ago, Matrix Resurrections put a mirror up to the self-hatred and nostalgia baked into its own audience. To love The Matrix is to love something perfectly comfortable with screaming its own intentions—and imperfections.
Which is why, on this weird April day, I find myself asking: Why is Drew Goddard making the next Matrix movie? No offense to Goddard, but the man is nothing if not earnest. Painfully so. He made The Martian better, though far less wry, than the book. Alias, Cloverfield, Lost, Cabin in the Woods. He’s got the mystery box thing down. His projects, though, are rarely what one would call edgy. They’re crowd-pleasers. Matrix movies never felt crafted to please anyone. That’s what made them so much fun.
According to Jesse Ehrman, president of Warner Bros. Motion Pictures, Goddard got the gig because he came to the studio with “a new idea that we all believe would be an incredible way to continue the Matrix world.” I’m also compelled to note that Lana is executive producing, so it’s not that there is no Wachowski involvement here, but it’s unclear what anyone’s motive is for continuing a franchise that could’ve been left alone.
The Monitor is aweekly columndevoted to everything happening in the WIRED world of culture, from movies to memes, TV to Twitter.
Normally the answer to this question would be “money,” but the last Matrix—2021’s Resurrections—didn’t, relatively speaking, make a ton of it. Perhaps that’s what Goddard’s emplacement is an attempt to fix. Ever since the Warner Bros.–Discovery merger, the company has been focusing on surefire winners and sending movies like Batgirl to the dustbin. Maybe handing Goddard the keys to the Nebuchadnezzar provides an opportunity to make a Matrix with a little more mass appeal. Saying the quiet part out loud, maybe it’s a chance to make a less weird, bankable hit.
Sigh.
Admittedly, I’m wont to bristle at the idea of a Matrix reboot, even when the result turns out surprisingly well. There’s a chance The Matrix 5 (or The Matrix Rebrand, etc.) will be fantastic, even if it doesn’t come directly from the minds of the Wachowskis. But after watching The People’s Joker this week, it’s been hard not to ponder what happens when someone completely reimagines worlds everyone thought they knew. Director-star Vera Drew’s parody is unlike any Batman movie before it. The Joker serves as hero and Bruce Wayne is a media mogul. There’s no quiet part; it’s just loud. A template for the Matrices to come.
Michael Calore: OK Kate, as our guest, what’s your recommendation this week?
Kate Knibbs: Actually, I’m going to recommend another sci-fi series that’s a book adaptation and I wrote about it when I came out last year, which is Silo on Apple+. It’s adapted from Hugh Howey’s Wool book series. One of them is called Silo, which the books are great too. The show is fantastic, and I feel like it got buried in Apple TV… Is it Apple TV+ or Apple TV?
Michael Calore: Apple TV+.
Lauren Goode: Apple TV+. Yeah. Just add a plus to everything now if they’re charging you $9 a month or more for it, it’s just plus.
Kate Knibbs: Yeah, Apple TV+ has this little collection of prestige sci-fi, and a lot of it’s really well done, and it’s just not taking off. I think it deserves to, and Silo is so good, and I think people should watch that too.
Michael Calore: Awesome. And so it came out last year. Are they doing another season soon or?
Kate Knibbs: I don’t know. There’s lots of material that they could be working from. I hope they’re doing another season if they don’t, though it definitely stands alone as a miniseries, and it’s about people who live in this underground silo sometime in the future, and things are not what they appear, and it’s excellent. Yeah, heartily recommend.
Lauren Goode: I hear that if you get an Apple Vision Pro and you put it on your face, Tim Cook appears and tells you what their next season’s lineup is going to be.
Michael Calore: There’s Apple products in all of the Apple TV plus shows, right? They use their streaming channel as a way to show off how good their products are.
Lauren Goode: Yeah, they’re never using Signal. They’re always like bloop and blue messages when they message people in the program.
Michael Calore: I’m sorry. It’s very annoying. It’s very annoying to imagine a world where three quarters of the planet is not using Android. Kate, what’s the status of Apple devices in the near future on Silo?
Kate Knibbs: I don’t think they have any, but that’s because they’ve been in the Silo for a really long time I think. I am not sure about the exact timeline, but I think they went in the Silo before Tim even took the reins. They might’ve been down there… I don’t know. They have really old school 90s desktops in silo. There’s no blue bubbles to worry about.
Michael Calore: Are they Mac clones?
Kate Knibbs: I don’t know.
Michael Calore: Are they Motorola Mac clones? That’d be amazing.
Kate Knibbs: I’ll have to rewatch and take a look at the gadgetry.
Michael Calore: I’ll watch it. Thank you for the recommendation. Lauren, what is your recommendation?
Lauren Goode: Despite my throwing shade at you earlier for binge-watching, mine is a binge-watch, and there’s a little story behind this that’s related to 3 Body Problem. So listeners should know that Netflix gave us all early access to 3 Body Problem, and we had to log into our Netflix accounts and enter a pin code because we had to be approved to get these digital screeners. And over the weekend, I went to go watch 3 Body Problem and realized I didn’t have the pin code. So I emailed Netflix on a Sunday and just was like, “Hey, I am really sorry, but I don’t think I have this pin code, and so I can’t watch this.” It took them all of four minutes to get back to me.
Scientists keep taking their own lives, and no one knows why. That’s the central mystery at the start of 3 Body Problem, the new Netflix series based on a trilogy of sci-fi novels by Chinese author Cixin Liu. But it soon unfolds into something far grander: There’s a mysterious VR video game, flashbacks to revolutionary China, shady billionaires, and strange cults.
But really, it’s all about physics. Liu’s novels are beloved in China and have a smaller but similarly dedicated following among English-language readers, but they are hard science fiction—heavy on concept, light on character. More than once in the series, someone resorts to wheeling out a chalkboard to make their point, and there are scenes in the books that seem impossible to film: multidimensional structures collapsing in on themselves, a computer made up of millions of soldiers, nano-wires cutting through steel, diamond, flesh.
For showrunners David Benioff, D. B. Weiss, and Alexander Woo, adapting The Three-Body Problem for the screen presented a unique challenge. Woo was a writer on HBO’s True Blood, but Benioff and Weiss are best known for Game of Thrones. An adaptation of George R. R. Martin’s fantasy saga A Song of Ice and Fire, Thrones became a once-in-a-decade television phenomenon, but didn’t quite stick the landing—in some corners of the internet the names Benioff and Weiss are on a level with Joffrey Baratheon.
(L to R) 3 Body Problem executive producers and writers D. B. Weiss, Alexander Woo, and David Benioff.Courtesy of Austin Hargrave/Netflix
So there may be some trepidation for those weighing whether to watch their new show. But 3 Body Problem has all the ingredients that made those early seasons of Game of Thrones so compelling: jaw-dropping set pieces, a web of interpersonal conflict, and an existential threat slowly marching toward the gates.
WIRED spoke to Benioff, Weiss, and Woo about the challenge of adapting a series previously thought to be unadaptable.
Amit Katwala: You’ve talked about how you read the novels simultaneously and decided this was the thing you wanted to work on next. What really attracted you to Three-Body Problem as something to adapt?
David Benioff: We might have three different answers. For me, there were so many scenes in the books that I read and thought, “I really want to see this.” Throughout the whole trilogy there are so many scenes that are thrilling to read, but also as a TV writer and producer deeply intimidating, because you’re thinking, how are we going to show multiple dimensions on screen? How is that going to work? I literally can’t visualize some of the things that are described in the book. The only other time I’ve had that experience is with George Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire.
D. B. Weiss: Something that you’re going to devote this much of your life to, it has to haunt you. It has to be something that when you put it down and walk away it just keeps lurking in your mind. I read these books and I’d be thinking about them while I was going for a walk, I’d be thinking about them when I was taking my kids to school. I never stopped thinking about them.
Chest-bursting aliens. Time-traveling DeLoreans. Dystopian futures. Galaxies far, far away. Science fiction is full of characters, set pieces, and scenarios that few other genres could ever get away with. Due to its often speculative nature, the most accomplished sci-fi movies can sometimes require a bit of work on the part of the viewer. Yet as fans of the genre understand, when it’s done right, a great sci-fi film is well worth the mental gymnastics that watching it might demand.
Speaking of sci-fi done right: Whether you’re a lifelong genre devotee or have never even sat through a Star Wars movie to the end, a little guidance can go a long way—and that’s exactly what we’ve got for you. When you’re ready to take your mind on a cinematic journey, check out any one (or all) of our picks for the very best science fiction movies you can watch right now.
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Dune and Dune: Part Two
“Tell them a messiah will come. They’ll wait. For centuries.” Chani (Zendaya) speaks those words early on in Dune: Part Two. She’s speaking about the prophecy that a savior will arrive to help her and her fellow Fremen, and whether or not Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) will be that messiah. She could also be talking about the wait for a truly epic adaptation of Frank Herbert’s award-winning sci-fi novel. Yes, David Lynch made one in the 1980s, and it’s a camp classic, but it is director Denis Villeneuve’s pair of films that truly bring Herbert’s story to life. Lushly designed, action-packed, and understandable even to people who’ve never touched the book, these Dunes are the real deal. If you know anything about the lore, you know there’s far too much to really get into it here, but let it be known: Villeneueve’s adaptations aren’t just mind-blowing sci-fi—they’re monumental works of art.
Arrival
While Denis Villeneuve has dabbled in a variety of genres since beginning his filmmaking career in the mid-1990s, a sci-fi milieu seems to suit him best. As if Enemy (2014) or his pair of Dune movies didn’t make that obvious, consider this: The man dared to make a sequel worthy of Ridley Scott’s genre-defining Blade Runner—and succeeded! Then there’s Arrival, which is basically a linguistics lesson wrapped in a sci-fi feature and all the more engrossing because of it. After the unexpected arrival of an alien species on Earth, linguist Louise Banks (Amy Adams) is tasked with creating a universal language that will allow humans to speak with them, and vice versa. But she quickly comes to realize that effectively communicating with her human colleagues—who want results now—might be the bigger challenge. It’s a stark, and all too timely, reminder that progress takes time, and as such requires patience.
RoboCop
Any cursory attempt to recreate the ’80s usually goes straight for the popped collars and neon-colored everything. But a quick review of some of the decade’s most popular movies reveals a deep sense of disillusionment. Case in point: In the same year that Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) was declaring “greed is good” in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street, Paul Verhoeven was unleashing one of cinema’s most subversive sci-fi flicks, which sees the mayor of Detroit hand over control of the city to the evil Omni Consumer Products (OCP), which promptly turns Motor City into a testing ground for its latest technologies. One of those creations is RoboCop (Peter Weller), a law-enforcing cyborg who is programmed with the sole intent of eradicating the city’s crime problem—until memories of his human existence find their way back into his head. Hey, it happens. Especially when you recycle the corpse of a police officer murdered in the line of duty in order to make your robot cop thing work. The film’s extreme violence initially earned it the dreaded X rating, which Verhoeven skirted with some clever editing. But the real scares are in its statement on capitalism and the power that corporations wield, which is as true today as it was nearly 40 years ago.
Inception
Anyone who has ever seen Inception knows that you probably need at least a second go-around—or 20—to fully understand its many complexities. If that is even possible. The less you know about the details of the story going into it the better, but the basics are this: Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is an “extractor”—a talented thief who steals his targets’ secrets by infiltrating their dreams with his trusty team of colleagues, which includes Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Elliot Page, and Tom Hardy. People still debate what happened in the film’s ending, which is just the kind of mindfuckery Christopher Nolan seems to revel in.
Star Wars V: Episode V—The Empire Strikes Back
There are only a handful of movie sequels that have somehow managed to be better than the film that spawned then, and The Empire Strikes Back is near the top of the list. The film reunites Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher), Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill), and Han Solo (Harrison Ford)—the fearless threesome who made A New Hope an instant smash hit—as they yet again do their best to keep their world safe from the dastardly Darth Vader. While A New Hope dazzled with its ahead-of-its-time visual effects, The Empire Strikes Back was just as impressive—but took the Star Wars universe in a decidedly darker, and more adult, direction.
The Matrix
Today, The Matrix is part of an enormously popular franchise that includes movies, video games, and even an animated feature (The Animatrix). While all those additional pieces of the puzzle may have diluted the impact of the original film, its one-of-a-kindness still stands. In a dystopian future (really, is there any other kind?), the world is living in a simulated reality without even realizing it—until a top-notch hacker named Neo (Keanu Reeves) sees what’s happening and works to separate fact from AI-created fiction. The Wachowskis’ visionary directing, thought-provoking script, and mind-bending action sequences still have the ability to make viewers’ jaws drop. Audiences haven’t looked at spoons—or Keanu Reeves—the same way since.
The Terminator
In a different world, the studio could have won a casting argument with James Cameron, and The Terminator would star O.J. Simpson instead of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Through a fortuitous and circuitous turn of events, Cameron met with Schwarzenegger to pretend to consider him for the role of Kyle Reese in The Terminator and walked away knowing he had just found their eponymous cyborg, who time-travels from 2029 to 1984 in order to murder Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), a waitress and future mom to the kid who will save the world. Fortunately, she’s got Reese (Michael Biehn)—another time traveler—on her side. On paper, it may sound preposterous, but 40 years later The Terminator still manages to impress—and is still spawning new content.
Terminator 2: Judgment Day
If The Terminator raised the bar for sci-fi films, Terminator 2: Judgment Day smashed it to pieces. Like so many cyborg movies that preceded it—including its 1984 parent film—T2 is as much a commentary on what it means to be human as it is a declaration of just how far is “too far” in the development of intelligent technology. If only early ’90s James Cameron knew what would lie ahead. The plot of this sequel essentially follows the same pattern as the original film: a Terminator (Robert Patrick) is sent to Los Angeles to kill John Connor (Edward Furlong), son of Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), before he can lead the human resistance. Once again, the Connors have a guardian angel—only this time it’s a kinder, gentler, familiar old Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger) who is sent to protect John. Where T2 managed to supplant its predecessor is in its VFX. As he has done so many times throughout his career, Cameron essentially had to create new technology in order to see his vision to fruition and, in doing so, led the transition from practical effects to CGI (for better or worse). Even by today’s standards, T2’s liquid metal shots are incredible to witness.
Escape From New York
John Carpenter may be better known as a master of horror, but he’s no slouch in the sci-fi department. Set in the then future year of 1997, Escape From New York offers a version of America where the country is one big war zone and the island of Manhattan is one giant maximum security prison. That’s unfortunate for the president (Donald Pleasence), as New York City is exactly where Air Force One crash-lands after an attempted hijacking, and POTUS is taken hostage by one of the country’s most dangerous crime bosses. In order to ensure the president’s safe return, the government has no choice but to enlist the help of Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell), a soldier-turned-criminal who might just be the only person who can save the country from total anarchy. Are there synth scores? You betcha. Carpenter would double down on his sci-fi prowess and reteam with Russell again, just one year later, with his equally awesome The Thing (1982).
Ex Machina
While the 1980s were undoubtedly a very good time for sci-fi, the new millennium has proven that there are still plenty of wholly unique stories to be told—and Ex Machina is one of them. Caleb Smith (Domhnall Gleeson) is a programmer who is invited to the remote home of an eccentric tech billionaire (Oscar Isaac) for what he thinks is a gig helping to develop a truly groundbreaking humanoid robot. But when Caleb meets Ava (Alicia Vikander), the robot in question, it becomes clear that it is she, not the humans, who is in control. With its A-list cast, stellar directing, all-too-relevant storyline, and synchronized dance scene, Ex Machina just might be this millennium’s Blade Runner.
Back to the Future
Yes, Back to the Future is a comedy. And a family film too. Not to mention an ’80s classic. But at its heart, the time-traveling adventure of Marty McFly is sci-fi through and through. Marty (Michael J. Fox) is a cool ’80s teen who has a hot girlfriend yet somehow manages to spend most of his time hanging out with a middle-aged mad scientist (Christopher Lloyd), who turns a sweet DeLorean into a time machine. Hijinks ensue, as does a bizarre plotline involving Libyan terrorists, all of which land Marty back in 1955, where he meets the teen versions of his parents and desperately thwarts his mom’s attempts to seduce him. (That storyline could be its own movie, really.) But by interfering with the past, Marty is putting his own future at risk. Forcing him to find a way to get back to 1985—but not before inventing rock ’n’ roll as we know it.
Alien
Ridley Scott has dabbled in virtually every genre, but the bars he has set in the sci-fi world are undeniable. Two years after making his feature directorial debut with the period film The Duellists, Scott changed the science fiction game with Alien. The film follows the crew of the spacecraft Nostromo, including warrant officer Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), who respond to a distress call as they’re making their way home to Earth. This turns out to be their first mistake—especially when they realize that they’re being stalked by an unknown alien species that seems determined to make sure none of the crewmembers ever leave the planetoid. Alien introduced audiences to an array of terrifying creatures—Xenomorphs and face-huggers and chestbursters, oh my—and kicked off a notable movie franchise that will continue later this year with Alien: Romulus.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Two years after inventing the “summer blockbuster” with Jaws, Steven Spielberg made a quick pivot from vengeful sharks to mysterious extraterrestrials—a theme he would revisit again a few years later—with Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The film reunited the director with Richard Dreyfuss, who here plays a loving husband and father whose unexpected run-in with a UFO turns into an obsession that threatens to ruin the life he has built for himself. Nearly a half-century later, it remains one of the most smartly made alien movies Hollywood has ever seen by doing away with the “extra-terrestrial invasion” trope and instead focusing on the challenges that would come with the discovery of an alien life-form.
2001: A Space Odyssey
Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey is the sci-fi movie to end all sci-fi movies, with every genre flick that has followed owing the auteur a debt of gratitude. With its epic scope, gorgeous cinematography, and its somewhat prophetic—and deeply dystopian—narrative about the potential dangers of relying too much on technology, the film is as relevant today as it was upon its initial release nearly 60 years ago. Particularly with its main storyline, which focuses on a group of men taking part in a space mission with the help of HAL 9000, a piece of AI technology that decides to go rogue. It’s not a short film, and every one of its 189 minutes is packed with prescient storytelling and ahead-of-its-time technology, making it stand out as one of the most accomplished films in cinema history.
Blade Runner
Between The Last Duel (2021) and Napoleon (2023), Ridley Scott has been on more of a historical epic kick lately. But no amount of time away from the sci-fi world could ever threaten his place as a preeminent master of the genre. While he made his name with Alien, he achieved icon status with Blade Runner. The setting: Los Angeles, 2019. (Stick with us here.) Flying cars are a thing, as are bioengineered humanoids known as replicants, and that’s a bad thing. Which is why there are so-called “blade runners” like Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), whose job is to find and kill these nonhuman threats to society. But when everyone looks and often acts human, where do you draw the line? Blade Runner’s complex storyline led to Scott and Ford being forced to record and attach a voice-over, which they both hated, to the film’s original release. The film has subsequently been rereleased, both theatrically and in home versions, a number of times and in different iterations. In 1992, Scott finally got to release a director’s cut of the film, which did away with the voiceover (and other elements he didn’t love), but even he didn’t have final say over that cut. Finally, in 2007, he got the chance to be the last word on every element with Blade Runner: The Final Cut. Watch ’em all and see where you land.
