Science Fiction Movies With A Message There are more people who are starting to believe this world is nothing but a computer simulation. I guess a lot of this has to do with the movie The Matrix. The movie was brilliant, and I think the part which referred to Déjà vu really made some people associate some strange things they saw happen with the possibility of this being a computer controlled world. Sometimes a movie, even a fictional movie with a great story can affect people’s lives and the way they think about things. I remember when the movie Rocketship X-M came out. Yes, I know it seems like centuries ago, but the movie upset some people at the time. The idea was a rocket with a crew was being sent for the first time to the moon. Somehow it gets off course and sped up and heads toward to Mars. The crew finds out Mars is mostly desert but they can go outside without spacesuits. While out there exploring they get attacked by what look like stone age people who are deformed. It turns out Mars had been practically wiped out in a nuclear war. This movie came out at a time when we were just starting the nuclear age. The message was clear, if not careful we could end up like the Martians. There was the movie When The Earth Stood Still and its remake. The most relevant was actually the original. An alien visitor who looks human comes to the earth and while trying to make peaceful contact is shot and killed, but he came with a giant robot who brings him back to his ship and back to life. The alien tries again to make contact this time with a scientist. Eventually the alien gets a chance after much carnage by his robot to address the human race and tells everyone he is a member of an organization of planets and they are peaceful and patrolled by ships containing robots with the power to destroy a planet if they start a war. He tells the people of earth they will have to stop their war like ways or be destroyed. There is even a scifi movie for the green crowd which has a terrifying message. It is Soylent Green. The earth has become overcrowded and hard to feed. The government is manufacturing a food tablet which nourishes people but no one knows what is in it. It turns out the only way enough people can be fed is by processing the bodies of the dead into food tablets. The people who worry about Artificial Intelligence destroying us have a few different science fiction movies that give a strong message in that area. I have three in mind with a strong message. The first has to be Terminator. Robots in the future have decided they will wipe out the human race because the Artificial Intelligence which rules them says humans are just in the way. They even send one through time to kill the mother of the current human rebel leader in the future before he is born. Another movie of that type is Forbidden Planet the movie responsible for the series on television which most of us loved, Star Trek. A spaceship lands on a planet with only one man and his daughter on it. He is an archaeologist studying a former race which lived there. Unknown to him is the fact that race had built a machine controlled by Artificial Intelligence which built monsters from their fears which wiped out that entire civilization and now the AI has become active again attacking the spaceship. The message is very clear, watch out for AI, it can destroy you. The last one I want to mention where AI turns on us is 2001 A Space Odyssey. Astronauts are traveling in space to investigate a strange monolith found on the moon which is also thought to exist further out in space. The ship they are on is controlled by an AI named HAL 9000. HAL seems to be friendly until he decides to turn on the small crew. Hal starts to monitor the crew’s conversations and eventually wants to kill them all. One of the most famous lines in the movie became Open the Pod bay doors, please HAL, but HAL refuses to allow one astronaut back in after the other is killed. Eventually he gets in and HAL gets turned off. One movie among many which stands out about the dangers of what we might find on other planets when we look for life is Alien. A spacecraft from earth lands on a planet and sees strange large eggs. They have flown there in response to a distress signal. While they are exploring, their ship’s computer realized the signal was not a distress signal at all, but a warning. As the eggs are being transported, they begin to hatch and creatures run after the ship’s occupants trying to cover their mouths so they can deposit their eggs inside humans to hatch. The result is not only dead crew members as the new creatures burst out of their chests, but this creature becomes huge and is impossible to kill. It won’t die even when exposed to space and the rocket blast. Another movie about a creature from outer space invading the earth is The Thing. I have always thought even though the remake was good, the original was the best. It was made in 1951 and scientists at the North Pole find a UFO in the ice. They try to get it out with explosives but they destroy it. A body is still frozen in the ice and they take it to their base. It thaws out and a creature comes to life who wants to kill them. They try and kill it but bullets do nothing. They realize the creature is basically a vegetable even though it has a human shape and it is compared to the makeup of a carrot. After many deaths they finally are able to kill it by frying it on an electrical mat they got the creature to step on. The message is clear, aliens can be very dangerous. For evolution worriers we have the Planet of the Apes. The apes have evolved while future humans have become their slaves. There have been many of these movies made, both sequels and different chapters. They never seem to turn out good for the humans in the end. Could a group of animals evolve so much in the distant future they might be smarter than man? I guess we would have to ask Darwin.
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