SCI-FI SATIRE MOVIE DOUBLE

A week of rogue machines, unstable realities, artificial intelligence, cybernetic bodies, corporate paranoia, cosmic dread, and a very cranky robot policeman.

This program traces a century of cinema asking the same uncomfortable question: what happens when human intelligence develops an Artificial Intelligence it can’t fully control?

The answer, judging by this week’s films, is never good.

SCI-FI SATIRE MOVIE DOUBLE pairs two films that look at the future and find the joke hiding inside the machinery. DARK STAR turns deep-space exploration into a deadpan workplace comedy about malfunctioning systems, bored astronauts and a bomb with philosophical ambitions. ROBOCOP takes corporate greed, privatised policing and American violence and pushes them just far enough to become prophecy. Together, they make a perfect double bill about smart machines, stupid institutions and futures that failed before they even arrived.

19:00 DARK STAR

John Carpenter | 1974 | USA | 1h23m | Presented in the original English audio with English subtitles

DARK STAR is John Carpenter and Dan O’Bannon discovering that the funniest place to put bored, disaffected worker drones is several light years from help.

DARK STAR is where John Carpenter’s career begins, not with polished horror or studio muscle, but with a group of bored astronauts stuck in space with faulty equipment, a talking bomb, and far too much time to think. The film follows the crew of the Dark Star, a scout ship travelling through deep space to destroy unstable planets before they become a threat to future colonisation. It sounds grand in theory. In practice, the ship is falling apart and the crew are tired of each other. Space - in Carpenter’s hands - is cramped, repetitive and badly managed.

What makes DARK STAR so enjoyable is how matter-of-fact its absurdity feels. A beachball-like alien escapes containment. A frozen commander still offers advice from storage. A bomb starts espousing existential philosophical doubts at exactly the wrong moment.

The film began as a student project at USC before being expanded into a feature. You can see the budget limitations, but you can also see the ideas forming Carpenter would return to in later films like HALLOWEEN, THE THING and ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK. O’Bannon would later write ALIEN, and DARK STAR already contains an early version of that film’s crew dynamic: tired people trapped together in deep space, arguing over procedure, boredom, hierarchy and the basic unpleasantness of doing a dangerous job in a badly behaved ship. Whereas ALIEN is a straight-shooting sci-fi horror film, you could argue DARK STAR is the world's first sci-fi workplace comedy.

I’m opening this week’s FOMO FUTURE SHOCK program with DARK STAR because it captures something the whole week returns to again and again: the future doesn’t always arrive as sleek progress. Sometimes it arrives broken, underfunded, mildly ridiculous and carrying a machine that has started asking questions nobody is prepared to answer.

21:00 ROBOCOP

Paul Verhoeven | 1987 | USA | 1h42m | Presented in the original English audio with English subtitles

When Edward Neumeier and Michael Miner wrote ROBOCOP, they looked at America in the 1980s and concluded the next logical step was that corporations should own police officers. At the time, this was considered satire. ROBOCOP is a corporate nightmare disguised as an 80s action film, which is probably why it’s aged better than most of the decade around it.

The film is set in a collapsing Detroit where public services have been handed over to private industry. Police officer Alex Murphy, played by Peter Weller, is killed in the line of duty and rebuilt by Omni Consumer Products as RoboCop, a cyborg law enforcement product designed to clean up the city and restore corporate confidence. His body belongs to the company. His memory doesn’t.

What makes ROBOCOP work so well is how completely Verhoeven understands the world he’s mocking. The fake news broadcasts, boardroom language, TV commercials and casual privatisation of violence all feel absurd until they don’t. The film’s funny, vicious and much more politically alert than its reputation as an 80s action movie sometimes suggests.

There’s also a strange sadness under the metal. Murphy isn’t simply a machine discovering he was once human. He’s a man whose identity has been repackaged as intellectual property. The action still works. The satire still lands. The corporate logic looks less ridiculous every year.

I’m including ROBOCOP in this week’s FOMO FUTURE SHOCK program because it understands artificial intelligence as part of a much larger system: policing, profit, surveillance, media spectacle and the fantasy that technology can fix social collapse without changing the conditions that caused it.