Sci-fi noir
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Sci-Fi noir is a term coined in the 2000s to denote a category of science-fiction films, a hybrid form of film noir and science fiction films. Milestone films generally cited in this category are Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville (1965), Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982) and Ghost in the Shell (1995). As an aesthetic category, it is very near to cyberpunk and neo-noir. The work of Tanino Liberatore's RanXerox deserves mention here.
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Future noir
Lancaster University professor Jamaluddin Bin Aziz argues that as science fiction has evolved and expanded, it has fused with other film genres such as gothic thrillers and film noir. When science fiction integrates film noir elements, Bin Aziz calls the resulting hybrid form “future noir,” a form which “... encapsulates a postmodern encounter with generic persistence, creating a mixture of irony, pessimism, prediction, extrapolation, bleakness and nostalgia.” Future noir films such as Blade Runner, Twelve Monkeys, Dark City, and Children of Men use a protagonist who is “...increasingly dubious, alienated and fragmented”, at once “dark and playful like the characters in Gibson’s Neuromancer”, yet still with the “...shadow of Philip Marlowe...”
Future noir films that are set in a post-apocalyptic world “...restructure and re-represent society in a parody of the atmospheric world usually found in noir’s construction of a city - dark, bleak and beguiled.” Future noir films often intermingle elements of the gothic thriller genre, such as Minority Report, which makes references to occult practices, and Alien, with its tag line ‘In space, no one can hear you scream’, and a space vessel, Nostromo, “that hark[s] back to images of the haunted house in the gothic horror tradition.” Bin Aziz states that films such as James Cameron’s The Terminator are a sub-genre of ‘techno noir’ that create “...an atmospheric feast of noir darkness and a double-edged world that is not what it seems.” --Jamaluddin Bin Aziz
From Alphaville to Ghost in the Shell
In the New Hollywood era, the most significant trend in noir crossovers has involved science fiction. In Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville (1965), Lemmy Caution is the name of the old-school private eye in the city of tomorrow. The Groundstar Conspiracy (1972) centers on another implacable investigator and an amnesiac named Welles. Soylent Green (1973), the first major American example, portrays a dystopian, near-future world via a self-evidently noir detection plot.
The cynical and stylish perspective of classic film noir had a formative effect on the cyberpunk genre of science fiction that emerged in the early 1980s; the movie most directly influential on cyberpunk was Blade Runner (1982), directed by Ridley Scott, which pays clear and evocative homage to the classic noir mode (Scott would subsequently direct the poignant noir crime melodrama Someone to Watch Over Me [1987]).
Scholar Jamaluddin Bin Aziz has observed how "the shadow of Philip Marlowe lingers on" in such other "future noir" films as Twelve Monkeys (1995), Dark City (1998), and Minority Report (2002). The hero is the target of investigation in Gattaca (1997), which fuses film noir motifs with a scenario indebted to Brave New World. The Thirteenth Floor (1999), like Blade Runner, is an explicit homage to classic noir, in this case involving speculations about virtual reality. Science fiction, noir, and animation are brought together in the Japanese films Ghost in the Shell (1995) and the short A Detective Story (2003), set in the Matrix universe.
See also
References
- The Rise of Sci-Fi Noir by Broken Projector
- Aziz (2005), section "Future Noir and Postmodernism : The Irony Begins."
- “Future Noir” by Jamaluddin Bin Aziz, Lancaster University, and School of Humanities, University Science of Malaysia. From Science Fiction To Future Noir: The Voyage Begins
