The thing about great science fiction is not just that it’s entertaining, but that it’s thought-provoking. It can make you consider moral and ethical questions for which there are no easy answers. As a genre fan, I’m thrilled that Austin played host to the first Other Worlds Austin sci-fi film fest, and can only hope that it continues to grow and expand as an annual event. Our intrepid Ed has already covered the fest with an interview with organizer Bears Fonté and coverage of one of the event’s main features, The Well. Here are a few more selections from the fest.
Time Lapse
Speaking of those ethical issues, Time Lapse begs the question: what you would do if every day you could get a glimpse of what’s happening 24 hours in the future? I liked the simplicity of this feature. Yes, it plays with time, but nothing that far-fetched is happening here as a result — the world doesn’t suddenly end, or a squished bug doesn’t change everyone into mutants or anything. Rather, our protagonists are regular people — artist Finn paying the bills by working property maintenance at his apartment, shiftless Jasper with no discernable occupation besides gambling, and writer Callie, who happens to be Finn’s girlfriend. These three roomies are regular people with regular problems, like clogged toilets, artist’s block, and the need to pay the bills having to take precedence over creative endeavors. When their elderly neighbor across the street disappears, they discover both his dead body and a large camera in his apartment, which is aimed at their own apartment window, and every day at 8 pm takes and spits out a Polaroid of their living room from 8 pm the next day. Of course, some of their next actions are predictable — you know Jasper is going to start making bank by “sending back” each day’s race results — but others are less so. How far will they go to keep their secret? It’s easy to think you would certainly handle the situation better — but would you really? Time Lapse pulls you in without being melodramatic, with an increasingly darker journey and enough twists to keep you guessing what will happen next.
The Sun Devil and the Princess
This short fantasy film plays well on paper, with sun and moon goddesses, a princess, and a sort-of-Hellboy-looking being called the Sun Devil. But unless you just really like extended samurai sword fight scenes, you can probably skip it. Our prissy princess looks like she’s sewn her own impractical garb for a cosplay convention, and seems too annoying to be worth saving. With warring goddesses, a rebellion, a debt of honor, various creatures and races, it seems like there could really be an interesting story there, if you fleshed it out and put some more money into the production. But as is, you could probably find a better use of a half hour; the teaser trailer pretty much sums up the whole film.
The Perfect 46
The Perfect 46 is scary; not because the subject matter is frightening, but because it’s entirely plausible. Set in an almost-present day where genome sequencing is ubiquitous, geneticist Jesse Darden creates a company that will review you and your partner’s genomes to determine if you two are a good genetic match (the “46” refers to the number of chromosomes you pass to your child — 23 from each partner). We meet Jesse when he is living in isolation and displaying symptoms of OCD; as two mysterious masked men invade his home, we learn about the rise and fall of The Perfect 46 corporation through a mix of flashbacks of both “real” scenes and a series of interviews from a TV news feature Jesse has on tape. Throughout, we constantly hear Jesse pontificate about the potential eradication of birth defects and disease through his process — not through curing disease, but through breeding it out. Though Jesse himself refuses to see any downsides to his service, others question the ethics of telling two people they are not a good genetic match for having children, and the word “eugenics” increasingly becomes the call of those who worry about the impact of the process on real people.
Though Jesse going on and on (and on) trumpeting the service tends to drag the action at times, it was really the only complaint I had about The Perfect 46. I can’t answer the questions posed here — they’re not easy ones, and they’re ones we as a society are going to have to start answering sooner than most people realize (see Scientific American and the MIT Technology Review for more on the current state of similar science). I can certainly see Jesse’s point of view, and you really do believe that the only intention he has for his service is to allow for healthy children who never have to suffer through heritable genetic defects and diseases. But I can also see the other side, with questions about everything from privacy concerns about sensitive information to the slippery slope that could lead from benign-seeming concepts like “healthy children” to the more questionable “designer babies” to even more sinister aims like race perfection and inadvertent creation of a class that’s healthier only because they can afford to be. If you’re feeling up to an interesting ethical dilemma, gather a few friends and check out The Perfect 46, available on demand.