Critics celebrate Lang’s Metropolis primarily for its visualization of urban space.  How does Lang glamorize or romanticize the city above ground?  Think about the angles and proportions of buildings and other structures, the vantage point of the camera, his use of brightness and shadow.

Interstellar was among the stranger films we have watched. It many ways it seemed to build on Arrival in that one of the central themes was how the universe can be perceived differently (there being 5th dimensional beings that created the wormhole and the black hole structure), but interstellar’s vision isn’t as clear as Arrival’s. Rather than trying to understand the aliens (possibly future humans?), the audience is simply supposed to accept that they exist. The movie sort of tries to explain the idea of the 5th dimension, but it doesn’t do a great job and doesn’t seem committed to making the audience understand, and tries to cover it up with scientific principles that anyone can understand.

The other driving theme in Interstellar is the power of love, which feels out of place in a movie that otherwise takes science very seriously. It isn’t impossible for a movie to be about both science and love, but in Interstellar the two feel disparate. It doesn’t help that the science in interstellar is not consistent at all. Much like in the cold equations, attempts to justify the plot with real scientific principles simply make the pieces that don’t add up stand out more. On the giant wave planet, if gravity was so strong it slowed down time, why could our protagonists walk around easily? Additionally, their time on the planet seemed to be in real time, but when they returned to the ship they had missed 23 years, implying they had been on the planet for over 3 hours. Overall, the film just doesn’t seem to know what it wants to be, and it tries to cover everything. It tries to be about relationships, but the characters are wooden, tries to be about hard science, but can’t stay consistent, and tries to be existential but just confuses viewers.

As one of the more modern films we’ve seen up to this point, Ridley Scott’s “Alien” mirrors many of the contemporary patterns in space-based science fiction that main stream works exhibit today, while serving as a reflective piece of popular culture from the late 70s and early 80s. The design of the spaceship in the film itself is not speculative, as it might have been in a previous generation. In terms of chronology, the film has a basis for depicting space travel since the United States put Neil Armstrong on the moon in 1969. As part of the space race that contributed to American lunar missions, there was an associated movement to increase interest in science and technology within popular culture — math and science education were prioritized in order increase the number of people with the training necessary to help the United States win the space race. While “Alien” came out almost a decade after Armstrong walked on the moon, the film can be considered as part of the growing cultural appreciation for science, engineering, and space — a trend visible in the popularity of modern films such as Interstellar. “Alien” depicts notions of space travel and human contact with a deadly organism. The alien form in the film is monstrous and its actions are based in hostility towards humans — this hostility is central to the depiction of many modern Alien vs. Human films. While the depiction of the alien is speculative, this film and science fiction works dealing with space in this era can be considered both a product and catalyst of a larger cultural appreciation of science, especially in the wake of Cold War conflict. Much in the way that the Apollo 11 mission inspired a cultural reverence for science, films like “Alien” were able to generate a popular base for scientific exploration and speculation.

“Story of Your Life” tells two primary stories, one about Louise’s encounter with the heptapods, the other about her life with her daughter.  What, if anything, connects the two stories?  Specifically where and how does that connection take place? 

The Le Guin readings, “The Question of Sex” and “Nine Lives” don’t offer a lot narrative action—laser fights, drawn out dramatic rescues, and so forth.  If they’re not driven  primarily by action sequences, what does drive them?  It’s fine to write about just one of the stories rather than both.

How would you position James Tiptree’s work relative to the pulp SF we have read to this point? What is one way in which “The Women Men Don’t See” is either different from or very similar to the style or content of earlier magazine stories (“The Roads Must Roll,” “The Cold Equations,” and “Helen O’Loy,” for example) that we have read?