Category Archives: Transhuman News

Director Rian Johnson's latest, starring Bruce Willis and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, is a sci-fi thriller with surprising heart.

Film District

"I don't want to talk about time-travel shit," Bruce Willis tells Joseph Gordon-Levitt early in Rian Johnson's sci-fi thriller Looper. "Because if we start, we're going to be here all day, making diagrams with straws."

It's a good bit of advice, and the film itself is generally wise enough to take it. As the title suggests, Looper has its share of fun with the convolutions and conundrums that take place when folks from the future start tinkering with the past. (One clever and unsettling example involves people etching scars into their own flesh as a means of sending an indelible message to their future selves.) But the movie never allows itself to get bogged down in questions about the physics or philosophy of time travel, the what-ifs and how-comes and why-didn'ts. Leave the structural analysis for the DVD commentary. For all its temporal shenanigans, Looper is to be enjoyed in the moment.

As jobs go, it's not so bad: Joe stands in a field with his pocket watch; waits for his cuffed and hooded prey to appear on the tarp he's carefully laid out; and blammo! Or at least it's not so bad relative to the other employment opportunities available in 2044, which seem to consist primarily of hobo and hooker. The sullen retro-futurism on display in Looper will be familiar to anyone who's seen Blade Runner, The Road Warrior, or their many imitators. City streetsand their denizensare gray with grime; high-tech hover bikes are rare, but old-school shotguns ubiquitous.

There is, however, one catch to Joe's profession: In order to tie up loose ends, the crime syndicates that employ the loopers eventually require them to kill their own future selvesto "close the loop." And when Joe's future self shows up on his tarp one day he's none to eager to have his loop closed.

It's a neat little setup. After Old Joe (again, played by Willis) escapes his rendezvous with mortality, Young Joe (Gordon-Levitt) is held accountable by his none-too-forgiving boss (Jeff Daniels). So Young Joe is tasked with finding and killing Old Joe, even as Old Joe is trying to keep Young Joe alivebecause a dead Young Joe means that Old Joe ceases to exist. And for any whose heads are not yet spinning, writer-director Johnson throws in another loop or two: In the future, Old Joe's wife was killed by a mysterious, Keyser-Soze-like crime lord called the Rainmaker; now that he's back in the past, Old Joe is determined to find this villain as a boy, and snuff him out before he can grow into deadly manhood. But Young Joe falls in love with boy's mother (Emily Blunt), a tough, resourceful farm gal, and he commits to protecting her and her son from the threat posed by his own future self...

Are you following me? If not, don't sweat it. There'll be plenty of time to diagram the whole thing with straws after you leave the theater.

First, though, a few words about the non-time-travel-related question most likely to be on viewers' lips: What the hell happened to Joseph Gordon-Levitt's face? Rest assured, the appealing young star (who got his big cinematic break in Johnson's first film, Brick) has suffered no motorcycle crash followed by problematic reconstructive surgery. Rather, Johnson asked makeup artist Kazuhiro Tsuji to increase Gordon-Levitt's physical resemblance to Willisin particular, his distinctive Roman noseand Tsuji succeeded, depending on one's point of view, either too well or not quite well enough. In either case, we're deep into the uncanny valley here, with Gordon-Levitt calling to mind less Willis himself than a Willis marionette that didn't make the final cut of Team America: World Police.

Happily, Johnson's decision to have Gordon-Levitt go the full Dyan Cannon is an uncharacteristic misstep in an otherwise sharp and self-assured film. Though Looper carries the echoes of many earlier entertainmentsThe Terminator, Blade Runner, Logan's Run, Witness, Willis's own Twelve Monkeysit is a fresh and vivid work of imagination, and a return to form for Johnson following the awkward misfire of 2008's The Brothers Bloom. With Looper, Johnson offers up a mind-bending ride that is not afraid to slow down now and again, to explore themes of regret and redemption, solitude and sacrifice, love and loss. It's a movie worth seeing and, perhaps, going back to see again.

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The Mind-Bending Charm of 'Looper'

Summary: Many companies view SMS as legacy technology, and are bypassing it in favor of apps and new, non-carrier communication services like WhatsApp. The death of SMS is nowhere near, though.

The tech industry attracts the worst kind of futurists, Clayton Christensen-quoting types who behold shifting paradigms, looming inflection points and disruptive innovations everywhere they look.

The futurism business is so competitive these days that technologies get declared dying at the very moment they are actually peaking. In monarchy terms, that's like preparing tocrown the boy prince when the reigning king is a hale and hearty 40-something.

So it goes with text messaging, aka SMS. Nobody disputes that SMS is the king of mobile communications today. 7.8 trillion SMS messages were sent last year, according to Portio Research. Another firm, Informa, counted 5.9 trillion text messages worldwide last year, comprising 64% of mobile messaging traffic. You alsohave research showing that in developed countries,texting has just become more popularthan voice calling.

Not only is SMS on top, but it's still growing substantially. Portio predicted earlier this year that it will increase 23% this year to 9.6 trillion SMS messages.

According to Portio: "SMS is not dead. SMS is still the king and will remain so for some time to come."

Yet, many experts have already declared the death of SMS. Consumers don't care - they're too busy texting. And somecompanies are reaping the marketingbenefits(see Mobile Marketer for more North American case studies and Sybase 365 for the rest of the world).

But too many companies are being persuaded not to invest in SMS or its picture/video-enabled sibling, MMS, in favor of building native apps, or waiting to see what the mobile IM services or Twitter or even fast-rising 'free' Over-The-Top (OTT) services like WhatsApp.

I understand that there is a consumer desire for a cheaper alternative to SMS. ButI think that companies waiting for the death of SMS will wait for a lot longer than they expect. In the meantime, there will be huge costs, in the form of blown opportunities to exploit the right-time, contextual marketing capabilitiesof mobiletoday.

As much as I'm a champion of apps, they remain largely a first-world phenomenon. Globally, smartphones that can run apps were outsold by featurephones by 2:1 last year.

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Text Messaging Still Thriving Despite Smartphones, Twitter and WhatsApp

The bright futurism of Star Trek: The Next Generation, the award-winning sci-fi series that warps into its 25th anniversary Friday, was so unique that the show probably wouldn't get the command to engage today.

"There is not a new hopeful, optimistic vision of the future that I am currently aware of," veteran Star Trek: The Next Generation writer (and Battlestar Galactica rebooter) Ronald Moore told Wired by phone. That shiny outlook, on display throughout seven alternately brilliant and bombed seasons, powered the show into our collective consciousness.

"I'd argue that in the last few decades in America, when people are asked what they hope the future will look like, they still turn to Star Trek," Moore said. "They hope we put aside our differences and come together as humanity, that we rise above war, poverty, racism and other problems that have beset us. They hope that there's a future where we set off into the galaxy to have peaceful relations with other worlds."

Still, some of Star Trek: The Next Generation's 178 episodes stand taller than others. We've beamed up our picks for the best and worst episodes (and feature films) in the gallery above for Trekkies (and Trekkers) to dissect, and tagged them with our own "Make it so?" ratings. Give them a level-one diagnostic and add your own picks in the comments section below for a shot at winning a Star Trek: The Next Generation: Season One Blu-ray collection.

Above:

Otherwise known as the six best episodes starring the franchise's omnipotent trickster Q, a character whose evolution is intertwined with Next Generation's DNA. The Q Files range from theatrical debut episode "Encounter at Farpoint" to the moving closure of the two-part series finale "All Good Things." There are also stops off at the Borg-birthing "Q Who," the hilarious "Deja Q," the Robin Hood-inspired "Qpid" and Capt. Jean-Luc Picard's afterlife fable "Tapestry."

Report! According to Moore, who co-wrote "All Good Things," the Hugo-winning series closer "turned out beautifully, and it had no right to!" Meanwhile, "Tapestry" offered Picard, played by Shakespearean actor Patrick Stewart, the chance to overwrite his violent history, even though, as Moore explained, "our past mistakes are what make our present lives possible." The results are Star Trek canon.

Treknobabble? Philosophical. The inscrutable Q are godlike jerks who love to mess with humanity's heads, hearts and lives. But they're also a reliable deus ex machina whose morality plays and cosmological inquiry keep The Next Generation much smarter than today's undead cultural programming.

Make it so? Engage, warp 13!

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The Best and Worst of Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Sci-Fi Optimism