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The science fiction film Oblivion topped the charts this week, becoming the loudest film of the season. It is noteworthy, first of all, by the fact that the script for the film, which describes the year 2077 and Tom Cruise participates, was written by the director Josef Kosinski himself - and not recalled from the previously existing ones. How much truth and how much fiction in Oblivion?
Beware, spoilers!
Sci-fi films in our time are not something out of the ordinary, although it is rather difficult to come up with something actually original. This testing ground has been carefully mastered during the last hundred years in the cinema and at least several hundred years in literature. All possible scenarios for the development of postapocalypse were sifted through in the Golden Age of science fiction and in the period of the New Wave.
It cannot be said that Oblivion has become something fundamentally new, but one should pay tribute to it - several original plots from the Sky Sky, which we are used to, intertwined in it, and in an interesting combination. It is also interesting in that the most fantastic assumptions in the film have a real scientific basis, which we write about here daily on Hi-News.ru. Someone says that the Kosinski film will look for many more years, like Kubrick’s Space Odyssey, someone frowns in disgust from the melodramatic plot, but we will simply sort out the truth and fiction in the Oblivion film.
Alien invasion
Fantasy:
In the movie Oblivion, the script includes canonical images from Stanley Kubrick's 2001 Space Odyssey, special effects from Independence Day, and even Star Trek television series (Borg!). In the literature, of course, the aliens attacked the Earth long before the birth of the “solid” genre of science fiction. Let us recall the story of Voltaire “Micromegas”, in which the newcomers from Saturn and Sirius visit the Earth and are amazed at our transcendent arrogance, which is not at all combined with our small size.
The science:
Despite the fact that scientific initiatives like SETI continue to peer into the darkness of space, alien races did not invade Earth. For now. But they can.
Rise of the Machines
Fantasy:
The most obvious cinematic predecessor of military unmanned aerial vehicles in Oblivion will, of course, be the Skynet death machines from the movie The Terminator. Several scenes in “Oblivion” also refer us to the underrated “Robocop” of 1987. But Isaac Asimov had anticipated the appearance of military drones a long time ago in his works.
The science:
In the United States and some other countries, military unmanned drones have long been in good standing.
Extraterrestrial colonies
Fantasy:
In the film “Oblivion” Tom Cruise's character, Jack Harper, believes that the bulk of the world's population fled to Saturn’s satellite, Titan. The idea of extraterrestrial colonies before "Oblivion" was considered in many films - for example, "Aliens", "Recall All" and "Blade Runner". Space colonies have always been popular in science fiction literature. In the Azimov series of novels The Foundation, all habitable planets in the galaxy are terraformed and colonized.
The science:
Titan is seen as a possible item for a space colony, as it has a dense atmosphere and oceans. In one of the messages of the program "Cassini" even flashed data that on Titan may well be organic life. On Saturn's moon are oceans of liquid methane. But while the idea of its colonization is far from real incarnation.
Post-apocalyptic crisis
Fantasy:
According to the story of Oblivion, the Earth is devastated by the world nuclear war. In cinematography, this storyline is far from new - let us remember classics like “Mad Max” or the popular film “The Day After Tomorrow”. The game series “Fallout” built its popularity on this idea, and the Strugatskys began to study the post-nuclear issue a lot after the literary research of Mary Shelley and Edgar Allan Poe in the early 1800s.
The science:
Oblivion uses a well-known scientific forecast of the consequences of global thermonuclear war: a broken landscape, radiation zones, severe weather conditions and the destruction of most of the flora and fauna.
Clones
Fantasy:
The clones in the films also got their moment of glory: from Star Wars to The Matrix. But in the literature, the history of cloning is rooted in the work of Aldous Huxley, and specifically to the famous novel "On the Brave New World" of 1932.
The science:
Ethical and social principles leave cloning beyond the limits of permissible, but technologies for cloning mammals already exist. Some conspiracy theories believe that human cloning is already being done in secret laboratories.
Underground cities
Fantasy:
Since the surface of the Earth in the film “Oblivion” is not possible for living, the refugees had to go underground in a network of ruins, caves and tunnels. In the cinema, similar ideas were again played up in The Matrix and the Terminator, and in literature in general it became a kind of cliché with Tolkien, Wells, Poe and Vern. Recall even “Dante's hell” - why aren't you underground cities?
The science:
There are hundreds of underground complexes around the world, many of which could fairly be called cities. The underground city of Montreal - La Ville Souterraine in France - has more than 20 kilometers of tunnels with apartments, hotels, offices and shops. In the last century, conceptual designers also planned for a long time the creation of underground and underwater cities - but somehow did not grow together. Someone even Moscow metro network can be called an underground city.
Astronauts in trouble
Fantasy:
In the hallucinogenic second half of Oblivion, new plot twists are revealed, which are quite common in science fiction: astronauts who are in danger. From a half-word, one can understand that we have seen this both in the “Planet of the Apes” and in the same “Space Odyssey”. Polish writer Stanislav Lem wrote about this in Solaris.
The science:
In the history of manned cosmonautics, more than 500 people visited space, 18 of them died (in Russian and American programs).
Finally, we note that in Oblivion the theme of the disappearance of the moon is touched upon. About the consequences of this, we recently wrote.
The article is based on materials .
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