Reference no: EM132348135

Assignment -

Need a 2 page essay and then need three paragraphs about three different movies.

1. Two page essay - All of the science-fiction films you have seen have something in common with one another--they all deal with artificial life or artificial intelligence. There is the robot woman in Metropolis, there are the robots in THX 1138, there are the replicants in Blade Runner (androids in Dick's novel), and finally there is HAL in 2001. Additionally, there are humans who are often reduced to behaving like machines or who choose to do so.

As we discussed in class, these kinds of characterizations and narratives derive, at least in part, from the dehumanization of labor in an industrial, high-tech society, the kind that has existed in many places around the world for over a century, and that now seems to dominate the whole world. Likewise, not only labor but all human relations are changed by the ways we have had to adapt our behavior to work with and live with the mechanisms and structures of such a society.

The workers of Metropolis are reduced to automatons to a great extent, while the economic and social elite are desensitized to the ordeal of those workers. In THX 1138, people are reduced to an automaton condition by totalitarian surveillance state that enforces its rule with drugs and robots, and actual human relationships have almost ceased to exist (and that state may itself be no more than an elaborate computer program that controls all things). In Blade Runner, a corrupt and decaying culture persists amidst the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust, and replicants are the new class of slaves--superhuman and subhuman at the same time, at least as far as those in power are concerned. Everyone else just struggles to get by. Finally, in 2001, the human beings who designed and programmed HAL have desensitized themselves to each other (notice the general lack of affect and warmth in Poole and Bowman in The Discovery spaceship). In some ways, HAL is the most emotional of the characters.

For this essay, consider what each of these films tells us about what it means to be authentically human, and using concrete examples from at least two of the films, write an essay that discusses how science fiction dystopias draw our attention to how, in the midst of a high-tech culture, we can fail to live up to the demands to be authentically human as we become more and more dependent on machines.

Science fiction films -

1. Manhunt in Space 1954 Rocky Jones

2. ASSIGNMENT OUTERSPACE | Free Films from SCI-FI-LONDON

3. Watch Powers of 10.

Attachment:- Assignment File.rar