So this is one possible outcome when a film, here a science fiction think-piece, is based on a critical essay? That essay was penned by eastern bloc author Stanislaw Lem perhaps best known as the author of book used for Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solyaris (an adaptation the author was not particularly happy with, albeit it is one of the key films of science fiction cinema). I wonder what Lem, if he were alive today would have to say about 1. Would he like the ponderously dense wordplay within the film a hybrid of voice-over narration, expository information overload and satirical potshots at a variety of societal institutions including book publishing, news-media and shady governmental secret police. 1 is a curious beast because it does make attempts to ‘show-don’t-tell’ but cannot figure out any coherent way to do so, so it ultimately has to talk-talk-talk, while cross-cutting to surreal imagery. As if Louis Buñuel and Terry Gilliam co-directed a run-on sentence. One will note connections to dystopian mind-fucks along the lines of Brazil, Ghost in the Shell or Neil Stephenson’s Snowcrash albeit without the whimsy or kineticism in any of those works, perhaps the more apt comparison would be to Oshii’s follow-up Innocence, a film that also gets swallowed by its own linguistic pretensions.
