Even pop scifi movie makers appeared to understand...
That a threshold had been crossed, a new world found, a new reason to both hope and fear the future, that unmapped country.
When you look at those pop sicfi films from a half century ago - from the best to the worst - there is a common theme: we are not what we were, we have become something new, even as most of the old stays with us, even as our everyday appears mostly unchanged. We have become something new and we're not ready.
But there's no choice, they say, no choice at all. There's no going back.
Fundamentally, this is, I think, what sets the pop scifi of the 1950s - the source material for many of our machine dreams - apart from what we see currently: the mixture of hope and fear, warning and celebration, seems to have disappeared, like morning mist. Perhaps Blade Runner, that extended meditation on loneliness, was the last great filmed example.
What has taken the place of the old nightmares which once walked hand-in-hand with the old dreams?
