This
is the 50th anniversary of 2001:
A Space Odyssey, whose influence is still keenly evident in science fiction
films, but not this one. It is something completely different. Instead of the
renegade HAL 9000 computer, there is an artificial intelligence program named
ARTi, who seems to have its own agenda. It and Mackenzie “Mack” Wilson are not investigating
an unlikely monolith. No sir, they are probing a cube that mysteriously appeared
on Mars. Plus, it is thirty-five years later in Hasraf Dulull’s 2036 Origin Unknown (trailer here), which is now
playing in New Jersey.
Several
years earlier, Wilson watched her beloved father perish in the first manned
space flight to Mars. That prompted the space consortium to move almost exclusively
to drones and artificial intelligence. She is one of the last human holdovers. For
her latest mission, she will share war-room oversight duties with ARTi, but her
earthbound bureaucrat sister Lena Sullivan makes it clear the machine has the
final say.
This
spurs quite a bit of bickering between Wilson and ARTi, but they manage to put
it aside when events start to jeopardize the mission. At first, it is merely
adverse planetary conditions, but they soon detect signs of external forces in
play. There might even be some spillover from the world war possibly erupting
on Earth, or perhaps someone is just trying to deliver a cease-and-desist
notice from the estates of Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke.
To
give credit where it is due, Katee Sackhoff is quite good as Wilson and Ray
Fearon nicely cranks up the intrigue as Sterling Brooks, the inspector general
sent from the quasi-public-private space agency. Steven Cree is also fine
providing the voice of ARTi, but his calculating tones will never have anything
like the cultural resonance of Douglas Rain’s silky sounding HAL.
You
better believe there are echoes of 2001 in
2036, but its worst crime is piling
on the humanity-hatred trend so depressingly prevalent in recent indie SF. Not
unlike Singularity and Genesis, 2036 basically suggests humanity is too sick to survive and
deserves what’s coming to it. In this case, Dulull and screenwriter Gary Hall
leave a small backdoor open for humankind, but it is a heck of a slender reed. So
that’s it then. According to Dulull and Hall, your children and grandchildren
are better off going up in a global fireball, so just resign yourself to it
already.
