As 2023 draws to a close, SFB’s Martin Jameson takes a look back at the output over the last year, starting with the SF movies…

One of science fiction’s favourite pastimes is to lurk in the collective consciousness – not unlike the dour Scottish Private Frazer in the classic British television comedy Dad’s Army – intoning to anyone who cares to listen that: ‘We’re all doomed!’ As a child in the 1960s this was funny precisely because we weren’t. There were plenty of wars, the occasional famine, a few oil tankers running aground, and nuclear missiles pointed at everyone, but humanity would muddle through. Apocalyptic fiction was little more than trauma therapy for the worried well.

Half a century later, on a shrinking, soiled, overcrowded planet facing quantifiable existential catastrophe on multiple fronts, TV viewers and moviegoers can’t move for narratives predicting the End of Days – although now it has become the impotent trembling mantra of the convicted, already on their way to the scaffold.

On that jolly note, 2023 began and ended with the worst and best that the end of the world has to offer.

10. Knock at the Cabin – The year kicked off with M. Night Shyamalan living up to his hard-won reputation of making laughable head-scratching high-concept nonsense, with the apocalypse striking while the central characters are on vacation in the woods – which is convenient as it requires very little in the manner of expensive spectacle. Instead, for some reason, the end of the world can be averted with a little human sacrifice, but having gone to all that trouble, for reasons lost on me, it was all alright by the end, and with one bound, humanity was free… or something.

9.  The Creator – The threat (or otherwise) from AI has also been stalking our apocalyptic subconscious corridors this year, so there were high hopes for Gareth Edwards’s robotic parable on racism and colonialism via the medium of world-weary androids, only for the whole thing to be a visually impressive but overblown disappointment.

8. Dream Scenario – Despite Nic Cage on top form as a schlubby university professor who finds viral fame when he starts appearing in everyone’s dreams, Kristoffer Borgli’s quasi satirical fantasy of the globalised digital consciousness, can’t quite decide what sort of film it wants to be and frustratingly disappears up its digital rear end in the final act. Nonetheless, there are some very enjoyable moments along the way.

7. M3gan – If Gareth Edwards is trying to wag a serious allegorical finger at us in The Creator, Gerard Johnstone doesn’t bother with any such subtleties, diving straight for the B-Movie jugular in this tale of a humanoid robot doll going murderously loco in small town America. Despite some terrible acting, it’s a tale well told, and succeeds in saying far more about our relationship to AI than its worthy bells and whistles counterpart.

6. Smoking Causes Coughing – If you’ve a taste for urbane ageing French Power Rangers – called Nicotine, Menthol, Mercury, Methanol and Benzene – who destroy rubbery giant monsters by sincerely induced cancer rays; if you could be sexually attracted to a giant drooling rat commander; and you’re interested in the horror stories a talking barracuda might tell you while it’s on the barbecue then this is the film for you. Bonkers but brilliant.

5. They Cloned Tyrone – How on earth could a movie starring A-listers Jamie Foxx and John Boyega come and go, virtually unnoticed? Well it wasn’t because it was bad. I contend that Juel Taylor’s sharply satirical cloning adventure was asking some deeply unfashionable questions, playing out like a provocative jab in the solar plexus to the received wisdom of Jordan Peele’s Get Out. File under ‘challenging’.

4. Godzilla Minus One – Sneaking in at the end of the year, Takashi Yamazaki’s intelligent, heartfelt epic is a monster movie for people who don’t like monster movies (i.e. me). I gasped, I cried, I cared.

3. Junk Head – Takahide Hori’s surreal dystopian stop-motion nightmare, is probably best described as: ‘Samurai Ninja Clangers On Acid’, although that would mean describing a certain eccentric 1970s British children’s animation to our international readers… so let’s just say that Junk Head is really, really weird… in a way that makes Eraserhead and Un Chien Andelou look mundane.

2. Lola – Just when you thought you’d had it with ‘found footage’ movies, and that there were no stories left to tell about fools who mess with the space time continuum, Andrew Legge comes along and blows us way with a startling 79 minutes of sharply told British Indy sci-fi. When two sisters in the 1940s develop a machine that can predict the outcome of the Second World War, you know where Lola is going, but it doesn’t matter, because it really is about the way Andrew Legge tells it.

1. Leave the World Behind – I began this top ten by ridiculing high concept end-of-the-world movies where the apocalypse is achieved at bargain prices by having it befall our protagonists while they are on vacation in the woods. Well, as I think I just said, it really is about how you tell ’em, because Sam Esmail uses a near identical set-up to M. Night Shyamalan’s risible Knock at the Cabin to say something profound about our divided society’s culpability in the existential threats facing us as we head into the middle of the 21st century. Julia Roberts, Mahershala Ali, and Ethan Hawke give career defining performances – as, with a little help from producers Barack and Michelle Obama, they remind us that we are indeed all doomed…

Unless… unless… There has to be an ‘unless’, doesn’t there?

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