I Am Mother: why blockbuster sci-fi faces an extinction event

Hilary Swank’s new thriller about an out-of-control environmentalist AI shows that ideas-led sci-fi is alive and well – just not in the multiplexes.

Hollywood needs to think smallerIt is hardly surprising, in the era of Extinction Rebellion, that dystopian sci-fi is once again front and centre.

Sooner or later, humanity is bound to create an artificial intelligence that decides it no longer needs us, and that it would make a better guardian of the Earth than us.

One suspects Greta Thunberg would (quite reasonably) agree.Strangely, though, we also seem to be living in an era in which blockbuster futurism – and I am talking ideas-led sci-fi here, as opposed to space-era or superhero fantasy – has dwindled to the point of irrelevance.

Where in the 1980s and 90s, the Alien and Terminator sagas drove all before them, creating, or at least popularising, many of the concepts that still run through their celluloid successors today,

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