philoscifiz Unknown

Join Matt and Dave for a winter solstice special with this last chance to explore 2021 via 1995 in 2021. Based on a William Gibson short story and script, this genre defining cyberpunk noir is a prescient foretelling of a global pandemic, information wars, and the internet/metaverse. At the hollow centre is Johnny (Keanu Reeves), a mnemonic courier exposing the fragility of truth and revealing – after psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan – the subject barred from itself.

Never look a gift horse in the mouth? What would you do if offered everything you’ve been told you ever wanted? Matt and Dave check out Boots Riley’s utterly hilarious and deadly serious counter cultural and visually inventive sci-fi dystopia. So, will Cassius Green stick to the later-than-late-capitalism script? Find out in our season finale as the present, past, and future of slavery collide amidst worker unions, big tech, performance art, and Hegel’s dialectic.

The end of the world is nigh! Join Matt and Dave for a magnificent sci-fi take on the Noah’s Ark myth, the Earth facing destruction from a rogue sun and its orbiting planet: Bellus and Zyra. There’s eight months to build a spaceship in a last-ditch attempt to save something of the human race, and carry 40 people to Zyra. Who will go? Will they get there? Is the planet inhabitable? And what can Sartre tell us about our desires to conjure tales of existential apocalypse?

Boot up your SQUID for the millennium, and join Matt and Dave as they tread the streets of Kathryn Bigelow’s apocalyptic vision of end-of-days Los Angeles. Lenny is a sleazy dealer in illicitly recorded memories - Mace is trying to save him, mostly from himself. Together they discover some tapes that will expose centuries of racism and misogyny. A movie as true today as when made. [CW: film and episode explore themes of sexual violence and racist violence.]

What if there are parallel worlds? Our human dominated world, and another, where dinosaurs survived and so evolved a reptile dominated world? And what if you could pass between them? Matt and Dave go portal diving with the first ever film adapted from a video game: the big concept extravaganza of Super Mario Bros. Along the way they explore the intertextuality of games, movies, and comics, and philosopher Gilles Deleuze on incompossible worlds.

Where's Billy Pilgrim? In his American lakeside home? A WW2 Prisoner of War camp in Dresden? Or on the planet Tralfamadore? Matt and Dave go time tripping in this classic countercultural scifi movie from the novel by Kurt Vonnegut. In so doing, they encounter a narration that disrupts temporality and can be explored through Henri Bergson’s theory of memory. Is this an anti-war film concerning PTSD and mental health? Or a weird alien abduction movie?