Monday, 18 May 2015

The Anomaly: The Sexism in the Science Fiction.

Let me start off by saying this film is just bad: badly written script, quite a bit of bad acting, and a messy plot that could have been improved in the hands of a better, and maybe more experienced, writer. It’s a film about an ex-soldier, Noel Clarke, suffering from PTSD who wakes up to find that he’s only conscious for 9 minutes and 37 seconds at a time. As the plot unfolds we find out *spoilers – though I’m saving you hassle here* that his treatment for PTSD was a cover to use his body for a dying professor, Brian Cox, to live in as his own body dies – with the help of his ridiculously posh son, Ian Somerhalder. This then develops into a bigger conspiracy about a disgraced company who thinks humanity can’t be trusted to look after itself so instead should be ran by two egomaniacal men controlling the world population’s minds instead. Go figure.

The film is set in the near future which means the London Bridge is still standing but that London’s sky scrapers are now even more towering, more metallic and more, well, futuristic. There are also blimps with adverts on them flying around like Blade Runner or Fringe or… what is this obsession with blimps being some missed out on genius advertising method? We tried, they failed, let it go science fiction. There were amazing advances in genetically modifying and weaponising diseases, there were DNA encoded guns so only certain people could fire them, and there were plenty of the usual holograms and other futuristic givens. But there was also another aspect of the future that makes me glad I won’t be there for it: misogyny.

Whilst some like to pretend we have ‘equality’ amongst men and women we actually still have a long way to go. So when I look to science fiction I look for a different world, one where there are no longer arbitrary ideas about the abilities of men and women or their roles in society. Yet here is a future of amazing technological advances and women are still no more than ‘whores’ or dead wives and mothers. It’s not only disappointing but it adds to the really bad writing that the film generally shows. If you can’t write in a way that does 50% of the population justice then maybe it’s time to admit you’re really just not a good writer.

For instance, some see prostitution and the sex industry as inevitable, as necessary and heck some even see it as empowering for women but I think it is none of those things. I think men are not entitled to sex, they are not entitled to buy consent, and their penises will not fall off if they have to go without having sex with a woman, who wouldn’t be doing it were she not paid. So why is it always still a staple of future worlds? Why is it in adult science fiction and fantasy it is used as a sign of the darker, seedier aspects of the world and not one we’ve eradicated? Surely it’s a sign that the future for most men is one where we still live under a patriarchy, where women are still objects for sale, and honestly that just sounds really dull.

It’s boring to go to a world full of immense possibilities and see those same old tired clichés of two dimensional female characters played out again and again. Two reviews of this film both called Alexis Knapp’s character Dana a ‘tart with a heart’, or a variation of it, and it turns out it is a fictional trope; from films like Pretty Woman to Moulin Rouge it is a character who is a prostitute but yet manages to be kind – the idea that those things are mutually exclusive is already terribly misogynistic.

But seems as I tend to see women are actual human beings I try and give them the credit they deserve, and Dana deserves more than the film, that trope, and the many reviews that don’t even mention her give her. I missed the very beginning of the film but I’m glad because in the trailer is the shot from where we first see her – just after she has slept with the lead, after he paid her, and after he wakes up out and becomes his real self again. In the trailer we see her lying fully naked on her front on her bed, her backside framed for the men in the audience; the person who made the trailer then followed through and used this same shot of her for the frame that displays her name as though she is only there to be a pretty naked body. So already we’re starting from the bar being on the floor.

As the film develops she is abducted by a vicious Russian pimp and is forced to hamper our protagonist, for which she later apologises. In his attempt to rescue her we get a long, drawn out slow motion fight sequence that felt more staged than anything; but, during that scene Dana is left holding a gun up, aimed at her cruel pimp. Ryan, the protagonist, tells her which code to use to fire the gun and she promptly kills her pimp who was attempting to kill Ryan. So from there they are relatively equal, they have both helped save each other’s lives and yet she is told to scurry away, with a bag of money, so she doesn’t get hurt through whatever Ryan is involved with.

The climax of the film is where we get into what could have been a more interesting character than Ryan or in fact any of the other characters, for me at least. After stopping Ryan from committing suicide she helps him get to his potentially last switch back to his real self, after fighting a losing battle against Cox’s character taking over his body. So she locks him up in a crate and waits out the three days until he comes back so the ending of the film can begin. But the film glances over this part; it brushes past it and treats it like simple exposition and filler. As we are coming at the film from Ryan’s perspective, needed to follow his confusion of drifting in and out of consciousness, we lose out on what could have been an interesting side of Dana’s obviously impressive character.

Due to the short time that Ryan is conscious each time Dana has to hide out right next to the abandoned building where the Evil Masterminds in this film are playing out their plan, and keeping a kidnapped child that our leads are randomly trying to save after his father was killed for their grand plan. So already we’ve got immense skill from Dana to get to the building, set up a base, and to do so all in complete secrecy from the people who want Ryan dead. Then she needs to look after Ryan, keeping him physically alive, all the while he’s not himself - while he is taken over by the arrogant villain of this film. We know that at the start of this film he, the professor, had hired her for sex and we later find out that it’s because she happens to resemble the his late wife; as creepy as that is it also creates tension for the three days that she looks after him. Whilst Ryan is in the box she has given him a phone so he can answer the question “What is my son’s name?”, her dead son, so she can know that it is actually Ryan who is conscious. So during those three days she must go over to the body of a man she knows, knowing his mind and consciousness are not there; she has to try to convince a man who was in love with a woman who looks like her to eat and drink so Ryan doesn’t die and has enough energy for the climax. When Ryan unlocks the phone we can see many messages have been sent between the two, I find it hard to believe that after three days their conversations didn’t drift away from his ‘let me out’s and her ‘no’s.

So then Ryan finally wakes up, and out she comes all prepared for battle, even ready with weapons – for a tart with a heart she is very prepared and clearly resourceful. Once in the building we get the usual shrugging off of her character as she is later held hostage by Somerhalder’s tweed wearing character Harkin. She has once again reverted back to simply being a damsel in distress and stands there simply waiting for her death. As she is saved by the film’s lead she is thrown aside, and promptly pretends to be knocked out. Later during the fight between Ryan and Harkin she gets up and saves him by beating Harkin over the head, and that’s… kind of it for the rest of the fight. Her skills in battle, despite having killed a man earlier in the film, are reduced to saving the lead and then taking a back step so he can finish saving the day.

After the battle is won and the world is saved from mass mind control we find Ryan waking up in a weirdly white building, fresh cuts on his neck and then Dana walks into the room. She explains, as that is what she’s there for, that she did surgery on him to remove what was controlling his mind, rescued the boy, and bought them a house to hide out in. So then there’s a joke about her taking control of him in the bedroom and the film ends.
Wait, what?
Dana was a nurse and yet she is apparently skilled enough to do careful surgery on his neck, not cutting any arteries, and keeping him infection free for the time he’s recovering; all whilst doing this and looking after him she looks after a traumatised young boy and buys a house and maintains it and feeds everyone. I know the film has a disrespect for women and them being autonomous human beings but what she has done single handedly was not only very impressive but it is used as nothing more than a throw away reason that Ryan happens to stay alive long enough to have his happy ending. Considering Dana was initially shrugged off its amazing what she does throughout and it is baffling how the writer insists that she is nothing more than a way to help move the plot along.


I could go on about how in the film it’s ridiculous to equate cars and records as deserving of equal nostalgia in any form of near distant future, I could go on about how boring it is to use dead women purely as sources for men’s pain, and I could go on about how insulting it is to control the entire human race to stop wars that are caused by men, and not by women and children who would suffer through this plan but I won’t. This film simply represents a long existing problem that science fiction has of being utterly unimaginative; it is meant to be a genre outside of the present day, outside of a patriarchal structure, and even outside of Earth – so why just copy it? Why just replicate a tired old world that is run by men, mostly white men, one where women are inconsequential props, and where people of colour apparently don’t exist (if Noel Clarke hadn’t directed, produced, and slightly written this then the diversity of the cast is woeful). It shows a complete lack of imagination, it is a sign of a writer who is unable to step out of the culture he lives in and see something more, and most importantly it is the sign of a writer I want nothing to do with.

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