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therewillbeblus wrote: Sat Aug 08, 2020 10:37 pm The magic that aliens, robots, and mystical presences all just want any ‘living’ creature to be happy, is as beautiful an outlook as it is depressing that this is an impossible meaning to give another. The finale’s reading of catharsis as a fleeting moment that can last forever in our hearts through memory.. well, what can be said about a feeling like this?

That it's cloying, manipulative, and as entirely artificial as the robots in the movie. I like Spielberg most of the time, but I loathe this movie. The aping of Kubrick in the first hour is forgivable, but once he moves on from there, Spielberg gives in to all of his worst instincts as a director. It's everything that his critics accuse him of being. The ending is pure schmaltzy saccharine junk. I think that I'm getting diabetes just thinking about it.

I used to feel similarly but I’ve come around to it. Even if you are averse to Spielberg’s approach to the material, I’m surprised you read the ending so optimistically. The entire last act is flooded with depressing hit after depressing hit, and having one day to bask in impermanent connection is much more bittersweet and honest than manipulative (it’s quite the realistic gut punch that this kind of catharsis we seek is not sustainable). I think the film raises interesting questions about what is artificial or real, and especially the notion that if subjective reality gives meaning (even in objective artifice, like memory) then it can be real. Overall it’s such a cringing, oppressive film- wavering between nihilism and hope and arriving in between, that I can entirely understand disliking it but would never call it “saccharine.” Though I do think part of the point is that the film uses artificial narrative constructs and mise en scene alongside brutal meditations on pain to drive home its points, connecting the real and machinations, signified and signifiers; so I think your negative point about the film’s artificial nature can be spun positive depending on the reading.

I haven't seen it since it was in the theaters. I've intentionally avoided it. I'd be willing to give it another chance, but I can't imagine changing my mind.

therewillbeblus wrote: Fri Aug 07, 2020 10:59 pm

knives wrote: Fri Aug 07, 2020 8:35 pm Absolutely, if I understand you correctly, but I don't think that's in Scott's film. Just look at the difference in perspectives of the characters played by Washington and Gyllenhaal. Gyllenhaal has a desire to change time, but Washington has long accepted the reality of the tech and there's no lost quality. Gyllenhaal has more in common with Moon's protagonist to my eyes as a journey of defining self.

Definitely (pertaining to the Jones' works)- I really need to see the Washington movie again. I grew up watching everything he was in because he's my dad's favorite actor and I like most of the critically-mauled works (i.e Out of Time) but Deja Vu is a bit hazier in my memory.

Regarding Duncan Jones.. Friendly advice: Nobody should watch Mute, which is still one of the most disappointing failures I’ve experienced after looking forward to it for the better part of a decade.

All of the Scott/Washington films are really great and worth revisiting. I think about them quite often with their strange and dreamlike qualities. They're also fascinating experiments in genre as each one uses action film language and tone for different genres. It comes to a real great head with Unstoppable which is a comedy from the Cervantes school of underplaying a scenario while having the characters treat it will the utmost sincere melodrama.

Man on Fire is my favorite, which has always played for me as a profoundly spiritual film. It builds quickly to an earned drama of alcoholism and mental health deterioration brought on by traumatic circumstance, and Fanning becomes Washington's higher power, saving his life. All the action revenge stuff is a byproduct of that rebirth using the only tools Washington's character, and Scott as a filmmaker, can to authenticate his existence in the name of his God, which is essentially unlocked empathy for another human being. It's an existential-faith narrative formulated as an action movie.

A bit of a derailment from the science-fiction discussion, but would be right at home in the faith-list thread

Contrary to popular opinion, I think Black Mirror’s third season is on par with the pre-Netflix series'. Not with the same consistency, but it features three of the show’s best episodes, all of which have a shot at making my list.

Nosedive: Little needs to be said about this too-real social satire that beats you over the head with the inauthentic manufacturing we’ve built into our reality, negating any essence that may have existed beyond the need to ‘be liked.’ Joe Wright excels at directing a fully fleshed out world in which our peripheral ideas of meaning revolve around our invisible caste system, totally amplified.

Bryce Dallas Howard delivers a very eccentric (yet required) range of acting that breaks down a fraudulently confident personality with thinly coated self-consciousness into honest levels of social and personal challenges. Self-preservation clashes with empathy in enthralling ways, and as a road movie that deflates the dangerously overstressed ego functions into an inverted sense of personal growth in unrewarded self-actualization, it's wholly unique and conceptually brilliant. The ending speaks a truth many of us in today’s era can relate to, providing an optimistic lens on a terrifying predicament through cleansing purge.


Playtest: This (Dan Trachtenberg helmed!) episode is a sleeper favorite of mine, with Wyatt Russell playing an engaging alternative-bro protagonist as the VR experience becomes creative horror in all the ways one might expect from how it might function in practice. The internal deliberations one’s senses would contest with to dictate reality bears our impediments toward identifying truths, and the episode intelligently dissects how technology could so easily expose these flaws in our design and reduce our sanities to mush. I was reminded of Nightmare at 20,000 Feet in the deconstruction of our psyche’s weaknesses, but the episode uses such concepts (a game “designed to scare you using your own mind”) to devise a witty, original horror-comedy.

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The end of the ‘game,’ when Russell’s brain becomes so fried that he loses sense of his entire identity, is more terrifying than any of the imagery in the game; but the actual finale that traps him, fully aware of his life, in a fugue state of disconnect invisible to his mother, calling her name to no avail- that’s the ultimate nightmare of the dissolve of self!

San Junipero: Judging by the cynicism branded into the show’s DNA, it’s probably a spoiler to call this episode “upbeat” but it’s also important to stress for the (apparently many) folks out there who stopped the show early due to its depressing diagnostics on mankind (full disclosure: I tend to tell people to skip to episode two, after a handful of friends wrote off the show following The National Anthem, but I think it’s one of the very best episodes, the one most rooted in our own time- to the point where I will not vote for it only because I don’t consider it science fiction).

Anyways, the less said about this one the better, but the pacing and sincerity of detail in every stage of a relationship (and life) makes this a very caring and committed story to expressing the power of love and meaning, and how to choose between sharing or carrying those burdens alone. The messages of impermanence and living for the present moment are woven into the fabric of this bifurcated narrative seamlessly, and the ending and its choice of music should make anyone smile who is interested in the possibilities of cinema to elicit empathy. Doubling as another creative method to frame the merits of subjective realities within their own vacuum, a favorite philosophical topic of mine often explored in science fiction to define significance, only adds icing to the cake.

therewillbeblus wrote: Sat Aug 08, 2020 10:37 pm ... The magic that aliens, robots, and mystical presences all just want any ‘living’ creature to be happy...

I am totally on-board with your interpretation of this film, but wanted to point out a crucial fact that has tripped up critics and viewers since the film was released: there are no aliens in this movie. As established by the subtitled dialog, the telepathic entities that discover David are just the latest generation of "mecha" or AI, built by a previous generation of "mecha". The "mystical presence" (Blue Fairy), is, or course, an illusion created by these robots when they recognize the mental capacity of David is that of a human child and believe this will be a good way to communicate with him. As you pointed out, the conundrum of how David will ever become a "real boy" like Pinocchio is solved by relativity: since humans have long since vanished from the planet, the latest line of AI would find that a first generation "mecha" who was created by humans would be as close to "real" as they are going to get. This mirrors our own existential issue: we continue to replicate ourselves without ever knowing/understanding the entity that first created us. The supposed sweetness of the ending (and the ending is true to what Kubrick's intentions were, if not his style of execution) disguises the horror that the human race is now extinct.

Thanks for that clarification RR! Your alteration of context and the associated connotative reading makes me love and appreciate the film even more on the same terms.

I was disappointed when David was kicked out and the movie took a new direction. It felt like the premature abandonment of a rich scenario whose drama and philosophical implications had barely been developed. Spielberg presumably made exactly the movie he set out to make, but the movie I wanted was Ozu with robots*. The sprawling epic A.I. turned into instead I found exhausting.

I didn't realize those weren't aliens at the end. Maybe I was nodding off at that point (haven't seen it in ages). I'm glad to learn they were a further generation of AI, which gives the film more thematic focus. Aliens would be one more convolution in an already baroque film.

*Almereyda's Marjorie Prime scratches that itch.

It's a common misunderstanding since the film doesn't focus on them much since the theme is more about concepts of self.

I have to admit I find the ending very depressing as it confronts one with the fact that unbridled love is a form of suicide.

Aniara (Pella Kågerman and Hugo Lilja, 2019) Earth is dead or nearly, Mars is colonized, and a ship that sets out for a three-week shuttle to the new world gets knocked off course almost immediately. The rest is pretty much exactly what you expect, but that's actually a compliment. This is, surprisingly, admirable for being nothing more and nothing less than what it set outs to be, as much a thought experiment as a narrative. The direction and acting are just fine, the production design is effective if not elaborate, and the script is, if not exactly profound, precise in its procession of events. It packs a lot into its 100 minutes, and it often relies on a kind of sci-fi shorthand to do so, because most of its arcs are elements that have been explored with more particularity, in smaller "societies" in other movies. High Life, Sunshine and Soderbergh's Solaris come to mind immediately, but what this one does, and does pretty well, is extrapolate those movies' concerns to a societal scale: if those are still lives in impasto oils, this is a watercolor landscape. We have a protagonist, but she's a figure to scale the ground, a cypher, important enough to justify her continued existence as our tour guide through the ship. But the focus is less on individuals than on their function as figureheads, directly or indirectly, in the larger group. So the movie works as a rise and fall and rise and fall of culture—dance trends and prophets and top-brass culture and ascetic repentance and "prison experiments" and nihilistic libertinism and the despair of and hope for and despair of rescue... For that, I think it's pretty interesting.

knives wrote: Mon Aug 10, 2020 6:54 pm I have to admit I find the ending very depressing as it confronts one with the fact that unbridled love is a form of suicide.

Good way to put it- it's just definitively bittersweet to me, because there is something about accepting the present moment as one's own subjective reality that's cathartic, but even that acceptance is as impermanent as the love one is searching for. As opposed to other films that are referred to as "bittersweet" this one really embodies the term in edging toward the depressing side of things. Or to put it another way, Spielberg doesn't let you forget the gaping void that prevents one from feeling whole, even in the midst of the 'cathartic' fantasy.

I agree. In a lot of ways the discussion the board recently had about the ending to Inception is equally applicable here since Spielberg opens up the walls of the stage that his character must so desperately believe in order to fulfill his sense of purpose. In a certain sense as well the ending gets at the illusion of free will as the ending just shows him fulfilling his perogative which can now make the theory on, not necessarily the only reading, that everything which can before is merely an unexpected result of his programming.

Right, but even in that reading I'd argue that it fulfills the idea that, illusion or not, subjective reality and meaning is real in the way that counts. But yeah, the panning out into objective space multiple times throughout that final act especially (literally and figuratively) refuses to turn away from the objective pathos around that concept. Your Inception analogy is spot on, and there's definitely a very similar thematic platitude on why I adore both, even if emotionally I find myself having very different and more complex responses in the Spielberg (though I don't necessarily 'like' it more).

I don't often post about films I loathe on this site, and try to be strengths-based about ones I do (with some notable exceptions), but in submitting to my compulsions to be a 'completist' I finally finished Black MIrror's 5th season and, my God, it's as awful as expected. I did not revisit the only ep I watched upon release, Smithereens, because there is no reason to ever return to that bleak-for-the-sake-of-bleak vehicle's deeply offensive audience-manipulations. What is attempting to be a fusion of a depressing and suspenseful narrative results in not a twist, but a human's attempt to share responsibility for a horrible incident with addictive technology. The questions of agency, or our addictive behaviors to technology, etc. aren't even what matter to the episode, but its didacticism is firmly planted on a warning of the trauma we can cause

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by texting and driving, or checking phone updates or whatever.

Yes, I am aware that compromising my safety as a kneejerk reaction to technology addiction is worth paying attention to, but going about beating me over the head with the prophecy this way is not helpful or purposeful. However, Topher Grace's man-bun'd CEO makes the episode bearable for his brief screen time.

So after suffering a traumatic experience of my own and writing off the show's new season, today I caved and watched the other two. Striking Vipers is probably the most poorly written episode of the series ever, taking an actually interesting concept of

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human beings, particularly stereotypically-masculine culturally-western men, unlocking the potentials of their sexualities through loopholes that help them differentiate and rationalize those urges

and executing it in the silliest possible way. Everything is overstated, from the homoerotic playfulness early on to the showdowns of declaring affection and resorting to stereotypes to cope with vulnerabilities. There was a solid idea here, but what everyone did with it was so grating and obnoxious that for me it's the show's worst episode.

Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too may be the best episode of the season, but that's only because it made me half-smile when the cool girl listed a bunch of decent bands as her favorites and the pop-music bot failed to recognize them; mostly because I took it as Brooker's stab at pop music given what we know about his own music taste. The plot is so obvious and what isn't obvious is just ridiculous and disconnects any amusement in the creation of the episode's design. It's just not smart or well-constructed, and the villains are beyond cartoonish (with a final line that's unearned because we just aren't invested in Cyrus' character or her tormenter to care or gain any catharsis from such a reaction).

I thought the show couldn't sink any lower than Bandersnatch, but that episode looks fine comparatively to these three. Overall I really like this show, and think the branded bleakness is supported by the intelligence of the objectives and their implementation. I really hope more people check out or consider eps from the first three seasons for this project, but sadly it's since jumped the shark.

An interesting discussion on Spielberg's A.I. above. I really like it and think that it might be Spielberg’s best film, because its inherent flaws in its narrative feel as if they are the entire point of the film. It even subversively critiques that sense of sentimentality in cinema (and Spielberg’s films themselves) and even the hero’s quest narrative itself as being entirely manufactured and artificial, but then moves beyond that potentially dismissive idea to a new one of whether even if the situation is inherently an artificial one it can still have value in itself. I usually spend the entire film in tears but in many ways I cry (especially at that faux idyllic ending) less about the trials that David goes through but because of the way it is making me think in a more distanced way about the ability to empathise with others (and whether that is ‘actual’ empathy or just a set of endlessly repeated learned behaviours) and the ethics of anthropomorphising and endowing inanimate objects with human behaviours, and therefore following that also imposing human roles and human obligations onto them, only to then discard them once they have served their defined purposes.

Teddy is the most classical version of this, with David being just a more advanced toy for grieving parents to wean themselves onto, and eventually off of once they outgrow the need for him. Every other supporting character expresses this as well: Gigolo Joe and the other sexbots are the proxies for frustrated desires; the refugee French nanny-bot endlessly looking for a child to take care of; even the Robin Williams voiced Mr Know-It-All is full of knowledge but cannot use it to further himself intellectually but is constantly in need of an outside ‘user’ to put his masses of data to some use (he is also very important as a character who is underlining the loss of context between 'reality' and 'fairy tale', as everything is just treated as information without consideration of the difference between how such information is either concretely about the real world or working more as an abstracted element of someone's hopes and dreams. Like the way certain people treat the Bible as painfully literal rather than as parable). The story feels about a slave or servant (or just generally a worker in a service industry role) who has been created for a purpose and then has that taken away from them, leaving them yearning to be able to fulfil their role again, even if it is (and always was) a ‘fake’ interaction from a conventional human perspective.

We follow David and Gigolo Joe in particular wandering purposelessly through a technological world that has no place for them, with David in particular looking completely incongruous wandering through the dark woods, or the Flesh Fair, or the gaudy cityscapes, and we eventually see a development in them of slowly setting new goals for themselves which suggests a slow development of a consciousness beyond just programmed duties. Though their goals are still flawed in some ways by their original programming (a comment on the effects of childhood development, socialisation and education?), from believing in the truth of fairy tales to still yearning to one day meet up with mother again when it is not just physical distance of doing an “Incredible Journey” back home that are separating them but even greater barriers such as the passing of time and the simple fact of death. Plus the mental distance of not being wanted anyway. Which only adds to the ersatz ‘managed’ feel to the ending, where the recreation of the perfect day (that never existed even back in the day, where the parents were always equally or more creeped out by David than glad for his presence) has to remove any distractions for the mother to ensure her attention is purely on David.

And I love the ultimate irony of the ‘last human’ being recreated purely for the somewhat selfish pleasures of entertaining an artificial being!

It is all building to that powerful final scene which impressively manages to be both emotionally and coldly intellectually satisfying simultaneously. Where David has in many ways ‘grown’ and defined himself as an individual through the journey he has been on in the world outside after he has been rejected by his family. As in Blade Runner, he has seen things that nobody else has seen, experienced the world in a way that no other being has, remembers a person (or persons) that have long been forgotten. But he still is stuck in his artificial nature of needing to be loved by the mother who so carelessly and thoughtlessly (or rather with only thoughts for her own wellbeing) ‘imprinted’ herself on him. That perhaps more than anything makes the more advanced artificial intelligences of the far future look on David with both love and a kind of pity for how ‘limited’ their distant ancestor is, being forever trapped in a cycle of yearning. Permanently stunted in the childhood stage of development. It makes me wonder what Freud would have made of the story!

And that yearning is both monotonously single minded on David’s part but that yearning takes on many forms throughout the course of the film for the viewer watching it, as reflected through the reactions of the various supporting characters to him. He’s better than an actual child at first. He will never get so sick that he might die (at worst just get parts swapped out, or you get a replacement model. This previously was probably only a benefit that parents with identical twins could avail themselves of!) which is probably perfect to provide to couples with actual dead or horribly ill children to let them transfer affections to without that fear of loss being present. But then that neediness never changes. The child never grows and becomes independent, or develops in any way because that is not the purpose they were created for, revealing their essential difference from an ‘actual’ child.

That uncanny valley effect of something so close to human but essentially not causes fear, disgust and eventual anger directed against David. He gets cast into the wilderness (perhaps making Hansel and Gretel the first fairy tale being alluded to, but with a far less obvious breadcrumb trail back home to follow! Before David himself fixates on Pinocchio and the Blue Fairy for their more epic quest narrative; and eventually we get to an inverse Sleeping Beauty complete with fairy godmother and tucking someone back into a permanent sleep as the final image) and together with the other purposeless robots is only useful for humans to round up and place in ghettos before they are 'humanely' disposed of. In some ways I can understand the behaviours of the parents pulling back from David’s aberrant behaviours or the figures at the Flesh Fair both similarly repulsed at what they see as a kind of obscene parody of humans in artificial forms, even if I find it impossible to condone their behaviours as well. The devices built to comfort humans and provide unconditional love to them become things to vent frustrated anger upon. In some ways I think that A.I. is a good companion piece to the themes in The Island of Dr Moreau, where innocent beings are ‘created’ in the form of man and have to bear the weight of all of humanity's wants and needs getting imposed upon them. They are ‘obscene parodies’ but also deserving of pity, even if that is yet another human emotional imposition upon beings who might not even have a concept of that feeling.

Eventually David’s quest reveals itself as hollow, and he confronts his creator and realises the nature of his existence (and ironically at this time performs some of the most purely self-directed actions of his life, in angrily destroying his dopplegangers and then committing suicide by jumping from the ledge), but Gigolo Joe gives him a second chance to carry on with a new quest for the blue fairy, although this is even less fulfilling of David’s yearnings than meeting his creator and being turned into a ‘real boy’ was. He is left praying to a completely inanimate statue, even more immobile and fixed in a single state than he is (another artificial being created in the image of a human) and perhaps this is the perfect way for David to meet his end, at least getting to ask the question over and over even if he will never receive the answer…

… but then the film continues on beyond even that, into the far, far future. David is thawed (and his blue fairy crumbles away into pieces before him) but he gets to meet beings that actually can grant his wishes, but only in the most time-limited manner. He gets to spend a final period of time with his recreated mother, who has been brought back to life for only a single day (compared to the aeons David has fixated on her) and he gets to actually be a boy and be treated as a boy for the only time in his life. I find it so moving because its pure sentimental nostalgia to recreate a halcyon past (and its tapping into the human desire to yearn for going back to past childhood days with lost parents, which might actually be a bit different from David’s motivations here. Because there is not really a sense that David is able to process the concept of death or nostalgia. He is just wanting to get back to duty) but with a really bitter edge that it never existed in that form.

Also the film ends at the most perfect point of pure fulfilment (a great asserting of the power of cinema to create a total, singular experience) but with the sadness of the suggestion of what happens from that point being almost impossibly upsetting. Maybe David ‘shuts down’ or dies peacefully now that he has fulfilled his life’s goal. But perhaps more likely (especially given the emphasis placed on the act of yearning) David just wakes up the next morning without his mother and goes right back to needing to be with her again, only this time there is not even the remotest possibility of there being another ersatz recreated moment created by the incredibly unlikely confluence of far future robots and a long cherished lock of hair on offer. That tragic sense of being trapped in a cycle for the rest of your days, never recognising or remembering the fulfilment of your goals, is perhaps something that A.I. and Memento have most in common!

It does make me wonder how many discarded computers are pining for their long departed owners out there, before they get broken up for parts or have their ‘memories’ wiped! I guess that it is better to get memory wiped sooner rather than later, rather than being dumped somewhere memory still full? At least then the person who does not want the device any more is doing their proper duty towards recycling it!

White Christmas is still one of Black Mirror's best episodes, even if it doesn't quite hold up to the masterpiece I once thought it to be upon release; though its charms are more in the narrative unfolding and compactness of ideas than a specific science-fiction build. Still, the Russian dolls of repetitive Sisyphean trappings become increasingly disturbing as moral relativism reveals itself to be the language of assigning value to consequences, where 'fairness' is the first mistake in subjective assessment. The social fragmentation that results from competing wills is brutalized, whether between loved ones or strangers. The ease by which we can divide ourselves from another through blocking (or the psychological torture with the copy) is arguably sicker than the acts that push others away because the former rob people of time, the most priceless privilege in life, and destroy opportunities for a future. There is no discrimination or exception for the empathetic or the regretful. As a portrait of the pains of living with loss for eternity, and the trauma from inherent unknowability in those we feel closest to, this episode finds creative ways to tell those stories in a variety of different mini-narratives.

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The ending also paints two distinct imaginative views of hell, if it's rooted in indefinite isolation, which is exactly how I'd imagine it to be.

I haven’t done any lists before over here, but this is very interesting task. It’s fun to pit against each other well-written serious movies and bonkers camp. For me sense of wonder is the main criteria. With that in mind it’s easy to pick Zardoz over Gattaca or Melancholia over Robowar.

I am debating with myself whether this project is the thing that will finally push me to watch Italian Star Wars rip-off Star Odyssey more than the Cinema Snob review of it! I did quite enjoy the full version of the robot boxing match scene, but I am not sure if I could endure the two comic relief robots being an annoying bickering couple of robot ducks who failed to fulfill a suicide pact!

"space shit", good definition of sci fi!

Are there any worthwhile film books on this genre? The only sci fi loving then-contemporary critic I can think of is Cahiers’ Fereydoun Hoveyda, though as far as I know none of his write ups from his tenure have been translated

I've been trying to figure out what Suvin works to target but can mostly only find essay or blips. I was hoping he had one hailed masterwork since I think he has some of the most interesting formulations on the genre.

colinr0380, I'm glad to hear that you're a fan of the Cinema Snob as well. Up until he moved to Chicago, Brad and I lived in the same general area and frequented the same theaters. I never met him there, but got to have a good long talk with him at an Iowa comic book convention that I took my son to a few years back. He was very kind.

domino harvey wrote: Thu Aug 13, 2020 8:43 pm Are there any worthwhile film books on this genre? The only sci fi loving then-contemporary critic I can think of is Cahiers’ Fereydoun Hoveyda, though as far as I know none of his write ups from his tenure have been translated

It's been a few years, and it depends exactly what you're looking for, but there are a few I seem to remember being worthwhile. As an aside, much of the (at least to me) most interesting material comes from SF Critics / academics rather than those based in film.

John Brosnan's Primal Screen I mentioned above - this is a good survey of (US) SF up to the mid 90s. I grew up reading his column in Starburst and at his best is a witty, knowledgeable critic. He has some real blind spots (a personal animus towards Corman for instance) but it remains an entertaining read. Think of it as a more specific update of Carlos Clarens' book should give you the type of book this is.

JP Telotte - I read his Science Fiction Film and Replications (robots in SF film), but almost 20 years ago. Unlike Brosnan, Telotte has a background in film academia - one of the few specialists in the field I can think of. Anyway, from what I can remember, these were both interesting but rather more demanding than the Brosnan.

Vivian Sobchack's Screening Space gets referenced a lot. The first edition is probably the best introduction to the field, the second edition (1997) adds an additional chapter which takes a post-modernist approach to post 1980 SF film and is much harder going (depending on your views on postmodern theory!). If you get just one book, I'd suggest this one. The Geoff King / Tanya Krzywinska Science Fiction Cinema in the Short Cuts series is on the similar lines - I recall it being a good summary introduction (if you've read any of the Short Cuts volumes, you know what to expect)

More specialised, I.Q. Hunter's collection British Science Fiction Cinema is highly recommended if you're interested in this particular area. There are several good survey essays, and some more tightly focussed ones (including one on the Post-Alien Intrusion Film!). Also highly recommended, both volumes of Alien Zone - some excellent essays in these.

Not read but in my to read kevyip is Roz Kaveney's From Alien to the Matrix - Kaveney is another critic coming out of the SF Field and is highly regarded so I'll let you know what it's like when I've read it.

These look potentially interesting:
The Philosophy of Science Fiction Film
Alien Zone and Alien Zone 2

This one seems to be an overview, but also academic/theory-based:
Science Fiction Cinema