Category / Science fiction television

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Wired Worlds

This was commissioned for a project that seems to have vanished, but I needed to write a couple of sentences for a chapter on the topic… I thought this text would be on my harddrive, but it’s hiding if it is. Fortunately I rarely delete emails.

 

Welt am Draht (World on a Wire/World on Wires) (Westdeutscher Rundfunk, 1973)

Adapted from Daniel F. Galouye, Counterfeit World/Simulacron-3 (1964)

(Dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder; Sc. Fritz Müller-Scherz and Rainer Werner Fassbinder; Pr. Peter Märthesheimer and Alexander Wesemann; Cin. Michael Ballhaus and Ulrich Prinz; P.D. Horst Giese, Walter Koch and Kurt Raab; starring Klaus Löwitsch (Fred Stiller), Barbara Valentin (Gloria Fromm), Mascha Rabben (Eva Vollmer), Karl Heinz Vosgerau (Herbert Siskins), Wolfgang Schenck (Franz Hahn), Kurt Raab (Mark Holm)) Continue reading →

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Spall’s Well That Ends Well

Electric Dreams: “The Commuter” (Tom Harper, 2017)

Now this is more like it — a fantasy partly set at Woking Station.

Funnily enough, I was looking at train times to Woking today and I’ve been there a couple of times. It get destroyed in War of the Worlds.

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Nothing is Impossible

Electric Dreams: “Impossible Planet” (David Farr, 2017)

One thing that struck me about the anthology series opener, “The Hood Maker”, was the openness of its ending — not in a Tales of the Unexpected twist way, but a leaving it open way. This week’s adaptation has another ambiguous ending, but in a more PhilDickian way and so inevitably, spoilers ahoy.

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Teeps n the Hood

Electric Dreams: The Hood Maker (Julian Jarrold, 2017)

Ok, what I’m not going to do is laboriously compare these Channel 4 PKD Estate sanctioned adaptations to the originals, partly because the f-word is not necessarily useful to criticism and partly because the collected stories are currently behind a pile of boxes. And it’s also worth noting that, frankly, some of the short stories are pretty ropey. See, say, “Paycheck”, which the film might just about improve on. So I’m ignoring the fact that this version of “The Hood Maker” shifts emphases, instead focusing on a general sense of the PhilDickian.

The jizz of Dick, to borrow a term from birding.

Oh, and spoilers.
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