Those films chosen by Kaveney inform the reader about which SF tropes she finds the most distinctive. They are tropes of gender, the postmodern and the post-human. And Kaveney carefully and with much delight tries to delineate the histories of these tropes as well.
Simply a wonderful work.
Author(s): Roz Kaveney
Publisher: I. B. Tauris
Year: 2005
Language: English
Pages: 209
From Alien to the Matrix: Reading Science Fiction Film......Page 1
Copyright Info......Page 5
TOC......Page 6
Acknowledgements......Page 7
1. Waking into Dream - Competence Cascades, Thick Texts and the Universalization of the Greek Aesthetic......Page 8
2. Director as Parodist - Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers......Page 16
3. Comedy 1 - Galaxy Quest......Page 28
4. The Decline and Fall of the Alien Invasion......Page 43
5. Comedy 2 - Small Soldiers and the Joke of the Robot......Page 58
6. Who Are You? Cognitive Dissonance and Lots of Really Big Guns......Page 68
7. The Mirrored Gaze - James Cameron's and Kathryn Bigelow's Strange Days......Page 88
8. Creation as Product - The Paradox of Franchises......Page 114
A Franchise Case Study - Alien and its sequels......Page 133
Alien - 'We live, as we dream--alone.'......Page 134
Aliens - 'Get away from her--you bitch.'......Page 151
Alien3 - 'We set out to make a release date and not to make a movie.'--Jon Landau......Page 177
Alien Resurrection - 'At least there's part of you that's human.'......Page 190
Index......Page 208
Index of Films......Page 206
