TECHNOTHRILLER

Technology, good and bad, finds a home in movies.

Murray, a film professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, uses popular American movies to explore “social constructions of power and technology in both the present day and imagined futures.” She begins with Michael Crichton, one of the two “fathers” of the genre, and the director of Westworld (1973), “an iconic intervention into the technothriller.” The adaptation of his biological-threat thriller, The Andromeda Strain (1971), was made at a time of intense social and cultural turbulence; it was also a time when Americans were confronting an “existential dread heralded by new technologies.” The movie, with its strong-willed female scientist, is a seminal work for Murray, and she writes about it in detail. Her research is extensive, but it sometimes makes for a dry overview of the films she covers. Contrasting Crichton and the other “father” of the genre, Tom Clancy, Murray writes that Crichton engaged in uncertainty while Clancy embraced control. Clancy’s stories focused on the tools of war and fetishized advanced technology, as in the movie adaptation of his “iconic Cold War anxiety narrative,” The Hunt for Red October (1990). Murray smartly touches on issues of race and gender, noting that white characters in the novels are replaced by Black actors in some films. Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (2014) blends elements of science fiction and technothriller to show that “people are ultimately the problem,” and Blade Runner (1982) and Alien (1979) also “create misanthropic visions of men and their innovations.” Movies that tackle artificial intelligence include everything from Terminator 2 (1991) to Tenet (2020). No one knows what the future of AI holds, but as Murray writes, “Technothrillers can be useful tools for learning to live with the existential uncertainty wrought by our innovations, navigating fear of the uncontrollable, contending with the fallout of techno-optimism, and negotiating our cloying American problems—together.”

Scholarly, in-depth survey with insightful critiques of a fairly recent film genre.