Belated Movie Reviews

What is seen cannot be unseen!

Last And First Men (2020) examines an attempt by humanity, a couple of billion years in the future and facing an existential rupture of space-time, attempting to communicate with, well, us.

There are no characters, just a narrator, discussing the problems of future humanity, while showcasing the abstract architectures of the future.

Sounds dull, something to skip? So I thought, although the movie makers did a good job coming up with disturbing shapes for the architectural elements, and I did make it to the end relatively painlessly. But this movie is based on the book of the same title, by Olaf Stapledon, a British philosopher, from 1930, and a little reading in Wikipedia dredged this up:

Stapledon’s writings directly influenced Arthur C. Clarke,^[15] Brian Aldiss,^[16] Stanisław Lem, Bertrand Russell,^[17] John Gloag,^[18] Naomi Mitchison,^[19] C. S. Lewis,^[20] Vernor Vinge,^[21] John Maynard Smith^[22] and indirectly influenced many others, contributing many ideas to the world of science fiction. Clarke wrote:^[13]

In 1930 I came under the spell of a considerably more literate influence, when I discovered W. Olaf Stapledon’s just-published Last and First Men in the Minehead Public Library. No book before or since ever had such and impact on my imagination; the Stapledonian vistas of millions and hundreds of millions of years, the rise and fall of civilizations and entire races of men, changed my whole outlook on the universe and has influenced much of my writing ever since.

Ideas such as a “supermind” composed of many individual consciousnesses forms a recurring theme in his work. Star Maker contains the first known description of what are now called Dyson spheres. Freeman Dyson credits the novel with giving him the idea, even stating in an interview that “Stapledon sphere” would be a more appropriate name.^[23] Last and First Men features early descriptions of genetic engineering^[24] and terraforming. Sirius describes a dog whose intelligence is increased to the level of a human being’s. Stapledon’s work also refers to then-contemporary intellectual fashions (e.g. the belief in extrasensory perception).

Last and First Men is a work of an influential early writer in the science fiction arena, almost a progenitor. This makes this movie more intriguing; it may even be a novel worth pursuing.

It’ll not be winning any awards, but it does stir up some thoughts for the audience able to disregard its taste for adventure, rom-coms, period dramas, and other genres, and simply watch and think.