Contemporary American Science Fiction Film

Terence McSweeney is Senior Lecturer in Film and Television Studies at Southampton Solent University and the author of The 'War on Terror' and American Film: 9/11 Frames Per Second (2014), Avengers Assemble! Critical Perspectives on the Marvel Cinematic Universe (2018), and Black Panther: Interrogating a Cultural Phenomenon (2021). Stuart Joy is Senior Lecturer in Film and Television Studies at Southampton Solent University and the author of The Traumatic Screen: The Films of Christopher Nolan (2020), co-editor of, and contributor to, The Cinema of Christopher Nolan: Imagining the Impossible (2015), and Through the Black Mirror: Deconstructing the Side Effects of the Digital Age (2019).

Introduction: The Fears and Fantasies of Science Fiction Film: Genre as Cultural Artefact

Terence McSweeney and Stuart Joy

1. A Tale as Old as Time: Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001)

Christine Muller

2. Through the Lens of 9/11: Reflections of Bush Era Politics and the Post-9/11 Milieu in Minority Report (2002) and V for Vendetta (2006)

Fran Pheasant-Kelly

3. Precarious Lives, Human Rights, and 'the sense of today': The Continuing Resonance and Relevance of Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men (2006)

Terence McSweeney

4. Seeing and Touching the Bodies of Others: Evolving the Male Animal toward Secular Moral Enlightenment in the Planet of the Apes Reboot Franchise

Carol Donelan

5. Time Travel, Trauma, and the Futility of Revenge in Looper (2012)

Stuart Joy

6. Science Fiction Cinema between Arthouse and Blockbuster: From Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 to Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014)

Steffen Hantke

7. Twenty-first-Century Star Wars: Profiles in (Female) Courage

Stacey Peebles

8. Rationality, emotionality, and geopolitics in Arrival (2016): From structural oppositions and reconciliations to mixed modalities and claims to "quality" status

Geoff King

9. 'The World Is Built on A Wall': Deconstructing Blade Runner 2049 (2017)

Will Brooker

10. Speculative Anger and Collective Economic Strength in Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You (2018)

Paul Petrovic

11. Coping with the Deconstruction of American Identity: Hybridization and Self-destruction in Alex Garland’s Annihilation (2018)

Andrew Schopp

12. Wakanda Forever? On Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther (2018)

Gerry Canavan