• Korean Institute of Interior Design Journal
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• no.33
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• pp.122-128
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• 2002

In the Sci-Fi movie, with future scene in its setting, how images are shown in the film is very important. Sci-Fi movie is supposed to be expressed In different way of its set design. This study suggests various types of expression in Sci-Fi movies. Sci-Fi movies construct the narrative upon the binary opposition of nature vs. culture, human vs. nonhuman. Sci-Fi movie is a contested terrain where conservative, liberal and radical ideologies are competing. While liberal Sci-Fi movies consider the opposition compatible, conservative texts show the paranoid towards science and nonhumans. And, Sci-Fi movies are expressed as utopian and dystopian. Utopian and dystopian elements are found in the history of architecture. Utopian element is often found in the religious architecture, and those buildings are geometric, orderly, and gorgeous. Dystopian element is often found in modern architecture, and those are asymmetric, distorted, and incompleted. Conservative movie, which developing of science is expressed negatively, retains both utopian and dystopian elements evenly. Liberal movie, such as Space Opera which science is expressed positively, is changed from futurist and mechanical type into more simple, geometric and orderly shrine type. Radical movie, which the boundary of human and science is expressed darkly, retains dark, complex, and incomplete dystopian expression elements.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.42
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• pp.505-524
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• 2016

This study examines the ways District 9, a film released in 2009, reworks the sci-fi genre to explore the human encounter with "other" alien populations. Like Avatar, released in the same year, District 9 addresses the tropes of conflict over land and human-alien hybridity and introduces non-humans and aliens, not as invaders, but as objects of human oppression and cruelty. Unlike many other science fiction films where the encounter between humans and non-humans occurs in an unidentifiable future time and location, District 9 crosses genre barriers to engage with urban realism, producing a social critique of contemporary urban population problems. The arrival of aliens in District 9 occurs as part of the recorded human past and the film's action is carried out in the present time in the specifically identified city of Johannesburg. A distinctly anti-Hollywood film that locates the action at the street level, District 9 plays out human anxieties about contact with others by referencing the divisions and conflicts historically attached to South Africa's sprawling metropolis and its current problems of urban poverty and illegal immigrants. Focusing on how this particular urban setting frames the film, the study investigates the ways Blomkamp's sci-fi film about extra-terrestrials presents a curious postcolonial mix of aliens and immigrants surviving in abject conditions in an urban slum and forces a realistic examination of the contemporary social problems faced by South Africa's largest city and by extension other major global cities. The paper also examines the film's representation of the human-alien hybrid and its potential as a force to resist human exploitation of the other. It also claims that though the setting is highly local, District 9 speaks to a wider global audience by making obvious the exploitative practices of profit-seeking multinationals. A sci-fi film that is keen on making a social commentary on urban population conflicts, District 9 resonates with the wider sense of insecurity and fear of others that form the horizon of the uncertain and potentially violent contemporary human world.

• The Journal of the Convergence on Culture Technology
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• v.8 no.1
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• pp.379-384
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• 2022

The year 2021 is a monumental year for the history of Korean cinema that inferiority of the sci-fi genre, by the appearance of two sci-fi blockbuster films- produced by Netflix and produced by TVing-at the same time. Coincidentally, both of movies are sci-fi films which appear post-human such as robot and clone. As can be seen in 『Frankenstein』 story, the progenitor of science fictions, the mankind have imagined beings similar to humen or post-human who are another human being for a long time. deals with the unusual subject matter of a space scavenger and a space janitor, and the main character is a robot that very familiar with human. is the story of a man who lives for a limited life protects and accompanies a clone named Seobok who was created as a test subject. This film deals with the philosophical themes like death and eternal life through the existential concerns of two characters. use Korean Shinpa -Korean specific senimental code-sentiment on narrative, and has the character of a road movie set in Korea's geographical space.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.40
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• pp.111-131
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• 2015

An unusual success engendering loyalty among cult fans in the United States, Mamoru Oshii's 1995 cyberpunk anime, Ghost in the Shell (GITS) revolves around a female cyborg assassin named Motoko Kusanagi, a.k.a. "the Major." When the news came out last year that Scarlett Johansson was offered 10 million dollars for the role of the Major in the live action remake of GITS, the frustrated fans accused DreamWorks of "whitewashing" the classic Japanimation and turning it into a PG-13 film. While it would be premature to judge a film yet to be released, it appears timely to revisit the core achievement of Oshii's film untranslatable into the Hollywood formula. That is, unlike ultimately heteronormative and humanist sci-fi films produced in Hollywood, such as the Matrix trilogy or Cloud Atlas, GITS defies a Hollywoodization by evoking much bafflement in relation to its queer, posthuman characters and settings. This essay homes in on Major Kusanagi's body in order to update prior criticism from the perspectives of posthumanism and queer theory. If the Major's voluptuous cyborg body has been read as a liberating or as a commodified feminine body, latest critical work of posthumanism and queer theory causes us to move beyond the moralistic binaries of human/non-human and male/female. This deconstruction of binaries leads to a radical rethinking of "reality" and "identity" in an image-saturated, hypermediated age. Viewed from this perspective, Major Kusanagi's body can be better understood less as a reflection of "real" women than as an embodiment of our anxieties on the loss of self and interiority in the SNS-dominated society. As is warned by many posthumanist and queer critics, queer and posthuman components are too often used to reinforce the human. I argue that the Major's hybrid body is neither a mere amalgam of human and machine nor a superficial postmodern blurring of boundaries. Rather, the compelling combination of individuality, animality, and technology embodied in the Major redefines the human as always, already posthuman. This ethical act of revision-its shifting focus from oppressive humanism to a queer coexistence-evinces the lasting power of GITS.