Mutants, machines and monsters: faces of war in science fiction cinema

Abstract

War – understood here in a broad sense, and encompassing multiple iterations in terms of scale, protagonists and motivations – is certainly one of the most present themes in science fiction cinema of the last five decades. Sagas such as Planet of the Apes, Star Wars, Mad Max, Terminator, The Matrix or The Hunger Games are, in this regard, very demonstrative, as the films Escape from New York, Dune, Children of Men or Avatar are. These are works that, regardless of the cinephile’s judgment or their critical status, occupy a prominent place in the Western imagination and culture. What we intend in this essay is to organize a gallery of portraits of the main protagonists and antagonists of these narratives. To do so, we will resort to a hybrid and heterogeneous, multi-, trans- or even a-disciplinary approach, depending on the perspective adopted at each step: we propose to operate a broad semiotic approach that sends or intersects with a set of notions arising from philosophy, narratology, religion or aesthetics, in a repertoire organized in conceptual triads that will allow us multiple points of view and, in this way, detect the signs of the portrayed in their condition of faces-idea, faces-archetype or faces-figure: the human, the posthuman and the inhuman; the hero, the anti-hero and the villain; the soldier, the alien and the android; the beautiful, the sublime and the ugly; the allegory, the parable and the fable; the paradise, the purgatory and the hell; the utopia, the heterotopia and the dystopia. Through the analysis of these faces of the future war, we intend to outline the hypothetical gallery/iconology of a warlike development of the human condition.