I had a different reaction. I watched the first 30 minutes and could not get into it.
It was like so much classic SF where it really is not about the future (except that in selective cases they have added suffixes or prefixes like -ray, cyber-, electro-, etc.) but instead an ode to reactionary sentiments like, "Gosh, humans are just perfect right now and anything we change about the way we act will make everything worse. If we get rid of our flaws we'll lose something essentially human about us!"
With a nice couple of complementary side dishes that assume that people who will try to change us to be something like less emotional will be very emotional about doing so and also very stupid. "Gosh, even though we're absolutely dedicated to our ideology let's not go all the way to making the system as stable and inescapable as possible by using something like genetic enginiering, implanted automatic drug pumps, or anything else that even people in the late 20th century could dream up, but instead rely upon everyone in our society taking their pills on time. Because I'm sure they all will."
Not to mention the idea that somehow the nuclear family unit will still be the standard in a society that is so dedicated to getting rid of strong emotions that they're going to even burn pretty art. Because people get so much more emotional about art than they do about people they live with. And art is so darn infectious that we need to burn it all, too.
It almost makes me want to write a story where someone is trying to restore some flaw from humanity's past that has been eliminated and discovers, much too late, that it actually was a good idea to get rid of it and he's unleashed something as bad as smallpox upon the world.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2007-08-05 07:28 pm (UTC)It was like so much classic SF where it really is not about the future (except that in selective cases they have added suffixes or prefixes like -ray, cyber-, electro-, etc.) but instead an ode to reactionary sentiments like, "Gosh, humans are just perfect right now and anything we change about the way we act will make everything worse. If we get rid of our flaws we'll lose something essentially human about us!"
With a nice couple of complementary side dishes that assume that people who will try to change us to be something like less emotional will be very emotional about doing so and also very stupid. "Gosh, even though we're absolutely dedicated to our ideology let's not go all the way to making the system as stable and inescapable as possible by using something like genetic enginiering, implanted automatic drug pumps, or anything else that even people in the late 20th century could dream up, but instead rely upon everyone in our society taking their pills on time. Because I'm sure they all will."
Not to mention the idea that somehow the nuclear family unit will still be the standard in a society that is so dedicated to getting rid of strong emotions that they're going to even burn pretty art. Because people get so much more emotional about art than they do about people they live with. And art is so darn infectious that we need to burn it all, too.
It almost makes me want to write a story where someone is trying to restore some flaw from humanity's past that has been eliminated and discovers, much too late, that it actually was a good idea to get rid of it and he's unleashed something as bad as smallpox upon the world.