As Steven Spielberg once said, “All science fiction comes true. It just does.”
That’s what the filmmaker had to say about the relationship between science fiction and reality in a recent interview he gave to promote his new film, Disclosure Day.
It’s a provocative claim, and one that reminded me of Soraya Murray’s excellent new book, Technothriller: Film and the American Imagination.
In the book, Murray dives into popular films like The Andromeda Strain (1971), War Games (1983), The Hunt for Red October (1990) and many more to reveal how the technothiller film subgenre provides a unique vantage point into contemporary anxieties and assumptions about the growing role of technology in our lives.
I recently caught up with Murray—a former professor of mine from my days in the film and digital media department at UC Santa Cruz—to discuss Technothriller. I asked her what she thought of Spielberg’s bold proclamation that science fiction eventually comes true.
“I love the statement,” Murray said with a smile. “There is some truth to it.” Taken together, she added, the films suggest that science fiction can come true—not literally, with A.I. and robots taking over, but through the very real anxieties surrounding them. “We keep seeming to innovate toward our own destruction,” she noted, rather than considering how ethics might guide technological development.
Murray taught a course about technothriller films at UCSC for several years. The class, as she told me, revealed technothriller films as “a great touchstone for connecting with students about the increasing presence of computational, biotech and military tech in our everyday lives.”
She is aware that not everyone considers films like Rollerball (1975) or M3GAN (2022) worthy of serious consideration for what they have to say about power and technology.
“Some of these films are B-films, yes, but they facilitate conversations about things that are really hard and really frightening, like existential dread,” Murray said. In fact, she argues, it is “because people don’t respect them in the same kind of way” that technothriller writers and directors “can actually say a lot more because they’re operating a little bit under the radar of the kind of scrutiny of the more lauded kinds of film.”
Murray points to Michael Crichton and Tom Clancy as two writers who established many of the tropes and archetypes of the technothriller genre. She observes that these two men both grew up “in the shadow of the bomb … with that anxiety hanging over them for almost their entire lives” and subsequently spent decades reflecting American’s Cold War-era anxieties in their works of fiction.
Of course, Crichton and Clancy were themselves drawing from older myths; one merely has to look to Frankenstein, or even the tale of Prometheus, for evidence that we’ve always feared that reckless innovation could lead to disastrous unforeseen consequences. But even though it’s “really, really tough to let go” of some of these foundational narratives, Murray finds examples within the technothriller genre that “are telling counter-narratives, saying other things about what’s possible and trying to create other visions of what may be.”
One such film is Gareth Edward’s The Creator (2023), which stars John David Washington as a disillusioned American soldier who is tasked with taking down a female A.I. scientist and her most sophisticated creation, which takes the form of a human child.
Murray points out that The Creator is a rare example of a technothriller film in which the “innovator and its innovation are not locked in a despotic, negative father-son relation, but rather a caring mother-daughter relation. It seems like such a simple change to make, but it opens up a whole new world of conversation about what can be and how we can relate to our innovations.”
In writing the book, Murray aimed to bring the unique insights technothrillers provide to a broad audience. She noted, “I wanted to hold up this maligned little subgenre that I thought was really important to help us think about our lives right now… (These films) are beloved by audiences, and I wanted to say: This is why these films really matter; this is what I see in them; this is what I hope you’ll start to see in them yourself.”
Soraya Murray’s ‘Technothriller: Film and the American Imagination’ is available to order from the MIT Press Store, barnesandnoble.com or bookshop.org. More at sorayamurray.com.
