While reading Vincenzo Natali's Sundance Diaries this week I came across this keeper from actress Sarah Polley, "Splice is a film that is morally indefensible."  The story follows two genetic engineers and their tribulations becoming 'new parents.' The young one is a novel genetic creation achieved by mixing a lot of diverse DNA sequences which later blossoms into something magnificent and very, very dangerous.  It does not stop there however, as the relationships between the three get both Freudian and Cronenbergian.

One of the hallmarks of science fiction literature (and to a lesser extent movies) has been the degree to which social and moral dilemmas can be process by having stories and conflicts in other times and places.  The best science fiction (some might argue this storytelling in general) acts as some sort of mirror to society and culture at large. 

A decade into the new century, most of the great science fiction films do indeed engage with  morality (and ethics), moving from "Can We?" to "Should We?"  Actually, in nearly every case it plays out more along the lines of "Oh, Shit!  What have we done?"

Due to the nature of this beast, there is most definitely *Spoilers* sprinkled throughout the below article. Fair warning.

Code 46

Globalization forms the aesthetic and the gristle for Winterbottom's take on a science fiction film set in the near future revolving around restricted travel, Big Brother surveillance and the laws governing cloning and reproduction (have DNA, will travel). A corporate investigator (Tim Robbins, subdued in the fashion of Winston Smith or Rick Deckard, two other classic moral sci-fi characters), gets caught up in an affair with the woman (Samantha Morton) he is investigating for forging inter-zone passports ('papelles'). He gets stuck in Shanghai and unable to travel back to Seattle due to his own papelles expiring. This leaves him with a complicated trio of choices: Go back to the hermetic life with his wife and kids in Seattle; Or start over as a fugitive in the glass and steel and neon wonderland of Shanghai; Or go off the grid into the free-zones of the Middle East.  Digging beyond the plot however, into the genetics issues at the heart of Code 46, the title itself indicates a pregnancy of incestuous nature due to all the cloned tissue and 'functional viruses' floating around in this future.  The moral issue boils simply down to:  When is it OK to be romantically and sexually entangled with what could be biologically your mother?

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

The experience of following Lacuna Inc. a loose small-business that specializes in erasing memories, and two patients, former lovers, who submit themselves to treatment spans the gamut of romantic nostalgia, comic farce, science fiction, drama, you name it.  Michel Gondry's fascinating take on the first blush of falling in love (twice) is surely one of the best films of the Aughts.  You can be swept up in the pure entertainment of the movie, or you can dive down the moral rabbit hole.  How much right to do have to exert over your own body?  Is it illegal to chop off your own arm?  Commit Suicide?  Erase significant portions of your memory?  Should an easy way of absolving oneself of guilt and conscience exist as a business venture (some would argue that most commercial ventures do this to one extent or another!)?  The curious thing is that the film, showing a surprising romantic streak for screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, makes a fairly compelling argument for emotion to trump morality.  Maybe he is right.

Solaris (2002)

Like most great science fiction films, Solaris (and I mean the more recent Steven Soderbergh remake) was not appreciated all that much on initial release. I am not sure if a re-evaluation of the film has started yet, but if not, here is as good a place as any.  While the film may on the surface come across as a strange love-story in space (the One-Sheet, included in the Gallery, would confirm this), indeed, Soderbergh took that one thing that was rather clunky in the 1972 film adaptation Stanislaw Lem's novel (Lem himself calls the American version a remake of the Russian film rather than his novel), and expanded it out to his much shorter remake.  But if you want to dig a little deeper, a variety of subtle and interesting notions are explored beyond simply flirtation, love, loss.  Delicately sprinkled with the debate on divinity vs. astronomical probability, the film seems to tap out on the side that Solaris, the planet, is in fact The Almighty (or at least an intelligence that is close enough to God so as to be splitting hairs).  The entity-planet affects the cosmonauts on the station with mirrors of their own thoughts, in essence resurrecting dead or far away family members.  After requesting friend and psychiatrist Chris Kelvin (George Clooney) to come up an evaluate the problem on the orbiting space station, the scientific leader on the shuttle, Dr. Gibarian, commits suicide. Later, the Doctors ghost (or perhaps Kelvin's own conscience or even, more daringly, God Himself) offers, "There is no solution, only choices." (Earlier Gibarian also equates space travel as the search for divinity in another choice quote, "We do not want other worlds, we want mirrors.")  Kelvin has to make the choice between returning to earth and his morbid, regretful existence, or living with a 'sub-atomic-particle' version of his deceased wife who is more of a collection of his own impressions of her, than *really* her.  Events lead up to the orbit station being sucked into the Planet's energy mass with Kelvin still aboard.  Is it a 'moment of fear' or a 'moment of truth,' because Kelvin has made his decision.  The last minutes, visually, are akin to an awakening, first of pain and suffering, then help by way of Solaris-version of Gibarian's Son (an corporeal in essence, The Son of God) who reaches out a comforting hand, and a offers a serene (Jesus-like?) face. That he ends up in Heaven (of sorts, where "Everything we've done is forgiven. Everything") with his deceased wife - all radiant and finally at peace, seems to  cement a spiritual read, but the question of whether it is OK to destroy an alien race because it happens to freak you out and seemingly has no motive for doing so remains unanswered.

Primer

Primer is without a doubt, a mind-bender.  It most certainly appeals to fans of science fiction for both its insanely complicated structure (it is a puzzlebox of the highest order) as well as its grounding discovery and science in the most mundane terms possible (home garages, U-Haul lockers, and my favourite, stealing palladium from the catalytic converters in their cars). It is a 'hard' science fiction film without any special effects and set in the present. It is dialogue, dialogue, dialogue matched to gritty and disorienting camerawork.  Beyond the surface of its lo-fi aesthetics and nested plot, lies all sort of moral and ethical traps.  These engineers may have the technical chops to invent something which could change the world (or like most game-changers, recognize the potential of an accident or unintended side-effect) but wowsers do they go off the rails in terms of dealing with it.  The invention, a form of time travel, offers power in the  gather limitless wealth, the potential to change events, or simply muck with causality:  Abuse the stock market, prevent a potential murder, punch your boss in the face then go back and stop yourself, or the real kicker - kill yourself.  Fear, paranoia and greed supersede any chance of trust. ("What's worse, thinking you're being paranoid or knowing you should be?")  There is a lot of 21st century post-tech boom subtext from the characters behavior and it has a lot to say about the way things are done in high-tech (nay the entire business world) sector since the 1990s of instant-riches-today, burnout-crash-tomorrow.  Ethics in business, Morality (and boy-oh-boy the difficulty) of playing God and the power of filmmaker may be summed up with this line of dialogue, "You want to put my camcorder inside the box that's so dangerous we can't look into it."

District 9

Neil Blomkamp, who miraculously struck commercial pay-dirt (making it the only film on the list to find a wide audience theatrically) with an urban apartheid allegory District 9.  But the film seems to abandon the segregation/racism thread at about the half-way mark, opting for a (literal) transformation of its central corporate stooge, Wikus Van De Merwe, into the very aliens he was working to relocate.  This may simply be the plot of the film kicking into high gear.  The governing body, the MNU (some sort of state-corporate privatized military operation) upon discovering the half-alien, half-human immediately attempts vivisection (why beat around the bush) to get to its sole purpose, alien weaponry.  This forces Wikus into a fugitive of the very organization he worked for and is a genre staple from Minority Report to Logans Run, but it is also a bleak commentary on how we eat our own -  especially if they 'go native.'  At the end of District 9, I am not sure if Wikus ever becomes a 'hero,' or even the everyman finding his moral center, but he is a creature who generates empathy (or at least pity) despite his shortcomings. 

Moon

After 1979's Alien, nothing gets hammered harder than corporate culture (usually the functioning body of government) in science fiction films.  And aesthetics and style of Duncan Jones' Moon is composed of science fiction classics (Solyaris, 2001:  A Space Odyssey, Silent Running, and yes, both Ridley Scott Aliens and Blade Runner).  A lone man discovers himself (literally) at the end of his solitary (outside of the stations resident A.I.) 3 year mining contract on the Moon.  Sam Rockwell's Sam Bell wrestles with himself (again, literally) on what his existence actually means, while holding out for joining back up with his wife and daughter.  Ironic, indeed, that the corporation, Lunar Industries, is willing to cross some interesting ethical lines (lets just say extreme exploitation of its workforce) in the name of 'clean' energy (the Helium-3 on the moon is what is being mined).  Contrary to what the detractors of this great piece of science fiction often say, the film is much more than the sum of it is parts, and has a lot of interesting things to ponder about the use and abuse of cloning and the mental strain of meeting 'yourself' in ways that you are certainly not prepared to do.  Moon finally offers a little tease of the social significance (again hammering on the corporation-behaving-badly) of Sam's return to earth to meet himself once again.