What Can Recent Netflix Sci-fi Movies Tell us?
2018 has been a productive year for Netflix. With Birdbox, Annihilation and Bandersnatch going viral on social media, Netflix sci-fi films have gained a decent reputation in marketing innovation and in quality improvement. Let’s take a closer look at each of these films in question!
​
Movie with Hashtag= successful promotion
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
Pizza Movie: choose your own toppings/adventures
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
It seems that Netflix sci-fi productions have targeted the audience of video gamers to expand their viewer group. Bandersnatch has exemplified an experimental combination of movie and video games. The interactive mode—letting the audience make an option of what’s happening next, is a ground-breaking innovation in the film industry. Although some of the options in the movie are not so impressive, like whether to listen to Song A or Song B, Netflix is quite sincere to show an intention to break some limitations. It’s reasonable to predict there will be more productions that allow us to choose plots just as easy as how we choose the toppings and crust for a DIY pizza!
ANN: ‘Evil’ Technology?
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
Cam is not a sci-fi horror film in a traditional sense. It provokes a controversial debate on the application of facial recognition technology. The movie is almost a post-modern metaphor for the highly digitalised society of today. It throws a question to the audience: will AI, software which can detect people’s facial features on video, spark identity crises, where people start abusing the technology to satisfy their curiosity? Spoiler Warning: In the film, the girl next door Alice Ackerman broadcasts her shows as a cam girl online. She soon discovers her broadcasting service has been hacked by another cam girl called Lola who is her doppelgänger. Lola is identical to Alice and performs before the camera in a way that Alice usually does. The movie reflects how the artificial neural network (ANN), a branch of Al software, plays a role in our real life. This also makes the face swapping scenes in the movie more realistic. In fact, the movie not only shows the multiplicity of modern digital identity, it also criticises the superficial social trend that people work desperately to cause sensational reactions and get attention on social media.
Goes deeper into philosophy…
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
Both Annihilation and The Cloverfield Paradox have shown a bold imagination of human world colliding with parallel universe. Despite many critical voices, The Cloverfield Paradox does illustrate its paradoxical theme; while astronauts are struggling to survive in the spaceship, other humans on the Earth are the same. A step into space means self-destruction, yet a step backwards still brings disaster.
Annihilation has received more praise for its interpretation of Übermensch (Superior man). The term was invented by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche believes the superior man can justify human existence by being a goal for humans to achieve. In the movie, the encounters with alien creatures and the ending have explained this abstract concept in a way that the audience can understand.
​
​
So, which of these films appeal to you?
Bird Box went viral thanks to the #birdboxchallenge trending on Twitter. The effect of the movie is perhaps not about people’s fear of post-apocalyptic scenarios but the audience’s imitation of the “blindfolding” theme. Twitter has been flooded with videos and memes making fun of this psychological thriller which follows a mother and two children compelled to wear blindfolds in a dystopian world. This shows that Netflix’s marketing team notices the potential force of self-media since the similar success of A Quiet Place, and so its smart move is to create interactive topics on Twitter and Instagram to get more people engaged in movie promotion.
​
Bird Box is an absolute winner of hashtags!
