Throughout December 2014, the BFI Southbank, a vast concrete hub outside Waterloo Station in London, dedicated to the presentation and preservation of British film archives—and whose internal design is not dissimilar to the deck of a movie spaceship—hummed with the chatter and combined expectations of scores of cinéphiles and science-fiction enthusiasts: two circles which make up a very tight Venn diagram. Flashing screens and interactive exhibits on Star Wars, Doctor Who and 2001: A Space Odyssey accompanied its special sci-fi season, dreamily entitled “Days of Fear and Wonder”, for the gratification of these two most passionate of caucuses. In some ways this was BFI renewing with its own history, as the building once housed the now defunct British version of the Museum of the Moving Image, a permanent TV and film exhibition which focused heavily on Britain’s science fiction heritage (you can spot the old “MOMI” in a sequence of the Hugh Grant film, Four Weddings and a Funeral, where Grant is being upbraided in sign language by his deaf brother for not pursuing Andie MacDowell more aggressively).

This extensive and deeply appealing season of films combined familiar monuments (Alien, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Star Wars, Blade Runner) old favorites (The Day the Earth Stood Still, The War of the Worlds, Forbidden Planet) cult classics (Silent Running, Dark Star, Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers) and lesser known curios (Zulawski’s On The Silver Globe, Peter Wollen’s Friendship’s Death, Mike Cahill’s Another Earth) with special events such as a visual effects masterclass with Paul Franklin, the Oscar winner behind the Christopher Nolan films Interstellar and Inception; lectures by cultural historian Christopher Frayling on Kubrick’s design; and novelist SF Said on the cinematic representation of alien life. The BFI raided its archives to fill out the program with sci-fi shorts, modern British favorites (Attack the Block, Monsters) cult television and even extracts from silent British sci-fi cinema dating back to 1897. On top of this they presented a short program of African American work curated by Reverse Shot’s Ashley Clark entitled “Inside Afrofuturism” and featuring a conversation with Afrika Bambaataa and the presentation of the evergreen John Sayles classic, Brother From Another Planet. This internationalist approach not only provided considerable heft and credibility to the season, it also served to illustrate the significant contribution made by British talent and resources (crew, studios, composers, writers, directors, effects) to the world of science-fiction.

BFI couldn’t fail to recognize that any legitimate chronology of British sci-fi must include an appearance by Professor Bernard Quatermass, the fictional creation of the legendary screenwriter Nigel Kneale. Quatermass and the Pit (1967) (American title: 5 Million Years To Earth) which screened in BFI’s second largest theater (NFT2) was the third Quatermass feature produced by the British horror studio Hammer Films, after Kneale’s original six part hit TV series had brought the character wide popular acclaim. Quatermass (played here with gruff Scottish defiance by Hammer regular Andrew Keir) offered viewers an authoritative, commanding hero—a man of science, but in keeping with the countercultural age in which it was made, an outlier who refused to bend to a corrupt politico-military establishment. Kneale, for his part, distinguished himself as a writer who refused to limit himself in scope. Unquestionably sci-fi, but wearing the outer-garments of horror, Quatermass and the Pit posits the theory that Martians not only jump-started the human race by accelerating the process of evolution, but also indirectly created witchcraft, demonology, Satanism and a good chunk of Christian mythology as well. Kneale’s story, which pre-dated Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods by one year, depicts an archaeological find of an alien species in a vessel beneath an abandoned metro station. The military predictably elect to treat the UFO as an unexploded device and resolve to carry out a controlled explosion. Professor Quatermass witnesses an alien power emanating from the vessel and, egged on by archaeologist Dr Roney (James Donald) immediately advises extreme caution and study of the vessel. This leads to his being promptly marginalized from the investigation by Col. Breen (a young Julian Glover in moustache-twirling mode). The film distinguished itself from typical invasion films—with their tendency to anthropomorphize the aliens—by depicting Martians as truly alien beings with a society and culture quite unlike our own.

But Kneale’s poetic imagination, his willingness to imagine things beyond that which can be analyzed in a lab (an imagination shared by the professor himself, which is what makes Quatermass such a subversive figure as a scientist) doesn’t mean he wasn’t deeply passionate about the science. One fundamental plot device concerns a machine that decodes and displays the mental images of a character who has been possessed by the aliens. The helmet of the apparatus resembles that of an early design of the electric chair. Such a concept, whilst clearly extraordinary at the time to the general public, was not entirely new. In fact the processes which would lead to us approximating visual signals from the brain were already in existence at that time: the first modern methods of brain imaging were developed as early as 1927, with cerebral angiography, an invasive technique which created images of normal and abnormal blood vessels in the brain, thereby helping to detect signs of internal bleeding or brain tumors. Early attempts at this process regrettably involved injections of deleterious tracer chemicals, the effects of which were detrimental and even fatal to the test subjects. In the 1960s, techniques were improved to create blood flow maps and later, computerized axial tomography (CT or CAT scans) provided detailed anatomic images of the brain, using safer and less invasive procedures. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), which began to emerge in the 1970s, permitted neuro-imaging without exposure to ionizing radiation. Functional MRI (FMRI) sought to take this technique beyond the field of diagnostics and into the realm of thought and feeling, attempting to pinpoint specific areas of the brain associated with a task, process or emotion.

The apparently gigantic conceptual step from brain imaging to brain “scanning” (i.e. reproducing images of actual thoughts) depicted in Quatermass and the Pit,has been taken furthest so far by the Gallant Laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley, who, using a combination of Functional MRI technology and YouTube videos, have been able to recreate approximations of moving images as they were being processed in the visual cortexes of three human subjects. This involved first constructing 3D images of the blood flow activity of its test subjects as they watched several hours of Hollywood movie trailers. A computer then used these images to predict the likely brain activity that would be produced for a certain type of image seen in a video. For example, an image of a man was recorded as likely to produce “brain activity A” while the image of a blue sky was likely to produce “brain activity B” and so on. The subjects then viewed another set of movie trailers while their brain activity was recorded and using a randomly selected set of 100 YouTube videos, the computer was able to reconstruct an approximate video of what the subjects were seeing, by ordering and overlapping the clips based on their relative similarity to the brain activity images first produced. You can see comparison clips from this study here and here.

Despite the limiting necessity of using a database of existing imagery to “imitate” the thoughts of the subject (as opposed to replication by “painting” exact thoughts) the results are nonetheless quite remarkable, and tend to indicate that a more sophisticated process, properly funded, could open up serious potential in the field. Apart from operational uses (such as communicating with coma patients and better understanding the impact of certain mental afflictions and the drugs that treat them) one can only wonder at (and fear!) the possibilities (judicial, military, economic) thrown up by a scientific process of genuine mind-reading. Perhaps Professor Quatermass shouldn’t have taken that particular invention quite so much for granted?

Perhaps the most eye-catching gala event of the Days of Fear and Wonder season was the premiere of the new Alex Garland film Ex Machina, hyped by its BFI host as “the most original and best science-fiction film of 2015” (a punchy sounding claim, in a year about to feature Ridley Scott’s The Martian, a new Terminator film and a new Star Wars film, none of which have yet been seen). Garland, whose previous written work includes Sunshine, 28 Days Later and The Beach directed his own script for the first time and also made an irascible appearance in a Q&A afterwards compered by the film’s “scientific advisor” the geneticist Adam Rutherford. In Ex Machina a young computer programmer (strawberry blonde straight bat, Domhnall Gleeson) wins an opportunity to visit his ultimate boss, a super-secretive reclusive genius (Oscar Isaac, in hairy, lairy mode) who has squirreled himself away in a billion dollar facility on a private island, to work (apparently alone) on the construction of what appears to be an all-hot-female-looking battalion of “A.I.”s (the word “robot” having now officially reached the status of passé). Isaac entreats Gleeson to examine his new creation, Ava (played by the now ubiquitous Alicia Vikander, an ex-ballet dancer with a mesmerizing stare) and to give his considered scientific opinion of Isaac’s work. Very early in the piece, Isaac invokes the so-called “Turing Test” (a popular feature of A.I. evaluation) in order to subvert it, on the basis that Ava is so superior an A.I. that the Turing Test is irrelevant. The Turing Test determines whether a machine is capable of persuading a human—purely by way of text-based conversation—that they are interacting with another human. Isaac’s plan in Ex Machina is more ambitious: to show the human (Gleeson) right at the outset that the machine with which he is interacting is clearly a machine—her exoskeleton leaves him in no doubt—but to test whether or not Gleeson believes she has developed “human” consciousness.

The flaw in the Turing Test of course, is that it’s dependent on trickery. Turing’s measure of the standard of the artificial intelligence is the extent to which it has developed the ability to fool humans. This is surely not an adequate measure of scientific progress in the field of robotics. A superior test for artificial intelligence which avoids this central flaw is the Lovelace Test, named for Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (who is believed to have written the first algorithm for Charles Babbage’s proton computer, the Analytical Engine, in 1842) and developed by Selmer Bringsjörd at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. The Lovelace Test posits that an artificial agent, designed by a human, passes the test only if it originates a “program” that it was not engineered to produce. The agent’s designers must not be able to explain how their original code led to this new program. Put simply, to pass the Lovelace Test, a machine has to be able to create something original, all by itself.

Garland—a self-avowed fan of A.I. technology who has little time for A.I. skeptics—has taken this idea and applied it directly to a thriller narrative, wherein the A.I.s are essentially being held prisoner by Isaac’s mad scientist and task themselves with devising an exceptionally clever (and non-programmed) way to escape his secure facility and its state-of-the-art fail-safe devices. The ultimate endgame is, of course, a familiar one: A.I.s, given the ability to form consciousness and act outside the parameters of their primary coding, will “rise up” and defeat their makers. This is a scenario which many scientists and thinkers—among them, Professor Stephen Hawking—are deeply concerned may actually come to pass (see their open letter published on the Future of Life Institute website here) but which Garland seems to want to celebrate. An alternative view, most recently served by Disney’s Big Hero 6, is that a fundamental component of an A.I.’s superiority is its ability to avoid conflict and tap into the “elevated” facets of human nature (community, healing, self-sacrifice) which humans themselves have all but left behind. The currently released Neill Blomkamp film Chappie wrestles with that precise dichotomy more directly.

Ex Machina is disarming because of how demonstrably Garland comes down on the side of the machines. One is reminded of the theoretical debate over whether apes should have “human rights”, as Ex Machina raises the same questions in respect of A.I.s. Vikander is exceptional in the role of Ava and is given the most complex and richly drawn part in the film, while by contrast Gleeson is easy to relate to, but ends up being simply the prototype of an inferior being. Oscar Isaac’s character—a more conventional villain—is a rich, hip blend of Metropolis’s Rötwang*, Dr Moreau and the Marquis de Sade. Ex Machina is an angry proto-feminist revenge thriller at heart, which makes literal the objectification of women, but doesn’t skimp on the erotica either.
*[While the film is not directly referenced, strong elements of the class struggle and in particular, the gender politics of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis filter through.]

An extended run of a devotedly restored 70mm print of Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 sci-fi monument 2001: A Space Odyssey was the jewel in the crown of the Days of Fear and Wonder season. Perhaps no other film embodies “science and film” as seamlessly as this one and the cleaned version afforded viewers a reminder of the sheer jaw-dropping beauty of Geoffrey Unsworth’s and John Alcott’s photography. 2001 is of course a film of questions, not answers. Vaultingly ambitious in its scope, it provokes, as all great science-fiction (all great cinema) should, a myriad of interrogations in the audience—and through its hyperreal pacing, it affords that same audience the time to indulge these interrogations to the full. Its themes include the enlightenment of man by alien life (as in Quatermass and the Pit) and the perils of artificial intelligence (as in Ex Machina) but also the exploration and colonization of space, the dawn of humanity...and a possible connection between the two. Space, as rendered in 2001,is both utterly quotidian (witness the business-like, tedious routines of the NASA employees at work) and metaphysically immense and terrifying (the final psychedelic journey). There are very few films which can teach us something with every new viewing and there are even fewer films which remain so irresistible, despite being at times bafflingly incomprehensible (Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad is another). The reason 2001,despite its legions of imitators and influences, can never get old, is that the questions it poses will always be asked and may never be satisfactorily answered: “where are we from?”; “where are we going?”; “what else is out there?”. The monolith at the film’s heart—first witnessed by the apes, then the astronauts and the hero Dave Bowman at the end—contains the mystery of 2001’s appeal: the existential, the theological, the metaphysical. It is the briefcase from Kiss Me Deadly...and it is Pandora’s Box. Fear and wonder, indeed.