We’re dusting off more than Diesel jeans and Resident Evil for the current wave of aughts revivalism, it seems; this brand of sci-fi is its own kind of throwback. Last year, in a fit of year-end mania, I took a dive off the deep end to categorize a (fake) subgenre I called “Bwaaaa!! It’s all connected!” In that essay, I taxonomized a particular streak of conspiratorial, twist-laden 2000s genre hybrids that most readers will probably know best through the work of M. Night Shyamalan. They’re thriller-y, mystical, cranked up and toned down (at least, their color grading is). They believe in aliens. They see dead people. Hell, they’ve probably been dead the whole time themselves—or have they?
They love nu metal and grungy montage. They want to save you. They borrow from the hard sci-fi classics of the ’70s (Steven Soderbergh even remade Solaris) and the Fincher school of ’90s mind-benders in equal measure before turning their global-scale apocalypticism up to 9/11. They’re confusing, jittery, supremely high-concept messes with nicotine-stained fingers and—believe it or not—hearts of gold under their hard-bitten, feel-bad exteriors. Is that a cross I see, poking out from under several layers of black fishnets?
As the current mini-wave demonstrates, this kind of existentialist genre movie comes in all shapes and sizes, from teen movies and blockbusters to art films—they even made them for kids! The same kinds of paranoia that preoccupied us post-9/11 are back, from fears around AI and techno-surveillance to environmental fatalism and broad political unrest. As spooky season draws to a close and the bitter winds of Noirvember start tugging at our turned-up trenchcoat collars, it seems only right to take a stroll down some of Bwaaaa!!’s dark, goofy byways and explore the less-appreciated, far less reputable side of 2000s science fiction.
Many of these picks were rejected in their time, but the re-appreciation of this kind of filmmaking has already begun: for every Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, there’s been a The Fountain or an Enter the Void waiting in the wings, sitting stoned in the corner at the party, asking to be loved (and asking if you’ve read Howard Zinn). Vanilla Sky is getting its tech support. Spielberg’s incredibly strange and then utterly dismissed A.I. Artificial Intelligence was just declared the best film of the 2000s by IndieWire.
So, let’s take a look. It’s all there waiting for you—but there isn’t much time. You don’t know me, but you’ll have to trust me. The fate of the world might depend on it.