Oofa … wow.
There are studies out there that suggest a steady diet of bad news is bad for your mental health. Once you understand that, you can understand why I’m not in love with Neill Blomkamp’s visually stunning new short, ‘Rakka.’ If you haven’t seen it yet, you can watch it here
Don’t get me wrong, I love dystopian and post-apocalyptic sci-fi. However, five minutes of this horror show and I’m skipping over to puppy and kitten land to mellow out. At some point, I stop being a storyteller and start being a human. I feel obligated to ask a very simple question: Where is this taking us?
It’s a legitimate question and one that the sci-fi community must seriously consider. We are what we eat, as it were, and we style ourselves as the arbiters of ‘what comes next.’ So if this is the vast majority of our cultural diet, what is the end game? Are we hoping people will wake up or are we simply wallowing in the horror that’s going to come? Is this supposed to motivate us to prevent night from falling?
To me, it’s a form of ‘set-up-to-fail syndrome.’ We’re only examining the worst aspects of humanity, instead of talking about what might happen if people actually start being the creatures they’re capable of being. I saw a ray of light in Wonder Woman a few weeks ago. We need more of that, and less of this.
At least, in this author’s humble opinion.