Ridley Scott, among great science fiction directors, has been of special interest to theologians and philosophers. See for example the great collection of essays, Blade Runner 2049 and Philosophy: This Breaks the World, for just one installment of essays inspired by his films.
Not that Ridley Scott exclusively makes science fiction classics. There’s also Thelma and Louise, or the more recent House of Gucci, but if you are the director who brought us the Alien franchise and the cult favorite Blade Runner, well, you gain a certain mystique.
Scott’s films typically ride along an edge of existential exploration into the human condition, with a side of terror. With Alien, for example, it really seems unwise to wish to meet the Aliens, because they will kill us. With Blade Runner, it is us who are doing the killing, executing replicants, bioengineered humanoids often indistinguishable from biologically “natural” humans.
But with any Ridley Scott film, the atmosphere is a character. There’s a whole mood, and that mood leaves the viewer continually unsettled by an ambience of wonderful discomfort.
The new series on HBO, Raised By Wolves, is peak Ridley Scott. The basic premise: what if humans are engaged in a horrific war between believers and atheists, and it’s gotten so bad the only way we will survive is to settle an exoplanet?
And what if there’s a space race to get there?
The atheists send a ship to Kepler 442b, an exoplanet about 600 light years from earth. Only two beings make the journey, advanced AI synthetic “robots” named Mother and Father. Mother carries human embryos she is capable of raising, and when this family arrives on the planet, they begin the task.
Meanwhile, the Mithraicists, who on religious grounds will not allow robots to raise children, travel on an ark style ship and arrive years later. When they arrive, the anticipated violence and tension arises between the two groups, but this is complicated by the nature of the planet itself. Turns out, the planet has interests, exerts an influence, has a history, and so at each turn in the season, the viewer is caught once again by surprise, having to revisit the assumptions they made in previous episodes.
HBO is aware the series raises significant questions for scientists and philosophers, and so alongside the series, they’re running a podcast which explores salient topics. You may ask yourself: can AI feel, and does one need to feel things in order to engage in moral reasoning? Or, is it realistic we will settle exoplanets, and which ones should we aim for? Can you really escape from religious strife by moving to a new planet? Can robots make good parents? Can super weapons keep us safe? Etc.
I’ve been appreciating the multi-media back and forth of watching the series, then listening to the podcasts. I like this mode, where the director of a series or movie is given free artistic license to just make the thing, and then others do the analysis. Which isn’t to say no art is allowed to be “on point” or carry over messages, but rather that for the most part, the best art tells it more slant than that.
That’s certainly why we love Bladerunner. In that film, there’s the enduring question as to whether Harrison Ford, the blade runner Rick Deckard, who chases down and “retires” replicants, is himself a replicant. One can’t distill one moralistic point from such a paradox, but it can produce the ambient discomfort Ridley Scott is famous for.
Okay, so why do I care about this series so much? I’m especially intrigued by the acting in the series, which is startling at every turn. The actors who portray the AI, as well as many of the other adults, frequently portray a kind of awkwardness verging on the bizarre, and yet because everyone is this awkward, it accomplishes a kind of naturalness.
Perhaps they are odd because they are AI. Perhaps they are odd because these are the kinds of human who survived an interstellar religious war and escaped. Either way, it’s often difficult to distinguish the AI from the humans, which leaves us as viewers disturbed at the possibility that we are advanced AI ourselves, running scripts and algorithms.
Which is to say, it’s very hard to define what makes us human, and since DNA is an algorithm, and it’s hard to define who we are, great film about AI forces us to consider there are more ways to be human than we assume at first.
I’m still not convinced the series does an adequate job of portraying religious sensibilities. The two groups have hardcore fundamentalist, opposite doctrinal stances. One group are true believers. The other group are true atheists. One wonders if in the future everything will devolve into such a binary of religious experience.
Nevertheless, what it gets right is that religion has within itself the capacity to other those who believe differently than us, and so see each other as less than human, and religion (and atheism) also has the capacity to develop our empathy and sense of shared humanity.