Turns out Christopher Nolan's Tenet won't be playing in theaters in July after all, so your best bet for a cerebral sci-fi action thriller could be STÖMOL, the feature-length SL machinima from Huckleberry Hax and crew. Mr. Hax just shared with me this teaser scene, redolent of cyberpunk noir.
Here's Hax to explain the scene:
"The scene features the film's protagonist, Epi Stömol (Huckleberry Hax), picking up a case from wealthy socialite Verity Certain (Ylva). Certain hires Stömol to track down her adopted son, a gifted coder able to retrieve and decode old media files rendered unreadable by the ruling government's 'digital hygiene' policy."
(Yes Hax is both the writer, director, and star of STÖMOL, which seems a bit much, but then again that's what they told Orson Welles. So, you know.)
The premise of feature, as Huckleberry puts it, is pretty Nolan-worthy:
"This has been an idea I've been thinking about for many years now. We talk about the mass availability of information brought about by technology, but so much of this information passes out of accessibility when the format it is in becomes obsolete.
"The idea first came to me when I read about a project to retrieve the information stored on the BBC Doomsday disks -- a huge social history project that took part in the UK in the 80s. It was contributed to by schools all around the country and intended as a sort of time capsule - thousands of images and articles all stored on laser disks. It was thought that this format was 'future proof.' Now, most of the disks have degraded and there are very few machines remaining capable of reading the ones that still work.
"We see this over and over. What about all that information stored on floppy disks? What about all that information saved as Word Star or Word Perfect files? What about all the information presented using the Flash format - which will soon pass out of existence?
"The irony is that we might end up in the future knowing more about the times where paper was used than we do about the times when digital media was used. So I envisaged a future for the movie when all of the formats we routinely access today have been forced into obsolescence by a government keen to rewrite history in its own favor. It's a slightly more modern take on the Orwellian concept presented in 1984. And it doesn't really require a huge leap of imagination in the present climate to see how easy it would be for this to happen."
I don't know about how but I can't wait to watch. Click to subscribe to Hax's channel for when the feature launches. But you can also definitely view it here. Stock the fuck up on popcorn my people!
Comments