To Live Again, To Live Forever, To Live on The Screen

by Francisco Payó González

Defeating death and achieving immortality thanks to science, improving our quality of life thanks to the latest advancements and to experiments where the human and the robotic, the real and the virtual, the ethical and the monstrous meet – such material has formed a broad and fertile field for the audiovisual imagination.

And, while we are still linked to our human mortality and fragility, many of these stories have or will live beyond their creators’ lifetimes, by turns inspiring us, amusing us and terrifying us. A few such examples are given below:

1 Frankenstein (1931): The classic par excellence, in which the unsurpassable Boris Karloff succeeds in drawing us into the soul of a “monster” created by a scientist using parts from various corpses. The scientist is the actual Frankenstein giving the work its title and, deep down, the story’s true monster – a man whose obsession with defying death and creating life ends in tragedy.

2 The Boys from Brazil (1978): Based on Ira Levin’s novel (Rosemary’s Baby), this movie ventures into the topic of human cloning as a tool that could be employed to bring back one of history’s most notorious monsters, Adolf Hitler, through the diabolic genius of another monster: Doctor Josef Mengele.

3 Star Wars (1977 - ?): And speaking of characters who stay alive thanks to science, few examples of fiction are as emblematic as Darth Vader, the saga’s villain-hero, who, after losing an arm and both legs and suffering burns over his entire body, is reconstructed to continue with his dark work, his raspy breathing a symbol of eternal agony.

4 Blade Runner (1982): Humans figure out how manufacture disposable beings – called Replicants – who are mainly used for dangerous space exploration and who, for safety reasons, are programed to live no more than four years. The Replicants are outfitted with false memories to provide them with a questionable emotional stability when faced with death’s inevitable threshold.

5 Robocop (1987): Both the original version by Netherlander Paul Verhoeven and Brazilian José Padilha’s 2014 remake explore the dilemma of a honest policeman who, after being murdered, awakes – or rather, turns on – to find himself converted into a cyborg at the service of a corrupt corporation that controls the police and the criminals guilty of his homicide.

6 Ironman (2008): Scientist-Playboy Tony Stark turns into the titular superhero thanks to the construction of an electromagnet, which is the only thing preventing bomb fragments from piercing his heart. In the saga’s later installments, Stark resorts to nanotechnology to ward off the electromagnet.

7 Avatar (2009): From the mind of a filmmaker obsessed with scientific research, submarine and space exploration, and technology in general, comes this story, in which a marine who has lost the use of his legs gets the opportunity for a second shot at life by transferring his mind to an alien body.

8 Altered Carbon (2018 - ?): This series shows a world where the human mind can be digitalized and stored like a database that can be downloaded, even 250 years in the future, into whichever body is desired and in order to fulfill specific missions. Few things are less pleasant than waking up in a future you had hoped to avoid.

9 Never let me go (2010): Based on Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel (The Remains of the Day) and written for the screen by Alex Garland (Ex Machina), this film shows a group of young people who discover that their purpose in life is to serve as organ donors to others. A cruder version of this premise can be seen in the movie The Island (2005).

10 Prometheus (2012): In this prequel to the Alien saga, we see how the creation of humans was the result of an alien experiment. In the search for these Creators, an elderly millionaire finances the most expensive space mission in the history of humanity, with a sole and egotistical purpose: to ask the Creators for the secret to eternal life.

11 Gattaca (1997): In a not-to-distant future, genetic advancements establish that the worst way to bring a human being into the world is though natural means. Those who dare to procreate “inferior humans” are thus condemned to live as a servile caste without aspirations – that is, until one of them cheats the system to become astronaut.