Prepare for a mega dose of Aura and Kaleidoscope of futures. Along with seizures from seeing different imaginary Universes coming together. The show provides a richness. Of design variety which wouldn’t happens in film, a signed film tends to be too neat, that’s what you want and enjoy in films… but the real future will always be a patchwork of things that look like a mash up of Camden Town, Oxford Street and Bond Street.
It’s Really fun to see it quickly. I felt it would do something to my unconscious later that night!
There’s an interesting variety of aliens and careful making and materials very surprising.
They have I Robot and the one that goes “Biddy Biddy Biddy” from Buck Rogers and the Robot who always gave the “Warning Robinson family, warning” with flailing arms.
You realise these are the robots from your life and how much they have affected you and the same goes for all the rest of the sci-fi here.
There’s one B-movie with loads of flying saucers that they’ve taken stills from, it’s really fun! There a model of a saucer crashing into the Capitol and loads of single storyboard shots of sauces photobombing prime tourist locations.
If there was a criticism, I Just wish the show covered the size of Wembley Stadium, it’s so well curated. That would be an amazing blockbuster show
I really liked seeing the different Godzilla heads
If you’d seen the YouTube video that showed the first suit was made out of concrete because they had no materials in post war Japan! A concrete body suit!
The Modern, ‘realist Godzilla’ has no personality. They went with dynamic powerful – exciting even plausible design, but it has no juju – no uncanniness and oddly no humanity! (The flip coin to that, is it lacks invention)
Or a sense of the fantastic enough.
The best bit of the show is the very realistic props from different films
You could enjoy it in a single hour
They have the head of the woman from species – looks like her head tendrils are made fro. Intestine sheath or a single layer of snake skin. The props have that surprising quality
And detail so you get the iconic punch of seeing something that’s fantasy or so fantastical and the suddenly it’s there unexpected and much less distance (it’s not on the big screen out of reach).
I could joke that it feels like a proper narrativist moment where you feel the object call out to you to take on your destiny. (Like a positive version of the uncanny) the moment of recognition chancing on objects from your deep childhood is like waking up something long lost. It’s coming face to face with something archetypal and friendly at once. And at the same time this is really what Sci-films and one or two other genre seek to do (but in a super loaded way)
It’s curious how the alien-monster-robot changes the environment/condition of that future
As they may be the thing gone awry or the very (concentrated) manifestation of a corrupted system (dystopia)
They also have the robot from Interstellar!!! That was a good surprise. So the contrasts as much as anything are really cool. It’s not just the design (tech or period they were made in) but the politics/ideology of our times and the fantasy escapes/testing of different futures and the feeling and effect of each robot that works so well.
You only get tasters of film storyboards.
The setup is Like an art exhibit featuring many props from movies with placards to explain them. It’s in one giant curve Semi-circle so you walk in one direct.
There are a few interactive things and quite a lot of stuff. There’s lots and lots of sci-fi books on display. Early books. You get to see the design, front cover, very early stuff, most of it leather bound. You see very early paintings
For things like – the land that time forgot. Jules Vernes stuff. Feels almost from another genre. Then if moves on to 50s versions of that stuff, B Movie stuff. Then more contemporary versions. There’s quite a range
What’s good us there first the history. Chronological. So you see a progression then maybe even a regression – via the B Movies – but you then see how they’re dealing with mass audiences and just throwing masses of ideas around – to the point where it gets surreal (possibly knowingly). So in some 8 mm films you could buy and project at home – in those films it’s like a frenzy of ideas trying to out do the competition so there are so so many monster/creatures presumably battling each other like in some crazy wrestlemania -(I actually had friends in the mid eighties who had those projectors and it’s be an amazing treat for them to set it up, like Donald the Duck coming to meet you).
It a very well researched show. You’ll come away wanting to writing down and wanting to see a dozen films, books etc that you never heard of, either vital missing links or totally totally obscure but really fun in a bonkers way