We engage ourselves in the fictional space the film creates for
us. The more we ‘lose ourselves' in the fiction, the further we
choose to enter this altered reality in a way psychologically
similar to the way Neo entered his new reality, Douglas Hall
and Jane Fuller enter simulated worlds in The Thirteenth
Floor, or the way Allegra Geller and Ted Pikul enter the
simulated game world of eXistenZ (Irwin, 2002: 179).
In creative terms, fiction is defined in opposition to reality,
designating all those productions with a content that does not directly
correspond to the empirical reality of the world. SF is a composed and
opposed concept, because science refers to the set of knowledge subject to
experimentation, arrangement and verification but fiction, on the other
hand, evokes invention, the ‘no-existence state’. SF, from this point of view,
constitutes a step forward in the idea of transgressing reality, transforming it
into something credible. And to make this possible the unconditional and
(un)conscious collaboration of the spectator is essential.
SF has used its diversity and flexibility to absorb ideas from other
domains and genres to keep the genre alive for more than a century (King,
2000: 3). Films like The Matrix are SF productions that contain elements of
other genres such as the martial arts film, the western and the thriller. SF
cinema manages to amalgamate the subjective point of view of the artist who
creates the story with the objectivity of science and, as a result, it creates a
scientific perception of the future observed from the subjective position of
the director. SF shows, in this way, the possible changes that will occur in a
hypothetical future from a credible point of view, telling us (sometimes
pessimistically) how things will be if we follow a certain direction and
thereby highlighting our present fears and anxieties. However, SF cinema
does not only display the contradictions of the system; it also makes clear
that the world in which we live is not the only possible one, but simply a set
of social and human relationships that is one amongst many possibilities.
Like myths, the main tool used by SF to reflect the problems of our
society is to project them into a different world or a distant future where we
can see, reflected with more objectivity, these problems of our society far
from the location and time where we live. Today these problems are mainly
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