In 1982, when Blade Runner first hit theaters, the American city was dying. Crime was up, the middle class had fled, and many of the nation’s major urban cores were dilapidated and derelict. That sense of urban decay — the notion that the city was somehow a lost prospect — was embedded and extrapolated in the movie, a science-fiction noir set in 2019 Los Angeles.

The movie’s futuristic city is dark and dreary, beset by permanent darkness and drizzling rain, hinting at a history of environmental calamities. Animals are mostly artificial, symbols of a natural world that has been lost to industrial blight, and healthy humans have decamped from the planet to unseen off-world colonies staffed by plentiful robot labor, hoping to start over. Those who remain on Earth are sickly, depressed, and desperate.

Blade Runner offers one of the densest and most richly detailed depictions of the future ever put on film; it’s an urban design statement as much a movie. And its vision is relentlessly bleak. It’s a movie about a future set in a city in which there is no future.

Yet the urban future it envisions is in some ways not too far from our own, and the reality turns out to be far less grim than what the movie projected. Despite its pessimism, the movie has helped define our own collective sense of what great urban environments should look like. It plays like a warning, but it helped invent the future as we know it today.

At the core of Blade Runner is a consideration of humanity’s relationship with the planet

To understand the strange appeal of Blade Runner’s quasi-dystopian future, it helps to know a little bit about the way the movie was conceived and designed.

Loosely based on oddball science fiction writer Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Blade Runner follows Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), a gruff detective type in the Humphrey Bogart mold who is pulled out of retirement to take down a group of escaped androids called replicants. This particular band of replicants are all advanced models that can pass for human, but are stronger, and in some cases more intelligent, than humans.

The movie, in other words, looks a lot like a sci-fi riff on the LA detective story — Raymond Chandler meets Isaac Asimov. The theatrical release version even included a hardboiled voiceover, added late in the editing process, in order to cement the connection.

But it’s much more than a simple genre mashup, and in some ways the detective story is the least interesting part of the film. Blade Runner is a big-budget mood piece, an existential tone poem about the precarious nature of humanity and its relationship to the planet, set in one of the most elaborately constructed and imagined futures ever put on film.

Watch any of Blade Runner’s street scenes, and it’s immediately apparent how much work went into creating its near-future Los Angeles. Director Ridley Scott’s shots are densely packed, nearly cluttered, with information: old cars outfitted with industrial odds and ends; flying vehicles with blinking monitors; graffiti-covered video payphones; storefronts with blaring neon signs competing for your attention; bands of strangely dressed people carrying umbrellas lit from the handles; video advertising, some of it vaguely menacing, plastered everywhere. Dirt and smog and steam coat everything.

There’s nearly as much audio information as there is visual detail: From the mixed-language slang spoken on the streets to the talking traffic systems and spoken advertisements blaring from blimp-born loudspeakers, Blade Runner’s streets are noisy urban collages.

The movie packs an incredible amount of detail into every frame, but what’s even more amazing are the details you don’t see. In Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner, author Paul M. Sammon writes about touring the set and finding tiny warnings engraved on the parking meters, and seeing newsstands packed with edgy magazines of the future, each with fully designed covers.

None of these laboriously constructed production elements are ever seen in close-up in the movie. Even the most attentive viewers would never know about them. They just exist in the background, adding to the accumulation of detail and suggesting a world that exists beyond the strict confines of the story and plot. Blade Runner’s Los Angeles feels lived in and used, like a place with a history. Like a well-developed character, it has its own life and backstory. It serves its own purpose. The movie has stayed relevant for so long in part because its world feels real in a way few science fiction films ever achieve.

Ridley Scott’s vision of the future blended the conceptual with the practical

Scott and his production team set out to cultivate that sense of layered, lived-in realism. Before he was a feature film director, Scott was trained as an artist and worked on television advertisements, and that commercial sensibility permeates the film. His idea of the future was that it wouldn’t look slick and shiny. Instead, it would be practical, a hodgepodge of recycled vintage fashions and contemporary ideas, all jumbled together and interconnected. He wanted it to look “authentic” rather than merely “speculative.”

During the film’s production, Scott was notoriously obsessive about creating that reality onscreen. “You’re going through a rather frightening process every time you make a design decision,” he told Sammon. “Whether it’s a television, or a bar, or the shoes a character will wear, it must be lumped in with everything else in the film. For better or for worse.”

Scott demanded the same level of attention from his crew. Sammon recounts a story told by the movie’s art director, David Snyder, during the building of Blade Runner’s elaborate street set — a re-dressing of a New York street set dubbed Ridleytown — Scott showed up to inspect the work. The team had worked for months to create the sort of dense, retrofitted industrial look that Scott had in mind, and they were already $1 million over budget. They thought they had done everything they could. Scott arrived, looked around, said, “It’s a great start,” then left them to figure out how to take his ideas even further. 

To help establish the film’s look, Scott hired Syd Mead, a “visual futurist” who had worked extensively with automobile manufacturers to develop concept vehicles. Mead’s job initially was just to design the movie’s cars, but he soon began to draw background environments along with the flying vehicles. Mead specialized in design work that was both innovative and practical; everything he designed for the movie was, if not quite workable, based on real-world engineering principles. He quickly became one of the film’s key visual influences.

What Scott and his team did with Blade Runner was create a future that was both stylistically plausible and reasonably realistic from an engineering perspective — a world that didn’t yet exist, but could. And now, in an unexpected way, it does.

Modern cities resemble sunnier versions of Blade Runner’s urban dystopia

Mead, importantly, was hopeful even as he worked on the film. “Despite the downbeat philosophical atmosphere permeating Blade Runner, I’m an optimist about the future,” he told Sammon.

Indeed, despite the pessimism that is so deeply embedded into its outlook, there is something darkly romantic about the way it depicts Los Angeles’s urban future.

It’s not just that Harrison Ford looks dashing in neo-noir future wear or that the lighting is always moody and perfect, as if the entire city had been converted into a sultry nightclub — though none of that hurts. It’s that Blade Runner presents its futuristic city as one that is overrun by the liveliness of mass humanity. Its bustling sci-fi cityscape is defined by diversity and walkability, by commerce and cultural mixing, by industrial ingenuity and panoramas of larger-than-life advertising. Even as the city is dying, it teems with the business of life.

The combination of realism and romanticism makes the movie’s 2019 Los Angeles a place you can imagine not only going to but wanting to visit.

And today, in a sense, you can: Walk through Midtown Manhattan and it’s hard not to see it as a better-lit cousin of Ridley Scott’s LA, packed with fascinating fashions and endless commerce, building-size advertisements and sizzling street food. (The movie’s LA was, after all, built out of a New York set.) It bustles with life and energy and industry. It’s Blade Runner, but without the darkness and depression. 

Urban centers have staged a comeback in the decades since 1982, and in the process, they have come to resemble sunnier versions of the gloomy urban landscape that Scott dreamed up. Yes, they are brighter and happier places, but they speak in the same visual language. In attempting to show us how cities would decay, the movie inadvertently ended up offering a reminder of many of the ways they are attractive and appealing.

Blade Runner, in other words, helped set our expectations for what cities should look like. And although it was far from a positive vision, it has, over time, become one.

I am not precisely sure when I lost the plot of Transformers: The Last Knight, but I think it was probably around the time that a drunk Merlin — yes, that Merlin, of the Knights of the Round Table — showed up at the ruins of an ancient spaceship and began pleading for help from a giant alien robot.

Merlin is somewhat mysteriously played by Stanley Tucci, who appeared in the franchise’s previous installment — 2014’s Transformers: Age of Extinction — but as a completely different character (the scheming technology executive Joshua Joyce). The wizard engages in a bit of comic monologuing, until the robot hands him a staff, which apparently allows him to control a three-headed robot dragon. The dragon emerges from a cave and swoops over the British hillside — it’s really quite pretty — ultimately joining an ancient battle, already in progress, to help the Knights of the Round Table defeat the Saxon army. There are a lot of fireballs and explosions and punishing subwoofer rumbles that seemed designed to test the strength of your kneecaps.

All of this happens in roughly the first five minutes of the movie, and the rest of the film makes about as much sense as the opening. Later on, there’s a fire-breathing baby dinosaur robot, and a bigger dinobot companion (left over from Age of Extinction) that has to be scolded, like a rogue puppy, for eating auto-junk. Steve Buscemi drops by to trade a few quips; he’s a robot, of course. So does franchise regular John Turturro, wearing silly shorts while watching over sun-bathing Transformers in Cuba, because, well, why not?

There’s also a comic-relief butler robot who assists Anthony Hopkins’s character, who turns out to be the last guardian of the legend of King Arthur. And somewhere in the middle of the film, Hopkins delivers a 15-minute-long monologue in which he reveals that Bumblebee, one of the franchise’s key Transformer characters, was actually a legendary World War II hero. There’s an evil Cybertronian sorceress-bot named Quintessa who can control other robots. Unrelated (I think), there is also a series of mechanical horns that were planted around the Earth before the continents separated. Somehow Stonehenge is involved.

After the opening sequence, I never quite recovered my sense of narrative balance, but I sort of enjoyed myself anyway, in part because I knew what to expect right from the start. The Last Knight doesn’t make any sense, but neither do any of the other Transformers films. The franchise is one giant, explosion-riddled mashup of wacky plot contrivances, dazzling special effects, and merchandising opportunities. It’s nonsense, sure, but it’s meticulously crafted, delightful nonsense that falls perfectly in line with both its roots in a line of robot toys and director Michael Bay’s extravagant sensibilities — and that’s part of its charm.

The Transformers films aptly capture the imaginative mindset of a child

“Magic does exist. It was found long ago — inside a crashed alien ship,” the disembodied voice of Anthony Hopkins says as Merlin stumbles upon his robot interlocutor, as if that explains anything.

But explanations are not what’s on order in The Last Knight. Indeed, the moments at which the film attempts to explain itself, to provide context or plot cues, are among its most incoherent. For example, Hopkins’s aforementioned extended monologue is supposed to explain the movie’s complex mytho-historical backstory, which dictates that the Knights of the Round Table were real, but also that they all relied on the aid of — you guessed it — giant sword-wielding robots.

What’s more, the whole thing is punctuated by a slew of pseudo-comic distractions and interruptions, including the appearance of an organ playing butler-bot, as if to make sure that viewers can’t possibly focus or concentrate for too long. I got the gist, which is essentially, Actually, the Transformers were a crucial part of the Knights of the Round Table. But I doubt I could explain much more.

With that said, I’m not sure it would make any difference if I could. Like most of the rest of Bay’s cars-and-robots franchise, The Last Knight dips in and out of history and legend, myth and nonsense, cynicism and silliness. It is not just impossible to follow; it comes across as intentionally designed to repel logical thought. It is a machine made to dampen thinking.

Even more than its predecessors, the film is a maelstrom of spectacle and sensation, a special effects–driven free-for-all that has somehow escaped the gravitational pull of traditional storytelling in favor of something more immediate and abstract, a kind of caffeinated nonsense cinema, designed to pleasure even as it pulverizes. At their best— or at least their most brutally effective — the Transformers films induce a form of audiovisual euphoria that seems to cast a spell over viewers, one that renders plot and narrative conventions useless. The Transformers movies speak to something deeper, something primordial, deep inside your mechanized lizard brain, the place where three-headed robot dragons live.

That’s fitting for a franchise that is, after all, based on a children’s cartoon designed primarily to sell a line of toys to preadolescent boys. For better or for worse, Bay has crafted a series of films that replicate the mindset of an 8-year-old kid playing alone in his room, letting his imagination run wild as he goes about inventing the most elaborate adventure he can think of. The films are both deeply focused and easily distracted. They are built around jokey comic relief and mindless violent conflict, as well as simple character relationships in which recognizable adult characteristics or responsibilities are entirely absent.

They possess deep mythological backstories, some of which are interlaced with real-world events, but they rarely make sense when considered for even a moment. They can be obnoxious and creatively scatological — if you’ve ever wished to see a giant robot car “urinate” on John Turturro, Michael Bay has your back — but for the most part, they are rather naive, and even innocent in their outlook on the world.

Bay’s Transformers films do not merely appeal to a childlike sensibility; they capture it, channel it, inhabit it. They are stunningly complex $200 million studio blockbusters that seem to have sprung directly from the sugar-addled fantasies of a particularly inspired child.

Michael Bay knows what he's doing; there’s clearly a method to the Transformers films’ madness

The Transformers films have grown more abstract over the years, less tethered to the mechanics of character and causality. And in the process, they have made their director’s intentions even more clear. 

The first movie, 2007’s Transformers, is the most coherent — and arguably the best — of the bunch. It’s a relatively conventional YA story about a young boy who gets a car that turns into a robot. But in the decade that’s passed since its release, the franchise has only grown stranger and more abstract.

The first sequel, 2009’s Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, revolves around a MacGuffin called the Matrix of Leadership and a machine that makes suns explode, which requires the matrix to work. It also involves secret cosmological signals being implanted in Shia LaBeouf’s brain, which can only be translated by John Turturro. Actually, that makes it sound more straightforward than it is. But if summarizing the movie’s plot is already difficult, trying to explain it is nigh impossible. Don’t believe me? Read this old FAQ, which attempts to break down what actually happens in the film and why — and ends up making painfully clear how disjointed it is.

The other sequels aren’t any more cogent. The third film in the franchise, 2011’s Transformers: Dark of the Moon, ties the Transformers movies to the moon landing, and includes a scene in which the evil Decepticons plan an attack while casually lounging around the monuments on the National Mall in Washington, DC.

And when giving an interview about the fourth film, Age of Extinction, screenwriter Ehren Kruger described it as “quasi experimental” and said that as a writer, “you start to make your peace with the idea that logical sense doesn’t have to be the be-all, end-all.” That film ends with an absolutely bonkers sequence in which a massive magnet sucks up all the metal vehicles in Hong Kong, and then Optimus Prime brandishes a sword and rides a robot dinosaur:

But the Transformers films’ nutso, erratic storytelling isn’t the result of Bay not knowing what he’s doing. His nonsense narratives and hyperactive editing are consistent stylistic choices. His smaller films — in particular, the smartly satirical criminal-bodybuilders film Pain & Gain­ — tend to be more narratively coherent. And he has been willing to toy with his own image as a filmmaker who puts “awesomeness” — usually in the form of explosions that escalate in both size and scope — above all else.

The careful attention Bay devotes to these trademark elements is apparent in The Last Knight; on several occasions, the film comes across as more than a little self-aware, piling on frenetic explosions and showdowns and special effects extravagance, deflating its own self-importance even as it builds it up. It never quite descends into self-parody, but it winks and nudges you, letting you know it knows exactly what it’s doing, even amidst the chaos.

There’s a sense that somehow Bay is in control, that he is orchestrating all of this for your delight, that he genuinely wants to entertain you, and is willing to work to do it. You didn’t really decide to see a Transformers movie for the plot, did you? Bay’s movies are expensive (but confident) bets that you did not. And they are bets that have consistently paid off. The first four films have earned more than $3.5 billion combined at the global box office.

The Transformers franchise’s whiff of organization among the chaos is also part of the secret to its charm: Michael Bay knows his movies are silly and ludicrous and deliriously nonsensical — and he wants you to know he knows too.

There’s a lot to love about the new Wonder Woman: It features a pair of leads with genuine chemistry who feel like real adults rather than adolescent fantasies. It manages to be serious and sometimes even dark without ever being grim or brooding. It has a functioning sense of humor. It is the first film in the DC Comics extended universe that does not come across as actively hostile toward its hero. All in all, it’s a refreshing change of pace from the conventions that have come to define the superhero movie generally — and a major improvement on the heavy-metal dirge that has so far defined the DCEU under Zack Snyder.

But there’s one super-movie trope that Wonder Woman doesn’t quite overcome: the noisy, bloated third act overstuffed with expensive but poorly rendered computer-generated special effects.

With its fire-lit nighttime color scheme, its clumsy bombast, and its weightless, slightly cartoony CGI, the climactic showdown between Wonder Woman and Ares, the God of War, feels like a hangover from the Zack Snyder era. It’s a tension-free exercise in digital effects overload, and in a movie that otherwise feels so grounded in both physical and emotional reality, the sequence comes across as jarringly disconnected from either. And a big part of the reason why is its over-reliance on the same sort of crummy CG that made the final battle against Doomsday in Batman v. Superman such a bore.

It’s not that computer-generated effects are always bad; in fact, many of the most memorable action scenes of the past 25 years show how it can be used well. But the trick is to use computer-generated effects sparingly and wisely — to accentuate and exaggerate physical reality, rather than to act as a substitute for it entirely.

Wonder Woman’s first action scene shows how to mix practical and CG effects

That’s not to say that all of Wonder Woman’s action scenes suffer from these problems. Indeed, it’s worth contrasting Wonder Woman’s final fight with the film’s first big action scene, which takes place on the island of Themyscira, where Diana — Wonder Woman’s real name — lives with her fellow Amazons. The opening battle does everything right that its finale does wrong.

The sequence starts when Diana rescues pilot Steve Trevor after his plane crashes in the water. It quickly becomes clear that Trevor, an American spy during World War I, is being pursued by hostile German forces. The Amazons and the Germans then battle it out on the beach.  

The most immediate difference here from the final battle is the lighting: The Themyscira scene takes place in the middle of a bright and sunny day, lit by overhead sun and a reflection that sparkles off the waves. But the scene also smartly and efficiently establishes the capabilities of the two sides: The Germans have guns and boats, while the Amazons have horses and swords, but the all-female band of Amazon warriors are also superhumanly powerful in a way that the mortal German men are not.

That’s where the CGI comes in. The scene follows bullets and arrows in time-dilated close-up as they fly across the battlefield, in order to highlight important moments in the fight. Director Patty Jenkins slows down time to show the Amazons in action as they leap, bound, and flip across the battlefield in ways that no human truly could. Some of it is wire-work, in which human actors are suspended on wires that are digitally removed in post-production, and some of it relies on computer-generated composites, with layers of images digitally stacked on top of each other and then tweaked by computer.

The backgrounds are enhanced as well, but the scene was shot on a real beach, with real sand, real water, and real seaside cliffs in the background. Jenkins uses computer-assisted effects to show what the Amazon bodies are capable of, and to demonstrate how powerful, agile, and graceful they are in comparison to the grubby German soldiers.

It’s a scene, in other words, that has clear stakes and a clear power-balance dynamic. And it’s built around the physicality of its participants and their relationship to the real, physical world, in which the CGI is designed to enhance that essential human physicality. (It doesn’t hurt that — as a scene in which powerful and noble women warriors slaughter brutish male soldiers, wiping out their engines of war — it helps to establish the movie’s theme early on.)

You can say the same about the mid-movie sequence in which Wonder Woman turns the tide of a battle in the trenches of World War I. Parts of the sequence, including portions of Wonder Woman’s sword, were created or modified in a computer. But it was also shot in dug-out trenches, with mud and dirt that give it a frisson of reality. These may not be the most memorable action scenes ever filmed, but compared to the finale, they are minor masterpieces.

Wonder Woman’s third-act showdown features two characters of indeterminate power. The specifics and limits of Wonder Woman’s powers are never firmly established, and the movie makes no attempt whatsoever to explain what, exactly, Ares is capable of, either: He shoots some sort of computer-generated energy from his hands, and he can also send chunks of runway and other large objects flying at his opponents. Almost everything you see in the finale, from the vehicles being tossed around to Ares’s electric-pulsing armor, was created or heavily modified inside a computer. As a result, the scene feels lifeless, flimsy, and more than a little tension-free.

CGI is better used to enhance than to create

It’s almost a stretch to describe Wonder Woman’s final battle as live-action filmmaking: It’s more of an animated scene with a few live-action elements layered on top. But big-budget action scenes, even those featuring impossible superheroics, almost always work better when it’s the other way around.

Think of something like the highway chase in The Matrix Reloaded. Although it’s not technically a superhero film, it’s an extended, computer-effects heavy scene in which super-powered characters leap between and fight on top of fast-moving vehicles. But to shoot it, the Wachowskis built an entire stretch of highway on an old California naval base. There’s a lot that’s digitally enhanced or even fully digitally created in that scene — some of the cars, for example, were inserted via computer — but it draws some of its impact from its baseline reality. The scene was shot on a real road, using a squad of real stunt cars, crashing and smashing in ways that reflect real-world materials and physics.

That’s true of many of the most memorable superhero action set pieces in recent years, as well. The big superhero face-off at the end of the second act of Captain America: Civil War is heavy on CG-wizardry, but the crew also spent days filming at Germany’s Leipzig/Halle airport, setting off real explosions. This year’s Wolverine sequel, Logan, was a smaller-scale effort that relied far less heavily on green-screen effects than many superhero films, but still built digital stunt doubles for its lead actors. For The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan — who is so wary of digital technology that he reportedly does not own a mobile phone or have an email address — flipped a real 18-wheeler in downtown Chicago. For the mid-air escape that opens The Dark Knight, Nolan dropped a full-sized airplane out of the sky.

But even a professed digital skeptic like Nolan admits that CG has its place. In a 2012 interview with the Directors Guild of America, he laid out his vision for balancing practical effects work with computer-generated enhancements:

The thing with computer-generated imagery is that it’s an incredibly powerful tool for making better visual effects. But I believe in an absolute difference between animation and photography. However sophisticated your computer-generated imagery is, if it’s been created from no physical elements and you haven’t shot anything, it’s going to feel like animation. … We try to enhance our stunt work and floor effects with extraordinary CGI tools like wire and rig removals. If you put a lot of time and effort into matching your original film elements, the kind of enhancements you can put into the frames can really trick the eye, offering results far beyond what was possible 20 years ago. The problem for me is if you don’t first shoot something with the camera on which to base the shot, the visual effect is going to stick out if the film you’re making has a realistic style or patina.”

It helps, of course, that Nolan’s foray into superhero films was with Batman, a more grounded hero who lacks traditional superpowers. And not every filmmaker needs go as far as Nolan to avoid digital effects. (It’s hard to imagine a Guardians of the Galaxy film, for example, without a significant amount of CGI.)  

But in its broad strokes, Nolan’s approach makes a useful guide to crafting exciting, grounded action scenes, superhero or otherwise. Modern superhero movies simply wouldn’t be possible without computer-generated effects. But it’s the blending of reality and hyper-reality — the connection and tension between the two — that makes a sequence exciting. Which means that you have to start with reality first.

For fans of serious science fiction, there aren’t too many options on TV these days. Despite this age of peak TV and the glut of original programming that has yielded some extremely popular genre series, including Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead, science fiction has struggled to find a foothold, and most of what exists is essentially contemporary in setting (think Westworld or Person of Interest).

For the kind of classic sci-fi built around spaceships and interplanetary relations, there’s really only one choice: The Expanse.

Fortunately, it’s a good choice. The series, which wraps up its second season on Syfy this week, was recently nominated for a Hugo Award — science fiction’s top honor — and even though its ratings are less than stellar, Syfy has renewed it for a third season.

A lavishly produced, politically complex drama about interplanetary rivalries as humans reach beyond the solar system, The Expanse is, by nearly any measure, one of the most ambitious science fiction shows ever made. But it also helps to illustrate why the genre has had such a difficult time flourishing on the small screen in recent years, and why it’s so hard to make great science fiction TV.

Science fiction is hard to produce well on a typical TV budget

The first obstacle any science fiction show has to reckon with is the budget. There’s a built-in visual appeal to most any science fiction world. From the sprawl of futuristic urban transportation systems to cramped spaceship interiors to the particulars of fashion, weaponry, and computing, most imaginary renderings of what the future will look like are inherently interesting. But typically, they’re also incredibly expensive to produce, because visualizing the future inevitably requires custom-built sets and props and complex computer-generated effects.

That makes science fiction a great fit for feature films, where it’s common for studio-backed sci-fi properties to spend well in excess of $100 million on a movie. For a two-hour film, that comes to nearly $1 million per minute of screen time. In contrast, few TV shows even come close to spending $100 million per season, and full-season budgets are often less than half of that: The production budget for Netflix’s Marvel comics shows is reportedly around $200 million for five seasons spread over 60 episodes, and the first 10-episode season of Westworld cost about $100 million. In any case, that money has to cover 10 or more hours of screen time. This means expensive sets and effects can only be used sparingly, if at all.

(This is a problem for fantasy series, too, of course. But fantasy at least has the advantage of being set in something that resembles the ancient past, which means producers can expect lots of scenes set in natural environments with nothing more expensive than a few horses and some sword props. Game of Thrones, one of the most lavish and expensive shows on TV, reportedly costs somewhere between $6 million and $10 million per episode.)

You can see this dynamic at work on The Expanse. Based on a series of books by James S.A. Corey, the pen name of authors Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, the show is set roughly 200 years in the future, after humans have colonized the solar system. There are three distinct factions — Earth, Mars, and the Belt, led by a loosely organized, quasi-terroristic Belters rights organization called the OPA (Outer Planets Alliance) — all of which are vying for political influence. The spaceship and settlement sets are impressive, but most are used repeatedly in order to wring maximum value out of each location. The show boasts consistently impressive special effects sequences, like the Martian power armor battle that opens the second season — but there’s also an awful lot of diplomacy and negotiation going on.

Much more than feature films, TV science fiction almost always has to be built around conversation rather than action set pieces or otherworldly visual spectacle. That’s not to say that space battles and shootouts are off limits entirely; but creating 10 or more hours of science fiction TV inevitably necessitates a lot of scenes of people standing around and talking to each other.

Science fiction TV has to explain everything from the ground up

That brings us to the next challenge for science fiction television: It has to explain almost everything. A contemporary show, or one set in the recent past, can take an awful lot for granted — everything from how governments work to what the characters eat to how people get around. All of this material is assumed when a show is set in the same world that viewers live in every day. 

A future-set show like The Expanse, on the other hand, has to explain everything: how people living in space get access to air, food, and water, how the economy works, and what sort of governments are in power.

The show’s three-way power struggle drives much of its story, which means that the complex political dynamics between Earth, Mars, and the Belt have to be explained. The show’s politics are pretty fascinating; as Tufts University professor Daniel Drezner recently wrote at the Washington Post, it might be the best show about international relations on TV right now. But it’s still a heavy storytelling lift.

Beyond politics, The Expanse also has to work through basic questions about the nature of physics and technology. For example, the story requires characters to move throughout the solar system far faster than any currently known technology would permit, so a subplot in one episode this season was devoted to dramatizing the invention of the “Epstein Drive,” a propulsion system that allows for ultra-fast travel without gravity-related side effects that would otherwise turn a body into mush.

Even basic modes of communication like accents and body language are potentially unmoored from the everyday expectations of a typical viewer. The Expanse’s Belters speak in a jargon-heavy, accented slang, and although it’s downplayed somewhat in the TV show relative to the books, they often communicate via large arm gestures, which Belter culture developed because they spent much of their lives in spacesuits that made facial expressions difficult to read. To account for this, the producers hired a choreographer who, according to executive producer Mark Fergus, “developed a comprehensive video-dictionary of Belter hand-speak for the actors and producers.”

In novels, these sorts of in-world mechanisms can be explained directly to readers by the author or the narrator. In a science fiction TV series, all of this information — cultural, physical, political, and economic assumptions that would otherwise go unspoken and unquestioned — has to be built from the ground up and clearly communicated to the viewer without getting bogged down in clunky exposition. It has to be dramatized, frequently in scenes involving characters who already know what’s going on and wouldn’t naturally explain it to each other. And it has to do all of this in addition to fulfilling the requirement of any good scripted show: to tell an engaging story with compelling and believable characters.

The Expanse had the advantage of a preestablished world to fill out

On The Expanse, you can feel the producers straining against these challenges, and there are times when the seams start to show. Some of the space station interiors feel slightly underpopulated, as if the show couldn’t quite afford to fill out the big living spaces. The insides of the various spaceships and space-based habitats all seem to work from similar design concepts, as if imagined by a single designer. Some of the dialogue verges on being expository, and yet the nuances of the series’ three-way politics still may not always be clear to those who haven’t also read the books.

Overall, though, The Expanse handles these challenges exceptionally well, balancing political backstory, technical details, and cultural world building with a broad cast of well-developed characters and a sprawling narrative about a solar system–wide fight for resources and power.

The show’s handling of space travel may be the most impressive thing about it: There’s no artificial gravity, and spaceships have to fly plausible trajectories that account for the gravitational pull of planets. It’s a series that takes the technical challenges of life in space seriously. And it does it all this within the confines of a television budget, while managing to be one of the coolest looking shows on TV.

One reason it all works so effectively is that The Expanse’s world was largely built before it was developed into a story. According to Ty Franck, one of the writers behind the books and an executive producer on the show, The Expanse began as a pitch for a massive online role-playing game, which never came to fruition and was eventually converted into a homemade tabletop RPG. Franck’s co-author, Daniel Abraham, was one of the players. 

“After about the third session,” Franck recently told Glixel, “[Abraham] kept looking at my giant notebook, and he would say things like, ‘Since every company out here in the Belt has their own scrip, what does the economy look like? How does the money exchange work?’ So I would explain it to him and he would say, ‘If we’re in these rock tunnels, wouldn’t the rocks be really cold? What do the tunnels look like?’ I would explain that to him, and he saw that it was all in my book, and finally he said, ‘You’ve done all the world-building that people do for novels. Why don’t we just write a novel out of this?’ I was like, ‘Yeah sure.’”

In other words, The Expanse’s writers aren’t just making up the world as they go, adding convenient technologies on the spot. Instead, they’re populating a complex preexisting world with people and conflicts, rather like a more conventional show in a contemporary setting.

That may be the biggest reason  The Expanse is so effective at solving the challenges of sci-fi television: It doesn’t always act like a science fiction series that has to laboriously explain itself to its viewers. Because it’s working from a fully fleshed-out world, it can do what shows set in our own time do and assume a degree of familiarity with how everything works. The characters on The Expanse all know how their world operates already, and that allows the audience to extrapolate on their own.

The Expanse obviously is not a contemporary show, but in many ways it functions like one, allowing it to develop its world without working too hard to justify it. Thus, it doesn’t just reveal the challenges of making great science fiction television — it also shows how to solve them. 

When The Fast and the Furious opened in the summer of 2001, few would have predicted that it would launch one of Hollywood’s biggest franchises. A modestly budgeted action picture built around urban street racing culture that borrowed heavily from Point Break, the film turned into a surprise hit, earning a total of $207 million at the box office, with about $144 million coming from domestic ticket sales, on a $38 million production budget.

Sixteen years later, the series has become more of a behemoth than even that initial success would have suggested. The latest two entries, Fast & Furious 6 and Furious 7,  boasted production budgets bigger than the first film’s total domestic earnings, clocking in at $160 million and $190 million, respectively. The series is now one of Hollywood’s most reliable moneymakers: The most recent, Furious 7, made $1.5 billion at the global box office by itself — the vast majority from foreign sources — and expectations for this week’s installment, The Fate of the Furious, are similar.

As the series has grown in scope, so have its signature car-themed action sequences, the small-scale street racing of the original giving way to increasingly epic and implausible vehicular spectacles that have defined the franchise and helped cement its international appeal.

At this point, you can trace the evolution of both the franchise and Hollywood’s business model through the progression of the series’ action sequences — and see the trade-offs that moviemakers have made as their audience goes global.

The modest origins of The Fast and the Furious

When the series began, it was working with a relatively modest budget, and it was targeted at a mostly American audience: young men steeped in, or at least aware of, contemporary car modding and street racing culture. And the action scenes reflected that.

The first Fast & Furious movie opens with a night racing sequence that sets the tone for the entire movie. It’s set on the streets of Los Angeles, where modern day hot-rodders have gathered for an illegal street race. The opening moments, before the cars take off, emphasize the community aspect of the race and offer a glamorized depiction of the culture and the participants — which is to say, a flattering view of the target audience.

It also offers a similarly flattering view of the objects of their obsession, their souped-up, home-modded cars. In this scene and throughout the movie, the cars are polished and brightly colored so that they stand out in the frame. While they idle at the starting line, director Rob Cohen cuts in for a close-up of the tailpipes spitting fire as the vehicles prepare to cross the starting line. Once the race begins, he cuts in to shots of gears being shifted and pedals being pressed, glancing at the ever-so-serious faces of the drivers as they make their moves.

From there, Cohen takes us inside the cars themselves, tracking their inner workings as they burst off the line. These shots rely on computer-generated effects to take viewers inside the vehicle in order to emphasize the vehicle’s power and performance. This sequence, and in some sense the entire movie, is about fetishizing hardware.

As the race continues, the scene takes some impressionistic turns, showing, for example, the warped view of a city street from the perspective of a driver going 140 miles per hour. But the cars themselves operate in a way that is essentially carlike, doing the sorts of things that viewers understand cars can actually do. It’s not documentary-real, but it’s more or less grounded in a sense of traditional physical reality, and the scene itself is set in a place designed evoke a real culture and a real place.

The same goes for a climactic chase sequence that pits the film’s two street racing leads, Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) and Brian O’Conner (Paul Walker), against a pair of bikers who have just taken out a member of Toretto’s crew.

Once again, the scene is not strictly realistic — you don’t often encounter hot rods chasing automatic-weapon-toting bikers through a major urban area — but it seems more or less aware of the laws of physics, and generally willing to abide by them. The impetus for the scene, meanwhile, is a drive-by shooting that bears at least some small likeness to real-life urban gang warfare, albeit with more than a touch of Hollywood melodrama.

The film and its action scenes, in other words, were set in a particular place, among a particular group of people, in a world that resembled, at least in some basic fashion, our own.

Hollywood’s business model changes — and so does the series

For most of its existence, that’s what Hollywood films, more often than not, were like. Yes, there were exceptions, but even a wildly fanciful production like, say, The Wizard of Oz was still framed by the experience of life on a farm in Kansas. There were limitations, as well: Because the target audience was domestic, that meant most of its characters — in particular its protagonists — were too. 

But over the past decade and a half, as foreign box office returns have become increasingly important to movie studio bottom lines, that’s started to change. Studios are making fewer films but with bigger budgets, and that means those films must appeal broadly across the globe. In 2015, about 73 percent of total studio box office revenues were generated internationally, up from 66 percent in 2010.

So a franchise like Fast & Furious, which was built on appealing to a relatively specific American youth culture, has had to evolve as well. And that’s exactly what it did.

After the series’ fourth film, which featured the return of Diesel and other core cast members, outperformed box office expectations, director Justin Lin — who oversaw the third through sixth films — was given license to essentially reboot the series. Starting with the fifth installment, Fast Five, he converted the franchise from one about American street racing into a series of globe-trotting action-heist films — sort of Ocean’s 11, but with a more youthful international cast.

The cars stayed front and center, but no longer did the series dwell on shiny muscle car components. Instead, Lin gave the cars superpowers, allowing them to leap through the air and rush across highways in ways that abandoned all pretense of obeying physical reality.

Fast Five offers a brief nod to the original film with a friendly quarter-mile street race between several of the main characters, but it’s a tribute rather than the main event. That comes in the finale, which features Toretto and O’Conner tandem-driving a pair of rally cars attached to a dumpster-size safe through the bowels of Rio de Janeiro.

The sequence is a joyous riot of speed and impact, completely and unapologetically unbound from any real-world understanding of how cars actually work. It’s an absolute blast, and it’s the moment when the series found its new calling: over-the-top vehicular action that treats the laws of gravity and engine mechanics as trifles to be ignored.

The next installment, Fast & Furious 6, took this mission even further. It features, among other things, a highway sequence pitting the car-driving Furious crew against a tank, and a seemingly endless finale in which they chase down a cargo plane as it tries to take off from an airplane runway.

These sequences rely heavily on computer-generated imagery and assistance — but instead of taking us inside the workings of the cars, as in the first film, the digital effects work is used to free the vehicles from the limitations of earthbound physics.

Part of the reason these sequences work so well is the enthusiasm with which Lin stages them. There’s an infectious sense of delight to these scenes, a giddiness that helps sell the big moments — not despite but because of their sheer outlandishness. They’re creative and clever, designed by someone truly invested in the work. Watching Lin’s action sequences is like watching what would happen if someone devoted $150 million to bringing a child’s Hot Wheels fantasies to life.

After Lin’s departure, the series got, if anything, even more over the top. In Furious 7, directed by James Wan, there’s a mid-movie set piece in which cars are dropped onto an Azerbaijani mountaintop via parachute. The second act closes after Toretto and O’Conner jump a supercar between buildings at the Etihad Towers in Abu Dhabi.

And there’s no sign that The Fate of the Furious, directed by F. Gary Gray, will be any different: One trailer ends with Dom jumping a muscle car over a submarine as it rises through a sheet of ice.

Since the fifth film, the series has managed to sell these outlandish moments by essentially refusing to acknowledge any meaningful limits on what the characters and their cars can do. Sure, they might offer a sort of knowing, you-gotta-be-kidding disbelief when the various mission parameters are explained, or exclaim in happiness after pulling off a particularly spectacular stunt. But none of them ever seriously question whether what they’re doing is possible. They don’t need to. They’re living in a world where it’s not really a question. Physical reality is not an afterthought in the Furious films — it simply doesn’t exist.

The franchise’s evolution shows the trade-offs made in a global movie market

That’s because the later installments of the Furious films don’t take place in the real world or anything like it. Instead, they exist in a borderless fantasy world where places are merely scenic backdrops and props, settings designed to give the digitally enhanced vehicle action scale and texture. Just as the original Fast and the Furious flattered its relatively target audience with glamorous fantasies of street racing culture, the reinvented series flatters its target audience with glamorous depictions of international hot spots and scenery. The difference is that now the target audience is everyone.

The franchise’s global reach has made it bigger and in many ways better: Its casting is broader and more inclusive, its locations are more sprawling and varied, its action scenes are grander and more epic. Overall, there’s no question I prefer the more recent films to the one that kicked off the franchise in 2001.

And yet, compared with where the series began, the world in which these movies now take place feels less real, because it’s less grounded in anything I recognize. It’s featureless and nonspecific, with all the character and cultural particularity of a comfortable airport lounge.

Spectacle for specificity: This is the trade-off that Hollywood studios have increasingly chosen to make with their global mega-blockbusters, and few franchises demonstrate that choice more clearly than Fast & Furious.

It’s a trade-off that those of us in the audience have to accept as well. I’ll take the tanks and the submarines, the tower jumps and the parachutes, and I’ll enjoy them, a lot. But a small part of me will also miss the days when a movie about street racing cars featured cars that acted like cars.

In preparation for the new live-action Ghost in the Shell movie, I recently returned to the 1995 anime film on which it’s based, and I couldn’t help but think of two things: The Matrix, and philosopher Daniel Dennett.

The link to The Matrix is obvious enough. Before making that movie, the Wachowskis showed Ghost in the Shell to producer Joel Silver as an example of what they wanted to accomplish with their non-animated action sequences. It’s not an adaptation, but The Matrix ended up borrowing heavily from both the structure and visuals of Ghost in the Shell.

As for Dennett, the movie dwells on many of the same questions and ideas about the nature of consciousness with which Dennett, a philosopher and cognitive scientist at Tufts University, has spent the better part of his career engaging. As a recent New Yorker profile of Dennett notes, he believes that consciousness is “something like the product of multiple, layered computer programs running on the hardware of the brain.” It’s an evolutionary process, purely physical in nature, in which sensory information and other biological functions combine and grow correspondingly more complex over time. There’s no mystery — just complexity.

The anime Ghost in the Shell finishes with a protracted shootout against a giant robot tank that looks like a spider — but the true climax is a lengthy monologue in which the villain, a sentient computer program, explains how he unexpectedly gained self-awareness, and laments the lack of basic life systems like death and reproduction. He finishes the speech by asking the movie’s protagonist, the cybernetically enhanced security officer Major Kusanagi, to merge with him, allowing for an evolutionary procreation. It’s a Dennett-esque foray into both the emergence of the self and its evolutionary perpetuation.

These are the sorts of consciousness-expanding questions that have animated the Ghost in the Shell franchise for more than two decades. The world of Ghost in the Shell is part futuristic action movie and part philosophy lecture, in which artfully constructed animated action sequences serve as vehicles for investigations into the nature of consciousness. It’s a showcase for what top-notch animation can do — one that the new movie never quite manages to match.

By positing a world in which people merge with machines, Ghost in the Shell examines what makes us fundamentally human

The Ghost in the Shell franchise began as a Japanese manga series in the late 1980s, but it was the 1995 movie that built its international reputation.

The film arrived at a time when anime was gaining global reach, and it highlighted the form’s strengths: richly detailed art, high-concept sci-fi world building, stunningly executed action sequences, and a willingness to deal in both adult themes and content.

For many, including me, Ghost in the Shell was a gateway to the wider world of Japanese animation, one that blended the appeal of comic books, movies, and science fiction — in particular, the sort of noir-tinged cyberpunk that Western writers like William Gibson had popularized in the 1980s.

The film introduced the characters and ideas that would become the foundation for the franchise. Those characters included the franchise’s protagonist, Major Kusanagi, a human-machine hybrid whose construction is shown during the film’s opening credits, and her colleagues Batou, a gruff, tough cyborg with enhanced eyes and a shock of white hair, and Togusa, a newbie officer who is probably the closest thing the movie offers to an audience surrogate. They all work for Section 9, a shadowy government security agency run by the aging Chief Aramaki, another character who would recur throughout the series. The story follows Section 9’s pursuit of a mysterious hacker known as the Puppet Master who, in a world of computer-enhanced individuals, can hack humans as well as machines.

Director Mamoru Oshii wanted a movie that portrayed the “influence and power of computers” by looking at how that influence and power might evolve over time, and the film posits a near future in which humans have begun to merge with machines. Limbs are upgraded with weaponry and other special functions; eyes are replaced with powerful computer-enhanced sensors; minds and memories are expanded via external storage technology.

The inevitable question that arises from all this, of course, is how much artificial enhancement and replacement can a person undergo and still remain fundamentally human?

That’s where the concept of the “ghost” comes in. A ghost is a person’s deep self, his or her essence, which remains intact even as one’s physical body becomes more and more integrated with computers and machines. The name is a reference to philosopher Arthur Koestler’s 1967 book The Ghost in the Machine, a treatise on the nature of consciousness whose title was borrowed from another philosopher, Gilbert Ryle, who coined the phrase to describe the notion of consciousness as somehow apart and separate from biological processes.

Koestler’s book took up the notion that humanity’s existence might have been a mistake, an evolutionary error, and dealt with humanity’s propensity to violence and awareness of the inevitability of death — all ideas that would come into play, in various ways, throughout Ghost in the Shell’s story.

This thematic richness would come to define the franchise — and occasionally weigh it down, especially under Oshii. His 2004 sequel, Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, is, in theory, another action-noir in which Batou and Togusa, now partners, investigate a series of murders involving robotic geishas that have been implanted with humanlike artificial intelligence. 

If anything, the Ghost in the Shell sequel is even more densely packed with philosophical references than the original: The film’s questioning, ponderous dialogue name-checks French philosopher René Descartes and John Milton, among others, and includes scenes in which robot replicas of the two detectives spout lines like, “The 15th century man-as-machine theory has been resurrected by cyberbrains.”

In an action scene near the end, the script winks at its own proclivities when Batou, facing an army of killer geisha-bots, grumbles, “Look, this ain’t the time to get philosophical — I’m running low on ammo here.” In the world of Ghost in the Shell, though, it’s always time to get philosophical.

The sprawling Ghost in the Shell franchise is linked by a commitment to science fiction world building and philosophical inquiry

It’s not necessary to catch every academic reference to enjoy the Ghost in the Shell series. The action sequences are reliably inventive and thrillingly staged, with blocking that is better choreographed than many live-action films. The animation by Production IG, one of Japan’s most accomplished animation houses (if you’ve seen the animated sequence from Kill Bill, you’ve seen their work), is consistently stunning, particularly in the way it blends environmental details. New Port City, the fictional Asian city where the series is set, is based partially on Hong Kong, and with its mix of grime and tech, modern mega-architecture, and busy street markets, it has the feel of a real place. It’s an aging metropolis built up in layers, over time, the urban counterpart to Dennett’s theory of consciousness.

The technology, too, is intricate and fascinating: Robotically enhanced bodies expand and reshape themselves, revealing fingers made for ultra-fast typing and eyes that jack into digital sensor arrays. The design work is busy and functional, almost industrial at times, as if designed for use rather than stylishness. Watching the series today, some of the choices can come across as a bit strange, in particular the reliance on bundles of wires for connectivity. But that’s part of the series’ charm: Even in more recent incarnations, it’s a vision of a future that is, in some sense, a perpetual extension of the technology of 1995.

Those later incarnations include the TV series Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, which ran for two seasons starting in 2002. Written and directed by Kenji Kamiyama, the show was an extension of the first film that also featured the Major, Batou, Togusa, and Aramaki. Although it was more of a traditional sci-fi action procedural than the film that inspired it, it nonetheless dealt in similar concepts and questions about computer networks, identity, consciousness, and reality. The first season sent the team on the trail of another mysterious hacker, the Laughing Man, while the second pitted them against a terrorist group called the Individual Eleven, which spread a virus through the posting of a fake terrorist manifesto. (Both seasons were also recut and re-edited into feature-length movies titled The Laughing Man and Individual Eleven, respectively, that focused more narrowly on the season-long plot arcs.)

More recently, the franchise has been essentially rebooted in a series dubbed Ghost in the Shell: Arise, a sequence of five original video animations (essentially hour-long mini movies) that were later recut into a 10-episode TV series, and which connected with the feature-length 2015 film Ghost in the Shell: The New Movie. Arise takes place in an alternate continuity but has many of the same elements as the rest of the franchise, including the main cast of characters (albeit with new designs) and animation by Production IG.

What links all the various iterations is a commitment to science fiction world building and philosophical inquiry. At every turn, the series offers a reminder that animation can do more than comedy and kid stuff — the realm in which it is most often found in the United States — and that at its best, it’s also capable of ideas and action, drama and intellectual engagement, mind-blowing imagery and stories to match.  

Sadly, the big-budget, live-action reboot doesn’t live up to its animated predecessors. Sure, it’s a visual marvel, often faithfully replicating key scenes and images from the original film, and sure, there’s still a lot of talk about ghosts and souls and what it means to be a human. But the characters themselves are all empty husks — there’s not a single identifiable personality in the film — and both the visuals and the dialogue lack the deeper context of the original. The search for the idea of a soul has been streamlined and Westernized into a simple quest for individual identity and memory.

The result is a movie that’s all borrowed parts, with no depth or connection. The layers never quite come together to form something more. It wants to be a movie about the search for consciousness, but, unlike its source material, it doesn’t have a soul.