This is, of course, just our opinion, and feel free to disagree in comments. We went back and forth about several of these films, and there were a few others that we almost included instead, so we're not claiming infallibility here. If you want to view this in non-gallery format, click here, and I promise it'll work.

Pitch Black. This is nearly the perfect movie — a gritty anti-hero with weird eyes that can see in the dark is on a prison ship, which crashes on an alien planet. The lurking monsters are ominous and alarming, but the film's real mystery is Riddick himself — the Furyan inspires loathing, hero-worship and a desperate longing for the anti-hero to become a hero by the movie's end. Like Riddick's own eyes, our view of him only really works when we see him through total darkness.

Avatar. I'm going to post my review of this film in a few days, closer to its actual release date. But this is definitely one of the decade's most significant science-fiction films, both in its startling new look and in its elaborate alien world. Sigourney Weaver is one of the few heroic scientists we've seen in movies lately, and she fearlessly spouts facts about the science of Pandora. Avatar is by no means a perfect movie — it's a frustrating mixture of brilliance and utter cheese — but it's clearly an important movie in science-fiction history.

Slither. This movie sort of slid (I'm tempted to say slithered) under the radar, but it's one of the great all-time alien possession movies, and a brilliant metaphor for being trapped in a bad marriage. An alien parasite lands in a small town and takes over a woman's awful husband — and then it starts infecting everyone else in town, so that they all speak with the husband's voice. Wherever the wife goes, she hears her husband talking to her. And then people start getting grotesquely pregnant with alien offspring — this sort of thing is really why body horror was invented.

Star Trek. A young hero reluctantly starts to claim his true destined greatness... only to find out that his whole life has been altered, and maybe wrecked, by time-traveling, tattooed maniacs from the future. It's a weird spin on a Star Trek movie, but considering how hard it was to imagine being thrilled by another Trek after Nemesis, this film is a marvel. Plot holes, frat-boy antics, "red matter" and all, it's still the film that recharged Star Trek and may have helped bring back space-opera as a genre. And Spock has never been so... fascinating.

Donnie Darko has garnered an enduring cult fan base, for good reason. Its blend of mysicism and weird physics has aged amazingly well, and we still get lost in its "tangent universes." We keep hoping Richard Kelly will make another film that's both as mind-blowing and as well-constructed as this one.

Robot Stories. Another great movie that didn't get enough props when it came out. Greg Pak, who went on to write the Planet Hulk storyline for Marvel Comics, creates an anthology of three stories about robots that show how much robots are connected to our emotional lives — and what will happen when robots get emotions. In one story, two office robots fall in love, only to find that robot love is forbidden. In another story, a mother becomes determined to help her dying son amass the perfect collection of robot action figures — at any cost, even stealing. You'll see robots in a whole new light after watching this film.

Spider-Man 2. There were a number of superhero films that managed to bring the greatness of comics' storylines to life in the first half of the decade, including two X-Men movies and two Spider-Man movies. For my money, though, this is the best of the bunch, particularly because of Alfred Molina's Doc Octopus. Peter Parker's superpowered angst collides with Doc Octopus' cyborg identity crisis, and both hero and villain seem to be clinging to their identities by a thread. Even though we wish Peter Parker could keep his damn mask on, it's still thrilling and maybe the most perfect straight-up superhero movie of all.

Sleep Dealer. Alex Rivera's look at the dark side of telecommuting is one of the most memorable and intense films we've seen lately. In the future, everything depends on the dollar — you can't even access water reservoirs in Mexico or speak to your family in another town without feeding dollars into a slot. And the only way to get dollars is to get cyber nodes all over your body, allowing your nervous system to pilot machines in the United States. That way the U.S. can import Mexican labor without bringing in actual Mexicans. It's beautifully filmed and harrowing look at the ultimate form of alienated labor.

The Incredibles. The other great straight-up superhero was one of several Pixar films that we wanted to pay tribute to from the past decade. If you were as disappointed as we were by the two Fantastic Four films, then rejoice that this film does the FF right. A surprisingly light-hearted look at super-mutants in a world that learns to fear them, this movie does a better job of portraying what makes superhero comics so awesome than almost any live-action film. And we love the Omnidroid.

The Host. Sorry, Cloverfield — this was the monster-rampage movie we loved from the past few years. Unlike Clovey, the Host actually has a decent if snarky origin story, including weird chemicals dropped in the water by a callous American, causing one of the local creatures to get a little too big (and rambunctious) for comfort. More than almost any other monster movie, this film sucks us into caring about its main characters, a hapless family who operate a failing fast-food stand on the beach — we laugh at their antics and then get hopelessly, tragically, wound up in their fate when they tangle with the monster. Rob and Hud just don't quite measure up.

28 Days Later. Purists may hate this film's "fast zombies," but they're not even really zombies — they're the victims of a "rage" virus that stupid animal-rights activists cause to be released onto an unsuspecting world. Of all the apocalyptic scenarios we've seen in the past decade, 28 Days provides the best dose of terror and the sheer horror of society unraveling. When Christopher Eccleston's vicious soldier says the words, "I promised them women," your gut sinks. And the idea that the rage-virus outbreak will cure itself because the quasi-zombies will starve is genuinely clever. We were tempted to include Danny Boyle's other great SF film of the decade, Sunshine, but 28 Days is clearly better.

Paprika. A parade of nonsense images stomps through a man's dreams, forcing him to jump out a window... and it's just the beginning of the mayhem as the dream world collides with reality, in Satoshi Kon's weird exploration of dreams and their potential to tear our world apart. A machine that allows you to enter someone's dreams therapeutically gets stolen, and soon reality itself is being torn apart. Trippy, insane and mind-expanding, this is a film you need to watch more than once.

Primer. Speaking of films you need to watch more than once... few, if any, science-fiction movies talk down to their audiences less than this one. You don't even realize, for a good chunk of the movie, that the geeky characters are building a time machine. and it comes with very realistic and fascinating limitations, even as it allows the main characters to cross their own timelines over and over again, rewriting history in more and more psychotic ways. The walkman scene makes the whole thing worthwhile, just by itself.

Moon. It's interesting how many of the great science-fiction movies of the past decade are about loneliness, one way or the other — but none of them delve into isolation as hauntingly as Duncan Jones' debut feature. Sam Rockwell is amazing as the two versions of Sam Bell, who's tantalizingly close to finishing out his contract on a lunary mining station — until he finds out that things aren't ever what they seem. Add paranoia to the list of things this film does better than almost any other.

Iron Man. As we wrote when this film came out, it's actually more of a cyborg narrative than a superhero one. Jon Favreau and company wisely chose to focus on the heart of Tony Stark's origin — literally, the fusion reactor that keeps his heart from stopping, and turns him into a part-machine badass whose armor is just a shell that goes over his cybernetic body. Tony Stark's uneasy relationship with the military technology that he created parallels his unease with his new technological body — he's like the heroic flipside of Spider-Man 2's Doctor Octopus. And yes, any movie that talks about our dependence on, and unease with, technology automatically gets to leap over the pile of by-the-numbers superhero films.

The Dark Knight. See here for our argument as to why this film really is science fiction. Shorter version: Batman's fantastical technology is at the heart of the story. If Batman Begins showed how Bruce Wayne used technology to become Gotham's fearsome crime-fighter, then The Dark Knight is about how far he's willing to take that approach in the face of a mad bomber.

District 9. Most science-fiction movies, you come out of furiously debating the science or the finer points of the storyline... but this one, people walked out of speechless and shellshocked. Perhaps the ultimate "humans oppress aliens" movie, this film confronts us with a perfect allegory of our own inhumanity, through the story of a crashlanded group of aliens who are forced into shantytowns. Even before the main character, Wikus, starts turning into one of the aliens, our loyalties are getting more and more divided.

Wall-E. The other Pixar movie we couldn't help including on the list, this may have been the greatest blend of post-apocalyptic dystopia and cute robots. The love between Wall-E and Eve is both lovable and genuinely moving, and the trademark Pixar humor is in full effect with Wall-E's junkyard slapstick and spaceship antics. The funniest, and maybe the best, robot uprising we've ever seen.

Serenity. Just pretend for a second that this wasn't the continuation of a beloved TV series, and that Joss Whedon had created a whole new universe from scratch just for this film — it would still be one of the most audacious, most memorable, science-fiction films of all time. The story of the Alliance, which maintains a tenuous grip on a sprawling star system after a brutal civil war, and the lengths to which the Alliance will go to try and make people "better," Serenity is one of the great action-adventure films as well as one of the neatest SF concepts ever. When you discover the secrets of Miranda and see how River Tam becomes both the messenger and the avenger of Miranda's people, it's hard not to jump up and down in your seat.

Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind. How far are you willing to go to get over a lost love? Are you willing to injure yourself — by erasing a huge chunk of your brief time on this planet from your own mind — just to get back at your former lover? This Charlie Kaufman/Michel Gondry joint does what all the best science fiction does: it creates a fictional technology that has the potential to change who we are as people, and then it uses it to tell a deeply personal story. The scenes where Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet are wandering through Carrey's childhood memories are both unsettling and poignant, as Carrey tries to hold on to the love he was in the process of throwing away — by letting her into more of his mind.

Futurama, "Parasites Lost"

Fry eats a dodgy egg-salad sandwich at a spaceship rest area, and the eggs hatch into tons of worms, who form a whole worm society inside Fry's bowels. So the Planet Express crew has to copy themselves into tiny little worm-sized robots, which they can control with their brains — so the robots can travel inside Fry's innards while the actual people (and robot, in Bender's case) controlling them remain safe and normal-sized.

Mobile Suit Gundam and Gundam Wing
The Wing Zero and Gundam Epyon suits included the ZERO (Zoning & Emotional Range Omitted) system, connecting to the pilot's brain via neural interface and giving the pilot real-time strategic data, and eliminating all pesky doubts. The system has one major flaw: the pilot tends to "hallucinate" the possible paths the suit can take, causing temporary insanity unless your mind is strong enough. Here's a battle between Gundam Wing Zero and Gundam Epyon.

Ghost In The Shell

Lots of people in this universe jack into android bodies and control them remotely — sending android "dolls" into danger while remaining safe. In this clip, Major Motoko Kusanagi controls two android bodies at once. Especially in "Solid State Society," she's frequently running two parallel processes, and manages to be in two places at once.

Cities In Flight by James Blish

Before humans can actually visit Jupiter in person, we send tele-operated robots with cool tentacles. Here's a relevant passage (thanks to Technovelgy):

For a wild instant he had thought there was a man on Jupiter already; but as he pulled up just above the platform's roof, he realized that the moving thing inside was - of course - a robot; a misshapen, many-tentacled thing about twice the size of a man. It was working busily with bottles and flasks, of which it seemed to have thousands on benches and shelves all around it The whole enclosure was a litter of what Helmuth took to be chemical apparatus, and off to one side was an object which might have been a microscope...

The robot looked up at him and gesticulated with two or three tentacles...

"This is Doc Barth. How do you like my laboratory?"

Bug Park by James P. Hogan

In this awesome novel, inventors Eric and Vanessa Heber develop a new kind of telepresence — direct neural coupling — which shuts down your usual senses and connects them to neural feedback from robots, known as Mecs. The novel explains:

Ohira, who had been watching phlegmatically, nodded his head at the figures in the chairs. "You see, it's the way I told you. No ordinary VR helmets here. This connects straight into your head."

"DNC: Direct Neural Coupling," Heber said to Michelle. "That's what makes Neurodyne different."

She nodded. "I have read a little about it."

"Would you like to try it?" Heber invited.

Michelle moved her gaze to the empty chairs but looked apprehensive. "I'm not sure. I wouldn't want to get one of your little guys shredded or caught up in a wringer."

So of course the Hebers, and their precocious teen son, come up with the ultimate business model — tiny little bug robots controlled by tourists' minds, which can explore an insect theme park or even take part in insect gladitorial contests. But of course, bad guys want to use the DNC technology to power miniature assassins instead.

Robot in Invincible

The leader of the Teen Team superhero group, Robot gets promoted to join the Guardians Of The Globe, who are like the Justice League in the Invincible universe. Everybody thinks he's just a regular robot, but eventually they discover he's actually remote controlled by Rudy Conners, a disfigured man living in a tank of fluid.

Battle Angel Alita

Soon to be a movie from James "Avatar" Cameron, this series follows a cyborg assassin who's controlled several different bodies, including a Berzerker body, a "motorball body" and a TUNED body. (Thanks to Cash907Censored!)

The Girl Who Was Plugged In by James Tiptree, Jr.

In a corporate-controlled future, advertising is illegal, so instead celebrities go around promoting products. This story's protgagonist has her personality put into a perfect robot body, while her real body is put "in the sauna room" and she becomes an advertising celebrity. Her new body is a "placental decanter," specially grown to be perfect, with control implants. "Little Delphi is going to live a wonderful, exciting life. She's going to be a girl people watch. And she's going to be using fine products people will be glad to know about and helping the people who make them."

Forever Peace by Joe Haldeman

The soldiers in this book are jacked into Soldierboys, Flyboys and other constructs, which they control with their brains. These machines allow the U.S. to run a remote-controlled war against various third-world countries. Protgaonist Julian Class controls his robot Soldierboy via a jack connected to his skull. Too bad that long-term connection to the Soldierboys and Flyboys has weird long-term effects, including "humanizing" you and making you averse to killing.

Sleep Dealer

Two different characters jack their nervous systems into robots, far away, in this incredible movie directed by Alex Rivera. Memo goes to work in the city in Mexico, where he's connected remotely to robots doing construction work in the United States — so the U.S. can import people's labor, without bringing in the people themselves. And Rudy controls a military drone with his mind — using it, among other things, to blow up Memo's family's house when Memo accidentally gets suspected of being a hacker.

Runners up: Suspended (InfoCom game), Debatable Space by Philip Palmer, City by Clifford Simak, Starstruck (comics), Neon Genesis Evangelion, Metal Gear Solid 4 and Call Me Joe by Poul Anderson

Thanks to Arthur Conan Smith, Kiala Kazebee, S.J. Edeards, Katrina James, Andrew Liptak, Greta Christina, Kate Dominic, Jessy Randall Carlos P. Diaz, FLIMGeeks, Espana Sheriff, Tom Marcinko, Barry Lukens, Lun Esex, Ashley Edward Miller, Allan Bostick, Jackie M, Star Killer, Jason Schachat, Bonnie Burton, Morgan Johnson, Paul McEnery, Izzy Oneiric, Jason Shankel and Kate Cowan.

Mutants:
Check out the latest trailer for David Morley's French film Mutants, where one pregnant woman has to fight off her rapidly changing boyfriend. It actually looks pretty gory, so I'm quite psyched.

Mutants

via Quiet Earth.

Zombies of Mass Destruction:
The latest zombie picture, which has nothing to do with the ZMD comics or ZMD movie adaptation, is from Kevin Hamedani and focuses in on what happens with a little island city gets overrun with zombies. It looks like, despite all the limb hacking and skin gnawing, this film will actually follow cultural and political intolerance between the island inhabitants - which could just be awful if they try and teach everyone wholesome values along with the zombie fighting, but we'll have to wait and see.

Meet Meline:
Twitch pointed out this beautiful little short from French CG artist Virginie Goyons and Sebastien Labanon. Check out the tiny trailer for the short - the little girl is captivating. The little lady supposedly uncovers an alien life form in her house, but don't worry - it looks nothing like Mac and Me.

MEET MELINE (2009) - TRAILER from Sebastien LABAN on Vimeo.

Sleep Dealer:
And finally, here are two clips from Alex Rivera's Sleep Dealer, which pops up all over theaters in the US on April 17th. The drama follows the future of labor laws when the US builds a giant fence around the country and contracts hired hands in from Mexico via robot Avatars.

Sleep Dealer will be arriving in theaters April 17 in select cities, and you should definitely check out this tripped-out film about importing labor (but not people) from South of the Border.

[IGN]

We are all big fans of Alex Rivera's Sleep Dealer, and we urge you to seek out this movie about the possible future of North America. In Rivera's dark future, all of the manual labor jobs are controlled by people south of the border (who are blocked from US access by a fence). Which means all the labor, but none of the people. It's a stunningly beautiful movie, with a tiny budget and big ideas. Follow the main character, Memo, as he moves to the big city looking for telecommuting "node" work, and in turn finds himself face-to-face with the people across the giant fence.

To see the poster, gigantor sized, click on the thumbnail below. The film comes out April 17 in select cities.

Sleep Dealer is the story of Memo, a young Mexican from Oaxaca who travels to Tijuana to become the new kind of migrant worker — one who stays in Mexico but exports his labor to the United States, via cybernetic implants. He meets Luz, a young journalist who sells her actual memories online via her own cybernetic implants, and she installs "nodes" on his body in a very Cronenberg-esque scene. A third character in the movie is Rudy, the cyber-pilot of a drone plane, who destroys Memo's home and kills Memo's father after Memo mistakenly hacks into some military transmissions.

The scene where Memo first connects to the telepresence network and his consciousness is suddenly inside a robot worker on a construction site in the United States is really breathtaking. You get a sense of how weird it must be to move your arms and legs and have a robot's limbs respond. Memo makes the mistake of looking down and realizes he's hundreds of feet above the ground — or, rather, his robot body is.

Rivera explained that the original inspiration for Sleep Dealer came from a film in the Prelinger Archive called Why Braceros? A 1959 industrial film created by the U.S. government, Braceros explains the need for Mexican immigrant workers on American farms. Here's a clip:

Rivera saw that film a dozen years ago, and it inspired him to start thinking about questions of borders and technology — a big point in the original documentary is that farm technology has allowed many tasks to be automated, but some jobs still require "stoop labor."

So Rivera made a fake documentary of his own, 1997's Why Cybraceros?, which features a satirical look at the idea of Mexican labor telecommuting over the border via cyber implants. It includes funny images of cartoon Mexican robots floating through the trees, and Mexican workers' arms getting taken off so the arms can cross the border, leaving the armless Mexicans behind. It's pretty hilarious, with the fake chart with a bar showing "American labor force sophistication" and a downward line showing "available farm labor." And Mexican workers controlling robots using a Commodore 64 and an Atari joystick. It's "as simple as point and click, to pick."

Rivera even put up a fake Cybracero website, which explains the program in detail.

"The rhetoric of that industrial film was very trippy, in terms of the abstract nature of labor," says Rivera, so he wanted to play with the idea of disconnecting labor from people. In 1997, when he made his short film, everyone was obsessed with the idea of the "global village" and borders coming down, but the U.S. was also building a wall along its border with Mexico and there was a new anti-immigrant movement.

He's been working on Sleep Dealer since then, and it's taken over a decade to complete. He finally got financing in 2005 and shot it in 2006. The film showed at Sundance, to enthusiastic reviews, and you can read our own review here.

Rivera also showed a couple other short films: a ten-minute set of documentaries about the border between the U.S. and Mexico, made as part of the PBS online series Borders, and a bizarre Independence Day-esque short about the U.S. being invaded by giant flying sombreros with chili pepper rayguns. The Borders films explore the idea of borders being closed to humans, but open to imports and services.

The hard part of making Sleep Dealer, for Rivera, was turning his big-picture economic story into a more personal story of two people and their relationship. "I like to think about systems, economics, the big picture, millions of pepope. To think about two people... was a real struggle for me." And these questions of the future of labor and immigration are really difficult to talk about, so "I wanted to see if science fiction was a genre where we could have this conversation."

When Memo first logs into the telepresence network, you can see a huge list of languages that he chooses Spanish from. The idea, says Rivera, was to show that you could hire telepresence workers from Indonesia or China or wherever — whoever is cheapest. It's a "race to the bottom enabled by the network." Sometimes the workers get blinded by a power surge, but it's an acceptable loss.

My friend who went to the event with me had one question about the future world of Sleep Dealer: is it ever really going to get cheaper to use robots to replace individual human workers? After all, robots have already replaced workers in a factory setting, but that's usually one robot doing the work of twenty humans. Here, you have one robot doing the work of one person. Is that ever going to be cost-effective? Rivera says yes, and he actually thinks this is a possible future economic model:

Have you seen those videos of the Honda robots that can dance and play soccer and walk up and down stairs? We're in a place where robots can do, physically, most of what we can do. They can dance better than I do... but they can't make any judgements. Artifiical intelligence is not anywhere near where the robot [can think for itself]. The robot mind is like a grasshopper mind. [So I foresee a] future where the mechanical part of the robot is very sophisticated and cheap, but it needs a spirit, somebody to make a judgement, someone to communicate. [And that portion] is outsourced. I think that's actually a business model. Not today, but in a few years. i have a feeling that's potentially a reality. We are seeing that ambivalence, where that mechanical is very sophisticated, but the artifiical intelligence is retarded.

Already, you have the weird juxtaposition of high technology and squalor, where ipods and other shiny gadgets are made by people who live in shantytowns, says Rivera. "It's a scifi nightmare more vivid than Mad Max."

Rivera is working on two new projects right now. One is a true story based on an article in Wired magazine. The other is a science fiction film that starts in the Andes in a gold mine, with the last remaining gold seams. The gold mine will turn out to be connected to nanotechnology, because the best nanotech often uses gold fibers "because gold is such a good conductive metal."

Sleep Dealer is being released in theaters in the U.S. in March 2009.

It's no mystery why pop culture is on course for more darkness and nastiness. That's what's done well in the past year or two. And the entertainment industry always wants to give us more of what we've already liked, even if conditions have changed in the meantime.

Just looking at the "Dystopia" tag on io9, I see lots and lots of posts which say something like, "in the upcoming movie _______, everybody eats their own reprocessed shit and then bathes in the blood of their own parents, before being eaten by zombies." There are a lot of vaguely satirical movies coming, about people forced to compete in evil game shows or video games turned real, like Game, or Fortuna.

We also have a few years of apocalyptic movies on the way, including the reliably Irwin Allen-esque Roland Emmerich, with 2012. I tried to read the script for 2012 and found myself developing a spontaneous case of TMJ disorder. There are also several post-apocalyptic movies on the slate, including Wynter Dark and The Road. There are literally 10,000 zombie movies coming out in the next couple of years, enough to keep a zombie army entertained forever.

And as for television? The shows that seem likely to be still on the air in a year or so are all pretty dark, including the increasingly twisted Lost and the quirky-but-dark Fringe. The new shows that are on the way are sardonic as fuck, including Ron Moore's Virtuality, a claustrophobic tale of astronauts trapped in a sardine-can ship with a virtual reality system that's getting scarier and scarier. And Joss Whedon's Dollhouse, a show about a woman who's had literally everything taken away from her, including her name and identity, so she can be a plaything for the rich. It's not exactly Pennies From Heaven, y'all.

If you're excited for another few years of bleak, no-way-out entertainment, then skip the rest of this piece. But if you're actually hoping for more fun, a more upbeat approach to storytelling, and maybe a bit of lightness, then read on. What could move things in that direction?

First of all, hope that Star Trek and Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen are not just hits, but mega hits. It seems like a safe enough bet, actually. Both films seem much shinier and friendlier than the big films of this past summer, especially Iron Man, Incredible Hulk, Dark Knight and even Indiana Jones 4, which featured Indie being accused of being a Commie, plus lots of angst about getting older. If either Trek or Transformers does better than Dark Knight, then you can bet we'll see Hollywood rearranging its priorities pretty quick. Another possible oasis of escapist fun next summer: another toy movie, G.I. Joe.

Conversely, you may want to root against Watchmen, which features rapist superheroes and a morally ambiguous ending. And Terminator Salvation, which McG is promising will take place in a super-dark future: "This picture takes place after Judgment Day. It happened. Everything is gone. The story of the movie is the 'brink moment' Reese always talked about." You may also want to root against Wolverine, depending on how much Fox succeeded in watering down the Wolverine movie's allegedly dark tone. (Last we heard, there were vague rumblings the director and the Fox suits were fighting over just how dark and gritty the Wolverine film would be allowed to be, even down to the way the sets were painted.)

Second, hope that Hollywood backs off its "all superhero films should be like The Dark Knight" meme pretty fast. Chances are, a slew of Dark Knight clones wouldn't be all that good, and they would mostly flop.

Third, accept that pop culture is always going to be a mix of light and dark. I shouldn't even need to say this, but I'll say it anyway. We need our Watchmens as well as our Incredibles. So what we're really talking about here is the ratio of light to dark. We'll always want both, and we'll always have both.

Fourth, bear in mind that escapist fun often starts from a dark place. Look at the original Battlestar Galactica, or the Glen Larson Buck Rogers, both of which are post-apocalyptic. Oftentimes, the funnest heroes are the ones who come out of the worst bogholes and rise above.
It's often part of the light-hearted heroic formula.

Fifth — and this may be the most important — support books and comics that are bright and optimistic. The book and comics industries have a slow development process, but they can respond to a hit faster than TV and movies can. Buy upbeat space opera novels about capable people surmounting problems. The next time Mark Waid psyches himself up to write something cute and fun like Brave and the Bold, do your part to make it a mega-hit. You'll be helping to support the source material for Hollywood's next sunny, cheery hit.

Shown to a small group of Pratt students and one very old woman who couldn't read subtitles, it was an inauspicious beginning of one of the best small budget science fiction films we are likely to see in some time.

Our hero is Memo (Luis Fernando Peña), a small-time hacker in futuristic Mexico who gets caught up in some very bad shit. Mexico is a waterless wasteland in writer-director's imagining, and Memo wants to go to Tijuana and become a "sleep dealer", an immigrant pulled in by nodes to larger system where the U.S. can enjoy "work without the workers," as the script artfully puts it. 21st century technology sucks the life force into the U.S., without much regard for the consequences.

When he gets to Tijuana, Memo meets the gorgeous Luz (Leonor Varela) on a bus. She tells him that she's a writer, and they part ways. Luz's writing consists of a voiceover of her own experience recorded in TruNode, a memory marketplace where she earns a living. While her other memories don't sell very well, her time with Memo finds a buyer, who asks her to go back to find him. Broke, she agrees, and turns Memo into one of them by installing electronic metal nodes into his wrists and neck.

The third participant in this drama is the person buying Memo's memories, but that's for you to know when Sleep Dealer arrives in a theater near you. It's difficult for a film to grab you with the same futuristic trappings these days, but the closest Rivera's Spanish language fantasy ever gets to America is the robot Memo controls remotely on a construction site in San Diego. This gives the $2 million dolllar film a freshness that most more expensively budgeted movies lack.

A lower budget can often be reflected in the caliber of actor the film attracts, but there's no such problem here. While Memo isn't given much to do — he's mostly an observer until the end of the film — he's a nice proxy for the viewer, crossing the border, meeting the new. The rest of the performances are similar understated. The real star is Rivera' constantly shifting point of view: he's a talented cinematographer, and Sleep Dealer manages plenty of unforgettable images. Node junkies writhe in seedy bars, turret cannons swivel and recede, farmers watch high definition television with cornstalks in the background. This is a world we're not familiar with.

This kind of story does the opposite of most science fiction, taking up the viewpoint of an outsider innocent of advanced technology. Memo's first appearance in the film is in front of a stack of books that says Hackers for Beginners. It's a funny joke, but the critique rings true: too often writers are focused on the ways developing technologies affect the most wealthy, or the most powerful. Sleep Dealer's message for America is a knowing, if overstated one, and yet its hero Memo still yearns for the technology, and the power that goes with it. Without that, he's helpless.

People have been going absolutely bonkers over this Mexican scifi film, including rave reviews from Sundance. And I think I see why from the trailer — not only is this film beautiful, but after just a few moments of exposure, I'm already curious to find out more about Alex Rivera's characters. Especially the young man who hacks his way into the people/computer system. Rumor is that this film will be released on a much grander scale in February of 2009. [Slashfilm and Sleep Dealer]

In Sleep Dealer, the U.S. has finally succeeded in stopping illegal immigrants crossing over from Mexico. But Mexicans can still work in American factories and farms for almost no money, thanks to the miracle of telecommuting. The people in Alex Rivera's film hook up their nervous systems to the Internet to control robots in the U.S., but it takes a toll on them, as you can see from the spooky clip and stills above. The film's title refers to workers who get so drained they collapse.

Rivera says this bizarre scenario may be what America wants: "to use the labor, but not have the person."

Here's the official synopsis for this Sundance-bound film:

The story begins with Memo Cruz, a young campesino, or peasant farmer, in southern Mexico. He's always dreamed of leaving his small pueblo and maybe finding work in the big cities in the north. His dream comes true in the worst possible way when his home is mistakenly identified as a terrorist hideout in a hilariously reckless "Global War on Terror."

Rudy Gaeta is a soldier fighting in this future war. He works for an American security company flying a remote control war machine — a pumped-up version of today's Predator Drone. Rudy's first assignment is to take out the "terrorists" in southern Mexico. Following orders, from his office in sunny San Diego, Rudy dispatches a drone and attacks Memo's home in Mexico.

Uprooted as a consequence of the attack, Memo has to leave the pueblo and go north to earn money to help his family start again. He heads to the massive border city of Tijuana.

On his way into Tijuana Memo meets a young woman named Luz. Luz is a writer, and going into the city to look for stories. After she meets Memo we see what "writing" means in this future. Alone in her room, Luz connects her body to the net and speaks. As she describes her day, the computer records visuals from her memories and the sound of her voice. She puts these recorded memories up for sale on the net - a blog, straight from the brain.

In Tijuana, Memo finds work in a futuristic factory - he earns dollars by connecting his body to the net, and controlling a worker drone in America.

At home in San Diego, Rudy, the soldier, is lonely and disconnected from the world. He spends his free time plugging in and watching recordings of other people's memories. A few days after he attacked Memo's home, Rudy has doubts - something about the attack didn't feel right. He searches for information on the net, and finds Luz's story. He buys it, and for the first time, through Luz's recorded memories, he sees Memo's face - the face of his victim.

Through Luz's stories, effectively through her eyes and ears, Rudy gets to know Memo. And as Luz and Memo fall in love, Rudy realizes what he's done.