Many moons ago, we showed you Coleran's film reel, which showcases his work on such films as Alien vs. Predator, Blade II, and The Island. More recently, Coleran has updated his website with tons of the user interfaces he has developed for a host of science fiction and spy movies.

These are just a small sample; his site contains dozens of images from each of the films he has worked on.

Playback Graphics [Mark Coleran via Metafilter]

Children of Men
Children of Men
The Island
The Island
Blade II
Blade II
The World is Not Enough
Mr. and Mrs. Smith

Speculative fiction is full of stories about people who've lost their identity – AMC just gave us a dreamlike remake of The Prisoner in which Number Six forgets who he really is, and Dollhouse returns Friday with more mind-erasing fun. But it's weird to see the trope of "fighting for selfhood" merged with that action-movie staple, the entertaining killing spree.

Recently, I was re-watching chunks of X-Men: Origins: Wolverine and thinking about that movie's insane body-count — both before and after Logan starts trying to regain his elusive humanity. In Wolverine, the mutant known as Logan is caught between his bestial nature and his dignity as an individual. For a hundred-odd years, he is a slaughter machine for the military, and then he joins a super-secret mutant taskforce. But in mid-atrocity, he suddenly starts questioning orders, and then he goes… rogue. (No, he doesn't bleach part of his hair and start talking in a Southern-girl voice. He just wanders off the reservation.)

The point is, Wolverine is just as much of a killing machine after he starts asserting that he's not just part of the machine, or not just an animal. He never makes the connection between the sacredness of his own personhood, and the sacredness of human life in general. I get that you have to fight for your freedom sometimes, but the movie makes a big point of showing Wolverine killing when he could just as easily disable his opponents — one of the movie's few great fuck-yeah moments involves cold-blooded murder. (Sure, he's killing scumbags. But he was just as much of a scumbag twenty minutes earlier.)

Likewise, Terminator Salvation (newly on DVD) gives us Sam Worthington's tormented cyborg Marcus, who discovers that he's basically a reanimated corpse with metal parts — and he makes the choice to be human, slaughtering several of John Connor's men in the process. (During his heroic escape from the resistance compound.) But it's okay, because Marcus' emergent selfhood is more important than any sense of self all of those dead people might have possessed. (Actually, I might need to — shudder — rewatch this sequence. I know a bunch of the rebels die, but some of them die due to hydrobots that attack afterwards. Does Marcus actually kill anybody directly, or just cause their deaths by tearing apart their security?)

And then, of course, there's District 9, in which Wikus also fights to regain his humanity — by putting on a battlesuit and shredding people with alien weapons. This film at least subverts this trope a bit, by having Wikus use alien weaponry that he's only able to use because he's losing his humanity — and the film doesn't exactly reward Wikus for his mass murder.

This odd combination — the hero who devalues human life in the process of exalting his own — has been around for ages, but seems to be on the rise. RoboCop and the Universal Soldier movies give us cyborg heroes who struggle to re-humanize while killing lots of other humans. Michael Bay (surprise!) gave us The Island, in which a clone grown as an organ donor kills his "original" self, along with a number of other people, on the way to becoming a full-fledged person.

For almost as long as there have been action movies, there's been the high body count: watching a Rambo movie in the 1980s, you don't stop and think that everyone of these bodies flopping to the ground is another person who won't come home to his/her family. It's one of the conventions of action movies that we accept that this carnage isn't really happening – even as the movie expects us to suspend our disbelief about a guy falling out of a helicopter on fire and surviving, it asks us to maintain full disbelief that mass murder is taking place in front of us.

On some level, too, we stop thinking that those people dying in front of us are really people – especially in a movie with tons of bad CG (like Wolverine). We can watch the corpses piling up because we know they're not human.

But the action-movie body count and the "search for identity" plot are great separately — I love a good John Woo bloodbath — but they sit uneasily together. The more people we see your cyborg or mutant kill — and the more casually they're killed — the less we can identify with our hero's quest for selfhood. The whole thing starts to feel more like a first-person shooter, and the main character more like a video-game avatar, rather than an individual who Deserves Human Rights and all that stuff.

If life is so cheap, then who really cares about Logan's quest for self? Not to pick on Wolverine, but these questions keep coming back as you watch the movie, as if they have a mutant healing factor.

How do you square the contrast, between the hero's inalienable uniqueness and everyone else's disposability? Maybe it's because Our Hero is a Nietzschean ubermensh, whose will to power makes his individuality more precious than everyone else's? What do you think?

LexCorp (DC Comics)
Hailed as one of the largest, most diversified multinational corporations in the world, it also happens to be founded by Lex Luthor, who runs it with his characteristic ruthlessness. The list of cities and countries where the corporation has holdings is basically as long as the list of cities and countries on Earth, and the number of companies controlled by LexCorp is almost as long and just as varied. Unfortunately, as of One Year Later, with Lana Lang acting as CEO, the corporation seems to be heading towards bankruptcy. The "No Helping Superman" rule still applies to all employees, however.

Primatech (Heroes)
The Primatech Paper Company of Odessa, Texas is the first Primatech facility the show introduces us to. Of course, they do a lot more than just make paper—They capture and "study" folks with enhanced abilities, but, really, what they do best is operate in a moral gray area. A very dark gray area.

Blue Sun (Firefly and Serenity)
While it's still unclear exactly what the corporation does, it seems pretty implicit that it isn't good. Although most of the Blue Sun products seen on the show seem as innocuous as coffee cans and crackers, River's actions, such as ripping off their labels on food and slashing Jayne with a knife when he wears their logo, suggest that there's something more going on. Some suggest that there's something in the food, but the stronger hypothesis seems to be that Blue Sun is somehow connected to the experiments done on River and is perhaps working with the Alliance.

Merrick Biotech (The Island)
Merrick Biotech's business is keeping clones of their customers around, just in case said customers should need a transplant of some kind. Basically like the ultimate life insurance, right? Except for the fact that it's illegal to allow the clones to be conscious and sentient, which, of course, Merrick Biotech lets happen and lies to their clients about. Therefore, the corporation has an entire population of fully-conscious human beings living totally unaware of the fact that they're basically just an organ farm. And that's just not cool.

Fatboy Industries (The Middleman, TV series)
In the final episode of the series, Wendy Watson is transported into a classic example of a Mirrorverse, where the megacorp of Fatboy Industries is a totalitarian presence, having taken the place of the government. Unfortunately, the morality of Fatboy in Wendy's real world is still unconfirmed, as there's a hint of "more than meets the eye" to both the corporation and its ambiguous founder, Manservant Neville. (This is underscored by the fact that the rest of Mirrorverse turns out to be not so very different from the real world.)

Buy n Large Corporation (WALL•E)
While maybe not inherently evil, the Buy n Large Corporation did govern Earth (perhaps much like the Mirrorverse Fatboy Industries) and did a very poor job of it. Even if rendering the planet uninhabitable wasn't exactly the gameplan, Buy n Large's role in that happening probably makes it a worse corporation than most of the others on this list.

Tyrell Corporation (Blade Runner)
The Tyrell Corporation produces the replicants, lifelike androids designed to the work deemed to dangerous and demeaning for humans, and is named for Dr. Eldon Tyrell, the founder and genius inventor of the replicants. While it's debatable how truly "evil" the Tyrell Corporation is, there is a definite sinister quality to their dealings and it's nigh impossible to deny that they definitely smack of "evil corporation."

Veidt Industries (Watchmen)
A lot of what was said about LexCorp could be repeated here. Once again, the ruthless ambition of the corporation paired with the questionable morality of its founder leaves us wondering how much to trust this (powerful, financially successful) corporation. Meanwhile, the impending release of the film was paired with a Veidt Industries commercial contest, leading to all sorts of fake '80's advertising:

Weyland-Yutani (Alien franchise)
Perhaps the gold standard of evil megacorporations, Weyland-Yutani's main gig is merciless profiteering, no matter what (or who) needs to be sacrificed in the process. (Fun fact: Their logo can be seen on some of the weapons in Firefly and they're said to be a client of Wolfram and Hart in Angel. Maybe this has something to do with the fact that Joss Whedon wrote Alien Resurrection.)

Cyberdyne Systems Corporation (Terminator films)
While the corporation is said to be benign in the first two films, manufacturing parts for bigger companies, they then make the mistake of creating Skynet, a system of artificially intelligent supercomputers that control (among other things) nuclear missiles. This was not a smart move. In fact, it's just un-smart enough to warrant Cyberdyne's inclusion on this list.

Yoyodyne (The Crying of Lot 49 and V. by Thomas Pynchon)
Yoyodyne is a defense contractor that's described in The Crying of Lot 49 as "a giant of the aerospace industry," and a few characters in the novel work for the company. While the morality of Yoyodyne isn't firmly sealed either way, the thread of conspiracy woven throughout the work suggests that it isn't all it seems. (The name "Yoyodyne" is mentioned, as you might remember, in The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension.)

Earth Protectors (Up, Up, and Away, 2000 TV movie)
Ostensibly a group designed to teach middle schoolers the importance of environmentalism, Earth Protectors' favorite method of persuasion is brainwashing. And while handing out CD's brainwashing kids into recycling isn't a completely bad thing, brainwashing the parents to rob banks is another thing entirely. (Actually, brainwashing in general? Not recommended.)

Omni Consumer Products (Robocop)
Described as dystopian and inhumane, Omni Consumer Products (OCP) is an example of military capitalism taken to the extreme, until the corporation no longer cares who gets hurt or killed as long as the PR stays good. OCP is depicted as having its fingers in almost every branch of life, as long as there's money to be made from it. One of their strokes of genius comes from running both criminal organizations and a private police force, thereby ensuring a continued demand for both crime and justice.

Soylent Corporation (Soylent Green)
It's 2022 and the world is overpopulated and hungry. Who better to step in than the Soylent Corporation with their rations of tasty wafers known as Soylent Red and Soylent Yellow? Well, okay, they aren't that tasty, but thankfully, Soylent's come out with a new flavor: Soylent Green. Much more delicious. So what's the catch? Well, we all know what Soylent Green is.

GeneCo (Repo! The Genetic Opera)
After an epidemic of organ failures, GeneCo steps in to give transplants to those in need. Benevolent, right? Well, sure, until the boss, Rotti Largo, gets permission to repossess the organs of people who renege on their payments. And once a corporation is taking out your insides, the benevolence is kind of gone.

People are already accusing Knightly's film of being a rehash of The Island. But to be fair, The Island was a rip-off of Parts: The Clonus Horror, which actually filed suit against Bay's movie back in 2005.

This movie, on the other hand, could be a much more intense drama, focusing on the relationships of three young students that grow up inside a boarding school for the sole purpose of raising organ donors. In the book, it sounds like when some of the students became aware of their fate, they've accepted it as their personal life-cycle, or just the way things are. In fact, one of the students' jobs is to comfort a clone who is about to face death, to donate their bits to improve another's life.

The scribe Alex Garland (28 Days Later) will also be producing the picture with award-winning music video director Mark Romanek (One Hour Photo) directing.

[Variety">Variety]

Science fiction helped to invent product placement, with Steven Spielberg's shoehorning of Reese's Pieces into E.T., making them the official candy of penis-fingered growly alien visitors. But that wasn't actually the first instance of product placement in the genre.

What was? It's hard to say, but one of the earliest instances was the overexposure of Sugar Puffs cereal in 1966's Daleks: Invasion Earth 2150 A.D. The movie version of the classic Doctor Who story starred Peter Cushing as the eccentric time-traveler, who visits a ruined future London where the killing-machine Daleks have taken over. There's no food or clean water, and the survivors of the Dalek attacks live in total squalor. But hey... did we mention Sugar Puffs cereal is sugary and delicious? Sugar Puffs helped to finance the movie in exchange for having their posters visible throughout.

Also, 2001: A Space Odyssey features prominent references to, and fake ads for, Pan-Am, IBM and Howard Johnson. But those were simply companies that director Stanley Kubrick thought would still be around in a few decades. As far as I can find out, no money actually changed hands — in fact, Kubrick contacted 50 companies and asked them to submit logos and designs for what their products might look like in 40 years.

Also this nifty bit of Marlboro promo in a Superman II fight scene predates E.T. by a couple of years. Kneel before our cool, refreshing smokes:

But yes, E.T.'s focus on Reese's Pieces may well have been the first high-profile example of product placement in a science fiction movie. The media reported widely that M&Ms had turned down the chance to be in the mega-hit, and Reese's Pieces reaped some extra publicity from all the coverage. The candy's sales spiked 65 percent after the film came out, and kids wrote to Steven Spielberg with fan art that featured Reese's Pieces prominently:

But there's also a lot of exposure for Coca-Cola, Coors beer, Speak'n'Spell and Pez candy, among other brands, in the movie. Here are some more screen shots:

Around the same time, TV's Knight Rider showed us the way forward in science fictional product placement: people will always want to buy the supercars they see featured on screen. (See below for Transformers and the new K.R.) General Motors gave the show's makers models of the new Trans Am, which they decked out as KITT, and people rushed to buy their own KITTs.

But E.T. and Knight Rider were like babies, or maybe monks, compared to the Back To The Future trilogy. Seriously, google "Back To The Future worst product placement" and set aside an hour or two to look at all the lists of the "worst movie product placement of all time" that include the BTTF trilogy. References to Pepsi are jammed into the first two films (like when Marty tries to order a Pepsi Free in 1955), his mom thinks he's named Calvin Klein, and the films ram Nike, Pizza Hut, AT&T, Hasbro and Mattel down your throat. (The DeLorean gets a free pass, because it's actually funny.)

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home took advantage of its present-day setting to pimp Michelob beer — the official beer of the Federation — and of course, Scotty gets to know an Apple Macintosh better. The Trek franchise liked that product-placement money so much, Kirk and his crew go camping in Levis jeans in Star Trek V. Meanwhile, Apple got sluttier and sluttier, getting some first-class pimping in Mission Impossible and Independence Day — where a Mac notebook is the key to stopping the alien invaders. And then in Blade Trinity, one character goes to the iTunes music store to assemble a playlist for her ipod, which she listens to while fighting vampires. There's also a nice Apple plug in I Am Legend.

Another movie which wins a spot in the product-placement hall of shame is Demolition Man. Sylvester Stallone gets woken up in the future, and finds that Taco Bell/Pizza Hut has won the "franchise wars" and now all restaurants are Pizza Huts:

One of the first television series to be accused of shoving consumer items in your face was Babylon 5, which stuck a gigantic Zima sign over the alien boxing ring in the episode "TKO." Series creator J. Michael Straczynski insisted the show got "not a dime" for the Zima plug, and it was just for the lolz.

Men In Black got a lot of flak for its relentless pushing of the Ray-Ban Predator 2 sunglasses, which tripled in sales to almost $5 million after the film came out. And Men In Black II is another proud moment for product whoring. An alien intruder arrives on Earth and needs to assume a form to confuse us humans. So of course her/its eye lights on a Victoria's Secret ad:

And then there's the famous taxi chase in The Fifth Element, which leads up to the cops getting showered with McDonald's cartons. Good thing they still have Mickey D's in this dystopian future:

One trend in the 2000s has been movies featuring fake advertisements for real products as part of the plot, sort of a throwback to 2001. Who helped pioneer this? None other than Steven "Reese's Pieces" Spielberg, who has Tom Cruise walk through a mall full of personalized ads in Minority Report.

Michael Bay also crams The Island full of fake ads, including a Chanel ad that stars the woman Scarlet Johnasson was cloned from.

I, Robot pushed Converse's Chuck Taylor shoes so much, there's a whole Chuck Taylor web page devoted to the film. (The movie gets four Chucks out of five.) I have blotted this movie out of my memory, but apparently all Will Smith does in it is wave his "antique" Chuck Taylors around and talk about how fast he can run away from the killer robots, thanks to his Chucks. If you saw this movie and liked the shoes, could you buy your own pair? Gosh, I think so!

I could be here all day discussing the wealth of car product placement in recent movies. The Lost World: Jurassic Park features a new kind of Mercedes Benz SUV, and Steven "man-whore" Spielberg lovingly, frames a shot so you can see the Mercedes logo really clearly. That Steven. The Matrix Reloaded is such a great Cadillac ad, with its freeway chase, that the DVD even has a featurette about the product placement. Terminator 3 is brought to you by Lexus and Toyota. I Am Legend is one big ad for the Ford Mustang. Transformers is basically built around promoting GM's latest car models, and the second film is already getting buzz around the new Chevy Volt and Corvette models. The Dark Knight is plastered with Ford. We have a new Knight Rider show, which is basically a Ford Mustang infomercial as the car transforms into different Ford models. Fringe is also chock full of Ford.

Heroes has had product placement for Sprint, Apple, Dell and other brands, but also especially Nissan.

A new growing category of product placement in science fiction, rivaling cars and computers: phones. After all, if you're under attack by aliens, you really need to be able to reach your comrades in a hurry. Hence, Jericho's and Heroes' constant whoring for Sprint, Superman Returns' constant Samsung and Virgin whoring, Cloverfield's Nokia love, etc. etc.

It's pretty amazing. Judging from our research, there's been more product placement, and more blatant product placement, in 2008 than in the past few years combined. We could literally spend an entire post just listing all the product placement this year. And it's getting way more blatant, especially on television. As we mentioned above, Sarah Connor Chronicles set a new high-water mark with its hour-long Dodge Ram commercial last week. Smallville devoted an entire episode last spring to Stride gum, and how it can turn you into a superhero. And then there's Eureka, which has apparently been finding ways to feature Degree For Men in every. single. episode. this season, including the one where Degree provides protection from a lethally hot second sun.

Where will it end? How much lower can we go? In the interests of ironic dystopian amusement, I can hardly wait to find out.

Additional reporting by Katharine Duckett.

It is indeed almost exactly the same movie as The Island, except in two respects. One, it is actually creepy and interesting; and two, the place the clones are told they're going is "America," not "the island." Which makes the whole movie way more of a political thriller and enlivens the plot. In this scene, a clone named Richard has escaped and the people running Clonus are questioning his girlfriend. Love the creepy talk of "America." Do ignore The Island, but Parts is definitely worth a see.

Parts: The Clonus Horror [via IMDB]

You could argue that most dystoipan movies are really false utopias, because the rulers of a dark, bleak dystopia (like, say, Brazil) still try to pretend that everything is perfect and wonderful. The difference is, most dystopias start out bleak and dark, and just get more horrid until the protagonist is forced to confront the darkness around him/her. But in the "false utopia" subcategory of dystopias, everything is bright and wonderful, and the main character is either getting some great drugs, or having lots of fun sex, or both in the case of Brave New World.

The "false utopia" genre, says Transparency Now,

shows humanity lost in false paradises of technology and simulation. In one subcategory, we see enclosed high-tech cities or habitations with apparently well-ordered societies full of people who are trapped by their dependence on automation and computers. They may also live decadent lifestyles that serve to distract them from the truth of their circumstances.

Here's a brief and cheerful history of fake utopias:

1909. "The Machine Stops" by E.M. Forster. Forster's reaction to some of H.G. Wells' more optimistic fiction. In the distant future, humans live underground, each in a separate "cell," with all of his or her needs provided for by the all-powerful Machine. Human culture stagnates, and people wrongly believe they can't survive on the surface of the Earth without protection. Over time, people start to worship the Machine like a god, forgetting they made it. And then eventually the Machine starts to break down.

1932. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. It's 2540, and everybody's drugged up to the gills on Soma, a sort of anti-depressant/psychotropic, and people can learn in their sleep. There's lots and lots of casual sex and orgies, and people chanting "orgy porgy" while having orgies. It's awesome. Oh, and people are incubated artificially instead of being born "naturally." The lower classes are engineered to be less intelligent and curious than the upper classes.

1956. The City And The Stars by Arthur C. Clarke. It's a billion years in the future, and humans have mostly abandoned Earth to go off and create super-ultra-awesome minds in space. In the domed city of Diaspar, people lead perfect lives, governed by the Central Computer. When they die, the Computer stores their memories and grows new bodies for them, making them nearly immortal. But then it turns out humans have been lied to about why they have to stay on Earth.

1971. The Futurological Congress by Stanislaw Lem. Ijon Tichy goes to sleep (or does he?) and wakes up in the trippy year of 2039, an utopian era without money or want. Everybody's mood is kept carefully controlled using drugs. Many people have pointed out the similarities of this drug-induced utopia to The Matrix: At one point, Tichy's girlfriend offers him a choice between two pills: The black pill will make him forget their relationship, the white pill will make him commit more deeply.

1976. Logan's Run, the movie based on the 1969 novel by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson. Everything is perfect in the domed city, with all the casual sex and meaningless hedonism you could ever want. Machines provide for all of your needs, but there's one drawback — when you turn 30, you have to die.

1994. The Giver by Lois Lowry. In this award-winning young-adult novel, it's a perfect world: bad feelings and conflict have been eliminated, thanks to perfect communication and drugs. (It's always drugs.) People get around by bicycle, and there are very few cars or airplanes. Romantic love and sexual desire (called "stirrings") are illegal, and are suppressed via medication. Instead, couples are matched up based on compatibility and can adopt up to two children from "birth mothers": one boy and one girl. Here's a Christian review warning against this book based on a misconception that it's actually utopian.

1998. The Truman Show. Truman lives in a lovely small town, surrounded by nice people, with possibly the only job in the insurance industry that doesn't totally suck. The only problem is, he can never leave town, and he's kept scared of the ocean by a fake story about his father drowning. He doesn't realize that everything in his world is a lie, and he's really one of the Pussycat Dolls.

2002. Equilibrium. I hesitated to include this movie, because it's not much of a utopia. It's sort of bleak and nasty, and Christian Bale will do gun-aerobics in your face. But it does have many of the hallmarks, including people being drugged into flat affect-hood.

2005. The Island. Ewan McGregor lives in a utopian community where everything is perfect, and all of his choices are made for him. As usual in these types of stories, everybody's told that the rest of the world is uninhabitable due to some kind of toxic disaster. Everybody yearns to win the "Lottery" and go to "The Island," a tropical paradise — but it turns out The Island is made of people. Sort of.

THX-1138. Totally hairless dude? Check. Drugs keep him asexual and out of it? Check. Total childlike submission to authority, at least at first? Double check. Somewhere there's an adult baby touching himself to this movie right now.

Brazil. Jonathan Pryce wanders through most of the movie with a lost-little-boy look on his face. And when he dreams about fighting back, it's as a childish fantasy sword-hero who isn't all that effective. It takes Kim Greist and Robert DeNiro kicking his ass to get him to start taking matters into his own hands. The film presents his boyishness as lovable, even though it's a direct result of the oppressive system he lives in.

The Truman Show. The film audience loves Truman for much the same reason as his fictional viewers. His cute overgrown boy grin, his cutesy sayings. People watch him sleep, like a puppy. Everyone around him tries to keep him scared to go too far away from home, and his job as an insurance agent is all about clinging to security. He's a big kid.

The Island. Okay. Ewan McGregor and his fellow agnates wear pajamas. A "nannyish" computer scans their urine and monitors their diet. Black-clad guards rush over if male and female clones spend too much time touching each other. They're taught to fear the outside world, and they do as they're told, waiting to go to a storybook paradise called The Island. Basically, it's THX-1138 with hair.

Of course, all of these films end with our hero growing up and casting off the corporate/state apron-strings. Otherwise, they'd make for pretty dull viewing. But first, they linger lovingly over the spectacle of their heroes turned into kids, because all that regression provides an escapist thrill for us, the audience. And why not? Isn't that what's so seductive about authoritarian cultures in the first place?

This all started with a remake of John Carpenter's The Fog back in 2005, and these foggy mutant films just keep rolling in. Based on the box office numbers from the Fog remake and The Mist (it's just about to drop out of the top ten, where it debuted at #8), it's unclear why Hollywood is so into this trend.

The good news is that comic book publisher Studio 407, publishers of Night & Fog, signed a first-look deal with Myriad Pictures, and that means its indie properties will begin the arduous Hollywood development cycle very soon. While it's nice to see deals with companies other than Marvel and DC, we hope there will be a few original storylines tossed into the mix.

Myriad, 407 On Drawing Board [Hollywood Reporter]