As a fan of near-future science fiction, I’m eager to see Sandra Bullock and George Clooney in Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity, which looks like it’s going to be as much a psychological drama as a science fiction movie:

It’s very easy to skip forward into a fully-established brave (or not-so-brave) new world, to 2161 when Starfleet Academy is up and running, for Rick Grimes to wake up in the hospital after the zombie apocalypse has already run its course, for Katniss to live in a District 12 that treats whatever cataclysm that dramatically reduced the human population of the United States and brought it under the dictatorial authority of the Capitol as an even that’s distant beyond memory.

But so much of the really interesting science fiction, particularly of the last few years, has been set at inflection points instead, rather than in the world those seminal moments produced. Max Brooks’ World War Z was a fascinating and refreshing spin on zombie apocalypse not because his zombies were fast or slow or some hybrid thereof, but because it was about people improvising, and learning, and making terrible sacrifices and awful mistakes to respond to a phenomenon that challenges everything they knew about the world. District 9 had the good sense to imagine the social consequences of an alien invasion, and to suggest that human unity in response to the revelation that there was life on other planets could make us seem as ugly as the giant insects marooned in Johannesburg. And Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion is about a moment when we could have careened on over into a plague-scarred wasteland, but yanked ourselves back from the bring by discipline and chance instead.

Gravity may not be even that futuristic, though Cuaron’s work on Children of Men makes me hope he’s doing at least some world-building here. But however far away from our own time its set, it’s exciting to see a science fiction that isn’t set in a world where we’ve established full control of the stars, and where the future retains some of that bigness and risk.

I hadn’t read World War Z by the time the trailer for the Brad Pitt-Mireille Enos movie came out, but after I finished it this morning, it was clear what a travesty this adaptation seems poised to be. It would be impossible to adapt the oral history as a single, coherent narrative. But the book seems like it would lend itself to a miniseries that could float between different perspectives, or perhaps even more fittingly, a series of movies like the Red Riding trilogy, which explored the long-running investigation into a Yorkshire serial killer. Here are the six sections of World War Z that struck me as the most likely candidates for stand-alone films:

Section: Kondo Tatsumi and Tomonaga Ijiro
Director: Stephen Chow
Why It Would Be Great: An otaku and a blind gardener take Japan back from the zombies? It would be one of the greatest genre mashups since Kung Fu Hustle, not to mention a pair of fantastic roles for Asian men. And while Chow is from Hong Kong, rather than Japan, his touch with Hustle was absolutely delightful. I’d love to see him have a shot at pitting two unlikely heroes against a mob of incredibly scary antagonists, and to pair it with some gorgeous landscape cinematography.

Section: Todd Wainio
Director: Ed Zwick
Why It Would Be Great: As he proved in Glory, the man can do a battle sequence. And it would be exciting to see a filmmaker with his kind of conscience take on the utter failure of the American military, and its attempt to recover from it, strategically and psychologically, and to turn the tide. Also, if Nicholas Brody’s going to get killed in the finale of Homeland this weekend, Damian Lewis is going to have some time on his hands. I’d love to see him take on this soldier’s role, particularly for the chance to see him get paired up with an honest-to-God, badass battle nun, who is Wainio’s partner in the reformed military.

Section: Admiral Xu Zhicai
Director: Shawn Ryan
Why It Would Be Great: Last Resort may be toast, but Ryan was on to something interesting with his story about a submarine crew gone rogue after it was given orders to fire a nuclear weapon on Pakistan. I’d love to see him take a shot at capturing the story of a Chinese submarine crew who smuggled their families on board and created a survivable society on board their ship as they fled from the zombie apocalypse consuming their country. Instead of deciding not to fire their nuclear weapons, as is the case in Last Resort, this story ends with the agonizing choice to nuke a bunker full of hardline Chinese leadership. It’s a harrowing adventure, but a deeply creative one, and it would avoid some of the pitfalls Ryan ran into when he tried to build out not just a sub crew but the population of an island in his ABC show.

Section: Xolelwa Azania
Director: Connie Field
Why It Would Be Great: Field directed Have You Heard From Johannesburg?, the amazing documentary series about the end of apartheid. While most of the people I recommend to direct these movies are feature directors, it would be fascinating to see Field go fictional and tackle South Africa’s decision to implement the Redeker Plan, an effort to save a core of South Africa by abandoning some of the population and the country’s land to the zombie infestation. As a story about racial reconciliation despite the echoes of apartheid in the plan, this could be a fascinating, subtle movie.

Section: Christina Eliopolis
Director: Patty Jenkins
Why It Would Be Great: This story of an Air Force pilot bailed out in the middle of infested zombie territory, staying alive with a voice on the radio as her only guide, could be an incredible showcase for a young female action star, maybe Gina Carano. And Jenkins knows a thing or two about directing a woman under extreme duress. This could be a simple, stripped-down, incredibly scary movie that wouldn’t even need to showcase a lot of zombies to be terrifying.

Section: Breckinridge Scott
Director: Steven Soderbergh
Why It Would Be Great: In Contagion, Soderbergh featured a repellant blogger, played by Jude Law, who spread the news of a false cure for a global pandemic, and was later found to be in the pay of a pharmaceutical company which hoped to spike sales of herbal remedies. I’d love to see him put this kind of scenario at the center of a film, instead of addressing it as one of many threads in a single movie. He’d have so much fun tearing into a figure like Scott, and portraying the luxury he lives in as a kind of suffocating rot.

I haven’t read World War Z, though it’s on the list. But this first trailer for it mostly seems like an excuse to show teaming masses of humanity roiling through the streets of world capitals and the prodigious firepower deployed against them:

Honestly it makes me think that Steven Soderbergh should direct a zombie movie. Contagion, his super-flu movie, was one of my favorite films of 2011, in part because it avoided all of the cliches of this genre. The violence and dissolution of society were on a realistic, deeply unsettling scale. Battling the virus was a major bureaucratic undertaking that required the people involved to take serious risks, confront their privilege, and deal with the gap between what they know they’re trying to do and how it seems to the public. The scale of the devastation is overwhelming, but it’s not complete. I’d love to see him address what comes after a disaster of this scale, and remind the moviegoing public that the bureaucrats who control food and vaccines are as important as the ones who control the bullets.

Contagion Steven Soderbergh’s stylish and beautifully-acted ensemble horror movie has as its main villain a virus, but in a larger sense, it’s a perfect September 11 movie. Even as the characters scramble to address an untraceable global threat that transcends state borders and agency jurisdictions and marginal figures get rich spewing hate, the movie reaffirms a strong faith in human decency and innovation.

The movie’s villain is Jude Law at his creepy best as a conspiracy-oriented blogger who is anointed as a prophet when his paranoia hits pay dirt — he’s one of the first people outside of government to notice a pattern of illnesses that signals an epidemic. But he parlays that fame into huge profits by declaring forsythia a miracle cure, garnering a windfall for the pharmaceutical companies that manufacture it, and urging his readers not to take a vaccine when one becomes available. It’s a sickening portrait of vaccine denialism — a phenomenon that’s already causing spikes in childhood illnesses in the United States, and that could be catastrophic in a global pandemic. He’s also an illustration of the power of the blogosphere, one I wish had been tempered by a more reasonable figure. “Print media is dying, Lorraine,” he hollers at an editor who refuses to print his initial story about the epidemic, “I’ll save you a seat on the bus.” But even if I feel optimistic about the blogosphere, it’s undeniable that conspiracy theories widely disseminated can damage our national life, whether they make us sick or perpetuate lies about the causes of the September 11 attacks.
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Pursuant to our discussion of the imbalance between sexy images of woman produced for men and sexy images of men produced for women, I think it’s worth considering Steven Soderbergh’s latest project, the male-stripper movie Magic Mike. The flick’s shaping up as a veritable man-candy festival: it’s based on Channing Tatum’s youthful experiences taking his clothes off for money, and he stars in it with physically-if-behaviorally-unattractive rising star Alex Pettyfer, the perpetually shirtless Matthew McConaughey who will play their boss, White Collar hottie Matt Bomer who’s earned much of his female fanbase by keeping his natty suits on, and now True Blood werewolf Joe Manganiello. In other words, it’s being written about as if it’ll hit a certain kind of sweet spot as the kind of thing that women can hit up in groups without actually being in the same space as a stripper, a chance to see as much as we want of an all-star lineup of desirable dudes.

But the question is whether a stripper fantasy is really a universal female fantasy—and as some commenters raised in that initial conversation, whether a universal, or at least common, female fantasy actually exists in a way that can be easily reproduced in popular culture. I’ve never found the prospect of male strippers particularly enticing: the idea of having someone I don’t know put his genitals near me without us having a conversation about it is something that I think for most women is coded as sexual harassment rather than wish fulfillment. If I was ever at a bachelorette party with a male stripper, I think I’d have to constantly be reminding myself that this was meant to be enjoyable and that conceptual step would keep me from actually having fun. But Magic Mike, depending on how Soderbergh sets it up, might remove that problem by making the object of the characters’ performances be women (and men) other than the movie audience, and letting us view them at a comfortable remove, while also seeing the characters as people we can invest in and eroticize as something other than performers.

Either way, Magic Mike illustrates the challenges of finding archetypes of sexy guys meant for women’s consumption. I don’t believe that women want a shirtless dude doing the vacuuming or erotically deploying Pine Sol:

But it’s not as simple as just translating what men find sexy either.

-I don’t really think that single-player gaming will be dead in three years. At least I hope it won’t! I still have so much to learn!

-Sometimes it takes litigation to make Google not be evil.

-Stephen Soderbergh: secretly filming a chick flick.

-Spoilery footage of The Avengers shooting a fight scene.

-I think I’d be looking forward to this more if it was about how Captain America reacts to being unfrozen. Otherwise, it looks like just another Quirky Lawyer Drama: