Technothriller: Film and the American Imagination

What technothrillers--popular films that center advanced technology--can tell us about ourselves, and how they ignite our imagination in technologically supercharged times.

In Technothriller, Soraya Murray reveals how popular American films after the 1960s, in which technology assumes a central role--mainly biotech, military, and computational--channel our cultural anxieties, dreams, and convictions about the power and meaning of advanced technology.

Along with iconic adaptations from technothriller novels by Tom Clancy and Michael Crichton, such as The Hunt for Red October and The Andromeda Strain, Murray considers Westworld, Rollerball, Demon Seed, WarGames, Ex Machina, Tenet, M3GAN, and The Creator, as well as the Terminator and Mission: Impossible franchises. Through these films and others, she traces deeply embedded popular beliefs about technology and innovation--and then asks what this tells us about the mechanics of power within our technological lives. Exploring how popular culture negotiates political and cultural attitudes toward innovation and difference, her work finds in technothrillers a new way of thinking about the troubled, sometimes catastrophic, relationships between humans and their inventions.

Soraya Murray teaches in the Film and Digital Media Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of On Video Games: The Visual Politics of Race, Gender and Space.