By Neil Hogan
“A reclusive veteran and her family settle on the isolated planet Proxima Centauri C, to study the local fauna, but are forced to fight for their lives as alien birds begin attacking them.”
A female hand wearing an implanted note band, and holding a small brush, wipes away dust to reveal tiny bones in layers of purple rock. “Here it is again. This time, 7 years ago.” A cry of something like a bird, and the camera pulls back to reveal muscular, dirt-covered, Nat Hucheon in red coveralls, looking up at the sky. She is standing in a sparse forest with brown rocks. The trees and plants are red, purple and black. Through them is a red sun and a purple sky. Above wheel alien archaeopteryx-like birds. She drops the brush and taps her glasses. “Drone 4. Join flock. Activate wrist control.” A white drone rises near her and flies into the flock.
Nat happily joins the birds via the drone. The feed shows the alien landscape is empty of anything human. The birds change colour as her drone gets closer, matching its white metal. Music: Sibelius, symphony number 5 ending. Then, as she swoops down with them, she sees a mass of dead birds on a patch of red rock. Music: J.S. Bach Toccata & Fugue in D-minor ending. “Return to base.” She pulls off her glasses, shocked. “Now?”
Nat is a xenoarchaeologist and astrobiologist. She is a tough ex-Space Force veteran and got tired of being involved in a war she could never win in her lifetime. She walks with a limp due to a bionic leg. She and her family moved to Proxima C a few months ago, a small planet circling the red dwarf Proxima Centauri. The nearest humans are on Proxima Centauri B which is uncontactable every 11 days when it’s on the other side of the star. They are isolated.
Nat heads back to the Hexicles – a single story outpost made of two hexagonal rooms joined together, with smaller installations around it. When she parks her buggy, she notices dead birds near the door, their eyes white. There is a crack in one of the windows. She heads inside, shaken.
Fireplace, wood walls. Very different to the outside. Food is on the table, with a note. “Thought I’d choose your favourite today. Kids slept early. Love.” She deactivates a time-freeze field. Steam begins rising from the food. She takes a bite and waves her hand in front of her mouth, (still hot), then checks on her husband and two kids in the next hexicle. Music: Angelo Badalamenti’s Haunting & Heartbreaking. Nat returns to the first room and swipes her hand across the fireplace. The room theme disappears, replaced with white walls, three plain windows, a table and three chairs. On one wall, a panel lights up with a smile icon.
“A.I. Proxima Centauri spectral analysis update.”
“Proxima Centauri ending seven-year cycle. Spectral analysis indicates…”
“Enough. Thank you.”
Frequent cuts to the birds point of view. The hexicle window from the outside comes up fast. Cut to Nat hearing a smacking sound. She is horrified to see birds diving at the windows. One of them hits so hard there is a burst of green blood. Another breaks into the room and attacks Nat. She grabs a chair and hits it, then hears a scream. Her teenage children are being attacked in the next room. She rushes in, pushes them and her husband and into a safer room, then fights off the birds, using anything she can find, including her metal leg. Music: Hanu Khosla Battle Symphony. The birds keep coming, changing to white as they enter, making it harder for her to see.
“A.I. Random themes. Now.”
“This will cause a considerable drain on…”
“Do it.”
“Avatar must be disabled.”
For a moment she pauses, then turns to her husband, watching from a doorway. “Sorry,” she mouths.
“Remember what you said,” he says. “It’s not always about winning.”
She frowns. “I must have been tired that day. A.I. Do it.”
“Confirmed”
The husband fades away, and his holodrone floats to the ground.
“Jill, Johnny. I’m relying on you. Shut the door. Protect each other.” The children close the door. The room shifts through themes of Elizabethan, Georgian, Art Deco, Gothic and more. The birds keep bursting through the windows but can’t change quickly enough. In a few minutes Nat’s killed them and no more enter.
The rest of the movie continues with greater and greater waves of birds doing more and more damage. Nat is unable to get help from the nearby Space Force, or the team on Proxima Centauri B. She keeps finding new ways to fight of bigger and more unusual birds coming from around the planet. First with all her drones, then a force field that breaks down, then by breaking up the second hexicle and using the pieces to secure the first. Finally, the birds break through her last line of defence. “It’s not always about winning.” Desperately, she expands the range of the dining table and freezes everything in time, safe until they’re rescued, if they ever are.
Critical Exegetical Statement
In this essay, I will explore the adaptation The Birds 2147 in comparison to the original speculative story The Birds by Daphne Du Maurier, and why certain choices were made for gender, characters, plot, colour, music, and viewer knowledge. I’ll also address why I chose this ending.
The Birds 2147 is a traditional futuristic science fiction story set on another planet in another star system. It features isolated characters that are under attack from alien birds, and is an adaptation and revision of the original The Birds by Daphne Du Maurier (1952). The original is an introspective speculative story about birds attacking people. In contrast, The Birds 2147 is more energetic and dangerous to exhilarate audiences. I chose traditional futuristic science fiction as the genre, as it is an ideal vehicle for adapting the story to appeal to a more technologically savvy audience, and gave a year to the title for instant recognition of what it is. Science fiction is also expected to teach something, “[It] is employed as a lens through which human culture may be viewed to discover new interpretations” (Menadue, 2017), and many of the audience want to learn something new and expect a technologically and scientifically complex narrative, such as the many ingenious ways that Nat uses to fight off the alien birds.
In this adaptation, the protagonist is female, and she uses science, technology, and brains to fight against the birds, unlike the original which features a male using materials, labour, and brawn. I made the protagonist female to redress the balance in the original story of Nat’s wife not saying or being of much use and being only referred to as ‘the wife’. (Nat’s holographic husband in my adaptation (never named) is a reference to this cardboard ‘wife’ character.) Also, he is there to help reject the original story’s androcentricity. An example is that “Women’s work is biologically determined and therefore is or should be home based and restricted to nurturing and domestic chores.” (Connelly, 2000). Instead, a simple solid hologram can take care of everything. However, having a female lead might also lead to culturally relativistic issues or arguments being expressed in the plot, if it was set contemporarily. By adapting it to traditional futuristic science fiction, the audience can enjoy the real stars – the computer animation, world building and action. It’s the future, so a single mum with two kids on an alien planet with a holographic husband aren’t the crux of the story, they are just vehicles. In this sense, the movie is making an obvious statement by not making an obvious statement about anything, unlike new science fiction, such as Arrival (2016) with its focus on peace, or Interstellar (2014) with its focus on family. This will result in a wider discussion outside the movie about the more subtle aspects of Nat’s agency, and the philosophy within the story. “The inherent intertextuality of literature/art forms encourages the ongoing, evolving production of meaning and an ever-expanding network of textual relations and value-systems.” (Sanders, 2016)
In the original plot, Du Maurier’s characters spend much of the time telling or not telling people about birds. “In “The Birds,” however, the monsters are not outsized creatures, cyborgs, or genetically engineered experiments gone awry, but normal-bodied animals that enact monstrous behavior.” (Bellanca, 2011). In this sense it is the killer birds that are the stars. This aspect makes it easy to transpose the story into a futuristic world with dangerous alien birds, with more focus on introducing various technoscience aspects and creative visual imagery. Reducing the number of characters helps increase the claustrophobia and fear level, while decreasing unnecessary dialogue.
The most common colours chosen are brown, purple, black and white, as the planet can only really have these kinds of colours in plants due to the spectrum of light released by the nearby star. White has been chosen for the human installations as an allegory for white colonies and invasions, and the birds struggling to become white to save themselves has been left open to interpretation. While initially colourful through the birds themselves, as well as the landscapes and the holographic themes used in the hexicles, the movie slowly progresses to darker and darker colours as the energy fades, the sun sinks, and the birds become more violent, reflecting the colour fading from Nat’s idyllic dream lifestyle.
The music changes from excitement to action to sombre, and intense, with silence filled with ominous hums or reverbs. By the time the force field is erected three quarters of the way through, at dusk, the light will be like hope against the darkness of despair and death. (Cue triumphant orchestral music.) When the energy field breaks it is more shocking as the picture is plunged into almost blackness, with deadly birds that can’t be seen in the dark.
The mise en scene contain homages for eagle-eyed science fiction fans, eliciting a cult following, generating debate, and expanding on the intertextual possibilities more than the movie by itself could. Many of the mysteries of who Nat is and why she has a digital husband are also not answered for this reason. This can help the movie have a life outside of its screenplay, adding layers of puzzles like a Palimpsest. While there are small references to other adaptations of The Birds, trading on the knowledge of the audience, more noticeable references are deliberately not included, to set it apart from these works.
The ending is symbolic in that humanity has been fighting the environment for millions of years. It is also symbolic in that freedom is only within. Even escaping a war, hiding on an isolated planet, avoiding people, doing her own thing, Nat is not free. She is jailed by her fears and oppresses herself. Her fights against the birds reflect her fighting within herself. When she freezes her family at the end to save them, she has decided never to change, forever trapped in an environment of her own making.
Overall, The Birds 2147 is an exciting horror thriller in the traditional futuristic science fiction genre to give an overall enjoyable escapist experience without being bogged down in contemporary arguments, but still allowing for some philosophical discussion, as well as teaching viewers about science and agency.
REFERENCES
Arrival. 2016. [film] Directed by D. Villeneuve. USA: FilmNation
Bellanca, M.E. (2011). The Monstrosity of Predation in Daphne du Maurier’s “The Birds.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, [online] 18(1), pp.26–46. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/44086927 [Accessed 7 Jun. 2020].
Connelly, M. 2000. Theoretical Perspectives on Gender and Development. [online] Available at: https://prd-idrc.azureedge.net/sites/default/files/openebooks/272-4/index.html.
Daphne Du Maurier (1953). The Birds. Kiss me again, stranger : a collection of eight stories long and short. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday.
Interstellar. 2020. [film] Directed by C. Nolan. USA: Legendary Pictures.
Menadue, C.B. and Cheer, K.D. (2017). Human Culture and Science Fiction: A Review of the Literature, 1980-2016. SAGE Open, 7(3), p.215824401772369.
Sanders, J. (2015). Adaptation and Appropriation. [online] Google Books. Routledge. Available at: https://books.google.com.au/books?id=Gs74CgAAQBAJ [Accessed 7 Jun. 2020].
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