Review: Don’t Miss Red Earth at The Enzian This Sunday
Meet the filmmaker at this ticketed event.
Courtesy Red Earth
Whether or not you’re a science fiction buff, you’re likely unaware that we have a noted sci-fi auteur among us in Georg Koszulinski, who teaches film studies at the University of Central Florida.
Two of his own films, neither of which is of the “Doctor X will build a creature” variety, will be screened at Enzian Theatre at noon this Sunday, Sept. 17.
One, a short film dubbed “New Mexico Deathwish Diatribe,” is an imagined, talk-show affair featuring himself and two guests, both of whom he fills in for: Robert J. Oppenheimer, the so-called “American Prometheus” who developed the atomic bomb, and an alien visitor who wonders out loud whether humanity is worth saving.
The longer film, “Red Earth,” imagines a future in which the Earth is a depleted wasteland, Mars has been colonized and mined for precious resources to save it – and its colonists, in order to save themselves, rebel against their home planet.
Courtesy Red Earth
It’s an inter-planetary civil war – and in a plot twist that might put you in mind of a typical, old-school sci-fi outer-space ray-gun shoot-em-up, the Mars colonists rig one of the planet’s moons up as a massive projectile and fling it at the earth to debilitate their adversaries.
But don’t let that mislead you. This is no late-night “War of the Worlds” rerun. Like all of Koszulinski’s works, both films have the quality of parables about them. “Most of my work over the past two decades either directly or indirectly is a thinly-veiled reference to the dehumanization of people via the process of colonization, and how that process makes conflict with the mother country inevitable,” he explains.
Courtesy Red Earth
In that sense, he’s tapping into a science fiction tradition that goes back to one of the form’s pioneers: H.G. Wells, who wrote the original, the literary granddaddy of them all, that being “The War of the Worlds” in the late 1800s, inspired by the catastrophic effect of European colonization of the Aboriginal Tasmanians.
Koszulinski will attend the screening and will be available for a question and answer session afterwards.
Tickets
Tickets are $11.00, but less for members and it is recommended to buy your tickets in advance.
