CAPTIVE STATE

CAPTIVE STATE. Rupert Wyatt, director, co-script with Erica Beeney. Keith P. Cunningham, production design. USA: DreamWorks (as Storyteller Distribution), Amblin Partners, Lightfuse & Gettaway, Participant Media (production) / Focus Features (US distribution), 2019. See IMDb for complexities of world-wide distribution.[1]

The alien conquerers of Earth are imaged, in their few appearances as sort of huge, highly aggressive cacti crossed with hedgehogs and porcupines,[2] but their SWAT teams, so to speak, are humanoid-robotic but with differences, making them appear more mineral than metallic. Similarly with the alien spacecraft, which look like large flying rocks (cf. and contrast Laputa in Gulliver's Travels). Indeed, much of the movie is kind of anti-SF visually, set in Chicago under a regime that forbids digital technology to humans and a handful of standard tropes are turned in ways that defamiliarize them.

Humans are tagged with tracking implants, but the implants are bio-electronic, with the visual emphasis on the "bio," looking like small-worm-size parasites.

Some humans are collared, but unlike the collars on real-world slaves or on "Risks" in Pohl and Williamson's The Reefs of Space and in the film DEADLOCK, the collars in CAPTIVE STATE are put on voluntarily to block transmissions from the implants.

There is a vertical trip by humans to the alien conquerors, but in an elevator, and not an ascent (to the gods) but going down.

Even hexagons[3] appear, but only fleetingly in anything remotely SciFi-ish, and appear also in the "chicken wire" on the cages of the emphatically low-tech cages for homing/messenger pigeons.