A Trip to the Moon to World War Z: A Hundred Years of Construction of the Savage in Science Fiction Movies

Yusuf Ziya Gökçek

Abstract: Science fiction cinema reproduces the self-centered recognition of the other and hierarchically coding the entities created in modern sci-fi novels originating from the 17th century. It makes the existence outside itself strange and freaky, but it prefers to leave its human essence in a tamable form. Colonialism transforms the space and human being affected by the disaster, which it tries to find, to a controllable level and a hegemonic power generation. In the study, it will be seen how a legacy has been transferred by appropriating the conventions of the science fiction tradition before itself, and how the genre has evolved from the past to the present will be examined with Van Dijk’s discourse analysis. It has been observed that Le Voyage dans la lune (Georges Méliès, 1902) and World War Z (Marc Forster, 2013) chosen as samples, which have more than a century among them, constantly produce the wild/ savage. The most fundamental rhetoric of Science Fiction and colonial politics is to clarify the distinction between us and the other, to establish a hierarchical sequence within the genre on the basis of the principles of dependency and liberation.

Keywords: Colonialism, Savage / Wild, Sci-Fi Film, World War Z, A Trip to the Moon

Yusuf Ziya Gökçek
DOI: 10.29224/insanveinsan.1058106
Year 9, Issue 32, Spring 2022


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