Join Matt and Dave for a winter solstice special with this last chance to explore 2021 via 1995 in 2021. Based on a William Gibson short story and script, this genre defining cyberpunk noir is a prescient foretelling of a global pandemic, information wars, and the internet/metaverse. At the hollow centre is Johnny (Keanu Reeves), a mnemonic courier exposing the fragility of truth and revealing – after psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan – the subject barred from itself.

Never look a gift horse in the mouth? What would you do if offered everything you’ve been told you ever wanted? Matt and Dave check out Boots Riley’s utterly hilarious and deadly serious counter cultural and visually inventive sci-fi dystopia. So, will Cassius Green stick to the later-than-late-capitalism script? Find out in our season finale as the present, past, and future of slavery collide amidst worker unions, big tech, performance art, and Hegel’s dialectic.

The end of the world is nigh! Join Matt and Dave for a magnificent sci-fi take on the Noah’s Ark myth, the Earth facing destruction from a rogue sun and its orbiting planet: Bellus and Zyra. There’s eight months to build a spaceship in a last-ditch attempt to save something of the human race, and carry 40 people to Zyra. Who will go? Will they get there? Is the planet inhabitable? And what can Sartre tell us about our desires to conjure tales of existential apocalypse?

Boot up your SQUID for the millennium, and join Matt and Dave as they tread the streets of Kathryn Bigelow’s apocalyptic vision of end-of-days Los Angeles. Lenny is a sleazy dealer in illicitly recorded memories - Mace is trying to save him, mostly from himself. Together they discover some tapes that will expose centuries of racism and misogyny. A movie as true today as when made. [CW: film and episode explore themes of sexual violence and racist violence.]

What if there are parallel worlds? Our human dominated world, and another, where dinosaurs survived and so evolved a reptile dominated world? And what if you could pass between them? Matt and Dave go portal diving with the first ever film adapted from a video game: the big concept extravaganza of Super Mario Bros. Along the way they explore the intertextuality of games, movies, and comics, and philosopher Gilles Deleuze on incompossible worlds.

Where's Billy Pilgrim? In his American lakeside home? A WW2 Prisoner of War camp in Dresden? Or on the planet Tralfamadore? Matt and Dave go time tripping in this classic countercultural scifi movie from the novel by Kurt Vonnegut. In so doing, they encounter a narration that disrupts temporality and can be explored through Henri Bergson’s theory of memory. Is this an anti-war film concerning PTSD and mental health? Or a weird alien abduction movie?

Matt and Dave are back for the third season of philoscifiz with as complex a scifi movie as is imaginable! The young nobleman Paul Atreides encounters his destiny on the planet Arrakis, the only source of the drug melange, aka spice. Director David Lynch adapts the original novel in his own way, accentuating the psychedelic enactivism and Nietzschean themes of will to power while playing with temporality and framing the story as propaganda told from the future.

Jeff Gomez – transmedia pioneer and CEO of Starlight Runner – invites Matt and Dave on a collective journey toward first contact with aliens. Along the way we encounter Nietzsche’s love of fate and an ungrounding of mathematics as a universal language. Yet the true ‘beauty of Arrival’ – for Jeff – is how Louise ‘understands something fundamental’, that ‘to know others is to perceive the world differently’, as a collective journey. And so concludes our second season.

Matt and Dave get trapped in a Cronenberg film! Because – it seems – you have to play the game to find out why you’re playing the game. Follow us as we tumble down a mole hole and enter the world of eXistenZ with the demoness Allegra Geller. Or do we? Technophobia becomes realist terror for the anti-gamer resistance while the film seen through the lens of Zola’s naturalism uses gaming to critique the reality of the real world. Or does it?

Matt and Dave are dropped head-first into a world where Descartes was right. Yet - proclaims the polyonymous entity from the shadows of this cyberpunk anime - 'neither science nor philosophy can explain what life is'. Set in future Japan, Motoko Kusanagi is a cyborg security agent, pondering such intangibles while fighting terror. From Gilbert Ryle to Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, we explore accounts of the mind-body problem, and the problem of machine reproduction.

Matt and Dave explore the significance of not smushing an ant! Ship ahoy as the crew of the Proteus are miniaturised in order to enter the blood stream and save the life of a dying scientist. Racing against the clock in real time, we go on a biological excursion as a kind of space exploration. Is the movie an expression of red scare paranoia? Or does it expose such fears? And what is the outcome of the Socratic dialogues between Dr Duval and Dr Michaels?

Matt and Dave go to robot heaven in this old-skool sci-fi classic from the late 1970s. On one side, the aphoristic, gung-ho Vincent and the fear and trembling of old Bob; on the other, the martial uniformity of the sentinels, the eerie horror of the cyborgs, and the malign presence and silence of Maximillian. Join us and the crew of the Palomino as we encounter the evil genius of Dr Hans Reinhardt, and the ambiguity of the black hole and the spacetime beyond.

Matt and Dave bound into the second season of the podcast with this bright, joyful, and profound multi-perspectival sci-fi movie. A big ball of evil is zooming towards the Earth, with only the elemental Leeloo standing in the way of an extinction event. But is human life worth saving when we do what we do to each other? Or should Leeloo love her fate, as wise-cracking Korben Dallas believes? Questions Nietzsche explored beyond good and evil proliferate!

To conclude the first season on a high, Matt and Dave explore a box office flop! Why? The film didn’t fail – we, the audience, failed the film. Thusly, it is time to join Prince Colwyn and his disparate companions as they journey through all manner of terrors in this visually stunning film to save Princess Lyssa and their planet from the Beast. Fantasy rises from the foundations of sci-fi as we encounter myth with Joseph Campbell and 'The Hero with a Thousand Faces'.

Matt and Dave feel some droid love with Huey, Dewey, and Louie aboard the Valley Forge at the rings of Saturn. This film explores the environmental fears of our time pushed into the future so we can see them with clarity. But is it really trees vs technology? Is it really Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann vs Adam in Eden? Or something far more complex and ambiguous? What is for sure, is the ecological, social, and personal trauma of Freeman Lowell.

Matt and Dave go back to the early days of sound cinema and one of the first great sci-fi films, scripted by non-other than H. G. Wells. A lavish golden age blockbuster! We follow as the movie explores socialism and technology in the 1940s, 1970s, and 2030s. Along the way we cross paths with the philosophy of Hannah Arendt, Marshall McLuhan, and Karl Marx, as well as the late writing of Wells. At stake are questions of human progress, happiness, and intention.

Matt and Dave psychoanalyse Lenny Huxley's brave new world of LA 2030 with the rise of uber-criminal Simon Phoenix and return of the indomitable John Spartan. We watch Hollywood burn with the LA Uprisings of the early ‘90s, interrogate a mise en scène of hygiene, and explore the fetishisation of the male body turning to Freud and his topological theory of mind. What transforms a utopia into a dystopia? Or, are they already the same thing?

Matt and Dave encounter the aftermath of a human apocalypse and the endeavours of a robot artificial intelligence to repopulate the Earth. But all is not as it seems for the young girl at the centre of events. Swerving the ethical dilemma of the trolley problem - explored within the film – we hurtle straight for Kant and the possibility of universal morality. We also touch upon the lifetime of a civilisation within the Drake equation, as well as the lies of Plato's Republic.

Matt and Dave take a deep dive in the further temporal shenanigans of Marty and the Doc. Find out how short shift can be made of the standard paradoxes of time, and what time travel films in general and the ‘Back to the Future’ trilogy in particular seem to explore. Along the way we have a close encounter with Trump, get caught up in family values, and see how the film can be said to affirm multiplicity.