With the inauguration, the pictures from Saturn's moon, and the false promise of a new Cold War, it's fascinating to see how many films were influenced by some combination of Nixonoid/Reaganite/Thatcherite doomsday politics and the creeping sensation that Earth's best days were long past, or waiting to emerge from nostalgic cocoons. Apart from epics like 2001: A Space Odyssey and its literary precursors, the Seventies and Eighties produced a new wave of interstellar paranoia fantasies, and many of them matched the overwraught brilliance of their forbears dating back to the Fifties and the height of McCarthyite "B" cinema.

Two notables in particular: Aaron Lipstadt's Android, starring Klaus Kinski, and Silent Running, featuring Kinski's spiritual brother, Bruce Dern. With stars like these, it's readily apparent that someone will have to go completely mad and do it in such a way that it's studious without being pretentious, and is thus the only redemptive aspect of the films themselves. Nevertheless, both films project their meaning and their main characters represent two worldviews, diametrically opposed in their outlook on life, and the prospects that the future holds.

Apart from their cosmetic similarities, the explicit nihilism present in their stories washes over the viewer: Earth, a scarred planet charred by fallout and defoliated by nuclear winter, coupled with the notion that only one messianic hero can defy history and return Earth to its state of natural grace, or that a devilish mastermind can revive his synthetic army to conquer the world from which they've been banished. These space cowboys represent the hopes and fears of mechanized society vis-a-vis the value of nature and the humanism that accompanies it, or a foreboding, narcissistic pessimism returning to finish its work with Calvinistic determination.

These films, unlike so many presently in theatres in an Oscar season rife with mundane tales of personal redemption, are connected to the overarching political and social context of the time in a way that a million producers and their million dollar babies can't aspire as the triumph of the genre picture plays out in the bloated budgets of boxing pictures and biopics, wholly divorced from present day reality. Hollywood finds itself in a crisis of overpriced, meaningless films, and beset by the robotic auteurs of their own manufacture. What is the future of a meaningful American cinema divorced from the lukewarm pabulum and celebrations of imperial conquest? Can those cherished "small" movies take over and sway audiences with their precious humanism, or will the Huckabee-an menace prevail once and for all with medieval epics and third generation remakes?