'Invisible Hand' director: Sci-fi satire has become more relevant

LOS ANGELES, Aug. 15 (UPI) -- Writer-director Cory Finley said his sci-fi satire, Landscape with Invisible Hand, in theaters Friday, keeps becoming more relevant after production ended.

The film is set in 2036, five years after an alien species called the Vuvv landed and took over Earth's school curriculum.

The film is based on a book by M.T. Anderson written in 2017, before schools in some states started limiting race, gender and sexuality studies in their curriculum.

"That's the thing about any kind of satire," Finley told UPI in a recent Zoom interview. "New disturbing points of reference will keep coming up in real life."

One uneducated character accuses a Black character of having privilege historically, completely oblivious to the history of slavery. Finley said the depiction of an education system that ignores slavery became more relevant as recently as last month.

On July 19, Florida schools approved a revamped African American history curriculum, which drew criticism for its inaccurate view of slavery.

The larger issue of Vuvv replacing Earth's education also is relevant outside Florida, Finley said. Multiple states have banned books about racism, the Holocaust and LGBTQ issues this year.

"It becomes a sort of propaganda for sure," Finley said about the Vuvv education system. "It's a top-down dictation of what's being taught in schools."

Other social issues the film addresses go back years and decades. By the book's 2017 publication, income inequality and environmental issues already existed.

The Vuvv technology makes most human jobs irrelevant, so even people in the top 1% of income are reduced to poverty. The privileged live in floating cities.

"That's where the Real Housewives of New York would live," Finely said. "So it should be a little tacky. It should be rich and gaudy and beautiful, but a little tacky."

In the film, the Campbells still own a house, so they invite the homeless Marshes to live in their basement. The Marshes' gratitude quickly turns to resentment as they feel even the Campbells living on the first two stories are classist.

"Even when all of the bourgeois have been flattened into this large proletariat, there's still class resentment, even within these equally hard-up sets of people," Finley said.

Chloe Marsh (Kylie Rogers) is a classmate of Adam Campbell's (Asante Blackk). Chloe's brother, Hunter (Michael Gandolfini), lashes out at Adam and his mother, Beth (Tiffany Haddish), because he's powerless against the Vuvv.

"He, like so many people do, has chosen to find scapegoats outside of the Vuvv," Finley said.

The Vuvv do offer humans some ways to make a living under their rule. Adam and Chloe agree to broadcast their relationship so the Vuvv can learn about human romance.

The Vuvv have given humans nodes to attach to their heads that receive and broadcast, like a more advanced form of modern social media.

"Especially with this neural ink stuff that Elon Musk is getting into, there is a lot of money being spent trying to get a brain-computer interface," Finley said. "That's basically what the nodes are."

The Vuvv have solved some of Earth's environmental problems. They produce food cubes that eliminate the need for natural resources.

Though the cubes provide all the nutrients humans need, many don't like eating them and still attempt to grow their own vegetables. Finley said the book intrigued him with Anderson's idea that the Vuvv made humanity an offer it couldn't afford to refuse.

"The environmental crisis in the world as it exists might prompt us to take a deal with the devil with these aliens," Finley said. "They may be fairly green in the way that they create things, but that's the only good thing about them."

To create the food cubes for the 2022 production, Landscape prop artists had several options. Steak cubes were actual steak.

"They actually just cooked steak, really big cuts, and then just whittled them very carefully in a machine-tooled-looking way," Finley said.

Carrot cubes were less appetizing, Finley said.

"They used a Jello emulsion and the cast did not enjoy eating those," Finley said. "That created the right feeling on set because it's supposed to be disgusting."

Anderson described the Vuvv as looking like coffee tables. So, it was important to Finley, and visual effects supervisor Eric De Boer, that the Vuvv did not look like any other movie alien they'd seen.

"We didn't want anything that looked like a little green man or a Ridley Scott Alien," Finley said. "We wanted something that felt ultimately very simple and iconic, but still did not look like anything we know."