Using Tom Gunning's conception of the cinema of attractions, Brooks Landon has suggested that the ‘“digital cinema of attractions” can help us rethink and “resee” the history and the future of science-fiction film’ (1999, 36). Regardless of the fact that ‘all cinema-of-attractions films can be thought of as science fiction’ (32), it is telling that Landon uses the adjective ‘digital’ rather than, for instance, ‘contemporary.’ Naturally, in the last decade or two, filmmaking in any genre or tradition has become ‘at base not film at all—or at least no longer all film’ (Stewart 2007, 1), in other words—digital. Nevertheless, it is science fiction that seems to enjoy a privileged position in the ongoing imbrication of cinema and digital technologies. Already in 1985, Stewart noted that ‘movies about the future tend to be about the future of movies’ (1985, 159–60). While this observation originally referred to the technical circumstances of science fiction film production, with time it has acquired a new dimension. The future of movies is as often defined by the increasing affordances of cinematic apparatus as it is contextualized in global and multicultural terms extending well beyond the traditional Anglophone scope of sf cinema. This transformation is intimately linked to the socioeconomic character of digital technologies, most obviously exemplified by the availability of special effects.

According to Stacey Abbott, ‘the relationship between science fiction and special effects (FX) is often mutually dependent since the genre needs special effects to showcase its future worlds and technologies while the imaginative demands of the stories themselves have spearheaded new developments of FX technologies’ (2006, 89). Conversely, Brooks Landon argues that the focus on the spectacle of film technology is in itself sufficient to classify a film as science fiction regardless of its narrative (1999, 32). While the latter proposition may prove radical for many scholars formed by narrative tradition and generic separatism, it is indeed true that many fantastic films relying on spectacular special effects tend to blur genre boundaries. Somewhat convergently, Abbott suggests that, because of their heavy reliance on digital special effects, such genres as horror, fantasy, and martial arts are transformed ‘into a form of hybridized science fiction’ (2006, 90).