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Category Archives: Science Fiction
Life finds a way …
We need reminding of plain facts. Only Jeff Goldblum could do it for us today.
UFO (2019)
The guy on TV was lying. College student Derek (Alex Sharp) tries to use his exceptional mathematical skills to interpret messages that appear to have been sent around a UFO sighting at a local airport, suggesting extra-terrestrial attempts at contact. Accompanied by his room mate Lee (Benjamin Beatty) and girlfriend Natalie (Ella Purnell) he is rebuffed by the airport staff and Government officials including FBI Agent Franklin Ahls (David Strathairn) and suspects a cover up. He requests the assistance of his professor Dr. Hendricks (Gillian Anderson) who thinks he is brilliant along the lines of a Thomas Edison but doesn’t really want anything to do with a gifted guy prepared to risk his scholarship by flunking her class. But he is haunted by memories of a childhood sighting which his mother refused to acknowledge … Do you know how many threats the airport gets every day? It’s not quite correct to describe this as suspenseful because it doesn’t conform to the usual tenets of dramatic pitch: rather it settles for a flat realist line mirroring the landscape, leaving the maths to do the talking. What’s marvellous is the lo-fi approach of paper, pencils and calculators to try and decrypt the probability and navigate the universe. Anderson is cannily cast, linking her meta-fashion to The X-Files, a shortcut to the idea dominating the story: We Are Not Alone. An intriguing exercise of singular focus utilising real-life information and TV newscasts about a 2006 incident at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport. Written and directed by Ryan Eslinger with a smart score by West Dylan Thordson. They put the Fine Structure Constant in their message. The mathematical equations and graphs are a thing of beauty, no matter how impenetrable. Practically a Hipster PDA exercise in astrophysics. That’s Warren Beatty and Annette Bening’s son as Lee. The wavelength is the unit of the measurement – it IS co-ordinates
Enemy Mine (1985)
Do you think we really are alone out here? During a late 21st century a war between humans and the reptilian Drac race,Bilateral Terran Alliance (BTA) spaceship pilot Willis E. Davidge (Dennis Quaid) ends up stranded after their dogfight ends up with them both crash landing on alien planet Fyrine IV with enemy soldier Jeriba Shigan (Louis Gossett Jr.). While both Willis and his Drac counterpart can breathe on the planet, the volcanic environment and its creatures are relatively hostile, forcing the two to trust each other and work together to survive. As time goes by, Willis and Jeriba become unlikely friends, though their unique relationship faces considerable challenges over three years and they save each other’s lives. Davidge dreams of spaceships and then sees human miners scavenging on the planet: they have to avoided because they use Dracs as slaves. Then Jerry, who like all Dracs is asexual, reveals his pregnancy and dies in childbirth after bearing a baby son Zammis (Bumper Robinson) whom Davidge undertakes to raise and return to the Drac world … Don’t you ever get tired of reading that book? Edward Khmara’s adaptation of Barry B. Longyear’s novella strains between creature feature and sci fi epic but succeeds on its own terms with a message of intrinsic humanity. It harks back perhaps to the effects-laden production that was director Wolfgang Petersen’s previous outing, The Neverending Story, especially with Gossett’s lizard-like makeup, but the Why Can’t We All Just Get Along theme is well worked out in the inter-species friendship and Quaid is his typically charismatic self. You’d have to have a heart of stone not to find it touching. It looks great and the beautiful score is by Maurice Jarre. That’s why when we walk or when we hunt we always walk in the direction of the rising sun
High Life (2018)
Nothing can grow inside us. Monte (Robert Pattinson) and a baby girl called Willow (Scarlett Lindsey) are the last survivors of a dangerous mission on the edge of the solar system. He dumps bodies in astronaut suits into space and rears the child as he continues his work. Flashbacks reveal that it is a spaceship filled with prisoners, chief among them mad scientist Dr Dibs (Juliette Binoche) who wants to breed a new generation of humans and gives the male criminals (André Benjamin, Ewan Mitchell) drugs in exchange for their semen on a trip that will not end in survival. Captain (Lars Eidinger) appears ineffectual while the women (Mia Goth, Claire Tran, Agata Buzek) resist male attention and don’t want to be forcibly impregnated. As the reproductive experiment takes shape a storm of cosmic rays hits the ship and tempers run high … You’ve become a shaman of sperm. Filmmakers can take a funny turn when they start making films in a language not their own. This screenplay by that singular director Claire Denis and Jean-Pol Fargeau with collaboration by Geoff Cox and additional writing credited to Andrew Litvack (and an uncredited contribution by Nick Laird) is a case in point as her first excursion into English is deeply strange and a reworking of many tropes and themes in the genre. For the first half hour you have to really like the sound of a baby crying; the rest of the film is mostly about bodily fluids – their source, their harvesting, their destination – interspersed with acts of violence. Pattinson lends it his intensity but to what end? Well, a black hole, if you must know. Not so much a space mission as emission, this is really a hymn to onanism: truly a mystery, all coming and no going in an exploration of sci-fi as inner space, in and out of hand. She is perfection
Deep Impact (1998)
This is not a videogame, son. One year after teenage astronomer Leo Biederman (Elijah Wood) spots a comet the size of Mount Everest heading for Earth, journalist Jenny Lerner (Téa Leoni) mistakes the scoop of a lifetime for a story about the mistress of the US President Beck (Morgan Freeman). Once she’s allowed into the loop of the Extinction Level Event with the rest of the press pack she finds that with one year to go before it could hit the planet there’s a plan to build a system of caves while a joint US/Russian spacecraft nicknamed Messiah being led by veteran astronaut Captain Sturgeon Tanner (Robert Duvall) is going to try to intercept its path with nuclear weapons … People know you. They trust you. A disaster movie par excellence, this mixes up men on a mission and race against time tropes with ideas about God, friendship, family and the all-pervasive sense of doom that settles upon people learning of an entire planet’s imminent destruction and how they deal with it. Leoni doesn’t quite have the expressivity to offer a mature performance although her particular role is buttressed by the subplot of her unhappiness at her father Jason’s (Maximilian Schell) new marriage while her beloved mother Robin (Vanessa Redgrave) suffers. However the entire drama is well structured and tautly managed. Written by Bruce Joel Rubin and Michael Tolkin (as a vague remake of When Worlds Collide, 1951) and expertly handled by Mimi Leder, better known for TV’s ER, some of whose alumni feature here. Let’s go home
The Dead Don’t Die (2019)
The world is perfect. Appreciate the details. In the sleepy small town of Centerville, Pennsylvania something is not quite right. News reports are scary with the earth tilting on its axis and scientists are concerned, but no one foresees the dead rising from their graves and feasting on the living, and the citizens must battle to survive. Chief Robertson (Bill Murray) and his officer sidekick (Adam Driver) get to work dealing with the undead while Mindy Morrison (Chloe Sevigny) reluctantly accompanies them, terrified and Hermit Bob (Tom Waits) observes hostilities … The only way to kill the dead is to kill the head. Well I didn’t see that coming. Jim Jarmusch making a zombie comedy? Things are getting exceedingly strange in the world of the cool Eighties auteur when he’s making a film that serves at least partly as an homage to George Romero with a side salad of Assault on Precinct 13 and a reference to Samuel Fuller. The title comes from a short story turned TVM written by Robert Psycho Bloch and it’s somewhat honoured here with a subplot about juvenile delinquents and the revenge they take. It’s something of a shaggy dog story with slow-running gags and the Murray/Driver double act offers deadpan self-conscious commentary on filmmaking indicating the lack of genre commitment, which may or may not irritate and take you out of the action the wrong way. In fact it makes it a bit of a zombie zombie film, if you think about it. There is a huge head count and most of the fun is in watching the different tools used to decapitate – guns, garden shears and, with her fierce Scottish accent and a samurai sword, funeral home proprietor Zelda Winston (Tilda Swinton). Even sweet Selena Gomez is separated from her torso. Did I mention the UFO?! Thought not. A nicely made oddity shot with typical aplomb by Frederick Elmes. This is definitely going to end badly
Star Wars: Episode IX – The Rise of Skywalker (2019)
These are you final steps, Rey. Rise and take them. The surviving Resistance faces the First Order once more as Rey (Daisy Ridley), Finn (John Boyega) and Poe Dameron’s (Oscar Isaac) journey continues led by General Leia Organa (Carrie Fisher). They discover that the Emperor Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid) is alive and unwell and living on Exegol where he’s been discovered by Kylo Ren (Adam Driver). With the power and knowledge of generations behind them, the final battle commences between good and evil and Rey makes a surprising discovery about her origins that leads to a confrontation that could have devastating consequences for future generations … Every Jedi who ever lived, lives in you. How to finish a beloved trilogy? Perhaps it’s fitting that the concluding days of a decade that ends a 42-year long saga is one that commenced with James Cameron’s Avatar a film that was purportedly about to change cinema; that film’s impact then became dissipated with the sheer proliferating superheroism of Marvel Comics; so now we have something that seems somehow less tainted than either of those (non-) series. J.J. Abrams may not be the ideal filmmaker to bring things to a conclusion, ending things not being his forte (I give you Lost). The first trilogy is so beloved; the second so critically reviled (albeit kids love it); so how would it tie up so many apparently disparate loose ends? Well, it does, if rather haphazardly. It brings together the Sith story with the Jedi story and allows the characters of both Rey and Ben/Kylo Ren to assert their position in the pantheon. The original characters play an active role, albeit in unexpected fashion; a favourite returns; and there is more than one kind of rebirth. In other words all the Jungian and mythical tropes that inspired George Lucas via Joseph Campbell are invoked. Even the Ewoks (the honours appropriately taken by Warwick Davis and his son) make a very brief appearance, in case anyone would think they’d been overlooked. There is some dreadfully portentous dialogue; there is some bad acting (I’m sorry to say I mean you, Richard E. Grant); there is a brief Lesbian kiss (the Force definitely woke up); there are some deaths and sacrifices. The film that made my entire generation go to the movies ends the 2010s and it’s not a cliffhanger, it’s a proper ending. What else do you want? It all sits, more or less, on the elegant shoulders of Ridley and she’s very good as the feistiest woman since, well, Princess Leia. Happy New Year. Screenplay by Chris Terrio and J.J. Abrams from a story by Derek Connolly & Colin Treverrow and Terrio & Abrams. We are not alone
Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (1964)
Camp seasonal classic for the ages featuring a very tiny Pia Zadora. Bliss, of sorts.
Captain Marvel (2019)
You call me ‘young lady’ again, I’ll shove my foot up somewhere it’s not supposed to be. Captain Marvel aka Carol Danvers or Vers (Brie Larson) is an extraterrestrial Kree warrior who finds herself caught in the middle of an intergalactic battle between her people and the Skrulls. After crashing an experimental aircraft, Air Force pilot Carol Danvers was discovered by the Kree and trained as a member of the elite Starforce Military under the command of her mentor Yon-Rogg. Back on Earth in 1995, she keeps having recurring memories of another life as U.S. Air Force pilot Carol Danvers. With help from S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) Captain Marvel tries to uncover the secrets of her past while harnessing her special superpowers to end the war with the evil Skrulls… We have no idea what other intergalactic threats are out there. And our one woman security force had a prior commitment on the other side of the universe. S.H.I.E.L.D. alone can’t protect us. We need to find more. The first twenty minutes are wildly confusing – flashbacks? dreams? reality? WTF? Etc. Then when Vers hits 1995 we’re back in familiar earthbound territory – Blockbuster Video, slow bandwidth, familiar clothes, Laser Tag references, and aliens arriving to sort stuff out under cover of human identities. And a killer soundtrack of songs by mostly girl bands(Garbage, Elastica, TLC et al). So far, so expected. Digital de-ageing assists the older crew including Annette Bening (she’s not just Dr Wendy Lawson! she’s Supreme Intelligence, natch) but the colourless Brie Larson (well, she is named after a cheese) doesn’t contribute a whole lot to the otherwise tolerable female-oriented end of the action adventure. There is however a rather marvellous ginger cat called Goose happily reminding us of both Alien and Top Gun. Written and directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck. I have nothing to prove to you
