Wheels On Fire [Review: Whip It]

First there was this re-make of Day Of The Triffids with that one minor plot change. Now we have Whip It! - the new Rollerball, without the murder, the future media politics and the balls, but just as much blood and elbowing.

This non-sci-fi film has a lot to recommend it to sci-fi fans. Directed by, you know, Charlie from Firestarter, it stars Ellen Page as a reluctant beauty pageant contestant who defies her 50s-style parents and secretly joins a Roller Derby crew. With it’s Blockers, Pivots, Jammers and unmitigated high-speed aggression, Roller Derby is the closest real-world sport to Quidditch and the film is an extraordinary juxtaposition of shy, geeky teenager coming-of-age and high-speed rollerskating carnage. Page as Bliss/Babe Ruthless is brilliant – well, we wouldn’t expect anything less, and Drew Barrymore delivers a very watchable sports film, earning her director’s wings while still finding the time to cameo as the accident-prone Smashley Simpson.

Roller Derby is gaining ground fast in the UK with two leagues active in London and several more across the country - the London Rollergirls became the first UK league to join the WFTDA last year. Naturally The Sci-Fi Gene is a fan of the steampunk-lovin' Steam Rollers team. Many RD players give themselves names that appeal to my sense of pun - soccer, golf or snooker would be vastly improved as sports if the players included R. Meg Eddon and Nuke Leah.

Daydream Believer [Review: Inception]

Inception is good, hard speculative fiction in the sense of gedanken-experiment. It revolves around a single, simple concept - shared dreaming - and the plot of the film introduces and explores the practical, philosophical and moral questions thrown up by this concept.

While the idea is straightforward, the plot is not: as the climax approaches, the heist-movie team of nöonauts* are travelling through different dreams simultaneously while trying to pull off their audacious and precisely timed plan. Director Christopher Nolan and editor Lee Smith, who also worked together on The Prestige, have once again delivered a complex plot that remains easy to follow - a number of cinematic devices, including the different colour themes and styles for each layer of reality, help with this. However where The Prestige is perfectly edited, Inception is close to perfect but slightly too long, and as a result a few scenes gain a comic edge that may not have been intended.

Casting is great whether you are a fan of Mr. DiCaprio or not - like many heist movies this is very much an ensemble piece. I was particularly pleased to see Ellen Page, the star of Juno, in a major role - an arrogant and talented architecture student and far from your typical action heroine.

Previous films such as The Cell, The Matrix, eXistenZ have explored similar ideas to Inception - travelling either into the minds of other people or into cyberspace. A common idea is that when you die, or are killed in such a state, you also die in real life. There's no obvious reason for this so I was pleased to see that Inception takes a different and more intelligent tack. Here, if you die in your sleep, you just wake up - however it turns out there are other, more plausible ways for dreaming to be dangerous.

*The term nöonaut for a dream traveller is not used in Inception but in Black Brillion and Matt Hughes' other novels and short stories of The Times Before The End Times, in which characters explore the collective unconscious and do battle with archetypal foes.