A team of Section 31 special agents on the hunt for a rumoured superweapon must persuade space pub landlord, ex-Section 31 agent and even-more-ex-Mirror Universe evil dictator Phillipa Georgiou (Michelle Yeoh) to ally with them. It turns out this is not the only thing linking Georgiou and the weapon.
In Star Trek history, Section 31 is the Federation's secret service, sent to carry out covert, deniable missions that might be seen as clashing with the Federation's ideology or laws - a lot like Special Circumstances in Iain M. Banks' Culture novels, or perhaps the secret services of our own world. Section 31 first appeared in Deep Space 9 episodes. They have cropped up in Enterprise, Picard, Lower Decks and some of the recent films, and were central to the plot of Discovery, which also introduced Emperor Georgiou.
The Section 31 movie was in many ways not what I had expected. The films and episodes above give an impression of a sinister and super-efficient spy agency, possibly with a mild black leather fetish. It's a little surprising that the team of special agents in this movie, supposedly Section 31's elite, are actually a bunch of comical, clumsy, arguing misfits. How do they ever actually get anything done? And how did powered-armour-obsessive Zeph and work experience girl Rachel, in particular, qualify for the Star Trek equivalent of 00 status?
However this description misses the point of Section 31, which is really all about Georgiou - and about Michelle Yeoh. I first saw Yeoh in action in the mind-blowing martial arts film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Yeoh is a talented actor who has appeared in a wide range of roles, not least Everything Everywhere All At Once, but Section 31 is designed to put her martial arts talents centre stage. This is an action-heavy movie in which no opportunity is missed for fantastic, joyous hand to hand combat - unusual in the phaser-heavy world of Star Trek.
Section 31 may not be the best Star Trek movie (obviously that's Galaxy Quest) but it's certainly the best Star Trek martial arts movie.
Score: Three stars out of five.
All movies reviewed on The Sci-Fi Gene blog are awarded three stars out of five.
While all the bear stuff is happening on all the social
medias (#TeamBear) this is a good time to retrospectively review two bearsploitation
movies released in 2023.
Cocaine Bear (2023), directed by Elizabeth Banks, is loosely
based on a real incident in 1985, where a bear found and ate cocaine that had
been dropped from a smuggler’s plane.
The movie tells the story of some tourists, a mother, daughter
and friend, a park ranger and a wildlife campaigner, some wannabe criminals and
some serious criminals who all converge on a forested national park. Into the mix
is added the missing cocaine and the bear that finds it. In real life there is
no evidence that the bear harmed anyone. In the movie this is not the case and
there are several gory fatalities. However this is a character-driven story
rather than a bloodbath for its own sake.
The bear is also a character. Early scenes show the effects
of the drug – one minute the bear is aggressively focussed on hunting tourists,
the next it is happily distracted by a butterfly. As the movie continues we
learn a little more about the bear’s background and can empathise with it –
this is particularly true of the final act.
Overall this is a unique, enjoyable movie with an excellent,
witty and thoughtful script and great performances from all of the ensemble cast,
and I would recommend it to fans of horror, comedy, action and bears.
Score: Three stars out of five.
All movies reviewed on The Sci-Fi Gene blog are awarded
three stars out of five.
Winnie-The-Pooh: Blood And Honey (2023), directed by Rhys
Frake-Waterfield, is one of a new crop of copyrightsploitation movies taking
advantage of the fact that many classic books are now out of copyright. Other recent
examples of this genre include Mad Heidi (2022) and Mickey’s Mouse Trap (2024).
The copyright-busting movie genre has its interesting
quirks. It is A.A.Milne’s Winnie-The-Pooh books that have come out of copyright
– the Disney movie version is still protected. So there is nothing to stop a
filmmaker presenting Pooh as a serial killer, but he cannot legally be shown
wearing a red T-shirt (instead he wears a redneck-style lumberjack shirt). To
make it even clearer that this is the book Pooh not the Disney Pooh, the movie
starts with an animated introduction very much in the style of the original
E.H.Shepard illustrations.
The genre is also growing fast – there is a sequel, Blood
And Honey 2, out this year, and further films in the Poohniverse or Twisted
Childhood Universe are in the pipeline, including Poohniverse: Monsters
Assemble which will feature Pooh alongside twisted literary versions of Bambi,
Pinocchio and Peter Pan. Meanwhile the first version of Mickey Mouse, as seen
in Steamboat Willie, is now unprotected hence Mickey’s Mouse Trap and several
other movie and game projects.
Blood And Honey is a low-budget, low-expectations movie: viewers
expecting the quality of script, plot, performance or production values of
Cocaine Bear may be slightly disappointed in some ways. These unreasonably high
demands from cruel, selfish moviegoers might also explain why this movie won five Golden
Raspberries and hardly any Oscars. On the other hand this is a full-on, no-holes-barred
gorefest. It’s probably the most violent Winnie-The-Pooh film ever - even more violent than A Blustery Day. And as an
animator who myself, back in 2012, put swearing, drug-taking and generally badly behaved LEGO minifigs on screen here, I do appreciate there is a pleasure in the subversion of innocence.
Score: Three stars out of five.
All movies reviewed on The Sci-Fi Gene blog are awarded
three stars out of five.
Sleep Dealer is an indie science fiction movie made in 2008 and set mostly in Mexico. I first came across it when reading an interview with the director, Alex Rivera. I recently watched it online and I think it's a beautiful film, deserving a second lease of life in this era of Zoom remote working.
Memo (Luis Fernando Pena) is a tech geek growing up in a farming village but dreaming of escape. When catastrophe strikes his family in the form of an aerial drone attack, Memo is forced to leave. He travels to Tijuana, along the way meeting city girl and aspiring writer Luz (Leonor Varela), gets mini-jack ports inserted painfully in his arms and back, and he's ready to get work in a "sleep dealer factory" where he can plug into the VR network and control a construction robot that could be working in another country.
This movie uses near-future sci-fi concepts to tell a very personal story about oppression, exploitation and the value of life. Remote working is not safe - thanks to dodgy electronics Memo runs the risk of blindness or injury every day he clocks in. His employers don't seem to be interested in health and safety and there's little he can do. But while labour is cheap, water is expensive - following the construction of a dam, the rivers around Memo's home village have dried up Jean de Florette style and the inhabitants pay to collect water from a commercially owned and heavily guarded reservoir.
The remote working theme is interesting as it becomes a metaphor for indirect oppression - while the privileged seem to be running the world, the means of oppression are remote controlled checkpoints with machine guns, and their operators are likely to be other low-paid workers. The drone pilot is revealed to be a young American with a Mexican immigrant background and perhaps it is this connection that leads him to seek information about Memo, leading in turn to a surprising finale with elements of Star Wars or Dambusters.
There's also a Scanner Darkly-esque theme about the many aspects of surveillance: Memo and his brother watch the drone attack unfold on a live TV programme, recognizing their own village as the drone approaches its target. Luz pays her bills by literally selling her memories online, including her memories of meeting Memo - a career choice that does not bode well for their relationship.
Sleep Dealer is accidentally prophetic. In addition to the themes of remote working and social media, it's the second indie film I've seen that predicts a US-Mexico border wall. The other is Gareth Edwards debut Monsters. In this case the wall has prevented migrants coming to work in the US, and as a result the low-paid migrant workforce has become an equally low paid remote working workforce, migrating to work digitally all over the world while remaining plugged in to their factories.
As other reviewers at the time of release noted, a weaker aspect of this movie is the CGI for the aerial drones and the construction robots. While it's good enough to tell the story it's not quite convincing as real. In contrast, the practical special effects are excellent. I squirmed in empathic pain when Memo had his nodes inserted - that's one memory I won't be downloading. And the acting from all the lead characters is superb, with total commitment to role.
Overall this is a likeable and thoughtful indie sci-fi and well worth the three stars out of five I'm giving it.
Score: 3 out of 5 stars
All movies reviewed on the Sci-Fi Gene blog are given a score of 3 out of 5 stars.
Ki-woo and his family, the Kims, live in a basement and barely
scrape a living folding pizza boxes. They get what seems to be a lucky break
when Ki-woo is offered the chance to become an English tutor for the daughter
of the rich Park family, his sister Ki-jeong forging a college student identity
to get him started. He then plans to bring the rest of his family into the
Parks’ employment, finding ways to get their household staff dismissed and
replaced. However this proves to be a risky strategy and it turns out the Kim
family are not the only ones with secrets.
Bong Joon-Ho’s thriller won the Palme D’Or at Cannes last
year and went on to win the Best Picture Oscar – the first non-English-language
film to do so. It was also panned by Donald Trump (so far the only Home Alone 2 cast member to be impeached). It’s an extraordinary movie worthy
of all these accolades, hitting many different notes – comedy, intrigue, heist,
psychodrama, thriller and tragedy – while still telling a well-written and
compelling story accelerating towards a dramatic finale.
The acting
is superb, often understated rather than melodramatic. Many performances stand
out, particularly Song Kang-ho as the father of the Kims. I thought Cho
Yeo-jeong’s performance as the impressionable Mrs. Park could have been played
purely for comedy value but instead she comes across as sympathetic even when
she falls for every trick or scam Ki-woo and the others can come up with, and it
becomes clear that she is driven by her own insecurities.
Everyone in this story has different insecurities, and this
is one of the many ways the movie explores its main theme of the social divide. It has a lot to say about this, and is far more interesting than simply moaning about the disproportionate wealth of the 1%,
although the attitudes of the Park family towards poor people are made clear in
some very tense scenes.
As with Bong Joon-Ho’s horror movie The Host, reviewed here
and also starring Song Kang-ho, this movie centres on a family rather than the loners,
romantic couples, friendship groups or mis-paired workers that feature in
Western movies. It's fair to say that the Kims are less dysfunctional than the family of the Host. I don’t know enough about Korean culture to know if this is
reflective, perhaps of a stronger family-orientated culture or a typical theme
of Korean movies. Train To Busan, another Korean horror movie directed by Yeon
Sang-ho, reviewed here, centres on a father-daughter bond.
I enjoyed this movie from start to finish, and no doubt Bong
Joon-Ho will be happy to add the coveted Sci-Fi Gene three stars out of five to
his packed trophy shelf.
Score: 3 out of 5 stars
All movies reviewed on the Sci-Fi Gene blog are given a
score of 3 out of 5 stars.
The space cruise ship Aniara begins its three-month mission
to bring thousands of moderately rich Earthlings to Mars, leaving behind an environmental
catastrophe. Amongst the passengers is MR (Emelie Jonsson), a
technician responsible for tending to MIMA, an AI that can give the colonists
soothing visions of Earth before the disaster. But shortly after departure a
collision leaves the Aniara drifting off course with no engine, challenging
Captain Chefone (Arvin Kananian) and his crew to try to find a solution and keep the passengers happy.
Aniara is a Swedish-Danish movie – and you can tell this as it
takes place on the decks of a rectangular cruise ship clearly designed and
built by the Ikea-Lego Corporation (Assemble Your Own Better Worlds). There’s
some clever low-budget sci-fi filmmaking – the interior of the Aniara has been filmed
in airports, shopping malls and hotels, or perhaps airport shopping malls and
hotels. CGI is sparsely used, basic but effective, mainly limited to exterior views
of the drifting Aniara.
The Aniara. Slightly rippled with a flat underside.
Aniara is based on the famous epic poem by Swedish Nobel
prize winner Harry Martinson, which as well as this 2018 movie has also
inspired an opera and several obscure albums in musical styles from jazz to
metal. The original poem incidentally is subject to disgraceful anti-English
discrimination. While the Swedish, French, Japanese and Spanish editions are
all on Kindle for under £14, Sjoberg’s English translation starts at £117 in
paperback only. And this isn’t even the most depressing thing about the poem.
Emelie Jonsson carries the film, playing MR as a character
determined to be happy and optimistic, to persevere and to see the best in
others. She believes in love and kindness. She’s perhaps a symbol for the human
spirit. While other characters, such as MR’s roommate the astronomer, swing
constantly between positivity and negativity, it takes a lot to bring MR down,
and when this happens it is painful.
Beautiful but misleading poster for Aniara. While the woman in the centre is MR, the main character in the film, she generally looks happier than this. However she does occasionally look over her shoulder. The spaceship in the foreground is not the Aniara and indeed is never seen in the movie, and I don't recognize the coridoor behind MR's head either.
All movies reviewed on the Sci-Fi Gene blog are given a score of 3 out of 5 stars
SPOILER WARNING
This review may contain spoiler warnings
2018's Avengers: Infinity War ended with the destruction of half of all life in the Universe, including half of the Avengers cast. I wasn't hugely surprised to find, and this isn't really much of a spoiler, that Avengers: Endgame turns out to be about an attempt by the remaining Avengers to bring the band back together and do something about it.
I was more surprised by the downbeat, bluesy tone of much of the movie. I would expect to see more personal depth and character building in the individual superhero stories, and there's plenty of this in Ant Man and The Wasp, and Captain Marvel - it's hard to get the same depth in an ensemble movie, but Endgame does better than most. The movie opens a few years after Infinity War, in a world reacting to the shock of that Thanos moment through memorials and support groups. Meanwhile the scattered Avengers have each reacted in different ways, and there's a reality to the transformed Thor, Hawkeye and Hulk that makes a lot of sense - possibly having fewer other characters overshadowing them means these characters can be more central. There's also a lot of gentle humour to be found.
However Avengers: Endgame is still not exactly an arthouse dogme experiment - I'm gutted that Lars Von Trier turned down the invitation to direct. There are plenty of CGI set-piece battles, and these are quite lovely but also confusing if you try to follow them. Why is Captain Marvel more powerful than Thanos one moment, and at his mercy the next? I gave up and just enjoyed the fireworks. The same applies to the main plot, the Avengers' plan to address the absence of half the Universe. Giving the writers credit, they have deliberately taken a certain kind of sci-fi plot and tried very hard to give it an original twist by disallowing the obvious routes. The end result serves the movie well but really doesn't stand up to logical analysis - luckily as a Doctor Who fan I have become immune to plot holes through repeated exposure so this did not spoil Endgame for me in the slightest.
Overall Endgame is a satisfying movie and a satisfying end to both the Avengers and Guardians of the Galaxy movie cycles. I am sure the great Stan Lee would approve of this movie's marvellous review score of three stars out of five.
As regular visitors to the Sci-Fi Gene blog will know, as a rule I have tended to post movie reviews without a score.
This has always been a deliberate decision. I have always felt that giving a movie a score diminishes the review, and indeed the movie, the cinema industry, the general public, Life, The Universe and Everything and by logical extension the reviewer. Can we even assign a meaningful number to a movie? Or a restaurant, a car, a hotel stay, the amount of goals scored by each team in a football game, or the attractiveness of a random stranger? Is this not just the human fashion of attempting to impose order where there is none? Is it meaningful to compare two numbers, for example (and this is plucked purely at random from the many, many possible examples I could have chosen) the speed of a car and the applicable speed limit for that particular stretch of the A127? Do numbers such as the number 5 even mean anything? How do I know that the number I know as 7 doesn't appear to you as the number 25? Would the Universe notice if 3 came after 2 instead of before? How many roads must a man walk down before they call him a man?* And how in seven hells do you use an abacus?
Despite my feelings about the judgemental nature of imposing judgements, and my incredulous near-religious denial of the existence of all numbers between 2.5 and 19, I have nevertheless experimented with number-based scoring systems on a few occasions, incorporating my patent-pending Shark Bonus into certain reviews. The experience left me feeling perplexed, overwhelmed and frankly a little dirty.
However I have come to a realisation. Ethically, a choice not to make a choice is still a choice. By choosing not to score movie reviews, I am in fact assigning a score of unscored. And so, having deduced that avoiding movie scores, like all other aspects of life, is ultimately futile, I have decided to grab the bull by the thorns and turn the adversity of necessity into virtue. I have found a way to fulfil the need for a movie review to be scored, without any of the massive, lethal drawbacks this could otherwise entail. My system is not new or unique to the Sci-Fi Gene - in fact many reviewers on the TripAdvisor website use a similar system.
Henceforth, all movies reviewed on the Sci-Fi Gene blog will be assigned a score out of 5 stars. On all occasions this score will be 3. And on all occasions this score will be entirely justified.
Fifty people awake to find they are standing on glowing red
spots in a circle in a dark room. They quickly learn that they are playing a
deadly game – every few minutes one person is killed instantly by a shock from
the hemisphere in the centre, their body then dragged out into the darkness by
unseen forces. If they step off their circles they also die. It takes them a
few rounds, and a few deaths, to understand that while they cannot prevent the
scheduled rounds, they can choose who dies in each round.
Circle is a literal, minimalist version of the balloon
debate – if the balloon is losing altitude and you can’t all survive, who gets chucked out of the balloon and how
do you persuade others to do the chucking. The starting fifty are diverse
enough to (loosely) represent all of humanity. As the players learn how to vote
for each other, alliances and dividing lines appear around age, race, gender,
sexuality, politics and profession. Players try to use this to their advantage,
but if they seem too manipulative then other players may turn on them next.
This is a low-budget, one-room, concept movie – The Hunger
Games meets Exam meets Cube (links are to my reviews of these films) with a dash of Lord of the Flies and a twist of Twelve Angry Men. While the
scenario is contrived, even compared to other one-room movies, the writers and directors, Aaron Hann and Mario Miscione, have hit on a simple but effective concept which builds
tension over and over again, and the script stands up well covering a lot of ground.
The
main expense for this film was probably the cast of fifty actors - all unknown but certainly up to the job, so the conflict is believable. There's a lot of death, it's sudden and brutal although not too bloody, and while some deaths are shown directly many are communicated through reaction shots. The ending isn't easily predictable, and left me with a lot to think about. The film could be a metaphor for political extremism, media bias or the rise of prejudice in general, and of course it's even more relevant in the age of Reality TV.
Two important questions are left unanswered: when does the board game
version come out, and how many batteries will it require?
To disambiguate, this is low-budget movie Circle (2015) – not the
movie of Dave Eggers’ internet parody novel The Circle (2017).
Hard-core escapologists may enjoy films such as Cube, Exam or the Saw series - you may find this film a little lightweight, it's definitely on the easy setting. On the off-chance you might actually watch this modest but passable film, I'll avoid further spoilers. However I will take a tip from another blogger, Big D, and analyse the poster/DVD cover a little.
Not bad? Pretty dramatic, nice logo.
Now I'll take you through some elements of the poster.
The chained-up double door with the windows and the scratch marks - never appears in the movie. Looks to me like hospital or laboratory doors, and the movie is not set in either.
The scratch marks on the door suggest that someone is trapped in the room for days or weeks - but the movie takes place over the space of an hour or two. It's common for real-life escape rooms to have a time limit of an hour.
There's a young woman kneeling on the floor, covered by blood, and screaming from pain, terror or both. Without giving too much away, this is true to the film.
There's a creepy fellow standing by the right edge of the poster looking creepy. Again, does feature in the film.
Most interestingly, there are three huge circular saws in the picture, set into gaps in the floor suggesting that they may be able to move along them. They look pretty deadly, the kind of thing Jigsaw might dream up in the Saw movies - in other words a deliberate trap intended to kill players who failed a test of some kind. The film does not feature any circular saws at all, and no similar deliberately designed killer traps - the threat comes from the evil entity that has unknowingly been introduced to the puzzle room.
So I'd just like to say thank you to the cover artist for completely obscuring the actual content of this movie, no doubt deliberately to preserve its precious few moments of genuine horror and suspense unspoiled.
A ghostbusting team consisting of a TV presenter (director Eileen Daly), a medium and a defrocked priest investigate a demon-infested castle - and their innermost desires. The mysteriously aged proprietor and his two succubus nieces give the ghostbusters the runaround while they search for a way to lift the curse. I say they... the duty falls mainly on Eileen as her two male co-ghosthunters are smitten with the nieces and unable to concentrate on the job. However when all seems lost the team benefit from the help of a passing demon-hunter and her remarkable iPhone app.
Witches Brew, screened at Horror-on-Sea 2018, is a movie that will infect you with its joy even as it challenges you with its rough edges.
Some directors and producers are so obsessed with perfection that they edit, re-edit and re-release their movies again and again in search of that ultimate, overproduced director's cut. Not Daly. Mistakes and mis-takes are seen throughout the movie - light and sound change from scene to scene, body-hair prostheses fall off the cast. This is not carelessness or ignorance. It's not satire. It's simply two fingers up to the perfection-obsessed zombie filmmakers (Prooooductioooon vaaaaaluuuuues...) - Daly makes the sense of fun her star - she could cut the mis-takes out but it's much more enjoyable to keep them in.
Witches Brew is a loveable movie in its own right. Also, without being a direct parody it somehow brings back pleasant memories of The Rocky Horror Show, the original Wicker Man, and curiously the ancient TV series Rentaghost. I can't explain this, and I don't need to.
Struggling horror-movie obsessed filmmaker Catherine Sweeney has a dream - to bring to life her Warm Bodies-style zombie romcom. She has the idea, now all she needs is a script, a cast, a producer, funding, a crew and a camera. Her first taste of reality comes when she draws the attention of a big player willing to come on board as executive producer and provide seven-figure funding - as long as she can write a talking dog into the script.
Egomaniac, screened at Horror-On-Sea 2018, is a bittersweet black comedy about the experience of compromising to get the movie made - with a particular emphasis on the treatment of women in the industry. It was made in 2016 but with the Hollywood scandals breaking in the past few months it's deeply relevant right now, and perhaps can serve as a reminder that far from being the clean, happy alternative to Hollywood, the indie world is the Wild West of moviemaking.
Catherine Sweeney, played by the real-life director Kate Shenton, carries the film with an intense performance. The script is outstanding - the characters Catherine comes up against in her Kafkaesque journey, inside and outside of her head, are hilariously and disturbingly seedy, and I particularly liked the conceit of Catherine arguing with her imagined characters in her head. When she finally snaps it's completely believable and she takes the audience with her to the murderous conclusion.
In honour of the late George A. Romero, two modern-day zombie classics:
Train To Busan (부산행, Busanhaeng) is a Korean movie made in 2016. Workaholic fund manager, divorcee and useless dad Seok-woo (Gong Yoo) must reluctantly accompany his daughter Soo-an (Kim Su-an) by train from Seoul to Busan, returning her to live with her mother - on the day Korea succumbs to a zombie plague.
I have enjoyed Korean horror movies in recent years, particularly Thirst (vampire horror) and The Host (newt horror). I can only comment on the few I've seen, but I've found them intelligent, well-written and produced, and willing to tell stories about families and relationships that are different to those in western cinema - as a result they're often very moving, while there's still plenty of action, drama, shock and gore, and also humour with just the right amount of darkness.
I can report that Train To Busan is another enjoyable horror. The backstory is unoriginal, with a viral outbreak from a quarantined lab, by-the-numbers fast-variety zombies spreading across the country and a disparate group of heroes must rely on each other, get their hands dirty and learn bravery, selflessness or perhaps some manners, all the while heading for humanity's last fortress. However the film works, making intelligent use of the train setting at every level - as an environment for tension-building and close-quarters action, as a microcosm for society allowing for satire and social commentary, and also as a device to control the momentum and pace of the movie. The ensemble cast are excellent. How do you help the audience warm to an unlikeable character and believe in his epiphany? Give them a real villain for comparison, in the form of Yon-suk (Kim Eui-sung) a company boss for whom the crisis brings out new depths of selfishness.
The Girl With All The Gifts is an adaptation of the excellent novel by M.R. Carey, the story of Britain overrun by "hungries" and of a young girl, Melanie, brought up in a school on a military base, strapped to a chair and watched over by armed soldiers as she attends her lessons with the kindly Miss Justineau. Just as Melanie's nature and her potential fate at the base are becoming clearer, the defences are breached and Melanie, Miss Justineau, single-minded scientist Dr. Caldwell and a group of soldiers make their escape in the chaos, heading for (yet again) humanity's last fortress, on the way facing moral dilemmas, character-building experiences and social commentary.
In order to turn this complex, thoughtful zombie novel into a film, the plot is greatly accelerated and several characters and subplots are simply removed - there's no mention of the tribes of human scavengers, for example. There are also some differences between the characters, in particular the racial backgrounds of Melanie and Miss Justineau have been reversed. This might be a political statement or a non-issue. The parts are taken by two extremely talented actresses - Sennia Nenua and Gemma Arterton, and there's very strong chemistry between the two.
When a valuable stolen treasure is sighted in the multi-dimensional Big Market, Valerian and Laureline, two intergalactic special agents are dispatched to recover it - but this turns out to be just the first step in solving a greater mystery connecting the stolen item, the destroyed planet of Mul and the mysterious entity that has taken over part of the multicultural space city Alpha.
Valerian And The City Of A Thousand Planets is a Luc Besson film based on the Valerian and Laureline French graphic novels. The heroes are played by Dane DeHaan and Cara Delavigne. As in the comics, Valerian is straight-laced and does it by the book while Laureline is more of an out-of-the-box thinker; traditional gender personality traits are exaggerated for effect. Somehow they appear younger in the film than in the comics - more or less hormonal, bickering teenagers despite their elite skills, military rank and galaxy-saving duties. Theirs is not the greatest on-screen partnership Hollywood has ever seen. When the chemistry does work the flirting and bickering is fun to watch, but it's hit and miss throughout the film. The plot also veers between child-friendly action, adult innuendo and the aftermath of a serious war crime making me wonder just who it is aimed at.
Valerian also takes inspiration from other sci-fi movies - visually there's a lot in common with The Fifth Element including colourful, entertaining aliens, sharp fashions particularly when it comes to uniform, and eye-popping over-the-top environments. The space megacity of Alpha, born from a series of space handshakes starting with the 1975 Apollo-Soyuz link-up, is a mixture of The Fifth Element's New York and Star Wars' Coruscant. There are plenty of other Star Wars parallels but on the other hand, for some reason none of the Star Wars movies feature a shape-changing alien exotic dancer performing any famous scenes from Cabaret. Why not, George?
I bought my ticket for Valerian with high expectations for the visuals but fairly low for everything else. I came out ahead in that the visuals are indeed pretty good, and much of the film (if not quite all) is entertaining.
When policeman Daniel Carter finds a wounded man in the road and drives him to a nearby hospital, he and the other inhabitants find themselves trapped, surrounded by monks with triangular hoods and at the mercy of whatever is already inside.
The Void is a Canadian horror movie, made on an Indiegogo budget and released in 2016. It's an original story but heavily inspired by the works of H.P. Lovecraft, demonstrating everything that makes a good Lovecraft horror. It's not just about the tentacles, you know:
Life from another dimension
Science confounded by the supernatural
Contact leads to insanity
A cult of murderous human worshippers
And yes, it's still mostly about the tentacles...
Performances are great, particularly from Aaron Poole and Kathleen Munroe. The film relies heavily on special effects rather than visual effects for the creature scenes, these are impressively gruesome and a lot of fun, channeling John Carpenter's The Thing and other classics. I have nothing against CGI. Nothing! But I have great respect for the art of the special effect and it can lead to a film with quite a different look and feel, something I also found when I watched the indie sci-fi film Hunter Prey, reviewed here.
The crew of the International Space Station retrieve a capsule from Mars, completing a sample return mission and bringing a small quantity of soil into their orbital laboratory. The sample contains what appears to be Martian microbes - but are they dead or can they be revived? And should they?
Life is at heart a surprisingly traditional creature feature, perhaps even a tribute to classic films such as Alien, The Blob or even Roger Corman's Little Shop Of Horrors. There's a creature who grows in power and intelligence as it hunts down the humans who had the hubris to summon it into existence. The only truly original aspect of this movie is the setting, with the ISS re-imagined as the perfect modern-day haunted house - labyrinthine, claustrophobic, vulnerable and disorientating due to zero-gravity. The creature is also well-designed, developing from scene to scene like a Martian Audrey Two, and it definitely feels alien, although there's little attempt to explain its biology or evolution.
The only missing cliche is the kid who nobody believes when he tries to warn them - but since the Thermal Curtain Failure debacle of 1986 and subsequent abandonment of the Jinx robotics programme I don't think we're going to see any more children in low Earth orbit for some time. So instead we have to make do with the somewhat childish medical officer David, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, and the excellent multi-ethnic cast playing his fellow astronauts and cosmonauts, led by Olga Dihovichnaya as the station's Russian commander.
I enjoyed the thrills, shocks and clever moments of this movie, and I think it was well casted and acted, with a great setting. The ending is a bit predictable but I'll let that go for now. I would still recommend it to horror fans. It's a little gory in places so other cinemagoers may wish to exercise caution. This is however a popcorn movie - other than the themes of hubris, bravery and self-sacrifice common to the genre it's not really about anything and doesn't have anything particularly profound to say.
Received my invitation to the Evil Medical School reunion. Think I'll give it a miss this year - it would just be too embarrassing meeting up with classmates Dr. Evil, Dr. Heiter and Dr. Ledgard, and having to admit I've still not achieved anything on a par with their nefariousness.
Some of the comments below could be considered minor spoilers. Read on at your peril.
Dr. Volmer, head of the Volmer Institute, would fare better in comparison, although he's still no Dr. Frank'n'Furter. His institute, an aquatherapy centre for rich guilt-stricken investment bankers and suchlike hidden in the Swiss mountains that hides a sinister history and even more sinister purpose, is the setting for A Cure For Wellness directed by Gore Verbinski. Ambitious young banker Lockheart is sent there to bring back a senior partner currently "taking the waters" but discovers what first appears to be a strict and eccentric health regime but develops into a gothic myth.
A Cure For Wellness is that rare thing - a mainstream Hollywood horror movie that really goes there. I thought some early scenes were tame and predictable, but by the final third of the movie I was on the edge of my seat and even had to cover my eyes once or twice, which is definitely not consistent with my backstory.
This is partly due to some superb worldbuilding and cinematography - the Volmer Institute with it's maze-like steam rooms, swimming pools, green coridoors and treatment rooms is a beautiful example of the creepy hospital subgenre. Cast is also mostly excellent, headed by Dane Dehaan as Lockheart and the aptly named Mia Goth as mysterious orphan and "special case" Hannah. I hope that's a screen name. Jason Isaacs as Dr. Volmer mostly hits the right note and is convincing as a threat, but sometimes veers a little towards pantomime villain. Supporting cast are excellent and it's nice to see an ensemble covering the whole age range rather than just pretty young students (yes, The Sand, I'm looking at you). Celia Imrie as the puzzle-obsessed Victoria stands out.
This film reminded me of other creepy-hospital or medical horror films, and there may be some deliberate tributes going on here. This does mean that at least the first third of the film feels unoriginal. The setting is three parts Rocky Horror to one part Hotel California - it's spelled out to Lockheart over and over that no-one ever leaves. Unnecessary. As well as Rocky Horror, at its best the film channels The Skin I Live In or Evolution, but there's also a hint of The Human Centipede, and even one or two scenes harking back to The Dentist. As with Evolution, there's a creature element; but where Evolution is a French Japanese puzzle-box to be unpacked slowly, here the creature's role in the horror is spelled out in detail and perhaps shoved down the viewer's throat - this is not an understated or subtle film. The last part of the film switches from horror a little too far into action - Lockheart almost becomes a martial arts-type hero at one point, which jars a little as there's no prior evidence his yuppie character has any fighting ability.
Overall this film is flawed in a few places but it's still a well-crafted horror movie - proof that Hollywood is still capable of creating something artistic, scary and utterly bonkers.
Adam and Eden, the hero and heroine of French film “Upside Down” are star-crossed lovers, the poor boy and the rich girl. Just like
Romeo and Juliet, Laura and Alec or Megashark and Giant Octopus, they live in
different worlds – no, they literally live in different worlds, one suspended
above the other and each with its’ own gravity.
When Adam (Jim Sturgess) last
saw Eden (Kirsten Dunst) she was falling upwards towards her own world and to
her death. Years later, when Adam discovers
that Eden is still alive and working for Transcorp, a mysterious company whose
offices link the two worlds, he comes up with a crazy plan to win her back.
Adam and Eden strive to escape the limitations of their
societies and geometries, so Upside Down is Science Fiction.
“Upside Down” tells a simple and rather traditional story of
love across the class divide, with a crude and obvious use of metaphor. Good
performances from Sturgess and Dunst can’t cover over the lack of depth in the
writing. I don’t care. Like Tron: Legacy, Mad Max: Fury Road and Daybreakers, this film is an example of near-perfect worldbuilding. It would work with or without the humans, although
arguably any film where Kirsten Dunst kisses someone upside down is by
definition a good film. The genius of “Upside Down” is the extraordinary environment
of the twin worlds. It's thought out, designed and filmed in a way that every scene is visually striking, and every detail of
every scene tells a chapter of the story, the history of the characters and
their societies - a story far more rich and nuanced than the melodramatic
script.
“Hidden Figures” tells the story of three
mathematicians who became crucial to the US space programme, and who faced down
sexists and racists in the segregated America of the 1960s along the way. The
three lead characters, Katherine Johnson, Mary Jackson and Dorothy Vaughan, all
strived to escape the limitations of what to all intents and purposes was a
dystopian society, so “Hidden Figures” is Science Fiction – it just happens to
be true as well.
This film could have been as bleak or serious as its’
subject matter. However the obstacles faced by Katherine Johnson (Taraji
Henson, superb in “Person of Interest”) and her fellow “computers” would not be
out of place in a Kafka play or a Douglas Adams novel. Appropriately the film
is light and humorous in places, although there’s plenty of black humour too. It
works - it's easy to ridicule and show up the behaviour of the bigots, played by Jim Parsons and
Kirsten Dunst, while the lighter moments show Johnson,
Vaughan and Jackson as human. They were never woad-painted freedom fighters,
rather they fought and won their battles with their brains, sticking it to the
Man from the inside, and by using humour the film does the same.
Sometimes you need to turn your brain off and just watch something stupid and bloody...
Evil Aliens is a comic horror film from 2005 starring Emily Booth as a cynical TV journalist and featuring Red Dwarf's Norman Lovett sadly only in a minor role. Booth and her crew are sent to investigate an alien abduction story on an isolated Welsh farm, accompanied by an eccentric UFO expert played by Jamie Honeybourne. It soon becomes clear that the aliens are somewhat hostile, and the film progresses into a series of close encounters of the messy kind.
This film is an unashamed gorefest, and it's very clear the budget has been spent mainly on realistic blood-and-guts effect shots which are detailed, delightfully inventive and utterly gratuitous. Everything else is cheaper - the script is perhaps not as fine tuned as it could be, the aliens appear to have bought cheap Predator costumes on eBay and rendered their spaceship CGI on Microsoft Paint. The acting is all hammed-up melodrama but it carries things along while you wait for the next bloodsplattering, and I think you've got to admire the endurance of the actors in this kind of film - some of those scenes would have involved hours spent in fairly disgusting set-ups.
This is not a film to watch with the kids, due to all the extreme violence and whatnot. Also, Evil Aliens isn't a porn film per se but does contain two or three sort-of soft-porn scenes involving sex with either aliens or camera crew. Which is weirder? You decide. Overall this film was strangely compelling to watch, plus any film that ends on as bad a joke as this one gets my vote.
According to modern science I use 100% of my brain, although not necessarily all at the same time. According to Hollywood - yet again - we all use only 10% of our brains, and unlocking the full 100% could give us godlike powers. I worked hard to deconstruct this myth in my award-winning* short film "We Can Get You Some Really Cheap Gear" so I am a little disappointed that the rest of you haven't moved on. What do you all have for brains? Pudding?
In Luc Besson's new film Scarlett Johansson plays Lucy, a tourist who is kidnapped by drug traffickers and receives an unintended dose of an experimental product that has been surgically implanted in her abdomen. As the drug boosts Lucy's intelligence and strength she manages to escape her Triad captors, but as her telekinetic powers grow she realises she only has a limited lifespan, and she must find a way to stay alive - and stay human - long enough to do something meaningful.
However, about a third of the way through Lucy, I realised that unlike Limitless, it isn't really about brainpower at all. Once this becomes clear it's possible to sit back and enjoy a pleasantly surreal experience. The brainpower story is just background styling for a plot that's about achieving potential in a much more general sense. Besson loves his technobabble - and what's not to love, especially when delivered by university lecturer Morgan Freeman.
*Kino London Film Of The Week (April 15th 2012) an award which, as far as I am aware, Luc Besson has yet to receive.
Glad you could drop by! This blog is part support group, part research institute for those who, like me, enjoy the best and the worst of sci-fi. In addition I have interests in computer graphics and independent media, and will continue to document my own adventures in filmmaking and CGI.
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