Sci-Fi Movies of the 2000s

Pitch Black

2000 PolyGram Filmed Entertainment, Interscope Communications, Gramercy Pictures

+ badass vs. horror in space

Vehicle: Hunter-Gratzner, en route to the Tangiers system.

This is a kick-ass fearless outlaw story set in space, combined with scary space monsters. That part is fine for what it is, but not really sci-fi.

What does count as sci-fi is the planet they land on, and the critters that come out in the dark. The special effects are good, aside from the over-the-top performance by the primary, the acting is pretty good, and the whole thing is plenty scary.

This is the seminal offering of the Riddick franchise.

The very scary outlaw:

“I’m not what you need to be afraid of.”

Red Planet

2000 Village Roadshow Pictures, NPV Entertainment

− Mars action adventure etc.

Date: 2056.

Premise: We’ve screwed Earth with pollution and stuff, so we’re terraforming Mars (robotically, from a distance — nobody’s been there yet). Just as Mars is almost all fixed up, it starts losing atmosphere. Our heroes are off to Mars, to find out why.

(That is my short version. You get a far, far longer, but no more enlightening, explanation in the opening monologue.)

Vehicles: Mars-1, a big, elaborate interplanetary vehicle, carrying a crew of six to Mars. No mention of its power, beyond that it is a rocket, and has fuel. Nice space shuttle.

Hey! Let’s write a screenplay! Fortunately, we have our handy screenplays for dummies!

1. start out with a lengthy verbal explanation of the situation.
2. move on to the listing of the characters, with characterizations. (Make sure to point out the love interest.)

3. move on to the initial character development.

   1. partial nudity and a sexual relation setup.
   2. on to further character relationship development.
   3. even further character relationship development.

4. get into the crash-bang roller-coaster action action action!
   Dangers include:

   • environmental catastrophe on Earth (not depicted)
   • solar flare / gamma ray burst
   • fire aboard ship
   • escape capsule crash landing
   • running out of oxygen
   • killer cliffs
   • killer robot
   • killer ice storm
   • Mars bugs that eat you and explode when ignited
   • no way to get back off Mars
   • heroic rescue by space walk

   (I’m sure I left some out.)

5. romantic resolution (and female fantasy)

The characters are mostly cardboard stock. Their dialog is abundant and very clumsy.

The tough woman mission commander isn’t bad, except, she has the hots for the cute guy on the crew, and her breasts are always prominent: even her space suit is lift-and-separate. It was hard for me to reconcile the sexual emphasis with her professionalism.

The one likable character is the scientist guy, who is a mensch, on top of being smart. He is responsible for solving the problem, and is also granted the few little bits of interesting dialog (but he’s forced to say a lot of really stupid things about science and philosophy).

Insipid debates about religion (confused with philosophy) vs. science protrude here and there. (Everybody knows, you gotta have that in space sci-fi shows.)

They cram a lot of relatively recent space science stuff into the story. Unfortunately, they get much of it strangely wrong, as though they heard some terms somewhere, but were extremely vague on the concepts. (Not that this is anything new in sci-fi, of course.)

Stuff taken from recent Mars missions: Bouncing ball landing. NASA’s Mars Rover Pathfinder is repurposed.

There is one mention of Mars’ half-Earth gravity, involving micturition. It’s slightly funny.

First disaster: a solar flare sneaks up on them, as though nobody would have noticed a solar flare. The flare’s got “gamma ray bursts”.

They call Mars bugs “nematodes”, but the CGI shows arthropods. I wonder what kind of cognitive disconnect would be responsible for that. I mean: anybody could have brought a Wikipedia page up, at any point.

They got “artificial gravity”, which they turn on and off (because that has happened in other sci-fi shows), but the CGI space ship has big rotating rings, as might produce centrifugal force. But, no.

Yeah, so they’re on Mars, and there’s not supposed to be breathable air, and just as they’re about to suffocate, they open their helmets and breathe, and it’s OK. Somehow, they had failed to check if the air was breathable.

Sure, many other space sci-fi shows have resorted to similar scenes, where actors were suddenly able to relieve themselves of the helmets that spoil their close-ups… but it was always awfully dubious.

I know, it’s typical of sci-fi. It’s just — you spend so much money on these things, and you can’t consult your geeky nephew on the science details? A large fraction of the people who go to see a space sci-fi show, are geeky to some degree — and as a geek, I can tell you, it’s cringe-provoking, and really boring.

Then, there’s the AI robot gone rogue. It’s an exercise in GUI. Why their helper robot should be a super war machine, makes no sense. Why they required this monster, on top of the monster Mars bugs, suggests a lack of confidence: the writers or the studio doubted that either one was scary enough on its own. It would have been a mercy to have left this thing out. (But then, they might have had to write more story and dialog! )

She’s talking to “Houston”, like they did in the Apollo program. This is a decidedly bossy and give-uppy Houston, though: rescue and success result only from heroism.

Multiple person-being-blown-into-space scenes, cuz it worked in 2001: a Space Odyssey.

A guy of dubious moral integrity proves to be a coward traitor, and dies an appropriately gruesome and painful death. (Oh, did I forget to give a spoiler alert? Would you need it?)

It ends in a predictable and overblown female fantasy. God and religion are reaffirmed. (Oh! Sorry! Spoiler alert!)

Musical strings passages are reminiscent of 2001: a Space Odyssey, Scary bits feature Latin chant typical of movies about demons, and heroic bits like Star Trek movies.

It’s space sci-fi by way of updating older and typical space sci-fi movies. It’s imagination-avoidance mix-and-match.

The sets and outfits are pretty well done, and the CGI scenes were top-notch for the time. Points for that, and for mentioning a little science, in spots.

AT LEAST

• the conversation with Houston isn’t real-time.
• the puzzle they are sent to sort out, they think out and resolve in a scientific-sounding way.
• they didn’t encounter meteors.

バトル・ロワイアル
(Batoru Rowaiaru)
[Battle Royale]

2000 Battle Royale Production Committee

+ teenage battle to the death

Japanese

It’s a possible near future, in which overpopulation and economic recession have resulted in severe legal measures being taken, including the "Battle Royale Act", by which the authorities kidnap each year a group of problem teenagers, transport them to an island, and force them to kill one another in an elaborate game.

Some of them try to rebel, but most indulge themselves in the slaughter.

In what way is it science fiction? There are some gadgets, but nothing that is beyond recent technology. This is social sci-fi: it’s a fantasy that society would behave this way, but not an impossibility.

It’s very violent, very bloody. And it’s done well enough that you can almost believe it. The kids are very well directed, each effectively playing a different way of handling the situation. Their teacher Kitano is especially chilling as the game’s judge and executioner.

Impostor

2002 Constantin Film

OK short story made action-thriller

date: 2079

Vehicles: various spacecraft, flying transporters that make lots of smoke.

Aliens: evidently, there are Centarians, but we never see one that isn’t in a human body.

Gadgets: various hand-held electronics look dated now. Lots of scary medical equipment; body scanners. Facial recognition doohickeys — was barely sci-fi then, isn’t even sci-fi anymore. Force field domes.

Earth is at war with Alpha Centauri, which is bombing the planet since 2050. Electromagnetic domes protect Earth cities. Too bad if you’re not under one.

The social situation is conventional: the fortunate are safe, while most of the society lives in misery and in danger of attack from space.

The format is basically action-adventure.

There is plenty of fancy CGI, and plenty of violence. Lots of stock situations, stock scenes (I lost count of how many times someone sticks a gun someone’s face — lots and lots), stock camera angles (and the fake bumpy hand-held camera effect fashionable at the time), gratuitous fashionable ventilation fans. Everything is very dark and drippy, for no reason that comes to mind, besides it’s what all the other moviemakers were doing at the time. Lots and lots of bumpy protracted chase scenes.

Toss in some kung fu fighting scenes, cuz why not?

They didn’t know how to expand the short story to a full movie, to hold the audience. So, they filled in with what was at hand and in fashion.

Overall, the production is professional, there are pretty and fascinating things to look at, some of the acting is pretty good. Something is wrong, though. The movie feels longer than it really is — not in a good way.

The twist is the primary focus, and it isn’t bad. This could have made a fine, heartbreaking story of stolen identity, if the movie hadn’t been so burdened with action-adventure schlock.

Donnie Darko

2001 Flower Films

++ paranoid time-travel

Date: contemporary (with some time-travel to the past)

It starts out looking like it might be a teen exploitation flick, and step by step gets much too harsh and weird for that, and genuinely creepy, and then takes so many twists and turns and apparent enlightenments that go all wrong… so… what is going on? And then… it takes a step into the weird, and never finds its way home.

It depicts upper middle-class neighborhoods, like ones I saw but was never part of. (It still make me feel a little jealous.)

The adult characters are very believable, sometimes a little stereotyped, but nonetheless, seem like people we might meet. The self-help preacher Jim Cunningham is very close to the mark. And the moralizing teacher is really icky — but we’ve all met these people.

Several of the high school kids are obviously way too old for high school. We must practice imagination.

The plot involves time travel and psychoactive pills. Hawking’s A Brief History of Time makes a cameo. Bla-bla about wormholes. And maybe there’s a ghost — the script does not change our impression that it is a ghost.

The movie theater is showing “The Evil Dead” and “The Last Temptation of Christ”.

Parables:
trust your instincts — 2nd thought — don’t
trust your memory — 2nd thought — don’t
trust your teacher — 2nd thought — don’t
trust your feelings — 2nd thought — don’t
trust the crazy lady — 2nd thought — don’t
maybe… trust that nightmarish rabbit thing…

American Astronaut

2001 BNS Productions, Commodore Films

+ musical theater in space

If you’re looking for hard science fiction, this isn’t it. If you’re looking for something familiar, look away.

Vehicles: a spaceship. We see only the cluttered interior, the props being just this-and-that’s, some suggest late 19th century.

Weapons: a novel idea of a disintegrator pistol.

Places: the asteroid Ceres, Jupiter, a barn in space, Venus.

The setting is one of space travel in the Solar System. One scene depicts a stroll on the surface of the asteroid Ceres. But besides that, all space scenes are stills, resembling the woodcut illustrations of Jules Verne novels.

Regarding production quality, acting or believability: the whole thing is just so relentlessly weird, they are hardly worth worrying about. On the other hand, for a thing like this, maybe the consistency of the weirdness is the production quality.

This movie is in this list due to the science fiction backdrop, and maybe a couple of props. It gets high marks for inventiveness, music and dance.

Minority Report

2002 20th Century Fox, DreamWorks Pictures, Amblin Entertainment, Blue Tulip Productions

++ prescient paranoid whodunnit

Premise: people with special abilities foresee crime, so cops can intercept crimes before they happen. It raises fun philosophical questions about predestination, justice, etc., in the presence of foresight.

The movie is visually very rich, and fairly packed with incidental special effects, including:

• Future-seeing people, “pre-cogs”.
• Mind-reading machines.
• Artificial eyes (for purpose of faking identity)
• Self driving? magnetic? cars (pods?) that travel up the side of buildings.
• Flying police transporters, flying police,
• Little robot “spiders” that can incapacitate people and identify them.
• Weapons like a sonic whip.
• Prisoners kept in suspended animation, immobilized.
• Genetically manipulated plants act like animals.
• Live wallpaper, live adverts on cereal boxes.
• Touch-screen computers are everywhere, smartwatches (but they were foreseeable in 2002).

In many scenes, people manipulate images on big transparent screens by means of full-body acrobatics, thereby making computer work more theatrical, as well as a better work-out. This wasn’t new in 2002, but it remains popular among sci-fi movie producers.

Spielberg has a lot of fun with a future where flying cops and robot spiders are commonplace.

I’ve never found Cruise’s acting to be even remotely convincing; here he lived up to all expectations. But he's just a narrative thread, and is safely ignorable.

Several performances are just precious. My favorite is that of Lois Smith as a half-mad genius, Dr. Iris Hineman. Then Peter Stormare as hopped-up Dr. Solomon P. Eddie is a hoot. Colin Farrell as Danny Witwer, Tim Blake Nelson as Gideon the prison warden, Jason Antoon as Rufus Riley, Samantha Morton as Agatha is each a very fun character.

28 Days Later

2002 DNA Films, UK Film Council

OK zombie apocalypse by infection

Premise: some scientists make an infection, called “rage”, which turns people and animals into mindless, raging, fast-moving murderers.

It’s like a zombie movie, except the zombies haven’t died yet. That’s a sub-genre of its own.

The story is about how a few people get through, and how maybe people are just as bad naturally, as with a maddening infection.

It’s full of shocks and grisly violence, if you’re into that sort of thing. There is good character development of the principals.

I don’t care for zombie movies, and there are hundreds of them. This one is in the list because it’s tolerable and has a sci-fi premise. And, as this sort of movie goes, it’s pretty good.

I, Robot

2004 Davis Entertainment, Laurence Mark Productions, Overbrook Films, Mediastream IV

OK action whodunnit Asimov derivative

Date: 2035, Chicago

Robots are commonplace, and follow without fail Asimov’s “Three Laws of Robotics”.

The CGI robots in this movie are very beautiful — no complaints there.

Will Smith is again just great. The guy acts, you believe.

I dock it points not because the movie is in itself deficient, but rather because it is overwhelmingly a cookie-cutter cop-action movie, set in a futuristic robot context. At the end, all the bad stuff is cuzza some evil entity — a facile cop-out.

It does fair service to Asimov’s ideas of robots, but it could have done so much more with the deeper ramifications of a world with robots, and the audience would have appreciated it.

Hollywood will be Hollywood.

Paycheck

2003 Davis Entertainment, Lion Rock

OK memory erasure in work contract

Memory erasure as part of work contract. Seemed like a good idea at the time. Who knew?

Affleck is a super genius engineer (physicist? what’s the difference?) martial arts athlete. (As are they all.)

Some nonsense about a lens that looks around the universe — not time travel, but seeing in time. Whatever. Anyway, Einstein gets mention: and, so, science.

The shtick, from the novel, is this: Our protagonist left himself a packet of clues and whatnots to maximize the action-adventure aspects of his escapades.

Date: near future, and its near future.

Gadgets: Two different methods of erasing memory: one is by somehow zapping cells, the other employs radioisotopes. Memory reading machines. A big machine for looking into the future with lots of CGI and ’90s electronics and (unexplained but convenient) bottles of liquid hydrogen attached. There are other fancy gadgets.

It’s one big chase scene, with lots and lots of cars, a motorcycle, a train. Cops are chasing him, bad guys are chasing him. Often, it was unclear, and probably immaterial, who is chasing him. It shows lots of shoot-em-ups in crowded areas.

Favorite action stunt: smashing through plate glass windows. I lost count at 5 times… but many panes of glass shatter, harmlessly. We see much pointing of guns in people’s faces: at least two scenes where two guys converse while pointing guns at one another’s face — as one does.

Filmed in and around Seattle and Vancouver — the overall look is so ’90s Vancouver. Familiar neighborhoods. Oh, the old sulfur pile by the rail yard. Those were the days!

The roller-coaster ride is Woo’s trademark. It’s entertainment, with some sci-fi props, as are most of these movies. Still, I would have preferred more Dick, less Woo.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

2004 Anonymous Content, This is That

++ memory erasure romantic comedy

Premise: a company, “Lacuna”, does a memory removal procedure.

Our imperfect couple break up and each decides to have their memory of the other erased. You don’t have to be a brain scientist to see how this might have ironic consequences.

And so we have a story. It didn’t have to be a comedy. But let’s say it is.

One may expect that Carrey would get carried away. He has to, somewhere — that’s why he’s in the part. But what if he can do more than the goofy stuff… suppose he can be a very introverted guy with limited self-esteem.

And it wouldn’t have much bite unless our couple is really in love, and this whole thing was really a bad idea, and they need to get back together. It would be unreasonable to expect big surprises.

The execution of the movie is very good, though. Carrey and Winslet manage to portray a clashing and funny relationship that flies and crashes. The depiction of the sensation of the imagined technology gone amok is pretty convincing.

The script fills out minor characters and involves them in the story; the main theme of reconstruction and redemption is quirky and somehow believable.

Most people will like this, even if they never had any memories erased.

Serenity

2005 Universal

+ space cowboys-n-bad-guys

Based on the short-run Fox TV series Firefly, aired in 2002. I saw a few episodes, and loved them, but for a long time never met another person who had seen one.

Date: 2500

More spaceships than you can shake a blaster at.

This a space-action movie, but also a very intricate and beautiful depiction of futuristic worlds. The characters are great, the character development is superb. The dialog is a blast — being done in a variety of dialects, from a Westernesque twang of the outer planets to a sophisticated silk of the inner planets.

Then the special effects… We don’t often see space scenes so carefully crafted in such movies. I was impressed by the starkness of light and shadow (absent in, e.g., Star Wars).

One main plot complaint: the mystery girl “River” is a profound psychic: OK, that’s typical sci-fi fare. But she’s also a super kung fu fighting machine who beats up whole battalions of heavily armed soldiers. Why stop there? Why not give her a whole whack more magical powers? This sort of fiction involves a suspension of disbelief — but with a character like this, it hangs until dead.

Even the one power was unnecessary for the plot: it turns out that the bad guys want her — primarily, for a bit of knowledge she might have. The superpowers were an unnecessary appendix, glued on perhaps out of fear that the dull-witted might lose concentration in all the other excitement. Oh, well… not my movie. Minus one point from me.

Full disclosure — the series’ catch on this is:

Wash: Psychic, though? That sounds like something out of science fiction!
Zoë: You live on a spaceship, dear.

I’m hard on it because, otherwise, it’s a ground-breaking sci-fi masterwork, and a really fun story.

A Scanner Darkly

2006 Thousand Words, Section Eight, Detour Filmproduction, 3 Arts Entertainment

++ dystopian drug-induced psychosis

This a story about a future of shape-shifting police who ineffectively battle consciousness-expanding brain-eating street drugs. But wow.

A post-production animation effect, new to me, works well to depict the psychotic state, as well as the shape-shifting, and to illustrate how the two might be hard to distinguish.

Several of the performances are just precious, especially those of Robert Downey Jr. and Woody Harrelson. Their intensity is just nuts. The top-billed actor manages not to ruin that, but he’s merely a narrative thread in the whirlwind of more fascinating characters and their delusions.

Do not expect pulled punches or tied-up threads in this movie. It is about chaos and confusion; the hints it provides only hint of worse confusion. That is the fun of it.

Children of Men

2006 Strike Entertainment, Hit and Run Productions

++ post-apocalypse action, politics

It’s a dystopian near-future movie, the theme being that people have lost the ability to reproduce. The script does not provide a reason for this. But society is falling apart, slipping into a very familiar nightmare.

The premise isn’t scientifically impossible, and there has to be a scientific explanation, and maybe science is to blame. But that is as far as a connection to sci-fi goes. It’s a maybe sci-fi movie.

The whole thing is just so involving, totally immersive. The script, the acting, direction, photography and scenery are as good as it gets. Every character is completely believable, many are quite likable. In the violent conflict scenes, I wanted to duck: the randomness and wantonness of the destruction was among the best I’ve ever seen.

There is a thread of hope, which keeps wearing thin and breaking, and then reappearing in a different form. There’s your good bits. Otherwise, it’ll give you nightmares.

The Fountain

2006 Regency Enterprises, Foy, Inc

+ multi-threaded drama

This isn’t primarily a sci-fi movie, it’s about life and death and loss, told in parallel story threads. Two of the three threads do have science-fiction themes. The title derives from the fable of the fountain of youth.

In one thread, a medical researcher is driving a team to cure a lethal brain disease, but possibly finds more than that. Meanwhile, his wife is dying of the same disease.

In another thread, a guy (perhaps the same guy) is traveling in what might be a spaceship containing just himself and a gnarled tree, toward a dying star.

In the remaining thread, the Spanish queen tasks a “conquistador” with finding the Tree of Life in a Mayan temple.

The medical part is nearest to a conventional science fiction theme.

The spaceship is very inventive, being just a transparent bubble traveling through space — very beautiful. The actions within the bubble are very poetic. The script explains nothing about this, though, and it might as well depict a mystical experience (as the passenger’s assumption of yoga poses might suggest).

Similarly, the story with the conquistador is very much a historical fantasy. Elements are taken from history: the conquistador’s task resembling Ponce de León’s quest, the Inquisition and Mayans in Mexico. The story itself has nothing to do with history, but rather is a reverberation of the other themes in the movie. People who insist on accurate history and ethnology may find the story difficult to swallow, however.

Science fiction should be limited by physical reality, even if it’s an imagined physical reality. This script drops that restriction, and uses science fiction motifs to tell another story. (Likewise, the conquistador thread is a very poor historical fiction, since it depicts a historical context that is mostly fantastic.) Fair enough, but this does not count in its favor in a list about science fiction movies.

Overall, the movie made up in visual splash what the story lacked of polish. It is very pretty to look at.

The movie does succeed in telling its central story, and the acting and the production values are pretty good. At the end, I enjoyed the experience, despite the inconsistencies.

Los Cronocrimenes
[Timecrimes]

2007 Karbo Vantas Entertainment, Fine Productions, Zip Films

+ time loop makes good guy bad

Spanish

This is a simpler, lower-budget time-loop story.

The characters are more personal and familiar here than in many stories of this kind. The acting and photography are very good.

It isn’t a nice story, though. Besides the time-looping theme, it boils down to survival, at the expense of integrity.

The Man from Earth

2007

OK ageless guy tells friends about it

Premise: a guy has lived for thousands of years without aging. This time, before moving on, he decides to tell his friends.

It’s a complete discussion of the topic, by some good actors. You may remember the plot from a Star Trek original series episode: that’s because the same guy who wrote the episode wrote this screenplay.

Take it as a play made of a short story.

The discussion of biblical history is a little overdone. It consumes an unfortunately big chunk of the script.

I am Legend

2007 Village Roadshow Pictures, Weed Road Pictures, Overbrook Entertainment, Heyday Films, Original Film

+ post-apocalypse monsters

This is the third adaptation of the novel, with fancy CGI for the mutants, after the 1954 The Last Man on Earth, and the 1971 The Omega Man. And well, it’s got Will Smith, who manages to tone his personality to fit this very dark setting. It’s in this list because it’s a significantly different adaptation of the same story rather than a re-make, and because it’s very good.

Monsters: mutant humans, “the infected”, fast-moving and strong, allergic to light. They got that way because of a virus that Dr. Krippin created, intending to make a cancer cure. From what I have read, this is closer to the novel than the other adaptations.

Cloverfield

2008 Bad Robot Productions

+ found-film giant monster

“Found-film” type.

This movie is not strong sci-fi. Something, an (evidently) alien monster, arrives in New York via meteor or something. The movie proposes no explanation; it consists primarily of a personal camera recording people fleeing.

Alien: a giant monster appears only in glimpses, but there are enough to get a good impression of it. It’s very big and very weird and ugly, and it’s very ticked off. And (perhaps in response to being fired upon) drops vicious, lethal little critters from its body.

The story isn’t for those in need of clean explanations or Hollywood endings.

It succeeds very well as a sci-fi monster movie, of the “run-away!” variety, and it’s unlike anything that preceded it in the genre.

It spawned two sequels. Cloverfield Paradox: lots of money for a confused unwatchable mess — so bad, I’m hesitant to try 10 Cloverfield Lane.

WALL·E

2008 Walt Disney Pictures, Pixar Animation Studios

++ eco-crash + animated robots

Date: 29th Century

Premise: people have destroyed Earth’s environment. The only remaining life appears to be cockroaches. One robot, WALL·E, which has achieved a sort of intelligence, remains, dutifully cleaning up huge mounds of garbage.

Vehicles: starliner Axiom, capable of “hyperjump”, by which it travels faster than light, has luxury accommodations for a vast number of utterly useless, vegetative, consumption-centered but good-natured passengers, and a crew of busy robots.

Robots: Many. The protagonist is WALL·E “Waste Allocation Load-Lifter (Earth Class)“, which has achieved a sort of lovable artificial intelligence, keeps collections of things he finds, appreciates 1960s musicals. EVE “Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator”, appears on Earth, confoundingly wielding a blaster ray, and proceeds to forge a romance with WALL·E. On the starliner, however, there is a bewildering variety of robots.

Computers: ship’s computer, and its second in command, AUTO.

Weapons: blasters, lasers.

Other gadgets: see-through televisors.

Pokes fun at: throw-away culture (which evidently caused the environmental disaster), “super-size me” mentality (the mega-corporation that owns the starships is “Buy n Large”, fashion.

Avatar

2009 Lightstorm Entertainment, Dune Entertainment, Ingenious Film Partners

++ colonialism in deep space

Date: 2154

Place: Pandora, a moon of planet Polyphemus of the Alpha Centauri star system. Is atmosphere is poisonous to humans, but it is rich with life forms.

Aliens: Na’vi — tall, blue humanoids, and the various CGI animals of Pandora. They have cables for hair, with which they plug directly into the nervous system of the animals they use. They’re peaceful and in harmony with nature.

Premise: people are there to plunder Pandora’s natural resources, but are having trouble with the pesky natives. Jake goes undercover as an avatar, somehow a human inside an alien body, to sort things out… or to undermine the aliens, depending on how you look at it.

Vehicles: giant spaceship, with very nice weightlessness scenes. Entry vehicle, shuttle-like. Nice. Titanic mining machines. Military flying machines with tilting fans, battle suits.

Part of the movie is shot directly with actors, but most of it uses CGI representations of actors, in an otherwise CGI world.

I saw the movie in 3D, and enjoyed it very much, although for me, the 3D worked much better for the CGI scenes than for the natural scenes, which resemble layered cardboard.

The movie has some problems. First, the scenes with Sigourney Weaver. She just spouts off moralistic lectures, out of place with the story. Her character seems like an add-in. Second, a physical problem: there are big floating rocks attached to the moon by roots, and trying to float away like antigravity. This is cool to look at, but I had difficulty accepting it physically. The script offers no explanation. Finally, the simplistic bad-people vs. good-alien story — In a movie this sophisticated, a more human story could have been presented, and it still would have been fun. But oh well… not my story.

Otherwise, the movie is immersive and gripping and very beautiful.

Several sequels have come out.

Moon

2009 Stage 6 Films, Liberty Films, Xinggu Films, Limelight

++ isolation on the Moon. maybe.

Location: Building Base Sarang on the Moon.

Harvesting “clean-burning helium-3”. (I checked up on this. It’s a real thing, although surely no usable amount of it is available on the Moon.)

The Moon scenes aren’t bad, although technically objectionable in a lot of ways, they may be about as good as any that have appeared in cinema.

Robot/Computer: Gerty, really more of a part of the station, attached to the ceiling of the station, shows a full spectrum of emotion using only a happy face on a small screen — really, one of the best parts.

Vehicles: wheeled Moon rover vehicle, big crawling Moon harvesters, small helium-3 transports, a big transport spacecraft.

Sam’s been there alone for almost three years. And he’s been cut off from direct contact with Earth. He’s got more than a little cabin fever.

There is a terrible, dirty secret about his contract. It is a mystery/suspense story.

Sam forms a couple of relationships of a nature that we haven’t seen before, of which the one with Gerty is not the least surprising.

Overall, this movie is very good. The sets and props are pretty believable, the acting (almost all by Rockwell) is very good. And it offers some situations new in cinema.

The action evolves slowly and requires the viewer to pay attention. So, it isn’t for everybody.

District 9

2009 QED International, WingNut Films

+ alternative-present, aliens as refugees

Date: (arrival) 1982, (present) 2010

Aliens: “prawns” (because they are arthropoidal)

Vehicles: alien “mothership” that mostly just hovers, a “command module” ship, that primarily travels to the mothership.

Weapons: lots of alien hand weapons, like ray guns and such, play into the script a lot. An alien battle suit.

This movie is peculiar in several ways. First, the premise is an “alternative present”, which depicts fictitious globally televised events as having happened in the past. This leads to a huge spaceship hovering over Johannesburg, and a slum of alien refugees (which is “District 9”) in the depicted present.

There isn’t much new science fiction here. This is a story of human refugees, in the guise of an alien visitation. That had been done, too, in the 1988 movie Alien Nation.

Given that the movie is primarily a social message, I give it a point for being a good one: the refugees are worthwhile, and somehow real Menschen (albeit arthropoid).

Only one (human) character develops (partly by way of mutating). He’s a conflicted guy who seems nice enough but who does quite evil things. He has some understanding of the aliens (he can understand their weird speech), but comes down hard on them. The events finally force him to take a side.

The CGI is mostly pretty convincing. It’s very, very violent: lots of bodies explode into lots of goo. Overall, the action is gross but fun.