Sci-Fi Movies of the 2010s

Monsters

2010 Vertigo Films

+ alien monsters invade

Place: Mexico

Date: near future (apparently)

Premise: a NASA space probe somehow brought alien creatures back from space, which have grown to monstrous size, and are taking over.

A map shows most of North Mexico, and Baja California as “Infected Zone”.

The boss of a U.S. American reporter commands him to find and rescue his daughter, and bring her back to the U.S. It becomes partly a sort of travelogue, as the two make their way North.

Aliens: 30m high or more, with lots of long tentacles, that walk with thuds, glow pretty colors in the dark, and make elephant-like noises. They are evidently very dangerous.

The military is in full warfare with the monsters. The movie is a fair representation of how the population might react. Life goes on, somehow, even when things get really scary and weird.

The filming is in “reality TV” style, as with a hand-held camera, although no cameraman is in evidence.

It was shot in Mexico, Guatemala, and Costa Rica. It makes good use of lots of unexpected existing scenery, such as destroyed buildings.

Most of the extras were people who lived at the filming sites, and their dialogue was improvised. For me, this worked very well, and drew me in, as though it were a recording of reality.

The monsters’ movement is very well executed; the impact of huge bulk comes across well. They are very scary. But we only see them a few times in the movie. Mostly we just see the destruction they have wrought.

A sequel came in 2015: Monsters: Dark Continent.

Inception

2010 Warner Bros., Legendary Entertainment, Syncopy

OK secret agents in action/adventure dreams

Basically it’s all like secret agents — very much Mission Impossible except all in extremely vivid dream-worlds.

Gadgets: They have gizmos like headsets that connect the dreamers, and administer various drugs.

The first round of terminology you have to absorb: “Extractors” can extract ideas from a dreamer’s mind. “Inception” is the planting of an idea in someone’s head, as though it was the person’s own idea. You’ll learn all this in the first few scenes. Unfortunately, there’s a whole whack more stuff to learn…

There’s not much new here. Inserting thoughts into the mind of a dreamer is an old sci-fi theme: for example, it is central to the movies Lathe of Heaven, and Brainstorm.

What’s good: very lush scenery, disposed to disintegrate, with a bent for bending. The effects are fun and often novel.

But seriously: half the dialog in this movie is explanation of how their imaginary dream technology works. Maybe I should have been taking notes.

Just when you think you understand the fantastical premise, dialog explains (at length) a whole new dream-technical issue — to cover some otherwise inexplicable event in an upcoming scene. This crap happens many times throughout the movie.

I’ve tried to watch it twice, and finally decided I just don’t care enough.

It feels like kids making up the rules to games as they go along. I call it bad storytelling.

Tiresome oh-so-grave acting by all the principals. The unrelenting dirge of the musical score compounds the monotony. To share in all this seriousness long enough is a big strain. Mind you, the actors are all cute, doing their best with this pap.

Do we really believe that most people have dreams this detailed at all? I don’t. My most vivid dreams are very dreamlike. In this movie, everybody has dreams that are like — movies.

This isn’t really about dreams at all. It’s a writer’s failure to write an engaging story.

Source Code

2011 Vendôme Pictures, Mark Gordon Company Productions

+ time-loop action-adventure

It’s another tight time loop movie: the protagonist learns a bit more each time through. It’s an action-whodunnit, lots of things go boom, people get shot, a guy jumps out of the train.

The sci-fi twist is that it’s not quite a time loop as such. Or is it? This all gets explained in the script: some gobbledygook about quantum bla bla. It’s medical sci-fi, or something. But maybe more than that…

Now that I think about it, they set this up as a series pilot. Ouch.

The unsavory characters get their comeuppance, everything turns out all right — you can see that coming, part-way through the movie.

This is an entertaining movie, for what it is. It’s quite sweet, after repeated violence.

Also, it features lots of pretty images of Chicago.

Melancholia

2011 Zentropa (etc.)

++ psychological terror planet

This isn’t essentially a sci-fi movie. The sci-fi premise looms throughout, but the story is really about emotional states, and madness.

The premise is: a rogue planet is gonna crash into the Earth. And how do you like that? Well, some people are just fine with it. Some — not so fine.

It’s a beautiful movie, gorgeously shot, strongly acted, but it’s not easy. It depicts madness, and that is going to feel uncomfortably familiar to some of us.

This is not a formulaic flick, and the director likes to poke you in delicate places. If you feel in any way delicate, you might read up on the sorts of hijinks Lars von Trier gets into before you wade in.

Super 8

2011 Bad Robot Productions, Amblin Entertainment

+ kids vs government conspiracy and scary alien

First, it’s very questionable that this movie is appropriate for kids. It starts with the death of a parent, and contains a great deal of blood splatter and people being killed. It’s beyond even the level of violence that TV daily exposed us to. Show your kid E.T. the Extraterrestrial, not this. That said…

Date: 1979

Alien: real big, fast, strange, deadly, and basically, scary. But the alien’s character develops.

Vehicle: the alien’s spaceship is quite colorful and imaginative, and constructed in a strange and alarming way.

The central characters are pre-teen kids, who, aside from having a parent die, are making their own horror movie (on Super 8 film). The kids are great, and their interactions really make the movie — more than the big cover-up story, more than even the alien.

In the script, Abrams continues Spielberg’s fixation on government cover-up stories. Suffice it to say, the cover-up has been going on for many years, multiple branches of government super-secretly ship in thousands of troops to super-secretly, and spectacularly, cover things up. That is, the usually nonsensical government cover-up story.

(I don’t care for alien cover-up stories. It’s a silly idea that has been overdone to the point where much of the public can only discuss extraterrestrial life in terms of a cover-up by the government.)

Each kid has either a fun or serious personality. By far the most amusing is Charles, a precocious aspiring movie director (obviously drawn from Abram’s experience). He’s played really brilliantly by Griffiths, one of those kids who get big and haven’t “leaned out yet”. He’s heavy, and aware and ashamed of it, but so driven that he draws all the other kids along. And you gotta like Cary, who likes to blow things up. One of the best lines in the movie comes from his friend Preston:

“Your obsession with fireworks — and I’m saying this as a friend — concerns me. And my mother.”

I have one bone to pick about the kids. Men wrote this story, about a group of boys. Presumably for balance, to bring in the other half of the viewing public, they introduced a girl. Fanning plays her formidable character strongly. She is both in fact, and in the movie, a “natural”. But her relation to two of the boys is romantic, and she gets rescued by a boy. Abrams should be capable of breaking patterns. He did not need to pull out the tired “maiden in distress”. Not in this millennium.

The script develops some sub-themes poorly: these include a terrible conflict between the two fathers, and a high school teacher who is onto the cover-up. The actors did their best, but the script let all of them down. (On the other hand, the sleazy camera store salesman is precious.)

For the flaws and the messy script, there’s a lot of good fun in this movie, and it has a different catch on an extraterrestrial.

A special extra appears the end: “The Case” — the zombie film the kids made.

O Homem do Futuro
[The Man from the Future]

2011 Conspiração Filmes, Globo Filmes

+ time travel comedy

Portuguese

Premise: Guy makes a time machine, goes back to his own past, and tries to fix it. But each time, things mess up, and change his own personality in the process.

The time travel comedy has been done many times, but the aspect of changing the traveler’s own personal development is a twist.

The whole cast is good, and the story is entertaining: you can like these people. It’s a fun movie.

Robot & Frank

2012 Stage 6 Films, Park Pictures, White Hat Entertainment, Dog Run Pictures

+ robots, memory loss, and crime

Date/Place: near future / Cold Spring, NY

It is a near future in which helper-robots are accepted technology. The robots form the main story.

The movie is a family drama, with several interesting twists, besides the robot.

Premise: Frank has gotten old, and his memory is going, and he’s a bit of a kleptomaniac, and… turns out, he has a “colorful” past. His grown kids care about him, but they have busy lives. One of his kids gets him a household robot, to relieve the burden of dealing with him. Frank doesn’t want it, but it grows on him, and he finds a novel use for it.

Gadgets: cell phones are transparent, and people make video telephone calls on big-screen flat monitors. (Autos, however, seem to be just current gas-guzzlers.)

The robots here are of technology that is conceivable at this time. They’re beneficial and likable. They’re not scary or smarter than humans, they just are very logical.

I particularly liked the honest presentation of the robot: it is not “becoming human”, it is a machine following its programming, in a very sophisticated way. It can know and deduce things, but this is part of its programming. The story is about how such devices might integrate into society, and into families.

Frank and the librarian are quite sympathetic characters; his kids, much less so. All parts are well played.

Looper

2012 Endgame Entertainment, DMG Entertainment, FilmNation Entertainment

OK time traveling hit men

This movie gives you not only time travel, but people with telekinesis abilities thrown in, for the same price!

Date: already the future… and then there’s the future future. It’s got two dystopian futures for the price of one! (Actually, the present future is more dystopian than the future future, while, in the future future, all we see is gangsters of a fancy-dress dystopia.)

Weapons: This is a gun movie — gunfire happens every few seconds, and the guns are awesomely big. Among them is a big-bore shotgun thing called a “blunderbuss”, and a huge 45-caliber pistol called a “gat”. Sara does product placement for her Remington 870 Wingmaster.

Vehicles: In the current future, there are “slat bikes”, like a motorcycle with a jet engine that hovers over the ground, notoriously difficult to start. Most cars appear to be modified older cars, with a pipe going from the gas tank to the other side. Other large craft appear floating in the distant sky.

Gadgets: In the current future they have see-through cell phones. The time machine itself belongs to the future future (where it is very illegal). In the future future, the gangsters use a device to remotely immobilize and drag a victim.

Seth is an addict to “dropping”; a drug that makes everything seem clear and happy, administered by eyedropper. Other characters despise it, and it produces withdrawal effects.

The time travel aspect takes place in a very simple, one-way trip into the past, for a purpose that is novel to this movie. The primary theme involves one of the obvious time-travel paradoxes. The top-billing actor forcefully discourages us to worry about other problems with time travel.

The acting by all principals is very good, if a little stiff. Willis delivers the usual, which is good, but usual. Jeff Daniels, as a nice, mild-mannered mob boss, may be the best. And the kid was great. (Let’s hope the job didn’t warp him permanently!)

The script is very polished, but in the end, I didn’t buy the motivations of the principals. The telekinesis theme was an unnecessary embellishment. (I don’t care to have my credulity stretched more than one way at a time.) So it’s good violent fun, and it has one new twist on a well-worn sci-fi theme, besides having a somewhat diverting mystery theme, and some novel effects.

Cloud Atlas

2012 Cloud Atlas, X-Filme Creative Pool, Anarchos, A Company, Ard Degeto

++ interacting life-lines

This movie isn’t essentially or even primarily science fiction. However, it has two future-fiction threads, among six story threads. Both of those are properly science fiction.

The over-arching theme is that people’s actions connect them to other people, in the past and future. This is a mystical notion that explains the connection between the different threads of the script, and which forms part of a philosophical message, which one of the sci-fi threads explicates.

The script expresses an anti-theme connecting the threads as a “natural order in the world” that “the weak are the meat for the strong to eat”.

Each of the principal actors plays a role in each thread. Some of them play multiple roles in one thread. This is pretty funny, and amazing. Surely no other movie has ever employed so many actors to play so many multiple primary roles. I’m sure they had a blast doing it.

As to the science-fiction threads: one is set in “New Seoul” in 2144, with many of the actors being Asians, and others wearing heavy make-up. (It worked for me to imagine that they were of mixed descent.) It’s a dystopian future, a “corpocracy” called “unanimity” where “fabricants” are humans grown in tubes to be slaves to the “consumers”. We see many scenes of impossible cityscapes, and vehicles that glide on force-fields. It mixes dystopian themes very quickly into a few scenes.

The other future-fiction thread is set in 2321, after “the fall” (of civilization), where a subsistence tribe struggles against cannibals. A group of “prescients” visits (in a trimaran yacht), with all sorts of fancy technology and medicine. They want something: a guide to a building on the mountain, where they can call for help to people on another planet. In later scenes, the principals are on another planet.

There’s little new in the science fiction, despite many elements, depicted in imaginative ways. (There’s even a little joke about Soylent Green, whose main theme makes an appearance.) Again, the science fiction itself isn’t the main point here.

Tom Hanks’ acting is most amazing, especially as the main role of the 2321 thread. I can watch this over again just to hear his wild dialect. For me, the most delicious character is the contemptible publisher in the 2012 thread, played by Jim Broadbent. I wonder if Hugo Weaving really enjoys playing really creepy bad guys (and gals). Here he’s several. The biggest acting wonder is Doona Bae in the 2144 thread, a face I can’t look away from, a quiet voice of strength. (I read this is her first English-language production.)

There are some annoyances: stock Hollywood chase scenes and cliffhangers (off cliffs), people unscathed from unsurvivable falls, etc. It may be objectionable that so many conventional motifs are laid on top of one another. (But the overlay is consistent with the theme of the movie.)

I could not follow how all this worked together the first time — just too much happening. This will be the case with most viewers. I watched it again, both because I enjoyed it so much the first time, and because the point they are trying to make is worth the extra work.

It’s worth comparing with The Fountain, which also had interwoven stories, played out in different time periods. How is it, that directors who choose this story form also try to make such pretty movies.

This movie could be overwhelming. Unless you pay some attention, it will surely be just a jumble. My recommendation is: set aside some time (2.5 hours) when you’re ready to take in a banquet of imagery.

Elysium

2013 TriStar Pictures, Media Rights Capital, QED International, Alphacore, Kinberg Genre

OK CGI dystopian action, space scenes and robots

Date: 2154

Vehicles: primarily a titanic wheel-shaped space habitat Elysium. Various flying machines, space shuttles.

Gadgets: “med bays” that cure illness and replace body parts. Powered exoskeleton.

Robots: police robots that are brutal and discriminatory.

Several main themes, primarily, class struggle in a dystopian future, and in an orbiting space habit. These aren’t badly done. The CGI is very good, and when the action gets going, it really goes.

As far as I know, this is the first depiction of an “artificial Earth” in sci-fi cinema. And the idea that it holds its atmosphere by centrifugal force rather than pressure was new to me. (Of course, to make that really work, the scales would have to be much greater than depicted. Still, a fun idea.)

The idea that a guy would shoulder-launch small missiles from the Earth, and they could make it all the way into space to shoot down shuttles heading for a space station, was difficult to swallow, besides being an unnecessary detail. This alone loses a believability point from me.

The rest is pretty much from the modern stock of sci-fi CGI.

The primary actors do their best, but it’s hopeless — the story and dialog fails badly in many places and many ways, so badly that I just don’t believe the situation or the characters at all.

The gritty scenes on Earth were fun, until we got to the super-evil hired bad guy, a stock comic-book character. Then the people on Elysium weren’t supposed to be liked — that is part of the problem. They were drawn unlikable, one-dimensional. It’s easy to write sub-human characters. This would have worked, but for the contrast with the otherwise human characters.

Something went very wrong in the production here. It feels like two or three movies spliced together.

Her

2013 Annapurna Pictures

+ artificial intelligence and love

Premise: guy falls in love with a commercial, artificially intelligent computer program (called an “OS”).

Time/Place: future LA is very pretty, colorful, people-friendly and antiseptic. The clothes styles are soft, colorful and comfy.

The main gadget is the AI itself. Besides this, the near-future smartphones are not the size of a brick… well, in 2013 it might have gone either way. You don’t see anybody typing at all, they dictate.

Theodore lives in a huge, exquisitely appointed apartment. He’s a writer who doesn’t think his writing is acceptable. We can guess how that is going to work out. Finally, he has women problems — that is plural.

Plusses are that the filming is gorgeous, it’s a feel-good movie, and sci-fi-wise, it’s not an awful premise. Minuses are that the primary theme goes much farther than necessary. The dialog rolls beyond soft audio female porn into firm female porn, and slips helplessly into hot sticky female porn.

There is some sci-fi here, it discusses all the usual questions about artificial intelligence and emotions.

The movie is a thoughtful exploration of the mind-body problem: to what degree are human intellect and experience dependent on the body? It depicts an intelligence sans corps that behaves to the end like a lover on the phone. It’s done well enough that I could almost believe it — almost, except I kept imagining a body attached, and having to remember there wasn’t one.

And in the end, I no longer believed. I don’t think this is the fault of the movie, it’s the fault of the concept. Our feelings are there as part of, because of our physical bodies. Sure, people might build something that fakes the whole phenomenon, but here, the program develops feelings. I wasn’t buying it.

The movie doesn’t pull its punches, though. It takes personal losses directly, and takes the AI to some other place without passing judgment.

Interstellar

2014 Legendary Pictures, Syncopy, Lynda Obst Productions

OK post-apocalyptic CGI space action

Scenario: Earth is dying. There has been a war. And NASA is now a super-secret underground power, because somehow we have to get to a “wormhole” that is out by Saturn, so we can find a new planet. But it’s way more complicated than that, for no good reason whatsoever.

Robots: the single most imaginative prop in the movie.

Vehicle: A very cool-looking space shuttle launches from Earth (using Saturn-V and photoshopped Space Shuttle footage), and docks with a tug Endurance — which spins for no apparent reason (should be for centrifugal force, but the interior shots are inconsistent with that interpretation). The astronauts travel in a liquid bath for suspended animation.

It’s a dystopian future that begins in a corn field, with people mostly looking happy and healthy. The script communicates the premise of a dying Earth very badly: they show a dirt storm. (I’m from Texas — that ain’t nuthin’.) I kept waiting for the big-screen global threat… it never comes. They just keep saying the Earth is dying.

For some reason, the “they” of conspiracy theories have decided to expunge the US space program from the school text books. My guess: some half-wit producers had swallowed conspiracy stories, and felt they had to work it into the movie somehow, while others wanted to emphasize that the Moon landings are factual. It’s just a peculiar example of the narrative jumble in this movie: it’s not clear how this debate advances the story.

One of the many often-repeated lines in the dialog is “the good news or the bad news”. Well, about the movie generally, there’s good news, and there’s very bad news. Actually, there’s a lot of news. If you throw away a lot of bad news, a lot of good news remains… then again, there is an awful lot of bad news in between.

Lots of big fancy beautiful scenes, many are novel in the genre. Kilometer-high waves on a water planet. Inside a space station orbiting Saturn, it looks like a Midwest farm curved into a tube. Nice animations of the black hole, and of the planet Saturn. The individual planet-scapes are each quite nice. A “tesseract” of a room inside a black hole. Why not?

Several direct rip-offs from 2001: A Space Odyssey and at least one from Star Wars.

Going to Saturn, where there’s a wormhole. They think planets are on the other side…it is unclear why. But on the other side, there is a big black hole with… what? planets going around it or something? It makes no sense, that these planets are going around the black hole.

And there was a whole whack of babble about solving gravity or some bla-bla, the upshot being the question of whether humanity would be able to follow the astronauts, and forms the backdrop for one of the conflicts.

The crew is patently unfit for space travel. They discuss how to operate the spaceship, as though they haven’t quite finished their training.

The writing is very choppy, unnatural and confused.

Actors deliver particularly tiresome technobabble with particularly annoying histrionics. There are many indications that the authors hadn’t paid a lot of attention to the U.S. space program. Oh god, it sounds like they listened to some physicists talking, grabbing bits here and there, without anybody bothering to make sure they made any sense. Scarcely a minute goes by without somebody having a fit of bla bla bla technobabble.

I read about the making of the movie, that they brought in the famous physicist Kip Thorn as a consultant, and that he aided in the special effects for the black hole. This does turn out pretty — but plays a small part in the overall jumble.

Two performances were especially strong: those of the protagonist’s two young kids. Somebody knew how to direct kids, and the kids were great.

Is it me, or are Americans all starting to talk like they have too much saliva in their mouths? Do they have too much saliva in their mouths? Several actors were playing voice games. The lame-brained explanation would be that the director thought that would add intensity or intimacy. It added intensity to my annoyance.

To let the audience know things are being exciting, the movie shovels in ’90s-style jerky hand-held camera effect. It’s irksome, as usual, effective at extracting me from any suspension of disbelief.

Oh no, they repeat some lines of Dylan Thomas over and over and over, until I wished to hear it no more. (Damn — I used to like that poem.)

This movie doesn’t stop with merely jerking tears, it bludgeons you for them. If your eyes are still dry, there’s more bludgeoning to come! My eyes stayed dry; my annoyance with this maltreatment will linger awhile.

Altogether, my recommendation is: if you want a movie with nice special effects, with all the sci-fi that can be bent, folded and mangled into it, with lots and lots and lots and lots of emotional ups-and-downs, and chained scenes of roller-coaster action, this is a good bet.

If you want to see a good story, or a halfway believable portrayal of human situations, or thought-provoking science-fiction, you’re in for a let-down.

If you tend to lash out at nonsensical story-lines or stupid dialog, it may be best for you to watch this movie alone.

Ex Machina

2014 Film4, DNA Films

++ robot artificial intelligence

The pretty female robot is see-through in parts, an effect that comes across well, because at once it shows her to be a machine meant to look human. Initially, it’s about computer intelligence, and develops into more than that. This is a who’s-playing-who movie.

We’re straightaway introduced to the ultrarich, super-genius, utterly unlikable boss.

The story asks a lot of good questions, but it parries and feints most of the usual artificial intelligence and robot thrusts. It panders to fashion a bit… presumably to make a human connection somehow, so we have the sex and romance aspect… but it makes good use of that.

The movie makes a lot of current technology, especially, the Internet and cell phones. There is also speculation about possible new technologies, such as a gelatinous computer.

It should make you think, and maybe worry.

Advantageous

2015 Good Neighbors Media. D.K. Entertainment. I Ain’t Playin’ Films

++ body swap personal economics

Premise: in some future, it has become possible to transfer the mind of a person from their old body into a new one, the main purpose being to improve one’s status.

In this story, the main characters are a woman and her daughter. They have a great relationship. Mom gets into a bind, and this procedure is proposed as a way out. She wants the best for her daughter.

The movie is very effective at bringing the viewer into the small, damaged family and their terrible choice.

The acting is superb, by everyone on the cast. You really feel the weight of the situation, and how an intelligent woman has come to consider such an extreme measure. But that’s just part of it.

The CGI depiction of a somehow overly beautiful future world is seamless. They also have the ability to spy on people remotely, and a flying car, and AI job agents.

This is a low-budget rarity: a thoughtful and touching study of a conventional science fiction theme that usually isn’t well thought through.

The Martian

2015 Scott Free Productions, Kinberg Genre, TSG Entertainment

+ space survival adventure

Vehicles: Mars Ascent Vehicle or MAV, interplanetary ship Aries is very big and pretty.

Premise: an exploration team on Mars experiences a disaster. They assume our hero astronaut dead, and abandoned him on Mars. How will he survive?

Matt Damon is quite believable in the role as an intelligent, trained, brave professional. His solutions to the many problems involve real science. (Some are a bit unlikely, but, hey.)

A lot of the drama and action takes place aboard the Aries, and while these scenes, too, are well done, the scientific/engineering explanation did not mesh well with the realism of the situation of the man on Mars. It’s a minor, subjective flaw.

24

2016 2D Entertainment

OK time-travel drama/romance/comedy/musical

Tamil

A time-looping fantasy, with three roles played by the producer. Already that sounds too ambitious, of course.

First, you have to understand, Indian entertainment just has to include song and dance numbers by the principals, de rigueur. That’s not my cup of tea. It is the tradition, so I have to just accept it.

I have a weightier objection to the three main roles. The script introduces us straightaway to a genius watchmaker brother and an evil twin criminal brother. I don’t believe either character at all, or their relationship. Then the son “has watchmaking in his veins” — a dumb idea. I don’t like him personally either. He launches into a nasty situation-comedy with the woman he falls in love with, involving time looping, trying all sorts of not-very-funny tricks and non-stop lies to arrange for her to fall in love with him. I found this very trying.

I’ve also never cared for sugary comedy mixed with explicit violence. Call it aesthetics. It can be legitimate, say, for irony — here, it clashes badly.

The cinematography is beautiful, and very colorful. Many of the settings are just lush. The special effects aren’t bad (but everybody these days has fancy special effects). The protagonist’s hijinks are at least inventive. I can’t judge the song and dance.

Many of the secondary characters are quite well played, or at least are believable as people.

The dialog is in Tamil. This aspect is pretty entertaining — especially to hear how often English words and phrases pop up in the dialog, often for deliberate comic effect.

The pace of the movie is frantic, which is hard on a body, when the movie is two and a half hours long.

The time travel aspect is little more than a literary excuse here. The story is about all the various relationships, and I don’t care for the main relationships. We don’t expect time-travel movies to make a lot of sense, and most other such stories are no better in this regard, so I can’t dock it points for that.

It tries to do everything for everybody, push all the buttons, and it works at it for two and a half hours. Evidently, this plays well for the Indian audience. It would have worked better for me, had it benefited from a strong editor’s hand.

Colossal

2016 Voltage Pictures

+ alcoholism-as-monsters

This is a funny kind of monster movie: monsters as alcoholic addiction.

The story is about real human interactions, real-life problems, about controlling personalities, told in a very peculiar way.

The acting is great — I felt like I knew these people. (It’s got fancy CGI, too, but so what?)

It’s not properly science fiction — it’s a sort of fantasy. (But this is my list.)

Aerials

2016 Fat Brothers Films

OK alien spaceships arrive. Now what?

Arabic, English

Place/Date Dubai, contemporary

Titanic space ships are floating around all the world’s big cities, including Dubai. They don’t seem to be doing anything, except, gradually, communication all goes out, and cars stop running.

There are two special effects. The space ships themselves, which are difficult to interpret or describe. And something else… which is a horror angle to the story.

The movie is largely dialog, mostly between Omar and his wife. They have a very interesting relationship.

This is about society facing something scary and unknown, and how isolated people cope with it, when society is just… cut adrift. And one person is physically handicapped, dependent on the other for everything.

The acting is pretty raw, partly because most of the actors are speaking mostly in a second language, and partly because these aren't big name actors, and partly because the direction is uncertain.

There is very limited action in this film. In only a few short scenes does anybody get really excited. The characters are concerned, confused, and frustrated.

The most impressive thing to me is the texture and color of the gorgeous little cocoon the rather odd couple lives in. Also, I don't know any other Arabic science-fiction movie.

Arrival

2016 FilmNation Entertainment, Lava Bear Films, 21 Laps Entertainment

++ alien arrival; conversation hitch

Aliens: come to Earth to say hi, that’s the premise.

They show up fairly early in the movie, and they are weird — very weird, and pretty darned alarming.

The Problem: they are utterly unlike us. They think in a different way than we do. How do we communicate? And then… should we trust these creepy things?

Vehicle: huge, black, not-quite-any-shape that hangs (usually) motionless in the air at a strange angle. Inside, gravity does whatever they want it to. The ships only get weirder — it’s one of my favorite parts of the movie.

This is sci-fi of the highest order. We really have to think about what’s going on, and it brings up topics that have never appeared on the screen before.

The acting is very good, sometimes great. The dialog is very natural, under the circumstances. The pacing is relentless — things are developing fast, and you don’t know just what might happen, and who might do them, but you know it’s gonna be big. And the feel is somehow ominous and hopeful at the same time. I worried for these people.

One note about a couple of the sci-fi subjects: for me, the notion of traveling faster than light (or whatever they do) is no less fantastical than traveling in time — in some sense, they’re the same thing. So I have no problem with the latter, given the former.

Passengers

2016 Village Roadshow Pictures, Start Motion Pictures, Original Film, LStar Capital, Wanda Pictures, Company Films

+ space travel misadventure

This movie is meant for the big screen, and that is where it should be seen. (I watched it instead on a 6" screen on the back of an airliner seat. I would gladly go to a cinema if I could find it playing.)

Now, this is a Hollywood movie, so cliffs are hung, loves are interested, tears are jerked, and well, is it giving too much away to say that lives are lived happily ever after?

And as it is a Hollywood sci-fi, there’s gotta be a meteor storm. And look out for the computers!

That all said: the premise is a straight-up sci-fi — standard stock of the literature, but not often seen in movies. The science gets a wee bit silly here and there, and the tech is a commentary on modern gadgets.

Vehicle: Avalon, a very lovely sub-light-speed space-liner, taking 5000 colonists to planet Homestead II. It is nuclear fusion powered and has an electromagnetic particle shield. The ship is different at the very least — and I do wish I’d seen it on a big screen.

Gadgets: android bartender Arthur is the best part, a somewhat fresh face on the old sci-fi question, where does humanity start in a machine? Human “hibernation” pods figure heavily into the story, and food replicators provide some plausibility.

The movie does justice to some science and science-fiction topics. It acknowledges the difficulty of interstellar travel given the limitation of the speed of light. It plays with the standard sci-fi question of intelligence and personality of a computing machine. Also, it depicts spectacularly difficulties that might arise with an “artificial gravity generator”.

You want special effects? Well, the trailers spoiled the best one. Nonetheless, it’s something never before seen. Again, it needs a big screen.

The few actors do a great job. You like them; you mostly believe them. The male is every woman’s favorite flawed, otherwise gorgeous, brave wonder-man. His flaw is a doozie though. While the story may be difficult to swallow, it does explore his flaw thoroughly.

Притяжение
[Attraction]

2017 Art Pictures Studio, Водород, ФОНД Кино, Россия 1

− mega-CGI alien arrival / disaster / social message

Russian

Premise: an alien spaceship falls out of the sky. While it’s still flying, military jets fire on it “to disable it” resulting in its crash in a Moscow district, and the deaths of a lot of people.

The script incorporates elements of

• meteor over Russia a few years ago
• Chernobyl disaster (mentioned)
• The Day the Earth Stood Still (both versions)
• Romeo and Juliet. (She even calls him Romeo.)

Alien spaceship: Has three rings going around varying axes. (Nicely done, but we’ve seen things like this.) It is apparently built for crash landings: it starts repairing itself using water. We learn more about it as the movie progresses. At the very end, it turns out to be a character itself.

Everything’s tinted poison blue, as is the current fashion.

Alien: shows up in scary battle outfits (“exoskeletons”). Turns out to be just a person.

The story at least shows the aliens as being of indeterminate intent, and the people reacting with anger to an accident partly caused by people.

The main problem with this movie is the young-adult thread, which is unfortunately the bulk of the screenplay. Basically over-educated high school kids who run in underground gangs and have suspicious knowledge of medicine, and who react to situations in unbelievable ways.

The kids are sometimes cute, but their script is wholly nonsense, and makes them as unlikable as their script is nonsensical. Among them, the least-likable ones are the central girl and her boyfriend. They are preternaturally worldly and smart-ass, besides being usually anti-heroic. The only good thing about them is that they aren’t always right. In fact, they are the cause of more trouble even than the military.

The alien crash landing interrupts a sexual encounter, resulting in a pantie-clad cliffhanger. The central young lady switches from one boyfriend to another, the second going so far as sacrificing his life for her. (The writers just tacked the act of sacrifice onto the end of a scene, which provides no clarification as to how or why he would have done it, only that he did it, and it was important.) She also sorts out difficult family issues in the midst of catastrophe. This is all facile feminine fantasy.

The hero girl single-handedly gives a blood transfusion to the alien, from her own veins. (At this point, I uttered: “Oh, come on.”, and my suspension of disbelief shut down for the night.)

Most of the characters, aside from the primary ones, are believable and even likable. The small parts of relatives and officials and cops are mostly quite well acted, and very sympathetic. The military commander is a very good part — a superior person played by a strong actor — maybe too good to be true. The scene where the vice-premier addresses the alien is pretty amusing.

Some social messages: it depicts social media spreading disinformation and hatred. And it does a very quick allegory of the rise of nationalism.

There are so many silly scenes, mostly beside the main point — which should have been the giant alien spacecraft sitting in the city. An editor could have lifted most of these scenes out easily.

If you can keep watching to the end, you will finally get to some science fiction topics. These almost redeem the weakest portions of the script, but even here, there isn’t much new.

A sequel, Вторжение, (‘Invasion’, aka Attraction II), came out in 2019.

Ghost in the Shell

2017 DreamWorks SKG, Shanghai Film Group, HuaHua Media

OK cybernetics shoot-em-up

English, Japanese

Date: sometime 21st century?

Place: Japan

Gadgets: Humans enhanced with cybernetic parts; human brain (the “ghost”) in cybernetic body (a “shell”). There are also robots. Hologram stuff everywhere. The spider-tank is pretty scary.

Premise: a mega-corporation produces cybernetic stuff, and their biggest new product is a human brain in a robotic body, for super-soldiers. Do we expect them to be benevolent? Our heroine is such a cyber-being.

The CGI is very lovely and inventive throughout, and sometimes pretty creepy. The half-hologram city is like that in Blade Runner, cranked up a couple of notches.

The mix of Japanese and English is pretty neat.

Lots and lots and lots of shoot-em-up action, by good guys at least as much as bad guys, including randomly firing automatic weapons into crowded areas. Shooting for the sake of shooting. This surely a bad thing to show to the general public, besides being a distraction to the plot. The movie loses a point for silly and irresponsible gunplay.

A signature scene has our heroine letting herself fall (unclothed, but hers is a robot body, a shell, anyway) from a tall building. It was shocking the first time, but we don’t see the point of it. The second time, we have to wonder: just why is she jumping off the tall building?

Altogether, it’s very splendid visually. It does explore some details of the main sci-fi premise. And if you’re in the market for a particularly frantic shoot-em-up, it will do that for you, too.

The main story is conventional, being about discovery of the past and treachery, about who your real friends are. We get to like just one character in this story — and it isn’t the main one.

This movie was preceded in 1995 by an animated movie of the same name, which had two animated sequels, and an anime TV series.

What Happened to Monday

2017 Raffaella de Laurentiis, Vendôme Pictures Productions

OK population control action/adventure

Date: near future

Premise: Overpopulation, collapse of food chain; bio-engineered food inadvertently stimulates multiple human births; a draconian government one-child policy, the “child allocation act”.

Gadgets: mostly electrical, all sorts of transparent/holographic signals. Computer screens project on all sorts of stuff; especially, palms of hands become like cell phones. A computer program aids in applying makeup.

It becomes an action-adventure, with loads of random hyper-violence and gore, with protagonists not quite like any I’ve seen before.

My problem with the movie is that it starts out with a pretty interesting twist on a social-science fiction idea, develops it quite well, and suddenly becomes solid hyper-violence and action sequences. I feel like… I was set up for one thing, and delivered another, just emotional filler.

That said, the action has remarkable moments. My favorite was when the girls take on big bad armored soldiers with all the kitchen implements. Not the least bit believable, but different.

And then, to fill in the rest of the time, they shovel in all the standard action scenes, one standard shovelful after another. It’s too bad, and so unnecessary. Clearly some imaginative and capable people worked on this. I always wonder what happens in these cases — does the crew lose their nerve, or do the marketers come in and screw everything up? It loses a point from me.

This isn’t a happy story at all. It gives something to think about, maybe not very nice things.

Annihilation

2018 Skydance Media, DNA Films, Scott Rudin Productions

++ alien arrival gets psychological

Premise: something alien arrives, but it isn’t a creature, or anything recognizable as life. Rather, it turns everything topsy-turvy, killing willy-nilly.

The special effects are very beautiful and convincing. They depict the effects of the alien presence, largely in the form of strangely or grotesquely altered biological organisms.

The first special effect, which they call “shimmer”, doesn’t correspond to anything in the book, but it is reminiscent of the strange colors described in Lovecraft’s story The Color out of Space… as are a couple of other elements of the movie.

The story does not provide any neat package. It resolves little, and that is as it should be. (Don’t even think about a happy resolution.) The script gets very psychological, maybe a little too psychological. It also has an aspect of the personal lives of the players being reflected in the action with the alien manifestation.

The main actors in the movie are women. The explanation for this state of affairs is a little lame, but once they set off, I had no trouble accepting the group of badass military women as such.

The acting is just terrific. Everybody is engaging and convincing in their role. The dialog too, is great.

The special effects are something I hadn’t seen before, and fit the overall mood set by the story and scenery. It’s pretty wild in places.

I have complaints about the plot. I could not see a practical justification for their military approach, which was to dive right in, where caution was advisable. Also, the movie spends half its time setting up the personal subtext, when the science fiction alone would suffice for a story. The second issue results in very slow pacing, and unnecessary complications to the plot. The first interfered with my suspension of disbelief — like an extended backing into a dark room.

In one scene, she is reading The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. There is a connection.

I have since read the novel, which I can also recommend. It’s even more psychological. The movie would have benefited from the novel’s idea that the military was lying to them, that the alien had been there much longer than they had been told, that far more soldiers had disappeared than they had been told, and that the military as a whole had lost its better judgment. That could have explained the lack of caution. Yeah, it’s not my movie, but then, it could have done better at the box office.

All that said, this one will stick with me, just for the strangeness of the mood, and for a different idea of alien life.

Aniara

2018 Meta Film Stockholm, Unbranded Pictures, Viaplay, Film Capital Stockholm Fond, Gotlands Filmfond, Ljud & Bildmedia

OK passenger ship lost in space

Swedish

Vehicles: space elevator; interplanetary craft Anaria, nuclear-powered.

Premise: humanity has messed Earth up, so a lot of people head for Mars. Something happens on the way; they don’t make it.

The main special effect and sci-fi detail aboard the ship is a room or a device, “Mima”, that transports a person’s mind to the way the Earth used to be.

They have artificial gravity.

Ha! She’s to teach “tensor theory”, where she lets go some neat-sounding technobabble. And some familiar books, including Misner, Thorne & Wheeler’s Gravitation, make appearances.

This is social sci-fi: the script as a whole focuses on social development and its effects on individuals, while the situation and several plot elements concentrate on possible future technology.

Several plot details were dubious: why they don’t contact Earth (or Mars), why they couldn’t open the craft apparently sent from Earth to save them… the explanations didn’t make any sense at all, yet the script expended multiple elaborate scenes on it.

OK, so it’s low-budget, and filmed indoors at a university campus or something. But it does’t manage to shake the impression of being in a university dorm in space. It requires lot of imagination of the viewer. This is the worst aspect of the movie.

The best parts: the acting is very good, the characters are painfully believable. The exterior spaceship views are something different, and manage to give a sense of scale.

Upgrade

2018 Blumhouse Productions, Goalpost Pictures, Automatik Entertainment, Nervous Tick, Film Victoria

OK action thriller, bionic implants and artificial intelligence

Premise: bad guys kill guy’s wife, make him paraplegic. Rich guy gives him a super-chip implant that cures paraplegia. Guy gets superfast (if he lets the chip drive) and starts kicking bad-guy ass.

Gadgets: Self-driving car immediately malfunctions and crashes. Smart house. Drones… aren’t very effective at stopping violent crime. People wiggle their hands in front of see-through computer monitors to control them. But the main gadget is the electronic medical implant that isn’t exactly passive.

Apparently, the bad people hang out with the poor people in this movie. Although the script makes no mention of social issues, we see only ultrarich and ultrapoor, and most of the ultrapoor are scary.

He discovers biotech enhanced people. They got guns in their arms, because that would be better, right? And they sneeze glass nano-machines that kill people.

So the guy with his chip start killing them in satisfyingly gory ways, after first subjecting them to icky torture — which always leads to useful information.

Seems questionable… wrong, even. Well, wait for the twist.

Frankly, I pegged this movie wrong, thinking it was just a variation on the usual U.S. righteously-offended revenge story. The movie follows that model most of the way, but it ends up complicated.

The acting is fairly good, but the direction is choppy. Marshall-Green and Gabriel especially deliver solid performances.

Car chases and Mexican standoffs are just as tiresome here as in other movies. An explanation for the ultra-violence comes, ultimately, but the story did not require it. This was to suck in rubes who expect to see gore.

The movie gets points for a fair twist on the bionic body genre, and for not giving in completely to the Hollywood disease.

Hotel Artemis

2018 The Ink Factory, 127 Wall, Marc Platt Productions

OK future dystopia nurse-n-robbers

Date/Place: 2028 / Los Angeles

The sci-fi is just the gadgets. There is all manner of fancy medical equipment: robotic medical assistance, tissue regeneration. 3D-printed livers, microwave scalpel.

Premise: Another dystopian future. The rioters are burning the city down. Somehow the bad guys are bad, the cops are worse. The hotel is a fortress hospital. The nurse keeps it going by treating and sheltering hurt bad guys.

This part of the story is novel, but the rest was heavily padded with conventional action movie scenes. They aren’t badly done — just, nothing new.

Foster is good as a tough, damaged nurse, though Goldblum doesn’t strike me as a killer. Brown plays his part solidly. The super kung-fu assassin lady was a tired stock character decades ago, but Boutella carries it as well as it could be. The orderly, Everest, played by Bautista, is most impressive. He makes a mensch of a nearly impossible character.

I am weary of scary stories about the country burning down. (We have whole propaganda news networks devoted to that premise.)

The story leaves a lot open: everybody was in big trouble at the end; only a couple of hints suggest what happened to them.

There are enough interesting characters to keep the mind entertained, and there’s enough action to keep the eyes moving with the brain switched off.

Durante la tormenta
[During the Storm]
aka. Mirage

2018 Atresmedia Cine, Colosé Producciones, Mirage Studio, Think Studio

OK accidental time-loop whodunnit

Spanish

Date: Partly 1989, at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall, partly in the present day.

Place: Spain.

A strange electrical storm, just like 35 years ago.

He’s reading Stanisław Lem’s The Investigation!

Aha — and an old analog TV is picking up signals, when they don’t broadcast in analog anymore! And it’s picking up a signal from 1980.

They interview a professor to provide a physical explanation, but part of the explanation, a book called Mirage detailing a similar case, turns out to be a “fantasy”.

Bwa ha ha! Hilbert spaces!

The first half or so is pretty convoluted slipping-in-time, involving a weird electrical storm and 1980s audiovisual equipment. It’s a little hard to swallow, but the acting and pacing make up for it.

The second half slips into a whodunnit, however — or rather, layered whodunnits. The change of direction was not for the best. But I have to say: it kept surprising me. No, I hadn’t figured it all out.

Good entertainment, with a standard sci-fi premise.

Prospect

2018 Gunpowder and Sky (DUST)

+ western-in-space

Premise: A single dad and his teenage daughter are prospectors in space. He is in financial trouble, and badly stressed, and really needs a big break. They land on a planet where they find a very valuable site called the “queen’s lair”… and also, groups of bad desperados.

Vehicles: a mining ship, and landing pods.

Weapons: A long gun (a “thrower”), which is charged up by means of a hand crank; similar pistols.

Places: space, and a forest planet

In principle, this could have been a Western.

But it is a space movie. The forested planet the first action happens on has a poison atmosphere, so they have to wear space suits, and breathe through a filter. And everybody has the problem: even if they do find something worth risking their lives for, how are they going to get off the planet?

The plants on the planet mostly look just like Earth plants. But in between are odd goopy things, like fungus fruiting bodies… The script mentions a relation between these and the goopy mess where the booty appears…

The movie employs multiple unusual cinematic devices. I particularly like the odd use of language, by more than one group of people.

Also, the music integrates well with the action, and isn’t bad, yet stays in the background.

This is a full-length re-make of the 2014 short of the same name, by the same guy. It’s a low-budget gem. It’s beautifully shot, the characters are believable and even charming, and the science fiction has some novel elements.

It suffers from a bad, very common flaw, which I’ll leave to you to discover. But for that, I would call it excellent. It’s still very much worth a watch, if you want a sci-fi action thriller.

流浪地球
The Wandering Earth

2019 Alibaba Pictures, China Film Co. Ltd, Beijing Jinggai Culture & Tourism Co., Beijing Dengfeng International Culture Communication Co. Ltd., G!Film[Beijing] Studio Co. Ltd.

− mega-disaster/engineering/CGI/drag

Mandarin Chinese

Background: the Sun is going to go nova. People decide to propel the Earth to another star: they put a bunch of mega-engines on it. (The explanation is that the big engines are burning rocks.) And they put a space station up to act as a navigation and early warning system. All survivors have to live underground. The rest die. (Nobody appears to object to that arrangement.)

Forward to a rough-looking future. Some kids fake passes to get to the surface. They start resisting authorities like crazy.

Earth needs to swing by Jupiter for speed. But they screw up somehow (Jupiter gets “gravity spikes”??), and they get into a collision course with Jupiter.

Then they start getting earthquakes — not just any earthquakes, but mega-earthquakes, of course. The script gets a lot of mileage out of the quake devastation, yet our intrepid cardboard characters just drive on through.

For character development, the actors holler at one another in terror, rage, or shock throughout most of the movie. Occasionally they play out some other emotions, to relieve the tedium of the histrionics.

This is a chain-megadisaster, with some credulity-stretching sci-fi stuck in here and there. There is no time for suspense.

I lost count of how many times people in space suits were hanging by a thread or jumping through space. (To be honest, I did some dishes in one or two of those endless cliffhangers. The dishes needed doing.)

Could it fail to have a gratuitous, all-powerful computer causing trouble? Maybe! But fortunately, the writers were too clever to let that happen!

Pluses: we have not seen Earth nearly crash into Jupiter before. It’s like, they always talk about Earth fitting into the big red spot on Jupiter… in this movie, they try to do just that. Have we seen big rocket engines mounted on the Earth before? Maybe they did that on Futurama. And of course, the dumb premise of Moon 1999 was that a nuclear explosion shot the Moon out into space.

One other thing: I don’t recall another sci-fi movie that mentions the Roche limit! The script doesn’t actually use it, but I give it a partial point for mentioning a little smidgen of science.

It’s mostly all about the CGI. With CGI you can cheaply make a disaster as mega as you like. And they whipped up some new CGI. It’s very stupid — pretty, but stupid.

But how mega can you make it and maintain your audience’s attention? This really pushed me past my limit. I wonder how long even the Chinese public will tolerate this nonsense.

Ad Astra

2019 Regency, Plan B,

− dizzy man-in-space

Date/Place: “The near future” on Earth, space stations, the Moon, Mars, and in orbit of Neptune.

Vehicles: Generally, the spaceships are very nice, although scarcely altered from ’60s and ’70s NASA rockets. A Moon rocket is just a scaled-up 1960s rocket. There are numerous lunar buggies — nothing but scaled-up Apollo buggies. Then there’s a Mars rocket, launched from the Moon. It gets no explicit explanation: the rocket is staged, and the flight stage appears to be nuclear. The Mars rocket lands on its tail. An enclosed Mars-buggy. Evidently, the same Mars rocket (refueled, at least, I guess?) blasts off for Neptune. They encounter a “Biomedical space station” on the way to Mars. The “Lima” space station orbits Neptune,

Weapons: mostly hand guns, of unclear nature. Some mortar shells.

No robots or computers in evidence. Lots of fancy information screens.

Explanation never comes for why station “Lima” needs to be orbiting Neptune in order to search for intelligent life on worlds outside our Solar system. (Because it makes no sense, of course.)

People have settled the Moon all over, but it is “borderless” and they are at war.

The movie depicts the exteriors of great big Moon stations, a great big Mars station — all with CGI.

A real attempt at a Moon-buggy ambush on the Moon is at least a new twist. (Why they’re still using Apollo-era Moon buggies escapes me... those things were ultra-light so the Apollo Lunar Module could carry them. (“Lack of imagination” explains it, with little imagination.)

The motivation for all the stress was hard to understand. There’s talk of “power surges”, “aliens”, “antimatter” — connected with nothing. On my second look, I saw that the Neptune station, which is searching for alien intelligence, has something to do with antimatter, and that maybe by accident it is causing the power surges on other planets??? or maybe it’s deliberate? Something like that? Evidently, it doesn’t matter — the film offers no clarification.

It’s all: don’t trust the authorities. But we never really come to understand who the authorities are. “Space Command” is as far as it goes. Cover story: “to prevent all panic.” Panic from what? Power surges? aliens? (Evidently, it was the power surges.)

The weightless scenes are very believable. The impression of being in space, and on the Moon, is really strong. (Yet here again is no attempt to depict low gravity on the Moon and Mars.)

They get to Mars very quickly — doesn’t look like it took a day. And they stopped on the way to experience some suspense and terror and pointlessly get a guy killed. That’s making time!

They “stop” in space. All this detail, and they don’t bother to consult anyone on the basics of mechanics.

His dad is out at Neptune. Dad has gone bad. The story shows that getting to Neptune is a matter of heroics (as opposed to careful engineering and planning.) (79 days to Neptune. Some fast rocket! But the real silliness has not yet begun!)

A major sub-theme is the search for intelligent alien life, and ultimately how they never found any. Maybe that’s what drove his dad batty? (??)

There is more problematic material in the script, than there is story.

The movie is doom and gloom, interrupted only by repeated cliffhanger action and proclamations of duty. Very little character development occurs besides that of the protagonist and his dad, and dad appears only in recordings until the last 20 minutes.

We listen in to the protagonist’s internal monologue a great deal. This contains lots of faux-Christian verse, doing honors to fallen heroes.

Besides this, there are pointless side-adventures such as:

• The “stop” at a Norwegian medical station appears to be gratuitous filler.
• How many times do they do a space walk, to go into an air lock? I lost count.
• He somehow climbs into a rocket that’s about to launch from Mars. It’s visually unclear how he accomplished this. It looked like he climbed in through a door at the rear, not far from the engine nozzles, as the rocket was lifting off. Whew! Close call! But, with all the space program detail, they miss the impossibility of this? Why bother with the rest of the detail?

Cliffhangers abound in this film. (Because that is what they have convinced themselves the public wants.) We see lots and lots of novel, incredible escapades, which ignore physical realities of scale, and speed. They get impossible, then impossibler, and at the end, they’re impossiblest.

He blows up something at Neptune, and “using the explosion as my primary propellant”, blows himself back to Earth from Neptune in a little space pod, like almost by accident, and gets there very quickly. (When it took months to get to Neptune deliberately.) Yeah, maybe that would work.

And then… nothing. Spoiler: the movie just ends.

I can’t flaw the CGI space scenes, they’re among the best ever, except they’re styled after Apollo-era technology.

For mindless escape, it might suffice — but if your mind switches on, it will be garbage-in.

Color out of Space

2019 Ace Pictures Entertainment, SpectreVision

+ horror from space

Premise: a meteorite lands on a family farm, and everything living becomes corrupted, including the people.

I had previously read Lovecraft’s short story, and can’t help but compare.

The movie is a modernization of the back-story to Lovecraft’s story. Instead of hearing about the terrible happenings, the hydrologist takes part in them. And rather than a story told at the beginning of the 20th century, about things then long past, it’s all in the present day: it shows only modern electronics and cars.

By way of modernization, it starts with juvenile witchcraft. It shortly proceeds to talk of marijuana and acid. Presumably, they were trying to portray modern family issues, but none of this was needed — it has nothing to do with the story.

Finally, after everything has gone way too far, dad goes to get the gun. There was no suggestion of this in the story. It does seem that, these days, studios require gun play.

The movie gets very gory and gruesome, which wasn’t explicit in the story. Instead of things turning strange colors and drying up gray as in the original, they turn strange colors and get gloopy and sticky. Well, we are in the age of gloopy special effects.

Despite the modernization, the movie conveys the strange horror of the story pretty well.

The movie deals with the familial terror, that in the story is left entirely to the imagination. The result is something that is at least more explicitly horrifying.

Warning: this is not a happy story. If you’re in the market for a serious horror movie, this might be what you were looking for.

I Am Mother

2019 Mister Smith, The Penguin Empire, Southern Light Films

++ can you trust robot-mom?

Premise: there was a war or something that killed everybody, except this one facility, with a lot of frozen human embryos, and a robot.

Robots: It’s about robots and artificial intelligence and human nature.

Great acting by both actors (that we see). Great CGI.

The script leaves many threads untied. It resolves some important questions, and was perhaps about to resolve others, but we don’t see them resolved. A couple of characters had told so many lies already, it’s not clear what we know. The next day, I’m still thinking about it.

This is splendid study in how AI might interact with humans. It’s touching and frightening, and it’s excellent sci-fi.