Tag: science fiction
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Rewatching Them! through an eerie haze of nostalgia
Gordon Douglas’ Them! (1954) is far more polished, slick, and straight-faced than its b-movie premise (and exclamation point!) would suggest. The subplot involving a traumatized orphan is genuinely distressing to watch, James Whitmore gives a rather modern haunted performance, and some of the effects are surprisingly gruesome. From a giant monster crushing a human torso…
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The hot mess Don’t Worry Darling is too much and not enough
Olivia Wilde’s Twilight Zone-esque thriller Don’t Worry Darling briefly dominated the discourse, for all the wrong reasons.
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Rutger Hauer lives on anxiety, coffee, and chocolate, in Split Second
Tag yourself: “He lives on anxiety, coffee, and chocolate.” It me; can relate. Tony Maylam’s Split Second is probably forever doomed to be a cult favorite, but it’s a pity it’s not better known. It has a wild, sometimes even manic electricity that covers up most deficiencies. I happened to watch it back-to-back with another…
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Star Trek: The Motion Picture was always out of step with the times
With a release history more tangled than a TNG time travel plot, Star Trek: The Motion Picture is now finally available in its most complete form yet: a 2022 4K remaster of the 2001 Director’s Edition of the 1979 film. Got that? Engadget has the full details, but in short, don’t call it a “restoration”.…
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Interstellar is a yet another time twisty Nolan scenario
The torturously complex premise of Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar requires a constant stream of exposition throughout, something I don’t recall being a problem in the director’s other time twisty scenarios like The Prestige and Inception. It’s also less emotionally urgent than either, perhaps indicating that the high-concept structure overwhelmed everything else. If Coop (Matthew McConaughey) —…
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Brad Pitt works out his daddy issues in space, in Ad Astra
Maybe this isn’t fair, but I couldn’t help but associate Ad Astra with Joker. If Joker is a shallow remix of Taxi Driver and King of Comedy, Ad Astra is a bland smoothie of Solaris and Apocalypse Now, with a cavalcade of stars you may remember from Space Cowboys and Armageddon. I half expected Harrison…
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Terminator: Dark Fate is a trashcan of exposition
Criticizing the plots of popcorn action blockbusters is usually a fool’s errand. Nobody cares if Hobbs & Shaw makes any sense, but surely it’s fair game in the Terminator franchise, where untangling pseudo-scientific time travel logic is 99% of the fun. So the biggest disappointment of Dark Fate (other than its singularly unmemorable title, and…
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Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker smothers all hope and wonder
My brilliant wife had the following absolutely perfect appraisal of the first two entries in the new Star Wars trilogy, which I will paraphrase here: “Most of the criticism of The Force Awakens was absolutely correct, but I loved it anyway. Most of the criticism of The Last Jedi was absolutely wrong, but I loved…
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What makes Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds unique also sabotages it
Although easily overlooked among the Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise filmographies, I actually rather enjoy their 2005 War of the Worlds remake. Unfortunately, what makes it unique also sabotages it: It’s practically a requirement for the alien invasion genre that the protagonist be the big hero that saves the world. Refreshingly, Cruise’s character here is…
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Battlestar Galactica: Blood & Chrome fracks it up
“You get an E for effort and an F for fracking it up.” That just about sums it up. I was a big fan of the mid-2000s Battlestar Galactica reboot and its sister series Caprica, but had somehow overlooked this pilot for a second prequel spinoff. Belatedly seeing it now, the plot seems too slight…