Tag: science fiction
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A Disease Immune to Bureaucracy: Fernando Meirelles’ Blindness
Director Fernando Meirelles has examined desperate pressure cookers (City of God) and institutional corruption (The Constant Gardener) before. Blindness proves perfect to meld both themes, with a science fiction twist imagining the downfall of civilization itself. Blindness is part of a special subset of the horror/sci-fi/disaster genre: the dystopian end-of-civilization nightmare. Whereas the typical entry…
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Believer Meets Skeptic, in The X-Files: I Want to Believe
The first X-Files feature film Fight the Future (1998) was so tightly bound to the complex mythology of the original television series that it was mostly incomprehensible to anyone not already a deeply committed fan. I myself had only seen the odd episode over the years, and as such could barely follow what was going…
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Death Has No Dominion in Steven Soderbergh’s Solaris
As a huge title card reads immediately at the end of the film, Solaris was “written for the screen and directed by Steven Soderbergh.” I am a big admirer, but that seemed a bit egotistical even to me. Perhaps an overenthusiastic end-credits designer is to blame? Or maybe the studio wanted to capture some more…
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Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solyaris (Solaris) is Vertigo in Space
The opening credits of Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 film Solyaris state it is “based on the science fiction by Stanislaw Lem.” It’s perhaps telling that the term “science fiction” is used in place of simply “novel.” This faint hint of apology may hint at a lack of respect for the original Polish novel or the entire…
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Thinning the Herd: M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening
The Happening is the latest in a long line of light entertainments that depict attacks of one sort (terrorist) or another (alien) upon New York City. A mysterious mass hysteria strikes the idyllic Bethesda Terrace (a place I walk through several times a week) in Manhattan’s Central Park, and quickly fans out to the entire…
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There’s Something in the Mist: Frank Darabont’s The Mist
Has writer/director Frank Darabont been weighed down by the heavy legacy of his first feature film? The Shawshank Redemption remains one of the most popular movies ever made, if not quite (yet?) accepted into the canon. The Mist, after The Green Mile, is Darabont’s third Stephen King adaptation, so far only having made only one…
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Into the never-ending night of Alex Proyas’ Dark City
I recall Dark City being one of my favorite films of 1998, and I would have rated it quite highly had I been keeping score at the time. It is a bold science fiction film noir most obviously indebted to Blade Runner, but also to favorites Brazil (especially the sequences of buildings sprouting up out…
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At the Worst of Times, the Worst of Us: Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men
Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men is, simply, one of the best movies I’ve ever seen. Repeat viewings never fail to overwhelm me with some of the strongest gut-level emotional reactions I’ve ever had to a movie. I can only talk about it in superlatives: it’s a near-religious experience. One of the movies that makes me…
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You won’t like Edward Norton when he’s angry in The Incredible Hulk
The Incredible Hulk is Hollywood’s latest incidence of what has become known as a “reboot.” The term came out of the comic book world, with further derivations in computer terminology. When a franchise begins to show its age with stalled creative energy and declining sales, its owners may opt to check it into surgery to…
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Charlton Heston is the alpha and The Omega Man
Now that’s a good intro: Robert Neville (Charlton Heston) cruises through an empty city with the top down. It’s eerie, but he seems happy, grooving to jazz from his onboard 8-track cassette deck. But suddenly! Screech! Ka-pow! He brakes, produces a machine gun and fires at a fleeting humanoid silhouette. A striking montage follows of…