Tag Archives: sci-fi

Star Trek

MV5BMjE5NDQ5OTE4Ml5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwOTE3NDIzMw@@._V1__SX1859_SY893_Obviously, you are aware of this movie, and you’ve probably already formed your own opinion. And anyway, I’d be leery of spoilers for anyone who hasn’t seen it. In theory, this constrains my review by quite a lot, but I figure it leaves me free to talk about what I really wanted to anyway. But, first things first. Did I like it? Enough to see it three times on opening weekend. Did it have flaws? I can think of a couple offhand, one extremely nitpicky and one that, absent, would have failed to feel like a Star Trek movie anyway. Plus, I think I’m willing to claim that at one point, there was actually an insufficient amount of technobabble. Was it accessible to non-fans? I feel as though it really was, and the reviews I’ve heard from non-fans (and in one case, an actively anti-fan) have borne this impression out. So you should really go see it, if this has not already occurred.

Because what J.J. Abrams made here was a philosophical, character-driven action movie, and really, how many of those do you think exist? Of the ones that exist, how many do you think aren’t insufferably smug about it? This right here is a narrow field to occupy! Action: ’cause, you know, space battles and laser gun fights. Character-driven: the driving forces of the story are all based in interactions. Kirk and McCoy’s friendship. Kirk and Spock’s rivalry. Spock’s relationship with his human mother. Nero’s irrational impulse for personal rather than systemic revenge. (He’s the bad guy.) Philosophical: take a group of people that shook the foundations of the Federation (and, projecting outward less than you’d think, the galaxy) and drastically change their history. Okay, many of the changes were not drastic, but one was, and there are clear, subtle ripples from there even before the main plot of the movie takes over. And then explore the question of random chance versus unalterable destiny.

I liked that by the end of the movie, the history of the Federation is vastly divergent from the one that fans of five TV series and ten movies know. And I like that it’s not going to be “fixed.” It was a bold move that I think is going to pay off in spades for the future of the franchise. But as much as I approve of that, I absolutely adored watching as, moment by moment, destiny pushed beloved characters into roles that they had fallen into by seeming happenstance in the original timeline. This new Trek may have surprisingly non-causal time travel that never really existed in “my father’s” Star Trek, but it also has some modicum of fate. And that’s kind of cool.

Millennium Falcon

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I’m not entirely sure why I bother to review Star Wars books at this point, except that it’s expected of me to review everything. It’s just, the context is pretty small, or something. Nonetheless, I’ve typed this much, so I may as well finish up! Millennium Falcon performs a few duties for the Extended Universe. Primarily, it puts together a history of one of the most famous starships in science fiction from before the days when Han Solo owned her (starting with a fairly cheesy Christine-on-the-assembly-line homage and, thankfully, improving from there). Secondarily, it provides a plot hook for a treasure hunt, and then places the Solo family on that hunt as a way to heal some of the still painful wounds brought about by the most recent Sith assault on the galaxy. Lastly, and probably most importantly to the ongoing storylines, it sets up the newest political threat to the Jedi Order, albeit behind the scenes and in throwaway moments.

The book itself was good but not great. I can’t really recommend it as a standalone, and if you weren’t planning to read it in that sense, you probably will regardless of anything I say on the topic. But the secondary characters were all pretty decent, and the stories-within-the-story format reminds me a lot of World War Z.

The Happening (2008)

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Yesterday, I said to myself, hey, let’s go see a movie! And then I looked up times, but the dollar movie I want to see (even though I found a second dollar theater, and right across the highway, not far away like that other one (where “far” in this case equals about 1/3 of my daily commute. Help.)) was only showing in the evening, and I already had evening plans. So then I poked around at what was out in general, and settled on The Happening. And then I saw it, which just goes to show you the value of a plan.

The movie itself was an odd mix of satisfying and cheeseball. I went in knowing nothing beyond what I’d seen in a couple of previews, which as it happens is sufficiently little to make the thing work; I have to assume that without the mysteriousness pulling you in, the satisfaction would have been nowhere to be found. The premise is straightforward: one day in Central Park, people start acting mentally and physically confused, and then they start dying. And those scenes which open the movie? Creepy as all get out, I tell you. Next thing, a teacher and his wife and some friends are headed out of town because of their concern over the TV-reported terrorist attacks that have just occurred, and the film turns into about one-third mysterious deadly event and two-thirds marital drama. Or maybe fifty-fifty? I was never annoyed that the scary mystery part had vanished, and the drama part was pretty decently done.

Unfortunately, this was billed as M. Night Shyamalan’s first R-rated movie. I call this unfortunate because, aside from a ridiculous chase scene about which I cannot divulge more that would otherwise assist me in mocking its ridiculousness, the biggest problem the flick had was its focus on gore. It just wasn’t the right kind of movie, in mood, to be concerned with over-the-top death scenes; and there were a few. It’s like M. was just trying too hard, to no good effect. Well, the acting was a little iffy, too, which is odd, because I’ve seen both leads do far better jobs elsewhere. All in all, though, it was a decent, scary movie. It was not the best movie I saw yesterday, which is kind of funny when you consider I had only planned to see the one. But anyway, just don’t go in expecting Shyamalan’s previous brilliance, and you should be fine.

The Incredible Hulk

I can’t really explain what went wrong with The Incredible Hulk. It was much more of a super-hero movie than Ang Lee’s much derided The Hulk from a few years ago. It did a really good job of pulling in numerous sly references to the ’70s TV show, plus of course to the original Marvel comics. The effects were always spot on, as they have been of late. And I have to geek out a little bit at the way that the various movies are being tied into a cohesive Marvel Universe, just as the comics have always done.

These all sound like pretty good things. And yet, it felt like a late winter release from Marvel a la Daredevil, rather than the summer renaissance they’ve provided so often this decade, most recently with Iron Man. I know that part of the problem has got to lie with the Hulk himself; at least, what I’ve read from 1962-1967 reveals him as an insufficiently interesting character with especially uninteresting villains. And sure enough, the majority of the movie related to Bruce Banner being hunted by the army, angered, transformed, eventually captured anyway, and so on, because the army and General Ross are practically his only interesting foes, and they because of the human element. Which is good and all, but falls flat in an ostensible superhero movie. You need super villains for things to work.[1] If you don’t believe me, ask Ang Lee.

On the other hand, though, whatever pejorative comments have been thrown at Lee over the past few years, the primary flaw of his Hulk was in making a movie whose reach far exceeded its grasp. There are worse epitaphs to be cursed with, and among them is to make a movie that simply didn’t bother to reach very far at all.

[1] And, okay, this had a super-villain. Which was pretty much an alternate brute strength guy who we do not like because he isn’t green and because Liv Tyler doesn’t like him. (Well, and he’s kind of a douchebag.) Still, not much of an improvement on the army, which he is incidentally a part of in the first place. On the bright side, they laid groundwork for the only interesting Hulk villain I’ve seen in the comics to be present in a potential sequel. So that’s something.

Resident Evil: Extinction

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Resident Evil is one of those movies that has zombies in it. Resident Evil: Extinction, being a sequel, also has zombies in it. Therefore, I can be expected to like it. (In some things, I am pretty predictable. For what it’s worth, though, Redneck Zombies was not very good.) Despite that, I think that this movie was not only a decent action-horror piece, but that it furthermore surpassed that apparent goal. Not enough to say it’s great and everyone should see it, but how many movies surpass even modest quality goals that they set for themselves?

So, Milla Jovovich is once more wandering, sporadically nudely, through a zombie-infested nightmare unleashed by the multi-national Umbrella Corporation. Except it’s been a few years since this all started, and said nightmare is now a globe-spanning concern. Also, I guess it affected the weather or something, because the majority of the planet has dried up into desert. Although, let’s be honest, the real reason for this is what Mad Max taught us decades ago: deserts and apocalypses go together like Milla Jovovich and being naked. Faced with the twin horrors of zombification and global warming, the human race has pretty well called it quits, aside from roving bands of heavily armed warriors out on the roads, if you know what I mean. And there’s Milla, trying to work out how to proceed, discovering some new talents, and finding out that Umbrella isn’t quite done with her yet. As fans of the series are already aware, this is the kind of thing that (naked or not) she really doesn’t take lying down.

As a result, you have reasonably decent special effects, more action than you can shake a pointed stick at, everything you’ve come to expect out of a zombie movie[1], and the best girl-fighting scenes this side of Summer Glau. Like I said, when taken across the scope of all 2007 cinema, these are fairly modest aspirations to meet. So that’s cool that they do so, and you end up with what you wanted: a good action-horror flick. Now, stay with me, because you’ll find this next part hard to believe, but I maintain that’s it’s true.

This volume of the Resident Evil series also has a meaningful theme. See, Alice[2] is stuck in a holding pattern. She’s free of Umbrella, sure, but the world keeps getting worse and being free isn’t really all that great when you’ve got a dying planet as your only “on the outside” option. The majority of the movie is her quest to break out of that holding pattern and find a way to make things different than they are. Which sounds all fine, but I could just be reading it in, right? Except, I’m not, because every Umbrella scene has brought us full circle back to the original events of the outbreak. Same spooky mansion. Same giant underground complex. Same AI attempting to orchestrate events. Everything Umbrella stands for in this movie and every action Alice takes in response to the external stimulus of her doomed earth are the visual representations of the spiritual struggle happening in Alice’s psyche: until she faces the past in an almost literal fashion, she’s not going to be able to break the chains of the present and get a move on towards a future in which maybe humanity won’t be extinct after all.

See? Not only theme, but below-the-surface theme. Despite having moved well beyond the game franchise’s rails (or, more likely, because of this), these movies remain the best video game adaptations on the market, and by a fair margin. Also, and I may have forgotten to mention this, but sometimes Milla Jovovich takes her clothes off.

[1] That one guy who gets bitten but doesn’t tell anyone so that he can end up turning at the least opportune moment, the annoying people who are more dangerous to their fellow humans than the zombie plague, etc.
[2] This is the name the movie uses to refer to naked Milla Jovovich. Well, also clothed Milla Jovovich.

Sunshine (2007)

Sunshine is the kind of movie you see in Austin, or the San Francisco Bay Area, or maybe Vancouver. It’s got the art film look, but with the science fiction sensibilities to ground the plot from wandering as randomly as one expects from art films. Or, if you prefer, it’s a science fiction movie but without being constantly dank, dripping, and gloomy, nor impossibly pristine and modern, due to its latent art film sensibilities. In any case, it just feels more right to watch it in one of those places that is obsessed with both how movies look and whether they make a good story instead of just one (L.A.) or the other (Pittsburgh or New Jersey). Now that I’ve gotten my cinematic biases on the record, there’s also this movie to talk about.

In the future: the sun is getting dim, and humanity is unlikely to survive the worsening problem. Six years ago (let’s say), the Icarus was launched with a devastatingly vast nuclear payload and a mission to launch that payload into the sun in order to restart it. (This may or may not be based in science, and failures of adequate explanation may or may not be mine; but I don’t remember the movie going into details. They were not necessary to my enjoyment, in any case.) Except, the sun stayed relatively dark and nobody ever heard anything from them ever again. Now, it is the future-present, and the Icarus II is en route with a second vast nuclear payload that comprises the end of the earth’s capacity for creating sun-restarting bombs. Eight astronauts have the future of the species in their hands, and they are just entering the 16 months of interference-enforced radio silence as the tale opens.

I could ask you plot-leading questions that would reveal a little more of the story, but why bother? Either you’re into science-fictiony isolation stories or you’re not, and spoilers will not help to answer that question. The high points were how pretty it was and how tense it was. The low points were that the climactic scenes were just a touch clichéd (or possibly overdramatic instead; but not both) and also dove a little too far into metaphor for my personal taste. But nothing like how things went in Solaris. If anything, Sunshine redeemed the isolated spaceship drama for me, so don’t worry on that count. (And if you liked Solaris-the-film… really? Really?)

Spider-Man 3

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Well, it’s summer now. There is an extent to which I feel like summer comes too soon, since there are no longer any good movies left by August. Nevertheless, I can only observe the status of these things, not correct them. I am like a groundhog for movies! (Except my job’s easier; summer never doesn’t come.) My point, of course, is this: midnight showing of Spider-Man 3, from which I am still reeling. I mean, I’m not talking about the movie yet; it’s just, I got five hours of sleep the night before due to seeing a musical on stage, and then I got something like four hours last night, but (and here’s the secret to making it extra awesome!) split into two parts. So if I’m incoherent, a) pretend like this is unusual and then b) blame it on my non-functioning brain.[2]

Let’s get the easy part out of the way. It was good. I regret the lack of sleep only on an intellectual level, and I’m quite sure I’ll go see it again. I might not do so without the IMAX draw, but only because of how little time I have relative to the number of movies I want to see right now. So, yeah, good. Probably won’t be the best movie of the summer, though. People[1] will tell you it was bloated both in time and number of plots. I don’t agree with that, because each and every one of the plots was personal to Peter Parker. Maybe they didn’t need to all occur at once, but neither were they arbitrary, and it all hung together as far as I could tell. Also, the action lived up to the previous movies.

Plus, plenty of meaty themes to sink your teeth into. For example: Good or evil isn’t who you are, it’s what you do. I can find shades of that in every single major male character. The part where the females are pretty much uni-dimensional cardboard is probably a trope of the genre, but it’s unfortunate nevertheless. They stand out only because of the comparison, though. Also present, and painful to watch, is the pride goeth before a fall theme. Because you can pretty well see each part of it coming, and Peter so obviously can’t, and you just want to grab him and shake him and explain how easy it would be to dodge most of this. Except he’s still a kid, and kids are supposed to make mistakes, and I’m not even sure grown-up Spider-Man would be of any interest. Anyway, I think it’s fair to say that it’s also as deep as the previous movies.

So why won’t it be the best movie this summer? Because it has a couple of stumbles and one major failure. For one thing, there’s an extraneous character; for the amount that Gwen Stacey added to the plot, she either should have had more to do or had her purposes rolled into Betty Brant and the character saved for use in a future sequel. For another, there’s a scene with a butler late in the movie (don’t worry; he didn’t do it) that was a clumsy plot bridge and terribly acted by said butler. The former is the more egregious crime, of course, but the latter made the former stand out in stark relief. But the big failure was the lack of an iconic moment. You have the New Yorkers on the bridge in the first movie, and Spidey on the train in the second one; you can’t make the conclusion of the trilogy be great without exceeding or at least matching one of these. And it just… didn’t. As much as I liked the movie, I’m not going to end up loving it, and that’s the only good reason why not.

[1] and by people, I mean critics; apparently I am one of those, now? Or maybe it requires a paycheck. I have yet to receive a penny, much less break even on domain registration, though, so I don’t count as that. And if I was paying for the hosting, it would be even worse.
[2] Also, I can kill you with my brain.[3]
[3] For reasons of my own!

Creature from the Black Lagoon

And herein lies the beauty of the double feature. Two movies in a row. The thing is, I really, really enjoy the cinematic experience. It’s like a double-header to baseball fanatics. (Although I’m not one, I certainly like those too.) Unless baseball people think that double-headers are somehow impure? Well, if they do: whatev. It’s just, there I’ll be, watching the credits go by, when suddenly I don’t have to leave and go home, because, another movie! It’s possible I’ve explained this sufficiently, though.

Creature from the Black Lagoon is about this, well, this creature, right? It lives along the Amazon, at a place that the natives call the Black Lagoon, for reasons that are not entirely clear to me. Black and white film makes some things non-obvious, water color among them. But I don’t remember any of the characters discussing anything being all that black. Anyhow, this so-called creature is kind of an amphibious fishman, who is among other things a perfect segue for the whole evolution discussion. It is amusing to me that the film so casually asserts that God created everything via evolution, yet it is so hard fifty years later to find people willing to take a look at that compromise position.

Besides evolution, though, this movie was about a lot of things. Underwater photography, for one. If you removed the underwater shots that served no other purpose than as a tech demo? Movie over in under an hour. It’s like Star Trek: the Motion Picture without the 45 minutes of “look at the cool new Enterprise model”. For another… well, it wasn’t about this, but it was certainly a permeating undercurrent to the whole thing. Natives? Completely irrelevant. The important thing is to work that paleontology and retrieve the creature-skeleton (and later, of course, the live specimen instead) in order to prove that it existed and make us all rich and/or famous. I mean, until the white people are in danger. Then it’s time to stop this tomfoolery and save ourselves. I know it was a different time, but I really am amazed/amused that nobody on the writing staff seemed to notice how blatantly dismissive of the natives they were being. Oh, and the paleontology? Maybe they were this careless back then, but I doubt it. The techniques were completely laughable, and I am very much an amateur on this topic.

But what it was really about was the relationship between the creature and the girl. The completely hot, thank you for going swimming and I wish you weren’t in your 80s right now girl, I’d like to add. She was thoroughly yum, and even moreso in her explorer shorts than in the bathing suit, if you can believe it. Which would be beside the point, really, except for the part where the creature is a stand-in for every teenage boy in America. Two goals: 1) get the girl, and then take her back to your aquatic underground lair where you’ll, well, okay, you don’t exactly know what it is you want to do, but boy do you ever want to do it, and 2) kill anyone that gets in the way of goal one, because that testosterone is on the upsurge just now, if you know what I mean.

I guess my point is, once the underwater scenes got old, it was the inferior of the two films due to being not quite as deep of theme. But then again, a good slice of cheesecake goes a long way. Also: multiple gratuitous spear gun shots, off the screen and right into your face! Yay, 3-D.

It Came from Outer Space

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Just nearly a week ago, I made a run down to Austin to catch a, well, a science fiction double feature. No, really. And in 3-D! It had been a while since I’d watched red-blue 3-D, as opposed to the stuff they have at IMAX these days with the cross-stitched goggle lenses. It reminds me of nothing so much as those dioramas that you’ll get at some natural history museums, with all kinds of animals and rocks in the foreground, and a painted background. But mostly, it was eye-poppingly 3-D, which was pretty cool. I speculate that it works a lot better in black and white than it does in color, although I’d need something recent to compare with know for sure.

My point is, good or bad, I’ve already gotten my money’s worth out of these movies. I bet this is how it was in the early days of 3-D at the real-life cinema, too. Conveniently, It Came from Outer Space is a pretty good film in its own right. Everyone will talk about Cold War paranoia, and maybe there’s something to it, but I think that’s entirely too narrow of a reading. The fact is, the outsider has always terrified us as a species, and it probably always will. Sure, we’re thinking of Muslim extremists these days instead of Russian commies, but it’s all the same thing, and it will be in another fifty years too. Although, perhaps with literal aliens.

So, there’s this meteor, right? Well, no, it’s really a spaceship, but try convincing anyone else in town of that when you’re just an amateur astronomer that hasn’t a lick of credibility. Then, before you know it, some Vorlon-looking aliens have started kidnapping people and then posing as them and buying up all kinds of metals and electronic parts. And now that you finally have enough evidence to convince the sheriff, oops, they’ve got your girlfriend. Now that otherwise highly useful posse he is itching to use, it’ll just get your girlfriend killed. (And quite possibly the Professor, for that matter, whose name turns out to be George.) But it’s okay, because they only want to go home and don’t mean us any harm, it’s just they’re scared that we’ll lash out and kill them for the crime of being different. …or is it all a trick, and they mean to wipe us off the face of the galaxy?

On the one hand, I get a little bit annoyed at sci-fi film after film in the ’50s and ’60s telling me that humans are paranoid freaks who’ll destroy anything they don’t understand or fear that they can’t control. Even though they’ve developed space travel, surely there must be some aliens out there who are paranoid freaks in their own rights rather than benevolent overlords who just want to teach us a lesson and then be on their way. But on the other hand, the scene where the sheriff crushes the (obviously fake, not even minimally frightening) spider under his foot in demonstration of what he’d do to those aliens just for the sin of alienness? It touches me, man, deep in my soul. So, y’know, maybe no aliens for me.

Slither (2006)

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You know Creepshow? Well, obviously you do; I didn’t mean to be insulting. So, here’s my point. Imagine if the meteor that turned Stephen King into a plant instead landed in Hicksburg, The South, USA and got all The Thing on the local residents, and then it and Malcolm Reynolds got into a competition for the same girlfriend. In this circumstance, you would be watching Slither, an excellent space monster movie that is inexplicably failing to sell tickets. I mean, this movie has alien cow-tipping!

More impressively even than that, though, it has that degree of reality that I was just praising in The Hills Have Eyes, where it feels like actual people are in this actual situation, somewhere just down the road and not in my life only through sheer geographic and temporal luck. Which is quite a feat for an alien-in-a-meteor flick. So, good on them.

Also? Someone I’ve had drinks with was in the credits. That’s never not cool.