Dune: Part One (Denis Villeneuve, 2021)
Yes, but what about John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon (1941)?
Continue reading →Category / science fiction films
Most Bogus
Bill & Ted Face the Music (Dean Parisot, 2020)
At the tail end of the 1980s was a science fiction comedy, which was just about silly enough — two Californian slacker dudes have to pass their assignment to guarantee the future and are aided in doing so by a man from the future with a time travelling phone box. Continue reading →
Sator Arepo Tenet Opera Rotas
Tenet (Christopher Nolan, 2020)
complexity. their of because follow to impossible almost are that thrillers intellectual producing for reputation a gained has Nolan Christopher, Curiously. Continue reading →
Deception
Inception (Christopher Nolan, 2010)
Nolan is one of those directors who flatters his audiences into thinking they are intelligent — at least in the half of his output which tries to be thinky, rather than the superhero tosh which somehow gets away with have a Gotham City that is so male that Batman and one of the villains are dating the same woman.
Oh, and gotta kill those wives.
With the possible exception of The Prestige (which flattens its source material), it’s been downhill since Following and Memento. (I confess I’ve not seen Insomnia, as I suspect it is not in the same league as Erik Skjoldbjærg’s original.)
Part of me is happy to see Michael Caine in anything, but as with Bill Nighy and Tilda Swinton, sometimes I suffer for their art.
I had seen Inception before — on DVD — and, appropriately, I’d forgotten most of it, aside from the criminal underuse of Ellen Page. So, the big screen rerelease to drum up interest in Tenet seemed like a good reason to see it large. And inevitably, I have to talk about the ending. Continue reading →
Per Aspera
Ad Astra (James Gray, 2019)
This is a bit spoilery in some of its gestures.
You know that you are going to be in for a bumpy ride when the near future setting epigraph to a film crossfades from a line about humanity’s future lying in the stars to the title Ad Astra, in case we can’t translate the Latin. Then the film goes into voiceover, wannabe Blade Runner, but the point of a voiceover is surely to mess with the visuals not to mesh with them. There is no point in him telling us that he is looking for a door and then showing us a door — later he tells us that he feels that he in the dark, holding onto a rope, as he is in the dark, holding on to … well, you get the idea.
Trust the audience.
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Peter Parker’s International Vacation
Jake Gyllenhaal has a strange look in his eyes for the first half hour — “I was nominated for a Oscar,” they say, “I used to do low budget quirky cult hits.” He’s a superhero from a parallel dimension, here to do battle with four Elementals that want to destroy this Earth as they destroy his. And it just so happens Water hits Venice when Peter Parker is on his school trip.
Oh Deeeerie Meeee
High Life (Claire Denis, 2018)
This is not alas the big screen version of the classic Alan Cumming-Forbes Masson-Siobhan Redmond sitcom, but Robert Pattison is no Alan Cumming and Juliette Binoche is no Forbes Masson. What we have is sf that suffers in the name of art, with Silent Running, Stalker and Sleeper wizzed in the blender with a crapper version of The Black Hole dribbling out of the jug.
“You made me come”
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (J. A. Bayona, 2018)
The cool thing about the Alien films — before they became pants — was each one was a different flavour of slasher movie: haunted house, Vietnam, prison. The Jurassic Park films just gave us variants on Westworld: genetically engineered dinosaurs get out of control at a theme park, again. I think in one they got to attack San Diego, which makes a difference from New York.
Wired Worlds
This was commissioned for a project that seems to have vanished, but I needed to write a couple of sentences for a chapter on the topic… I thought this text would be on my harddrive, but it’s hiding if it is. Fortunately I rarely delete emails.
Welt am Draht (World on a Wire/World on Wires) (Westdeutscher Rundfunk, 1973)
Adapted from Daniel F. Galouye, Counterfeit World/Simulacron-3 (1964)
(Dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder; Sc. Fritz Müller-Scherz and Rainer Werner Fassbinder; Pr. Peter Märthesheimer and Alexander Wesemann; Cin. Michael Ballhaus and Ulrich Prinz; P.D. Horst Giese, Walter Koch and Kurt Raab; starring Klaus Löwitsch (Fred Stiller), Barbara Valentin (Gloria Fromm), Mascha Rabben (Eva Vollmer), Karl Heinz Vosgerau (Herbert Siskins), Wolfgang Schenck (Franz Hahn), Kurt Raab (Mark Holm)) Continue reading →
Eleven Minutes to Nine
“I’d sort of like to see some of my ideas, not just special effects of my ideas, used… and concepts that awaken the mind rather than the senses.”
Blade Runner 2049 (Denis Villneuve, 2017)
May contain spoilers — I am circumspect at the start, with a firmer warning later on.
So after a full week of lectures and tutorials and a London day trip, I checked when a certain sequel was showing and saw there was a Thursday night preview with one seat left. So I booked.
I confess to a love-hate relationship with Blade Runner, ranging from the hating it because it betrays the source to loving it for visual style and allusiveness to hating it because half the students were writing about it and I’d seen it too many times. If I’m honest, I didn’t see the need for the sequel and I wasn’t convinced Scott could pull it off — and Prometheus and Covenant didn’t help, but the baton had baeen handed on.
I fully expected to hate it and had kept my expectations low, as I saw a number of rave reviews and Kim Newman’s balanced response, although I carefully didn’t read past his spoiler point.
Subject to Change 