Sci-Fi Archives - Page 13 of 33 - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

Night of the Comet (1984) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray + DVD Combo Pack

February 3, 20141980s, 2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi, Scream/Shout! Factory, Zombie

click any image to enlarge

½*/**** Image C+ Sound C+ Extras B
starring Robert Beltran, Catherine Mary Stewart, Kelli Maroney, Geoffrey Lewis
written and directed by Thom Eberhardt

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. There's a quote from the seventh season of "The Simpsons" that applies to the problem before us where Bart, happening on a "Schoolhouse Rock" thing and learning from Lisa that it's one of "those campy '70s throwbacks that appeals to Generation X-ers," says, "We need another Vietnam to thin out their ranks a little." If there were, and if it had, we might've avoided the current rage for hipsterism–if the Joss Whedons of the world (and David Cranes and so forth) had found themselves casualties in some hostile jungle setting, then would this current youth generation have adopted, ironically, that last generation, and would people like me at my tender age of 40 be fuelling demand for hale distribution/archival companies like Shout! to produce exhaustively-supplemented HiDef releases of garbage like Thom Eberhardt's excruciating Night of the Comet? Look, I'm not immune–I wrote an entire monograph (200+ pages, no kidding) on Steve De Jarnatt's Miracle Mile that, in my defense, was more memoir than anything else (or is that more disclaimer than defense?). Still, I'll proclaim to my grave that Miracle Mile has substance, while Night of the Comet has none. The first and greatest danger of nostalgia is that having grown up with certain artifacts, we treat them like family and tend to love them unconditionally, as family does. This affection doesn't mean that junior isn't a grinning idiot, however, because at least in this instance, he is. And I'm a strong believer that if one of your family members is a grinning idiot, it's actually your job not to inflict him or her on other people.

John Carpenter’s Escape from L.A. (1996) – Blu-ray Disc

February 2, 20141990s, 2014, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: John Carpenter, Sci-Fi, Thriller

click any image to enlarge

**/**** Image A- Sound B+
starring Kurt Russell, Stacy Keach, Steve Buscemi, Cliff Robertson
screenplay by John Carpenter & Debra Hill & Kurt Russell
directed by John Carpenter

by Bryant Frazer The 1990s were unkind to John Carpenter: The stock market was booming, there was a Democrat in the White House, and the American horror film was at a low ebb. That was the decade when Carpenter–arguably the best B-movie auteur in the world during the 1980s and certainly the most audacious–lost his mojo. Exhausted from the experience of making two genre classics (They Live and Prince of Darkness) back to back, Carpenter took a couple of years off from filmmaking. When he was ready to work again, he considered making The Exorcist III but eventually settled on an ill-fated Chevy Chase vehicle, the $40 million sci-fi adaptation Memoirs of an Invisible Man, that torpedoed his attempted return to big-budget filmmaking. Carpenter tore through three more projects in the next three years–the Showtime horror anthology Body Bags, the Lovecraft riff In the Mouth of Madness, and a Village of the Damned remake–before deciding to pillage his own back catalogue with a sequel to the dystopian Escape from New York.

Plus One (2013) – DVD

January 19, 20142013, 2014, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Sci-Fi, Teen, Thriller, Time Travel

+1
***/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B-
starring Rhys Wakefield, Logan Miller, Ashley Hinshaw, Natalie Hall
screenplay by Bill Gullo
directed by Dennis Iliadis

by Walter Chaw David (Rhys Wakefield) screws up and loses girlfriend Jill (Ashley Hinshaw), only to run into her the night of a gigantic, hedonistic, Gatsby-esque party attended by rave strippers, DJs, and drug dealers. An unlikely place to stage a comeback, David, with buddy Teddy (Logan Miller), coaxes Jill into a conversation that goes south–but then the lights cut out, there's a weird meteorite event outside, and David finds himself with the opportunity to try the conversation again: same place, different Jill. It seems that something's created a quantum split–a little bleed-over maybe from a parallel dimension that twists time and creates doubles of all the revellers, though only a few notice. The ones who don't party on in a kind of nightmarish inattention that reminds of the dreamscapes of Miracle Mile and After Hours; the ones who do begin to wonder what will happen when the time-slips overlap and they find themselves attempting to share the same space as their doppelgängers.

Message from Space (1978) – DVD

January 15, 20141970s, 2014, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Japan, Sci-Fi, Scream/Shout! Factory

***/**** Image C+ Sound C- Extras C Madness A
starring Vic Morrow, Sonny Chiba, Philip Casnoff, Peggy Lee Brennan
screenplay by Hiroo Matsuda
directed by Kinji Fukasaku

by Walter Chaw Essentially a big-budget, feature-film version of Calvinball if Bill Watterson were a manga artist undergoing a psychotic break, Kinji Fukasaku's balls-insane Message from Space is a very special brand of genius. It honours no structural logic that I can discern, though it does have a kinetic kid-logic, the kind honed from endless summer afternoons tromping around with your buddies, making shit up and being happier than you'll ever be again in your life. Message from Space captures that headiness, that heedlessness, the sort of reckless creativity that charts the course between memorable films by someone like Ed Wood and forgettable films by every other hack with the same level of talent but not the same joyful dedication. I'm not saying Message from Space is a good movie–I can't even say that the reasons for its existence are particularly honourable (it's an obvious Star Wars cash-grab). But I can say that Message from Space is crazy-energetic and has more delightful moments packed into it than a dozen "normal" movies. I also wouldn't underestimate its influence on a generation of kids Star Wars-hungry during that three-year gap between the first film and The Empire Strikes Back. Herein, find the source of Will Ferrell's Ron Burgundy at least, and, incidentally, the better version of Mel Brooks's Spaceballs (and Stewart Raffill's The Ice Pirates).

Body Bags (1993) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

January 13, 20141990s, 2014, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Directors: John Carpenter, Directors: Tobe Hooper, Horror, Sci-Fi, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller

click any image to enlarge

**½/**** Image A- Sound C- Extras B
starring Robert Carradine, Stacy Keach, Mark Hamill, Twiggy
written by Billy Brown & Dan Angel
directed by John Carpenter and Tobe Hooper

by Bryant Frazer In 1989, HBO debuted a horror anthology show, "Tales from the Crypt", based on stories from the disreputable EC comic books of the early 1950s. Jump-started by a stable of Hollywood big shots like Richard Donner, Joel Silver, and Robert Zemeckis, the show was a hit, and the wisecracking "Crypt Keeper" who introduced each episode quickly became a pop-culture icon. HBO's rival Showtime, known primarily for its softcore anthology "Red Shoe Diaries", was presumably aiming to duplicate that success when it backed Body Bags, an anthology project led by co-executive producers John Carpenter and his wife, Sandy King. Despite that genre pedigree, the series never got off the ground, but a pilot was completed: three half-hour segments with a goofy framing story involving Carpenter himself doing a deadpan Betelgeuse impression among the stiffs in a city morgue. The finished omnibus aired on Showtime as a one-off in the summer of '93.

Her (2013)

December 18, 2013****/****, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Romance, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

****/****
starring Joaquin Phoenix, Amy Adams, Rooney Mara, Scarlett Johansson
written and directed by Spike Jonze

by Walter Chaw Two moments early on in Spike Jonze's Her. The first when our hero, Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix), initiates his new operating system, Samantha (voiced by Scarlett Johansson), and is asked to characterize his relationship with his mother; the second when, in flashback, Theodore and his ex, Catherine (Rooney Mara), pretend to choke each other. They're waypoints Jonze establishes for his piece: in one direction, there's Blade Runner and its questions of proximate humanity; in the other, there's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and its mad love. Jonze establishes, too, that this will be a work of science-fiction owing its parentage to the best sources, that its premise will be fantastic but grounded in characters and their place in the world. Of all the compliments I can think to pay this film, the best is that Her is at least the equal of its waypoints. More, when its solution recalls the metaphysical coda to the great The Incredible Shrinking Man, it's the equal of that as well.

The Last Days on Mars (2013)

December 12, 20132013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

*½/****
starring Liev Schreiber, Elias Koteas, Romola Garai, Olivia Williams
screenplay by Clive Dawson, based on the short story "The Animators" by Sydney J. Bounds
directed by Ruairi Robinson

by Walter Chaw Sort of expecting an impressionistic adaptation of David Bowie's "Ziggy Stardust" cycle, imagine my surprise to discover that Ruairi Robinson's The Last Days on Mars is a derivative, flaccid little space-set horror flick that proves the maxim that movies with "Mars" in the title tend to suck. It boasts an exceptional cast, anchored by the ever-steady Liev Schreiber, who receives strong assists from Olivia Williams, Romola Garai, and Elias fucking Koteas. And it features a script by Clive Dawson, based on a Sydney Bounds short story, that is so familiar to genre enthusiasts by now that if you can't predict who lives, who dies first, even what the last shot will be, well, you just aren't paying attention. See, The Last Days on Mars is about the last hours for this scientific expedition looking for proof of life. On the verge of giving up, they find proof of life. But the life is evil and it turns them into space zombies. No, seriously.

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013)

November 20, 20132013, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

*½/****
starring Jennifer Lawrence, Liam Hemsworth, Josh Hutcherson, Philip Seymour Hoffman
screenplay by Simon Beaufoy and Michael Arndt, based on the novel by Suzanne Collins
directed by Francis Lawrence

by Walter Chaw Portentous, eagerly-anticipated, ending on an abrupt cliffhanger aboard a spaceship… Yes I'm talking about The Matrix Reloaded–I mean, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (hereafter Catching Fire), which for all the conceptual visual improvements inherent in moving from The Hunger Games director Gary Ross to director Francis Lawrence for this instalment, still suffers from hilarible, unspeakable dialogue and a scenario seldom honoured by the execution. Those who haven't read the books (myself included), fair warning that you'll not be able to follow a moment of this one without revisiting the first film–again like The Matrix Reloaded. From what I could glean based on the fragments of The Hunger Games I haven't blocked out is that this girl, Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence, earnestly dreadful), has won a televised deathmatch sponsored by a monolithic government to keep control of twelve impoverished, racially- and class-coded districts. I get it, it's a metaphor and, um, a satire of some sort.

MHHFF ’13: +1

October 16, 20132013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Film Festivals, Sci-Fi, Thriller

***/****
starring Rhys Wakefield, Logan Miller, Ashley Hinshaw, Natalie Hall
screenplay by Bill Gullo
directed by Dennis Iliadis

Seconds (1966) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

October 1, 2013****/****, 1960s, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: John Frankenheimer, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Horror, Sci-Fi, The Criterion Collection, Thriller

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A+
starring Rock Hudson, John Randolph, Salome Jens, Frances Reid
screenplay by Lewis John Carlino, based on the novel by David Ely
directed by John Frankenheimer

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. For the longest time I wanted to write a book about John Frankenheimer, the crux of which would be a closer look at the relationship, if there was one, between the declining quality of his work and the assassination of his buddy Bobby Kennedy. It would be a cultural study, see, this way to tie the death of the Sixties with a director who for me definitively speaks to the rises and valleys of that decade, and who paved the way for the despairing paranoia flicks of the 1970s. In the end, I was defeated by the prospect of dealing with Frankenheimer’s later films–not because they were all as bad as Prophecy (or that any of the others are near as bad as Prophecy, or that anything could be), but because many of them are really, really good in really, really difficult ways to quantify. Closer to the truth of his output post-RFK assassination is not that it’s terrible, but that it’s all Seconds again in some form or another: diaries of personal apocalypses and the constant threat of the dissolution of identity. Besides, I think there might be an entire book in 52 Pick-Up alone.

TIFF ’13: Almost Human

September 19, 20132013, Authors: Bill Chambers, Film Festivals, Horror, Sci-Fi, TIFF, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
written and directed by Joe Begos

by Bill Chambers The picture's opening titles are in John Carpenter's familiar white-on-black Albertus font, and intercut with fragments of exposition like the intro to Prince of Darkness while some neo-Alan Howarth works the minor keys on a synthesizer. But as the makers of Almost Human have already given the game away in an endless, stilted prologue, what may sound like loving homage feels in context like a desperate play for credibility, a dog whistle meant to reassure the horror geeks they're in good hands. They're not. Set in the late-'80s, because nothing good's happened since then, the film is about an archetypal fat-guy/hot-girl couple (Josh Ethier and Vanessa Leigh) and third wheel Seth (Graham Skipper) getting torn asunder when the husband, Mark, is rudely abducted by aliens. Two years later, Seth remains shattered but Jen has settled down again with the poster boy for modern douchiness, one of those guys who shaves his beard into a thin strip along the jawline. So much for period detail; so much for Jen's taste in men improving. Anyway, Mark is returned to Earth, but not in the same placid condition–maybe the aliens broke him and this is nothing more than their version of tossing a toy out the window on a highway. As Mark begins a psychotic rampage that inches him ever closer to Jen, Seth's spidey sense starts tingling and he goes to warn her in one of many scenes that peg this for next-gen Ed Wood, because writer-director Joe Begos couldn't conceive of a more efficient, less torturous way to put Jen and Seth in a room together than to have him show up at her diner, politely ask the lady at the counter to retrieve her, then twiddle his thumbs (and ours) waiting for her to materialize. Some decent splatter–Mark uses a greatest-hits of horror implements against his victims–makes up the shortfall before going a bridge too far into tentacle rape and a recreation of the Irreversible head-bash but with a woman. I don't think the filmmakers are world-class misogynists or anything, I just think they're kind of stupid. Be sure to stay through the closing credits for a tag–not that it's worth it, but I was the only one at my screening who did, and misery loves company.

Swamp Thing (1982) – Blu-ray + DVD Combo Pack

September 15, 20131980s, 2013, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi, Scream/Shout! Factory, Superhero, Wes Craven

**½/**** Image B- Sound A- Extras A-
starring Louis Jourdan, Adrienne Barbeau, Ray Wise, Dick Durock
written and directed by Wes Craven

by Bryant Frazer Do you find monster movies that revolve around damsels, décolletage, and men in phony rubber suits pathetic or endearing? If the latter, you may well find room in your heart for Swamp Thing, an old-fashioned creature feature that already seemed anachronous when it hoisted itself up out of the mud of early-1980s genre cinema. As movies like Alien, Altered States, and Scanners put a grim, often grotesque spin on ideas about biological transformation, Wes Craven–surely one of the grimmest of horror directors in the 1970s–embarked on a PG-rated fairytale about a gentle scientist whose own experimental chemicals turn him into a super-powered hulk made entirely of plant matter. As Craven’s contemporaries busied themselves with tales of human bodies rent asunder by sex, drugs, and the military-industrial complex, the director of Last House on the Left was making a story of tender love in the wilds of South Carolina, where a wound to the breast can be healed by a clump of swamp moss and a beast’s severed limb can regenerate through the judicious application of sunlight.

Telluride ’13: Under the Skin

September 7, 2013****/****, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Scarlett Johansson, Sci-Fi, Telluride, Telluride 2013

****/****
starring Scarlett Johansson, Paul Brannigan, Krystof Hádek, Jessica Mance
screenplay by Walter Campbell and Jonathan Glazer, based on the novel by Michel Faber
directed by Jonathan Glazer

by Walter Chaw Trouble Every Day and The Man Who Fell to Earth as directed by Stanley Kubrick, Jonathan Glazer’s astonishing Under the Skin marks his return to feature filmmaking after a nine-year hiatus. The loosest of adaptations, cherry-picking from Michel Faber’s strong novel of the same name, Under the Skin is home to a trio (at least) of indelible images and a style and presentation that function as shunts into a thicket of thorny existential questions; it’s the best film I’ve seen this year and among the best films I’ve ever seen. Stripped to the bone, as capable of viciousness as it is tenderness, it achieves what seems impossible by creating a sense of the mysterium tremens in the body of a human-looking alien. When it works, it’s a stunner worthy of mention in the same breath as Blade Runner, but more significant than its immediate impact is its lingering afterimage. I liked it initially. In the six days since I saw it, scarcely an hour’s gone by that I haven’t thought about it. Under the Skin, not to be flip, burrows exactly there, and nests.

Riddick (2013)

September 5, 20132013, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

**½/****
starring Vin Diesel, Jordi Mollà, Matt Nable, Katee Sackhoff
written and directed by David Twohy

by Walter Chaw Maybe it was the anticipation, maybe it’s because it’s too much like the first film, Pitch Black, but David Twohy’s Riddick is merely fine for what it is, lacking the kind of loopy, operatic invention of the franchise’s middle course and contenting itself with being a bug hunt in the James Cameron sense of the word instead of exploring more of this universe. Not that there’s necessarily anything wrong with that, but I wanted to love this movie with all my heart, having declared to everyone’s exhaustion that of all the prestige movies prepping down the pike, this was the one I was waiting for. Turns out, the best science-fiction film of the last quarter of this year is Jonathan Glazer’s unbelievably good Under the Skin–not Gravity and, alas, not Riddick, either. To be fair, of the three, Glazer’s is the only one to deal with science-fiction as existentialism rather than as background and circus. More’s the pity, because Chronicles of Riddick, with its elementals and fringe religions, its funky spiritualism and its sense of fairy-tale hyperbole, is one of the genuinely great cult films of the last decade. If not for an ending to Riddick that promises Twohy’s ready for another swing at the plate if another ball is lobbed at him, I wouldn’t be in a very good mood at all.

Telluride ’13: Gravity

September 4, 20132013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Sci-Fi, Telluride, Telluride 2013, Thriller

**½/****
starring Sandra Bullock, George Clooney
screenplay by Alfonso Cuarón & Jonás Cuarón
directed by Alfonso Cuarón

by Walter Chaw Alfonso Cuarón’s eagerly-anticipated, already-buzzy follow-up to the tremendous Children of Men is Gravity–a title that doesn’t reference the Ray Bradbury story “Kaleidoscope,” to which the film owes at least a little credit (in addition to the premise and theme, Gravity also lifts the character name “Stone”), or any real meat at the heart of the story. It’s not for lack of trying, as Cuarón and son/co-writer Jonás attempt, after the emotional tissue connecting the protags of Children of Men, to graft another lost-child drama onto a larger science-fiction conceit. What results is probably the most venue-dependant release of a year that includes Pacific Rim–if you can see it in IMAX 3D, you ought to: the biggest screen with the best sound. It’s possibly the first film since Avatar that actually works with the extra dimension, despite having been converted in post-production; at times while screening Gravity at the Werner Herzog Theater in Telluride, I felt a bit vertiginous. It’s an effect that no doubt had everything to do with the dual-projection and the custom-designed sound system by Meyers Sound. I talked to several techs from the company running around before the show, tweaking, testing, making sure that organs physically shifted during the presentation. My favourite story of the festival is how Cuarón, from the auditorium, instructed the booth to turn up the audio to just less than twice the “acceptable” volume.

The Oxbow Cure (2013)

August 23, 20132013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Drama, Horror, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

***½/****
starring Claudia Dey
screenplay by Yonah Lewis, Calvin Thomas, Lev Lewis
directed by Yonah Lewis & Calvin Thomas

by Angelo Muredda The latest in a wave of immersive,
formally-sophisticated works from young Toronto filmmakers that includes Kazik
Radwanski's Tower and Igor Drljaca's Krivina, Yonah Lewis and
Calvin Thomas's The Oxbow Cure expresses a bold new vision even as it
fits itself snugly within established Canadian cultural traditions. As a film
about a woman who heads off to an isolated cabin to treat a mystery illness,
you could say it's indebted to David Cronenberg's '70s output, and its
unhysterical depiction of a body in the throes of a profound, if still mostly
imperceptible, transformation make it a more worthy heir to the queasy body
horror of Shivers and Rabid than the baroque flourishes of Antiviral.
Cronenberg echoes aside, for students of Canadian literature, the minimalist
plot might also recall Margaret Atwood's seminal novel Surfacing, which
similarly sends a young woman in crisis off into the woods on a sort of vision
quest, exposing her to the elements of her home country and to the uncivilized
mirror image of herself it offers up.

Europa Report (2013)

August 13, 20132013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Pseudo-Documentary, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

**/****
starring Christian Camargo, Anamaria Marinca, Michael Nyqvyst, Sharlto Copley
screenplay by Philip Gelatt
directed by Sebastián Cordero

by Walter Chaw Sebastián Cordero's found-footage sci-fi flick Europa Report tells the tale of the first manned trip to
the titular moon of Jupiter in search of some kind of lifeform lurking there
beneath a thick layer of ice. Never mind that this is a premise Arthur C.
Clarke's 2010: Odyssey Two already explored to similar consequence, nor
that Europa Report is essentially an intergalactic The Blair Witch Project: best to focus on an unfortunate framing story that dumbs down the
proceedings, emotionally and intellectually, at the exact moment the picture
appears to be gaining momentum. It's all the more puzzling, given the existence
of something so pandering and condescending, that the group apparently most
enamoured with this movie is the scientific community, who I would
have guessed would have taken more offense at being talked down to. Maybe they're
so beaten into submission by the idiotic things Damon Lindelof passes off as "science"
that they're willing to forgive Europa Report its more minor trespasses.

The Wolverine (2013)

August 8, 20132013, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical, UK

***/****
starring Hugh Jackman, Will Yun Lee, Hiroyuki Sanada, Tao Okamoto
screenplay by Mark Bomback and Scott Frank
directed by James Mangold

by Walter Chaw James Mangold's The Wolverine is lovely, unusual, novel enough that the moments it makes concessions to its genre and comic-book origins are the same moments that feel like a shame. It's not that they don't work, exactly–it's that when a brooding character study offset by a few delightful action scenes introduces an adamantium samurai mecha and a Poison Ivy manqué to bring it all home, well…it's that it works too well at being something the film is otherwise not. It's two movies, really: a unique one about women in tension; and a more common one about a grief-stricken man taking on the responsibility of protecting a surrogate. Both are complex. It's a pity that, by dint of license and expectation, The Wolverine had to be a literal superhero movie and not something more covert like The Caveman's Valentine or The Brave One. At the end, the only place to put the blame is the impossibility of funding a picture like this without the license and expectation: no one would invest, it would seem, in an anonymous story about a man's mute, impotent melancholy and the many females around him engaged in the maintenance of their separate, disintegrating orbits.

Oblivion (2013) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital

August 6, 20132013, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Romance, Sci-Fi, Tom Cruise

*/**** Image A+ Sound A- Extras B
starring Tom Cruise, Morgan Freeman, Olga Kurlylenko, Melissa Leo
screenplay by Joseph Kosinski and Karl Gajdusek and Michael Arndt
directed by Joseph Kosinski

by Walter Chaw If you’re going to see Joseph Kosinski’s Oblivion, you should see it in IMAX. Oh, who’m I kidding? There’s no good way to see Kosinski’s sci-fi-lite follow-up to Tron: Legacy, starring Emperor Thetan Tom Cruise as a future-Jiffy Lube mechanic jetting around post-bellum Earth circa 2077, fixing automated drones programmed to kill alien “Scavs” that have taken over the empty planet. Following? It doesn’t matter. Via soulful voiceover, Cruise’s Jack Harper informs us that a war has decimated Earth and that all the surviving humans have fled to Titan (that’s a moon around Saturn, Jack explains), leaving behind only Jack and his lady-pal Vika (Andrea Riseborough) to tend to giant sea-water fusion engines that provide energy to our ragtag, fugitive fleet. No, it already doesn’t make much sense, except that it’s sort of like something L. Ron Hubbard would have written–but that’s gotta be a coincidence, right? Anyway, seems that Jack has built a special cabin in the woods despite Earth being uninhabitable due to the nuclear holocaust we unleashed to free ourselves of alien enslavement…or is it? Irradiated, that is. Earth, I mean. And what of these strange memories of the Empire State Building that memory-wiped Jack keeps having, where he and supermodel Bond Girl Olga Kurylenko exchange doe-eyes and sweet nothings? If you’ve seen any science-fiction film worth a crap in the last twenty years, you’ve already seen a better version of Oblivion, I promise you.

Elysium (2013)

August 5, 20132013, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

*½/****
starring Matt Damon, Jodie Foster, Sharlto Copley, Alice Braga
written and directed by Neill Blomkamp

by Walter Chaw Lost in the hue and cry for meaning in film
is the truism that having a message does not necessarily denote meaning. Case
in point, District 9 helmer Neill Blomkamp's left-wing screed Elysium,
which feels, unpleasantly, like having lunch with Sean Penn and all the filthy,
proselytizing, self-martyring glory that implies. It's also like that lunch
Indy forces Willie Scott to eat in Temple of Doom: Mmmm,
condescending! It's unashamedly pushing an agenda, and while it does a better
job of that than Star Trek Into Darkness, it's arguably
more frustrating because so much of it demonstrates a bracing nerd-topia of
tech wonders and genre references. Indeed, Elysium is the closest we've
come to seeing a big-screen adaptation of Ursula K. Leguin's astonishing The
Dispossessed. Which is to say, not very close at all, but there you have
it. A pity, then, that armed with so able an action star as Matt Damon, the
movie finds itself at the end more comfortable in a double-feature with Promised
Land than with The Bourne Identity. Damon's at his best as a hero in
the act of discovering his own potential, see–and absolute bollocks as
political philosopher and activist. Times like these, I think Team America:
World Police was right about him all along.