Sci-Fi Archives - Page 14 of 33 - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

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.

Lifeforce (1985) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray + DVD Combo Pack

July 22, 20131980s, 2013, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Tobe Hooper, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller, Vampire, Zombie

Lifeforce2

**/****Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B
starring Steve Railsback, Peter Firth, Frank Finlay, Mathilda May
screenplay by Dan O’Bannon & Don Jakoby, based on the novel The Space Vampires by Colin Wilson
directed by Tobe Hooper

by Bryant Frazer The early 1980s must have been a weird time to be Tobe Hooper. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre had made him one of the most notorious directors in the world, and Poltergeist vaulted him onto the A-list. He would have been on top of the world if not for an extended controversy over that film: Poltergeist was produced by Steven Spielberg, and there were widespread rumours that he actually directed it, too. Hooper denied it and Spielberg issued oddly-worded statements that permanently muddied the waters. Whatever the truth of their collaboration, the controversy was a blow to Hooper’s reputation. His Texas Chain Saw felt almost like outsider art–raw and twisted, it was the antithesis of the burnished Spielberg style. Poltergeist, on the other hand, was the very quintessence of a Steven Spielberg film, from its familiar suburban family in distress to its richly detailed mise en scène‎. If Hooper really did direct it, it doesn’t say much for his authorial voice that he left virtually no discernible fingerprints on the final product.

Pacific Rim (2013)

July 10, 20132013, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

**/****
starring Charlie Hunnam, Idris Elba, Rinko Kikuchi, Charlie Day
screenplay by Travis Beacham & Guillermo del Toro
directed by Guillermo del Toro

by Walter Chaw I have this theory that the reason the United States started remaking Japanese movies (particularly the J-Horror stuff) almost immediately post-9/11 is that it was after that pivotal event that the country assumed a distinctly Japanese worldview. Suddenly, it was possible for something unthinkable to happen to civilians; the universe was callous and arbitrary in its measuring out of lives, and the idea of a “civilian target” or, more to the point, of “innocence,” was hopelessly quaint. It’s as good an explanation as any as to why there are so many evil children in Japanese horror–the same explanation, as it happens, for why there were so many evil children in late-’60s/early-’70s American horror–the difference being that there was usually an explanation for why the children were bad in the United States (the Devil, mostly). In Japan? Not so much. In America’s post-9/11 evil-kid flicks, even the ones not remaking Japanese films, the kids are generally just born that way. Even the rise of “torture porn” is more or less a not-as-graphic reproduction of Japan’s “Guinea Pig” cinema–seven pictures from the ’80s (including the indescribable Mermaid in a Manhole and Flower of Flesh & Blood, which caused a credulous Charlie Sheen to call the FBI), culminating now in the United States with a pretty rough update of Maniac starring everybody’s favourite probably-murderer, Elijah Wood.

World War Z (2013)

June 20, 20132013, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Horror, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Zombie

**/****
starring Brad Pitt, Mireille Enos, James Badge Dale, Matthew Fox
screenplay by Matthew Michael Carnahan and Drew Goddard & Damon Lindelof, based on the novel by Max Brooks
directed by Marc Forster

by Walter Chaw Marc Forster’s World War Z, an adaptation of Max Brooks’s cause célèbre novel (think Stephen Ambrose on the zombie apocalypse) that had a production so troubled the real surprise is Terry Gilliam had nothing to do with it, lands as half an idea, handsomely mounted in a really expensive crater. With almost no relationship to the book beyond honouring its concept of a conflagration told in vignettes, it feels almost exactly like James L. Brooks’s I’ll Do Anything, which began life as a musical and ended up, after extensive reshoots and careening budget overages, song-free, yet whole somehow despite the trauma. That sense of a sudden change in direction, in genre, is all over World War Z–something in its almost apologetic reserve, something in its unmistakable indecision. Indeed, it serves as a fitting metaphor for a zombie as a corpse similarly brought to shambling half-life, but frankly, it could’ve been a lot worse. It works for what it is in the same way that Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion works, and with the same limitations, ambivalence, anticlimax, and handsome mounting. If, at the end, its Damon Lindelof-penned solution* (the twelfth-hour salvation of a freight train jumped its tracks) is as stupid as you would expect something Lindelof to pen, at least the journey there is interesting, even occasionally (if only very occasionally) arresting. A shame that Forster hasn’t gotten any better at directing action since Quantum of Solace.

Man of Steel (2013)

June 13, 20132013, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical

**/****
starring Henry Cavill, Amy Adams, Michael Shannon, Russell Crowe
screenplay by David S. Goyer
directed by Zack Snyder

by Walter Chaw Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel is 44 beautifully constructed trailers strung together in the world’s most expensive promo reel; at this point in his career, it’s fair to wonder who it is Snyder’s still trying to impress. Shapeless, structure-less, the movie aspires towards nostalgic, grandiloquent, patriotic pastiche but succeeds only in being disjointed, muted, and frustrating. Take the casting of Kevin Costner as Superman’s terrestrial dad, Jonathan Kent. Perfect, right? But he’s reduced to a fantastic scene where he reveals his adopted son’s alien origin that is fantastic solely because Costner is not only magnificent when he’s allowed to be in his wheelhouse (baseball player, cowboy, farmer), but also because there’s a certain weight in the wrinkles on Costner’s face and the grey at his temples. He’s the embodiment of a specific brand of nostalgia all by himself, and the potential for him to be the spiritual centre of a soulless film isn’t merely squandered, it’s aggressively squandered. The Superman mythos at its best is about fathers and sons–the hero (Henry Cavill, playing Supes as Wolverine) has, after all, lost two fathers, orphaned twice in a strange land and compared visually and thematically to Christ in every incarnation. (“The last son of Krypton,” n’est-ce pas?) It’s a powerful theme, one that explains the enduring popularity of the character when wags have correctly identified that there are no real, viable external threats to someone who’s essentially all-powerful. The Jesus story is meaningless if Jesus never thought of Himself as merely a man carrying a terrible burden. Consider the elevation of Watchmen‘s Dr. Manhattan to inscrutable WMD, or The Incredibles‘ Mr. Incredible’s near-ruin in the role of family man. No, Superman’s weakness is existential. I fear that Snyder–a director who seems to abhor difference and adore surfaces in his pictures–is exactly the wrong person to explore the irony of an immaculate conception tortured in the role of outsider.

After Earth (2013)

May 30, 20132013, Action, Adventure, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Directors: M. Night Shyamalan, Sci-Fi, Teen, Theatrical, Will Smith, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Will Smith, Jaden Smith, Sophie Okenedo, Zoë Kravitz
screenplay by Gary Whitia and M. Night Shyamalan
directed by M. Night Shyamalan

by Angelo Muredda Give M. Night Shyamalan this much: he is not a timid filmmaker. Where some might have responded to the critical drubbing of The Village with a shrug, Shyamalan turned his follow-up, ostensibly a children’s story, into a vicious riposte. Lady in the Water isn’t just an off-kilter fairytale about an endangered waif who falls out of the sky and into Paul Giamatti’s swimming pool: it’s also a deranged manifesto for protecting the imaginative freedom of artists like Shyamalan–playing a writer who will one day be martyred for his ideas, collected in a volume modestly titled “The Cookbook”–against critics and nonbelievers, who meet deservedly bad ends. That would be a gutsy move if the artist had something to die for himself, yet the best you could say for Lady in the Water is that at least Bob Balaban’s beast-ravaged movie reviewer is spared the finale with a saviour eagle that Shyamalan has the gall to christen “Eaglet.” Though nominally a star vehicle for Will Smith and his son Jaden, After Earth covers much the same ground, down to its repetition of both the aquila ex machina trope and half-assed nomenclature. (A double-sided spear is a “cutlass” in the future, while walking stealthily is now “ghosting.” No word on what we call spoons or actual cutlasses.) Lady in the Water‘s world-building by crayon doodles can be explained away easily enough by its bedtime-story mechanics, but there’s no excuse for After Earth, a thinly-sketched, unbearably haughty survival story that cites Moby-Dick as it steals from Suzanne Collins.

Dark Skies (2013) – Blu-ray + DVD + Ultraviolet

May 27, 20132013, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi, Teen, Thriller

Darkskies3

***/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras B-
starring Keri Russell, Josh Hamilton, Dakota Goyo, J.K. Simmons
written and directed by Scott Stewart

by Bill Chambers Dark Skies takes place in the days leading up to the Fourth of July. The movie thus promises fireworks–and it delivers, albeit on a modest scale befitting its humble suburban milieu. Like Signs, it’s such an insular take on the alien-visitation genre it could almost be performed on the stage; unlike Signs, it’s not pious to a fault (surprisingly, given that writer-director Scott Stewart previously made Legion and Priest), and its lapses in logic aren’t as maddening because they’re built into the film’s very ethos, with a Whitley Streiber type (lent unexpected pathos by a Hunter S. Thompson-dressed J.K. Simmons) opining late in the proceedings that aliens are unfathomable to us in the same way that humans are unfathomable to lab rats. There are a lot of superficial similarities to Signs, actually, such as the way the picture uses asthma and walkie-talkie devices as narrative keystones and its climactic transformation of the family home into a fortress. For that matter, Poltergeist, Paranormal Activity, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind are liberally paraphrased as well; over three films, Stewart has shown himself to be nothing if not a magpie artist. The good news, which would normally be upsetting news, is that the producers of Dark Skies are Bob and Harvey Weinstein, who seem to rein in Stewart’s other bad habits, like snail’s pacing and a tendency towards arcane mythology. Third time’s the charm.

The Blob (1958) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

April 22, 20132013, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Sci-Fi, Teen, The Criterion Collection

Blobcap1

***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Steven McQueen, Aneta Corseaut, Earl Rowe, George Karas
screenplay by Theodore Simonson and Kate Phillips, from an idea by Irvine H. Millgate
directed by Irvin S. Yeaworth Jr.

by Jefferson Robbins Burt Bacharach and Mack David’s sock-hoppin’ title-track lyrics aside, the key creature of Irvin S. Yeaworth Jr.’s The Blob never “leaps.” Sure, it sort of lunges up a stick to absorb an old hermit’s paw, but mostly what it does is ooze around, digest flesh, and act as the centring point for the film’s fine balance of character, pacing, and grace in the face of certain doom. While The Blob has its light moments, it’s seldom again as carefree as its opening credits would seem to portend. The blob crashes within its meteor case into a riven small-town society and drives it–the way all good monsters do–to better know and reconcile with itself.

The Fury (1978) [The Limited Edition Series] – Blu-ray Disc

April 18, 20131970s, 2013, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Brian De Palma, Espionage, Revenge, Sci-Fi, Teen, Thriller

***½/**** Image B- Sound B Extras D
starring Kirk Douglas, John Cassavetes, Carrie Snodgress, Charles Durning
screenplay by John Farris, based on his novel
directed by Brian DePalma

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. While Brian DePalma is nothing if not a leitmotif filmmaker, it’s curious that he chose to direct The Fury right after Carrie. Imagine Spielberg following up Jaws with Orca–it’s like De Palma was begging to be pigeonholed. And it’s not surprising that The Fury wasn’t as zeitgeisty: it lacks the classical simplicity and youth appeal of Carrie, with almost no one in the cast under 30 save for future softcore legend Andrew Stevens and Carrie holdover Amy Irving, a good actress who just doesn’t have that X factor. But The Fury‘s echo can still be heard, because its ending is indeed that impactful. Nearly every review mentions it, and the terms in which Pauline Kael and her acolytes described it gave it a kind of porny rep that’s since inspired generations of young film buffs to seek the movie out. (Armond White called it an “orgasm.”) It is a great ending, but a revisit makes clear that The Fury is worth reading for the articles.

G.I. Joe: Retaliation (2013)

March 28, 20132013, Action, Adventure, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Espionage, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

*½/****
starring D.J. Cotrona, Byung-hun Lee, Adrianne Palicki, Dwayne Johnson
screenplay by Rhett Reese & Paul Wernick
directed by Jon M. Chu

by Angelo Muredda While it’s easy to snicker at a title sequence that boasts of “Characters by Hasbro,” G.I. Joe: Retaliation (hereafter Retaliation) is the kind of movie you root for. After the banality of predecessor Stephen Sommers, John M. Chu is an inspired choice of director. This is a guy who’s made his name by bringing elegance and agility to his two attempts at the surprisingly bullet-proof Step Up franchise. There was reason enough, then, to hope his preference for long takes and earnest interest in bodies in motion would translate to a franchise inspired by a line of action figures. After all, such baubles are nothing if not fetish objects, their biceps studied by the faithful with a mad love usually reserved for dancers, matinee idols, and wrestlers. What better meeting of the three than a project steered by the director of dance films and anchored by Channing Tatum and Dwayne Johnson, née The Rock?

Killer Klowns from Outer Space (1988) – Blu-ray Disc

October 30, 20121980s, 2012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Horror, Sci-Fi

***/**** Image C+ Sound B- Extras A
starring Grant Cramer, Suzanne Snyder, John Allen Nelson, John Vernon
screenplay by Charles Chiodo & Stephen Chiodo
directed by Stephen Chiodo

by Walter Chaw Boy, you know, I really like the Chiodo Brothers’ Killer Klowns from Outer Space. I can’t help it. I like it more than Night of the Creeps, more than Matinee, more than any other film that would see 1950s creature features resurrected, be it through homage or farce or satire. I like it because it’s unapologetic, and because its high concept is broad enough that there are sufficient gags to peanut-butter across the entire runtime. I like, too, that they don’t end a scene without a groaner, meaning they’re unerringly true to their stated mission of erecting a shrine to Irvin S. Yeaworth’s The Blob (truer, even, than the contemporaneous remake of The Blob) and doing it with a relentlessly light touch. It’s never scary (unless you’re a true coulrophobe), but it is often uproarious–like when one of the titular alien Bozos squirts angry Officer Mooney (John Vernon, just fantastic) with gag flowers, to which Mooney, out of proportion to the affront, responds, “I oughta shoot you right now.” I also appreciated the moment when head girl Debbie (Suzanne Snyder) asks why they’re being shot with popcorn and her boyfriend Mike (Grant Cramer) replies, “Popcorn? Because they’re clowns!” Well, no shit, Debbie, try to pay attention.

Cloud Atlas (2012)

October 23, 20122012, Authors: Walter Chaw, China, Drama, Esoterica, Germany, Hong Kong, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Singapore, Spain, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

**/****
starring Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent, Hugh Grant
screenplay by Lana Wachowski & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowski, based on the novel by David Mitchell
directed by Lana Wachowski & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowski

by Walter Chaw It speaks to the extraordinary hubris of the tripartite godhead behind Cloud Atlas (the Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer) that in the middle of a 172-minute film composed of interminable exposition and multiple timelines, they would invoke long-winded Russian prisoner Solzhenitsyn without fear of ironic reprisal. More, it speaks to their hubris that they would make a film this sprawling and messianic about the Disney maxim that you’re never too puny to change the world, so don’t stop trying, tiger! If you’re at all offended by white people doing the “ah, so” thing in yellow-face, by the way: relax, because there’re also white people doing the evil Fu Manchu thing in yellow-face. What there isn’t is white people doing blackface, suggesting that if you’re about to make the argument that Cloud Atlas is about how we’re all the same under the skin to the extent that we could have been different races in past and future lives, then don’t bother. That doesn’t stop the movie, though, from talking about the evils of slavery with a super-duper, plantation-attitudes-changing Magic Negro, or from positing a future-Korea that clones wage-slaves before paying off never-accidental post-modern self-referents. If you were to take Cloud Atlas remotely seriously, in fact, you’d have to address it as an attempt to create a completely post-modern artifact in a world that didn’t already have “Beavis and Butt-Head”. Quick, look, the author of that manuscript the old editor in the 2012 timeline is reading was written by the kid from the 1973 timeline who had a crush on one of the black versions of Halle Berry (the one playing Pam Grier)! Did I mention that Berry has a timeline in whiteface? Or that Hugo Weaving and Ben Whishaw have ones in drag?

Beyond the Black Rainbow (2012) – Blu-ray Disc

September 19, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Esoterica, Horror, Sci-Fi, Thriller

Beyond4

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras F
starring Michael Rogers, Eva Allan, Scott Hylands
screenplay by Panos Cosmatos, inspired by the book Be Your Self by Mercurio Arboria
directed by Panos Cosmatos

by Angelo Muredda Panos Cosmatos claims he wasn’t allowed to watch R-rated movies as a kid and had to make do with the lurid box covers he saw on video store shelves. Rising above those less-than-ideal conditions, the first-time helmer and son of famed Cobra and Rambo: First Blood Part II director George P. Cosmatos makes an auspicious debut with Beyond the Black Rainbow. As befits its retro title, this is a bravura pulp homage that recreates the feeling of a preteen creeping down the hall to catch a sidelong glance of the bygone genre cinema pulsing out of the living-room TV and painting the walls orange. Still, it’s best approached not as a found object from that time, but as a mood piece–a sustained exercise in atmospheric nostalgia for what LCD Soundsystem eloquently called the “unremembered ’80s.”

TIFF ’12: Antiviral

September 9, 20122012, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Film Festivals, France, Horror, Mystery, Satire, Sci-Fi, Thriller, TIFF

*½/****
written and directed by Brandon Cronenberg

by Bill Chambers Featuring more close-ups of needles piercing flesh than a booster-shot training video, Antiviral, the debut feature by Cronenberg offspring Brandon, takes place in a world evolutions ahead of TMZ, where fans pay to have themselves infected with viruses extracted from their celebrity crushes. (“Biological communion,” the film calls this process–a phrase that links father and son filmmakers as efficiently as a paternity test.) The slightly repulsive Caleb Landry Jones is Syd March, a rogue technician for The Lucas Clinic who breaks protocol by contaminating himself with the disease that is rapidly, unexpectedly killing superstar Hannah Geist (Sarah Gadon), making him a target of Hannah’s family–who figure he’ll be useful in their search for a cure–and fans, who want to watch him expire as a proxy for their beloved Hannah. Yes, it’s pretty silly.

Brainstorm (1983) – Blu-ray Disc

September 5, 20121980s, 2012, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Sci-Fi, Thriller

***/**** Image C+ Sound B Extras F
starring Christopher Walken, Natalie Wood, Louise Fletcher, Cliff Robertson
screenplay by Robert Stitzel and Philip Frank Messina
directed by Douglas Trumbull

by Bryant Frazer Brainstorm will always have a reputation–among those who are familiar with it at all–as a film maudit. Casual film buffs know it as the sci-fi picture Natalie Wood was shooting when she drowned at the age of 43, under circumstances that remain clouded by mystery. Some of them know that it was one of only two narrative features (Silent Running being the other) directed by special-effects genius Douglas Trumbull, whose work on 2001: A Space Odyssey, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Blade Runner is the stuff of legend. Real movie nerds remember that Brainstorm was intended by its director to be one of those landmarks that forever changes the future of film–like The Jazz Singer debuting synch sound, Becky Sharp employing three-strip Technicolor, or The Robe introducing CinemaScope. As a movie partly about the afterlife, it is a weird kind of eulogy to Natalie Wood, yes, but it also memorializes Trumbull’s enduring dream of a new breed of cinema that would make moving images more likelife, and more mind-expanding, than any photographic process that had come before.

The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996) [Unrated Director’s Cut] – Blu-ray Disc

August 19, 20121990s, 2012, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: John Frankenheimer, Horror, Satire, Sci-Fi, Thriller

**½/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras F
starring Marlon Brando, Val Kilmer, David Thewlis, Fairuza Balk
screenplay by Richard Stanley and Ron Hutchinson
directed by John Frankenheimer

by Walter Chaw This is a tough one. As an avowed if guarded fan of director John Frankenheimer, his involvement with The Island of Dr. Moreau is something like a gobsmacker. Sure, he’d ventured into genre before with the ridiculous Prophecy, while, arguably, his two best films–The Manchurian Candidate and Seconds, his masterpiece–are genre pieces, too. But I think at the time, bringing in Frankenheimer three days into a troubled shoot to replace that assclown Richard Stanley was more an act of expediency than of ingenuity. If New Line thought they were getting a closer, they were right; if they thought they were getting someone who could corral the downward-spiralling Val Kilmer, they were less right (“Will Rogers never met Val Kilmer,” Frankenheimer famously said). What they probably weren’t expecting was that Frankenheimer would turn in something that, though critically-savaged at the time, had some legs. No, The Island of Dr. Moreau isn’t a whole, falling apart as it does in the last half-hour or so, but it is the sort of movie that hints at larger issues and boasts enough indelible moments to deserve another look. Truth is, only movies this odd and discomfiting earn this amount of misdirected ire. It’s not to say there’s not a lot wrong with the film, but rather to suggest that the chief criticisms of it being strange and “a mess” aren’t among them.

Outland (1981) – Blu-ray Disc

August 6, 20121980s, 2012, Action, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Sci-Fi, Thriller, UK, Western

***/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Sean Connery, Peter Boyle, Frances Sternhagen, James B. Sikking
written and directed by Peter Hyams

by Jefferson Robbins Has anybody looked at Alan “Laddie” Ladd Jr. as an auteur of U.S. film’s late-’70s/early-’80s science-fiction renaissance? By definition, the auteur theory addresses directors, but producer-execs are inevitably part of a film’s genome–at their worst, barriers to a film’s artistic ambitions, at their best, enablers of daring visions, and often rescuers or champions of interesting failures. Ladd, of course, famously midwifed and defended Star Wars (later Star Wars: Episode IV- A New Hope) while he was president of Fox, and the studio went on to shepherd Alien to theatres during his tenure.¹ His production firm, The Ladd Company, sent forth Blade Runner, the first film to put a Philip K. Dick concept on the screen in addition to being very much its own, deeply influential beast. Some unifiers among these films include introductory crawls or intertitles, situating the audience in a far future or faraway galaxy; grimy or rusty milieux, painting the SF frontier as a sumptuous scrap pile; deep attention to class, with starcraft piloted by hardworking space jockeys in trucker caps; and, as it was pointed out to me on Facebook the other day, a reliance on established fantasy/SF artists (H.R. Giger, Ron Cobb, Moebius) to carry out much of the production design. Building a world costs money, and Ladd signed the checks.²

Barbarella (1968) – Blu-ray Disc

August 5, 20121960s, 2012, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Fantasy, France, Italy, Sci-Fi

***/**** Image A Sound A-
starring Jane Fonda, John Phillip Law, Marcel Marceau, Ugo Tognazzi
screenplay by Terry Southern and Roger Vadim, based on the comic by Jean Claude Forest and Claude Brulé
directed by Roger Vadim

by Bryant Frazer Barbarella begins in the fur-lined cockpit of a space-faring starcraft, fabulously appointed with a statue of a moon goddess and, inexplicably, what looks to be a full-sized replica of A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grand Jatte. Despite the high-flown frivolity of its conception and the infectiously groovy theme song, this tableau does not represent the most quintessentially with-it of all possible sci-fi worlds. That changes when the astronaut who has floated into view starts pulling off the different panels of her moon-suit to reveal, underneath the shapeless layers of scuba-like gear, a naked strawberry-blonde with slender, delicate fingers and legs that don’t quit.