Sci-Fi Archives - Page 2 of 33 - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

Telluride ’23: Poor Things

September 5, 2023****/****, 2023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Ireland, Romance, Sci-Fi, Telluride, UK

****/****
starring Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo, Willem Dafoe, Ramy Youssef
screenplay by Tony McNamara, based upon the novel by Alasdair Gray
directed by Yorgos Lanthimos

by Walter Chaw Ex Machina by way of Anaïs Nin, Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things is a libertine exercise-cum-fable about the hypocrisies of politesse and the occasional eruptions of collective sexual hysteria designed exclusively for shackling women to proverbial bits and millstones. It is the final of three films in 2023 that use Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as a launchpad for progressive genre explorations, locating in the novel’s stitched-together creature a fulsome metaphor for the indignities afforded the spirit encased in prisons of rotting flesh. Rather than quibble about the merits of one over the other, watch all three (Bomani J. Story’s The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster and Laura Moss’s Birth/Rebirth being the other two) in any sequence to witness the unfolding of an extended treatise on gender and racial politics delivered with brio, invention, wicked intelligence, and bracing creative courage. It’s possible to make a movie of a lecture, but it’s more effective to make dangerous, even experimental, art from which all manner of lecture and examination will eventually be constructed. The former is the province of creators limited by their fear and ignorance, the latter of mad scientists inordinately confident in the ability of their cinematic children to find a way through the rubble of a drowned and ruined world. I don’t know that these three films are the best three films of the year, but they’re among them, and certainly, they comprise an uncanny trilogy for a period in which the United States has stripped women of their bodily autonomy at the moment of a suspiciously-timed rise in fascist white nationalism and its handmaiden, Puritanism. They’re doing it in the open: raising a flag of moral panic waved by Evangelical fucknuts pushing hard for an Apocalypse they hope will consign everyone else on this burning Earth to a damnation born of their perverse, onanistic fetishism.

Telluride ’23: Fingernails

September 4, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Romance, Sci-Fi, Telluride, UK

½*/****
starring Jessie Buckley, Jeremy Allen White, Riz Ahmed, Luke Wilson
written by Christos Nikou, Stavros Raptis, Sam Steiner
directed by Christos Nikou

by Walter Chaw If you ever wondered what a tuneless Yorgos Lanthimos rip-off would look like, Christos Nikou’s Fingernails has your answer. It’s lifeless, pointless, idiosyncratic in the basic, formula-bound way non-idiosyncratic people imagine idiosyncrasy to be like, and it staggers around trying to make sense of its internal logic before it’s too late–but it’s too late. There’s no plan here that makes sense, only a high concept that sounded smart one night and a trillion-dollar corporation desperate for something to fill the voracious maw of its content extruder. Fingernails is the stupid-person’s version of Dogtooth, substituting an explicitly violent and sexual fable for the dangers of oppressive belief systems with a conspicuous nothing-burger that, not knowing what it’s about or how to be about it, is predictably a dumpster fire that thinks it’s about the indomitability of love yet in execution is about nothing. The movie has going for it three of the very finest actors working right now in Jessie Buckley, Riz Ahmed, and Jeremy Allen White–and it has going against it a script that feels like a first draft, desperate direction, and a technical presentation that, at least in its festival incarnation, was marred with flaws that exacerbated the impression the film’s brand is “undercooked.” Everyone deserved better.

Fantasia Festival ’23: Aporia

July 28, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Sci-Fi, Time Travel

**½/****
starring Judy Greer, Edi Gathegi, Payman Maadi, Faithe Herman
written and directed by Jared Moshé

by Walter Chaw Titled after a word meaning “irresolvable internal contradiction,” Aporia is a tragicomedy of errors à la The Butterfly Effect in which three well-meaning suburbanites figure out a way to change the past but can’t quite figure out how to avoid causing unexpected temporal fuckups in addition to the ones they’re trying to cause. For what it’s worth, their always remembering their former timelines isn’t addressed in any meaningful way–nor, I guess, does it need to be, given that this is soft sci-fi and not Primer, but I did think about it. I also thought about how the title is probably fair warning against trying to Neil deGrasse Tyson the thing, and so: fair enough. What happens is that grieving widow Sophie (Judy Greer), seven months out from losing husband Malcolm (Edi Gathegi) to a drunk driver, does her best to manage the trauma she and her daughter Riley (Gaithe Herman) are going through, but it’s a losing battle. She confides in her friend Jabir (Payman Maadi) that things are spiralling, and Jabir tells Sophie that he and Malcolm had been working on a time-travel device that could fire a burst of energy to a specific time and place in the past. If they were to kill the drunk driver, they figure, maybe all would be well again in their world. So they do it, and at first it seems like this Monkey’s Paw is one of the rare benevolent Monkey’s Paws. But then Sophie starts feeling guilty over the financial plight the drunk driver’s wife, Kara (Whitney Morgan Cox), suffers in the absence of her lout of a husband.

Superman: 5-Film Collection (1978-1987) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

June 25, 2023****/****, 1970s, 1980s, 2023, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Comedy, Sci-Fi, Superhero, UK

Note: all framegrabs were sourced from the 4K UHD discs

SUPERMAN (1978)
****/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras A-
starring Marlon Brando, Gene Hackman, Christopher Reeve, Ned Beatty
screenplay by Mario Puzo, David Newman, Leslie Newman and Robert Benton
directed by Richard Donner

SUPERMAN II (1981)
***/**** Image A+ Sound B+ Extras A-
starring Gene Hackman, Christopher Reeve, Ned Beatty, Jackie Cooper
screenplay by Mario Puzo, David Newman and Leslie Newman
directed by Richard Lester

SUPERMAN II – THE RICHARD DONNER CUT (2006)
***½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras A-
starring Gene Hackman, Christopher Reeve, Ned Beatty, Jackie Cooper
screenplay by Mario Puzo, David Newman and Leslie Newman
directed by Richard Lester

SUPERMAN III (1983)
**½/**** Image A+ Sound A- Extras B-
starring Christopher Reeve, Richard Pryor, Jackie Cooper, Marc McClure
screenplay by David and Leslie Newman
directed by Richard Lester

SUPERMAN IV: THE QUEST FOR PEACE (1987)
*½/**** Image A- Sound C Extras B
starring Christopher Reeve, Gene Hackman, Jackie Cooper, Marc McClure
screenplay by Lawrence Konner & Mark Rosenthal
directed by Sidney J. Furie

by Walter Chaw The split in Superman–his faultline where he’s the weakest, the most vulnerable to attack–is there from the beginning. He is a Zen kōan whose existence represents the essential riddle at the heart of any mythology for an infallible, omniscient, omnipotent being. He is an eggshell’s impregnable yet permeable surface: incredibly strong and prone to shatter; seamless but filled with life; unknowably alien and a reflection of everyone’s secret self. An incubator and vessel, the source and the end. He is the immovable object and the irresistible force, the “eternal boy scout,” branded at various times by the terminally unempathetic as “boring”–the rejoinder to which is that he’s been the centre of thousands of stories (tens of thousands?) in uninterrupted serialized adventures since his first appearance in Action Comics on April 18, 1938. Superman has persisted through every era of the United States from the Great Depression to now and every war since WWII, through the fall and rise again of the Ku Klux Klan and every form of mass media, in endless rejuvenating cycles bleeding into each other until their borders become a meaningless melange coalescing into a logo that is as archetypal in the West as the outline of a mushroom cloud. He is the literal “super” man, and somehow he means the most to the bullied and the broken–not as a fantasy of retribution, but as hopeful indication that even the most perfect of us are beset by doubt and alienation. He is the essential shining metaphor for post-modern existentialism.

The Flash (2023)

June 16, 20232023, Action, Adventure, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, New Zealand, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical, Time Travel

*½/****
starring Ezra Miller, Sasha Calle, Kiersey Clemons, Michael Keaton
screenplay by Christina Hodson
directed by Andy Muschietti

by Walter Chaw Andy Muschietti’s jittery, frenetic The Flash has about it the feeling of someone getting away with something. Some of that’s extratextual, given the tribulations of its ingratiating star Ezra Miller, who went on a mini crime spree–caught on camera choking a female fan, accused of grooming/kidnapping an underage girl and exposing an infant to a firearm, and so on–and some of it is due to Miller’s performance, by turns irritating and overblown, which again is either on purpose or just who Miller is. Lots has already been written about this movie being allowed to go forward under David Zaslav’s anti-art reign over the storied Warner Bros. brand while other, largely minority-led films and television shows get vanished into the tax write-off cornfield. Even more has been written about the delays that greeted this tentpole as the studio waited for Miller’s name to dissipate from the news cycle. Everyone has their redline, and I’m not equipped to judge people who won’t watch a Roman Polanski film yet own the entire Led Zeppelin discography. Everyone has a blind eye, and we turn it according to personal instructions hypocritical, mercurial, and mysterious. It is what it is. I am of the belief, however, that only the bad guys burn books.

Elemental (2023)

June 14, 2023****/****, 2023, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, Drama, Family, Fantasy, Pixar, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

****/****
screenplay by Peter Sohn & Kat Likkel and Brenda Hsueh
directed by Peter Sohn

by Walter Chaw I tell this tale over and over again as I see echoes of it pop up now in a landscape temporarily interested in the particulars of the immigrant story, but my parents came to the United States in the early ’70s to complete their educations: my mother her Master’s in Secondary Education, my father a Ph.D. in Geochemical Engineering. They settled in Golden, Colorado, in the cradle of the Rocky Mountains, after getting married at the Justice of the Peace, saying their vows phonetically and anglicizing our family name before my father really knew how to write in English–if you were ever wondering why it is my name is spelled “Chaw” when it was more common to go by “Chow” or “Cho” or “Chou.” My dad, he did his best. Rather than teach or pursue a career in mineral mining or oil, he decided he wanted to be his own boss. His temperament, I think, made it hard for him to work for someone else. So he opened a rock shop in Golden, learned silversmithing, and made and repaired jewelry. I don’t know if it was his dream to do this, but it’s what he did for the rest of his life until the stress and misery of it killed him at 54. My mom was pulled into it with him but quit when he died. I disappointed them both long before that, changing my major from Biochemical Engineering to English long about the time I ran into Differential Equations freshman year. We were estranged until my wife insisted we invite them to our wedding. My wife is the angel of my better nature and guardian of the tatters of my soul.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023)

June 2, 2023****/****, 2023, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Family, Sci-Fi, Spider-Man, Superhero, Theatrical

****/****
written by Phil Lord & Christopher Miller and Dave Callaham
directed by Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, Justin K. Thompson

by Walter Chaw Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is fucking spectacular. Taking the baton from Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse‘s Oscar-winning team of Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, and Rodney Rothman, new co-directors Joaquim Don Santos, Kemp Powers, and Justin K. Thompson have created something that feels like a chi-chi art gallery in uptown Manhattan, where geniuses who make things you can’t believe you’re seeing are all exhibiting their mind-blowing riffs on the same pop-cultural theme. I even thought of Peter Greenaway’s work in how the characters have colour-coded costumes to exist in mood-specific settings that transition from one to the next at a dazzling, dizzying, breakneck pace. Every inch of Across the Spider-Verse is filled with light and detail without being overcrowded. It’s a sensory amphetamine, kaleidoscopic, exhilarating, yet somehow not exhausting. I sometimes forget why I ever loved superheroes and comic books, given the direness of the flavourless gruel parade masquerading as outsider art nowadays. Then along come Into the Spider-Verse and now Across the Spider-Verse to remind me how important these stories are when they’re told in the voices of the oppressed rather than through the stock portfolios of the oppressors. In the hands of the people who are hurting, comic books can be and often are fantasies of hope. In the hands of the wealthy seeking to become wealthier, they’re fantasies of exploitation, colonization, and fascism.

Boston Underground Film Festival ’23: Smoking Causes Coughing

March 29, 20232022, 2023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Film Festivals, France, Horror, Satire, Sci-Fi, Superhero

Fumer fait tousser
***/****
starring Anaïs Demoustier, Gilles Lellouche, Jean-Pascal Zadi, Oulaya Amamra
written and directed by Quentin Dupieux

by Walter Chaw French provocateur Quentin Dupieux’s eleventh film Smoking Causes Coughing is an anthology picture organized around a framing device in which five costumed idiots forced to go on a team-building retreat tell each other horrifying tales around a campfire. I’ve been decidedly lukewarm on Dupieux’s films. They’re the very definition of an acquired taste, and I suspect they’re hit-or-miss even if you’re dialled into their frequency. His best-known film is probably Rubber (2010), a creature-feature about a car tire that causes folks’ heads to explode using “telepathy.” That’s the punchline to the long setup of a tire rolling around to tense music, which Dupieux punctuates with dialogue that’s knowingly campy, dedicatedly stupid, and ramped up with vein-bulging sincerity. It’s the kind of conceit that attracts viewers who like to laugh at movies. I think Dupieux’s sense of humour relies a lot on exaggeration and repetition, with the former landing like grossly performative sarcasm and the latter like the most irritating person you know milking a joke until the doggedness itself becomes the joke. For the most part, Dupieux’s movies don’t think much of the genres they’re mocking and, by extension, they don’t think much of the audiences for them, either.

Boston Underground Film Festival ’23: Spaghetti Junction

March 27, 20232023, Disability, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Sci-Fi

*/****
starring Cate Hughes, Cam McHarg, Eleanore Miechkowksi, Tyler Rainey
written and directed by Kirby McClure

The Boston Underground Film Festival runs from March 22-March 26, 2023. Click here for more info.

by Walter Chaw A spirited, earnest, decidedly kitchen-sink pastiche of John Carpenter’s Starman, Kirby McClure’s Spaghetti Junction sports a game cast engaged in a scattershot project too distracted to land. I found it to be a lot like talking to someone on cocaine. Which is to say, I don’t think it’s about nothing, only that whatever it’s focused on for a moment is the most important thing there ever was–but then the moment passes, supplanted by the actual most important thing there ever was. You can follow it, but I’m not convinced the juice is worth the squeeze. Recent amputee August (Cate Hughes), trying not to be a burden to struggling single-dad Dave (Cameron McHarg), is doing her best to get along with rebellious older sister Shiny (Eleanore Miechkowski). Dad wants Shiny to take August with her everywhere, but Shiny just wants to be alone with her loser boyfriend, Antonio (Jesse Gallegos). Though Dad’s motivated by guilt over the car accident that took August’s foot, August is eager to move on with mastering her prosthetic and trying to be seen whole… At least, that’s what I think is motivating her. As Spaghetti Junction doesn’t really articulate the point, I wonder if it was avoided on purpose. Bolstering the read of this as a disability melodrama, Antonio does call August a “cripple” out of frustration at her being a persistent cockblock, but she’s not there to hear it and Shiny doesn’t object, so…whatever you take from the disability subplot of the film, if there is one, depends on whatever inference you’re willing to make from the information provided.

M3GAN (2023) [Unrated Edition] – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Code

March 21, 20232023, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi, Thriller

***/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B-
starring Allison Williams, Violet McGraw, Amie Donald, Jenna Davis
screenplay by Akela Cooper
directed by Gerard Johnstone

by Walter Chaw That the Internet works the way it does and evolved as quickly as it did likely had everything to do with it being the finest distributor of pornography the world had ever seen. If a band of apes created something like the Internet, for instance, they would use it primarily to inflict violent dominance over others–and for sex, if possible. No “ifs” about it: we are, and we did. When an artificial intelligence was tasked with machine learning via the Internet, it became a misanthropic, misogynistic racist almost instantly. The Internet is also the single greatest anthropological bellwether ever created, diagnosing who we are when we’re not obsessively adjusting our mask of civility; 100% pure id. I love Alex Garland’s Ex Machina because it understands that if a robot that looked like Alicia Vikander were invented, men would try to fuck it, and no expense would be too great in that pursuit. It doesn’t even have to resemble Alicia Vikander–it can just be a flashlight with a rubber hole in it. Which brings us to the question M3GAN refuses to confront. If you make a little blonde doll that looks like a 12-year-old Fiona Gubelmann, you’re opening an entire hornet’s nest of uncomfortable issues that would be fascinating to address. What happens when unfettered tech capitalism collides with pedophilia? I mean, the Replicants in Blade Runner are soldiers, teachers…and prostitutes. Even Spielberg’s A.I. recognizes that great leaps in technology are historically tied to warfare and rutting.

65 (2023)

March 11, 20232023, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

*/****
starring Adam Driver, Ariana Greenblatt, Chloe Coleman, Nika King
written and directed by Scott Beck & Bryan Woods

by Walter Chaw Bryan Woods and Scott Beck’s 65 is a straight-line exercise: You are familiar with where it begins, you are familiar with where it ends, and you are familiar with the line it travels. It starts with a man of action mourning a lost child. He has an opportunity to become a surrogate father to a kid who has lost her parents. Their time in our company ends with them jetting off to further adventures. If it’s true there are only one or two stories in the Western canon, then it’s not about the what but the how. The how of 65 is piew piew piew lasers and rrrrraaaawr rwar rwaaar! dinosaurs. When I was in elementary school, my best friend and I decided the greatest movie ever would involve aliens fighting dinosaurs, because, as children, we were undemanding of our entertainment to do anything beyond satisfy the most simplistic desires of our pea-sized lizard brains. We kept spending eighty 1980s dollars on Atari 2600 games because we could imagine they looked good. It was during this period that I saw most of the terrible movies I still love unconditionally for their ability to remind me of how much more promise the world seemed to hold back then. I even have an Atari 2600 connected and in working order. I’ve been grateful to have grown out of being that easy to please, though now I can’t think of a single reason why.

Invaders from Mars (1953) – 4K Ultra HD

February 2, 20231950s, 2023, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Sci-Fi

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras A-
starring Helena Carter, Arthur Franz, Jimmy Hunt, Leif Erickson
screenplay by Richard Blake
production designed and directed by William Cameron Menzies

by Bill Chambers Predating Jack Finney’s novel The Body Snatchers by two years and Don Siegel’s seminal film adaptation, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, by three, William Cameron Menzies’s Invaders from Mars makes for an apt precursor in featuring a child protagonist and beginning at the dawn of an invasion instead of the usual in media res. When his alarm clock reminds him in the middle of the night to check out “Orion in its zenith,” little David MacLean (Jimmy Hunt) accidentally rouses his father, George (Leif Erickson), who is careful not to discourage the curiosity of a fellow “scientist” while tucking his son back into bed. David is awakened again by a commotion outside, and from his bedroom window sees a flying saucer disappear below the horizon. Dad agrees to check it out, which is of course not the wisest idea, yet his respect for his son’s intelligence is touching. While a twist ending recontextualizes this moment, suggesting it may have been wishful thinking on David’s part, that’s touching, too: Here’s a movie where the child’s fantasy of saving the world isn’t about demonstrating feats of heroism beyond his years, but about adults giving him the benefit of the doubt.

Infinity Pool (2023)

January 27, 20232023, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, France, Horror, Hungary, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

**½/****
starring Alexander Skarsgård, Mia Goth, Cleopatra Coleman, Jalil Lespert
written and directed by Brandon Cronenberg

by Angelo Muredda Brandon Cronenberg delivers his own visceral riff on the resort satire trend with Infinity Pool, a high-concept thriller that shares obvious genetic material with its precursor, Possessor (2021), but feels more like the runty kid brother in terms of its ideas. With his third feature, Cronenberg hones his skillsets in grounded sci-fi storytelling and kaleidoscopic montage while continuing to make a meal of the charge that he’s merely following in his father’s footsteps as a new purveyor of brainy body horror, boldly playing once more with the motifs of inheritance and imitation where less confident nepotism babies might dodge the comparison outright. Yet in the absence of stronger material, these predilections don’t ripen into rich artistic fruits so much as they rot, leaving Infinity Pool‘s success riding largely on the back of its occasionally startling images and self-effacing cast, who, like Cronenberg, are riffing on the roles we expect from them.

M3GAN (2023)

January 5, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

***/****
starring Allison Williams, Violet McGraw, Amie Donald, Jenna Davis
screenplay by Akela Cooper
directed by Gerard Johnstone

Avatar: The Way of Water (2022)

December 13, 20222022, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

½*/****
starring Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver, Kate Winslet
screenplay by James Cameron & Rick Jaffa & Amanda Silver
directed by James Cameron

by Walter Chaw The discourse leading up to James Cameron’s Avatar: The Way of Water (hereafter Avatar 2) has been largely about how although the first Avatar is the second-highest-grossing film of all time, it hasn’t left much of a mark on popular culture. It’s a take derided for the evidence of the numbers and the emergence of a theme-park attraction, though I do wonder if its cultural impact isn’t like that Song of the South ride “Splash Mountain,” which is only just now, finally, closing in early 2023. I don’t know that the vile myth of the happy enslaved person made much of a mark on popular culture, either, insomuch as it is, itself, already and essentially popular culture. Maybe Avatar didn’t make much of a “cultural impact” because it didn’t introduce any new ideas into the ecosystem while profiting from a few antiquated ones. In the interim between Avatar‘s release in 2009 and this first of four promised sequels, a lot has changed in terms of cultural tolerances–even if, systemically, things have not only not improved but regressed. Maybe the problem with Avatar is the same one that any stories about first contact with a technologically less sophisticated alien culture share, given how our historical templates for these narratives involve genocide and the pillaging of natural resources. When a white person tells a story of a white man saving an indigenous culture from other white men, however, I start to worry about what kind of fetish is being indulged, and to what purpose/at what cost. What’s not in doubt is that Avatar 2 will make bank, because whatever kink is being indulged in white-saviour narratives has proven a durable and profitable one in a white nationalist state. That’s one way to look at it, anyway.

Nope (2022) [Collector’s Edition] – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray

November 3, 20222022, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Horror, Japan, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Thriller

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version.

**/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B+
starring Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer, Steven Yeun, Michael Wincott
written and directed by Jordan Peele

by Walter Chaw I don’t think you ever see the heroes getting hurt, but they limp around a lot, and I couldn’t stop wondering why. Just because it’s more dramatic to be out of breath and limpy? There’s a rule about not looking something in the eye, but I don’t know how the horses can obey it, or if horses look up and behind them when they run. I’ve never seen them do that, in any case. If there’s a rule about eyes, is the plan, in the end, to put eyes on the hood of that hoodie, and if it isn’t, why did he? I understand there’s a point being made here about how Hollywood doesn’t care about the people who work in it–especially minorities and child actors–once their usefulness has been used up, yet I worry if by equating their trauma with a television chimp who goes insane and starts eating faces that the analogy, assuming there is one, has gotten as out of control as the chimp. There’s a reveal that’s less a reveal of an important plot point than a reveal that the reveal of an important plot point was left out somewhere. There’s a powerful opening scene where something happens involving a nickel that is very effective up until the moment it’s explained, at which point it no longer makes sense; why did it do what it did and not what it does for the rest of the film? Is it attracted to movement? Noise? It seems like both–but if so, how are folks constantly escaping it by moving around and making noise? That picture she takes? It looks ridiculous and will be convincing to no one. Wouldn’t the camera and the film the famous cinematographer is shooting still be in one piece, like a black box, when the thing happens with the balloon? How is that the first balloon it’s ever seen or eaten? If I ate a balloon (and could, for instance, withstand multiple gravities of speed and possibly interstellar travel), would I explode?

Prey (2022)

August 4, 2022****/****, 2022, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Horror, Sci-Fi, Streaming, Thriller

****/****
starring Amber Midthunder, Dakota Beavers, Dane DiLiegro, Stormee Kipp
screenplay by Patrick Aison
directed by Dan Trachtenberg

by Walter Chaw There is a complete lack of pretense to Dan Trachtenberg’s Prey–lack of pretense being one of the emerging traits of a filmmaker whose two films so far (both stealth sequels, both tremendously ethical towards their source materials) are lean genre exercises that feel like minor miracles in a landscape studded with sodden, high-profile disasters. Neither a puzzlebox nor a legacy sequel requiring a spreadsheet and an encyclopedic knowledge of a quarter-century of lore, Prey tells a particular, standalone story in an economical way. It’s a coming-of-age period piece with shades of Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto; what I’m saying is it means business. Set in the Northern Great Plains in 1719, it follows a spirited young Comanche woman, Naru (Amber Midthunder), as she tries to prove herself as a hunter under the shadow of her brother, Taabe (Dakota Beavers), a gifted bowman and all-around badass who has a stranglehold on the admiration of their tribe. When she follows an all-male hunting party in search of the mountain lion that has attacked one of their people, one of the young men asks her why she’s bothered, given that they don’t need a cook out there in the wilderness. But she sees things they miss in their arrogance and desire to impress one another. Like the skinned rattlesnake left by a path, or the footprint bigger than anything that should be in this place. The boys discount the latter as nothing to worry about, lest they be seen as cautious and thoughtful–as feminine, like Naru.

Nope (2022)

July 21, 20222022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

**/****
starring Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer, Steven Yeun, Michael Wincott
written and directed by Jordan Peele

12 Monkeys (1995) – Blu-ray Disc|4K Ultra HD

July 12, 20221990s, 2019, 2022, 4K Ultra HD, Arrow Video, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Terry Gilliam, Drama, Sci-Fi, Time Travel

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

Twelve Monkeys
***½/****
BD – Image A Sound A- Extras B
4K – Image A- Sound A- Extras B
starring Bruce Willis, Madeleine Stowe, Brad Pitt, Christopher Plummer
screenplay by David Webb Peoples & Janet Peoples, inspired by the film La Jetée written by Chris Marker
directed by Terry Gilliam

by Bryant Frazer Twelve Monkeys is a movie about a moment. Yes, sure, it’s a decades-spanning science-fiction tale about time travel, the illusion of free will, and a romance at the end of the world. Yet its defining facet is its repeated, soulful depiction of a few terrible minutes in the life of a young boy who witnesses an event that’s tragic in ways he can’t comprehend. That’s how the story starts and how it ends, the first thing we see and also the last–a child’s eyes, open wide, as he is exposed to the spectacle of death, probably for the first time. Although Twelve Monkeys deals with the destruction of human civilization by a lethal contagion, and the plague’s aftermath, less of the action centres on the plague itself than on this little boy. Mostly, it’s concerned with a man named James Cole (Bruce Willis), who believes he’s a time-travelling agent sent back from the 2030s, after a small number of survivors retreat to the safety of underground caves. Liberated from a prison cell for the mission to contemporary Philadelphia (ground zero for the virus release), Cole is trying to discover information about its origins that can be used, decades hence, to help make the earth’s ruined surface safe for human habitation. Success means redemption, since Cole would return to his future world a hero. But in an ironic twist, Cole is almost immediately institutionalized; only psychiatrist Kathryn Railly (Madeleine Stowe), a specialist in “madness and apocalyptic visions,” and fellow patient Jeffrey Goines (Brad Pitt), who may be a nascent environmental terrorist, suspect Cole’s references to upcoming cataclysmic events may be more than just delusional.

Lightyear (2022)

June 26, 20222022, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disney, Drama, Family, Pixar, Sci-Fi

**/****
screenplay by Jason Headley, Angus MacLane
directed by Angus MacLane

by Walter Chaw Angus MacLane’s handsome-looking Lightyear gets enough things right that it’s unfortunate it can’t quite shake how its best parts are borrowed from Joe Haldeman’s classic The Forever War. It has more problems than that, granted, mainly with how its thin supporting cast fails to give the film the humour and pathos it needs to honour the by-now-familiar “heartwarming tearjerker” Pixar formula. There’s not a lot of rewatch value here, alas, and that has everything to do with Lightyear‘s awkward dialogue and inability to stick the landing–maladies, both, that afflicted co-writer Jason Headley’s previous Pixar outing, the similarly disappointing and COVID-doomed Onward. The highlight of the piece is robot cat SOX (Peter Sohn), who provides the film its credulous audience surrogate as well as its adorable animal-sidekick comic relief. By himself, SOX saves Lightyear, though he can’t elevate it above the airless jokes and pained delivery. What a shame, considering the movie sets a new bar in terms of the complexity of its digital imagery and animation. With Taika Waititi in the cast, I gotta think they could’ve hit him up for a quick joke polish.