Sci-Fi Archives - Page 4 of 34 - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

Moonfall (2022)

February 15, 20222022, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, China, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, UK

***/****
starring Halle Berry, Patrick Wilson, John Bradley, Donald Sutherland
screenplay by Roland Emmerich & Harald Kloser & Spenser Cohen
directed by Roland Emmerich

by Walter Chaw Between The Day After Tomorrow and the new Moonfall, Roland Emmerich has become our unlikely climate disaster Tierisius: Oedipus’s blind seer, dispensing fair warning to a population not paying any attention. In the earlier film, global warming causes a new Ice Age and an exodus of American refugees looking for sanctuary in Mexico, while Moonfall sees the entire west coast flooded and essentially everyone at sea level in the United States trying to get to Colorado. Both ideas are ripe with satiric irony, animated with a sense of gallows humour about how extraordinarily shortsighted American leadership is in the face of obvious signs and portents. Oh, and science, of course, which should have been enough once the evidence of our own eyes somehow proved inadequate. Even Moonfall‘s ultimate revelation–something about AI and space arks and a running gag about Elon Musk–speaks brilliantly, however intentionally, to our primate desire to conflate the hoarding of generational wealth with genius, when all the wealthy really want to do is escape the rapidly-changing planet they’ve strip-mined for its resources. All that, plus a broad redux of H.G. Wells’s The First Men In the Moon, and, kids, we got ourselves the smart and unpretentious version of Don’t Look Up.

John Carpenter’s Escape from L.A. (1996) – Blu-ray Disc|4K Ultra HD + Digital Code

February 14, 20221990s, 2014, 2022, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: John Carpenter, Sci-Fi, Thriller

Please note that these screencaps are from an alternate source and do not necessarily reflect either of the discs covered herein.

**/****
BD – Image A- Sound B+
4K – Image A- Sound A-
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.

Dune (2021) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

January 11, 2022****/****, 2021, 2022, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Directors: Denis Villeneuve, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Sci-Fi

Dune Part One
****/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B
starring Timothée Chalamet, Rebecca Ferguson, Oscar Isaac, Javier Bardem
screenplay by Jon Spaihts and Denis Villeneuve and Eric Roth, based on the novel by Frank Herbert
directed by Denis Villeneuve

by Walter Chaw I couldn’t get through the Lord of the Rings trilogy when I was a kid, but I devoured Frank Herbert’s Dune in a fever and read it again immediately. I have a tactile memory of it. Mostly, I was haunted by the frequent use of passages from the diaries, histories, and philosophies of one Princess Irulan, inserted throughout the text to give the book’s story a sense of lost time, immense. I wouldn’t experience this feeling reading something again until years later when I finally got into Proust, this thing where you read it in the present, but the text is irretrievably past. You’ve arrived at the dock, but the ferry, impossibly beautiful and decked out with incomprehensible pleasures and mysteries, has left, and it’s not coming back. Princess Irulan opens the book by warning us not to be deceived by its hero, Paul, having spent the first fourteen years of his life on a planet called “Caladan”–that his story is inextricable from the fate of a place called “Arrakis.” It reminds me of the many epitaphs for T.E. Lawrence. Herbert told his son that he left multiple threads unresolved in Dune so its readers would want to revisit it–return obsessively to it to follow different paths, suggestions, prophecies. I think it’s why I’ve read four or five of the subsequent Dune novels only once and retained so little of the stories they tell and the answers they provide. It’s like Arthur C. Clarke’s sequels to his 2001: A Space Odyssey novelization: I don’t actually want to know what’s inside the Monolith.

The Matrix Resurrections (2021)

December 21, 20212021, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Esoterica, Sci-Fi, Streaming, Theatrical

½*/****
starring Keanu Reeves, Carrie-Anne Moss, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Neil Patrick Harris
screenplay by Lana Wachowski & David Mitchell & Aleksandar Hemon
directed by Lana Wachowski

by Walter Chaw I guess I wouldn’t mind that The Matrix: Resurrections (hereafter Matrix 4) is so stupid if it didn’t spend so much of its bloat trying to explain itself. Just let it go. If you’re riding with the same plot as Space Jam: A New Legacy, own it–run with it, for fuck’s sake. Exposition is always a delicate if necessary evil, but here it’s particularly undignified. It’s Glen from Raising Arizona explaining his Polack jokes. The plot of Matrix 4 is essentially that conversation with the guy who’s way too stoned who has this great idea for a Matrix sequel. “Okay, okay, see, Neo is–haha–NEO is Mr. Anderson again and–haha, check it–he’s like this programmer dude, real boring piece of shit, and he made a game back in 1999 called ‘The Matrix’, and yo, yo, yo, wait, wait… What if Trinity was The One, too?” You’ve heard of the concept of “raising all boats”? Well, an hour of deadening exposition devoted to explaining a plot this contrived, this smug and half-cocked, this simultaneously convoluted and simplistic, sinks the boat–sinks all fucking boats. Good poker players have confidence and chill; not only does Lana Wachowski have a real bad tell, she gives speeches about what she’s holding. “Hi, I’m Lana, creator of The Matrix, and I’m drawing on an inside straight.” Small wonder Lilly refused to participate in this boondoggle, leaving Lana to recruit their Cloud Atlas partner-in-crime David Mitchell as one of her co-writers. That either of these people kept their names on this is evidence of an almost majestic, feline confidence.

Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021)

December 17, 20212021, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Spider-Man, Superhero, Theatrical

**½/****
starring Tom Holland, Zendaya, Benedict Cumberbatch, Marisa Tomei
written by Chris McKenna & Erik Sommers
directed by Jon Watts

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Peter Parker (Tom Holland), having just been outed to the world as Spider-Man by a dying Mysterio (Jake Gyllenhaal), finds himself besieged by press and angry mobs mistaken in their belief that Mysterio was a very handsome hero. This pushes Peter into hiding with his Aunt May (Marisa Tomei), girlfriend MJ (Zendaya), and bestie Ned (Jacob Batalon). The kids need guards when they go to school (why are they still going to school?) and are trying to focus on applying to MIT because they’re all three of them brilliant, in case you’ve forgotten. Recognizing the toll of his exposure on the people who have remained loyal to him, Peter asks Dr. Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) to cast a spell on the universe so that people forget him. How this might be achieved in the age of social media and pocket cameras is dismissed as “magic,” which is also how it’s explained that a hole in the multiverse opens up, allowing a bunch of villains and other versions of Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire, Andrew Garfield) to cross over into this one’s reality. At least the film has the self-awareness to constantly call out the facility of “magic” as a catch-all, layering its characters’ incredulity in a running joke about a “wizard’s dungeon” and one character’s “You have magic here?” As wit goes, it ain’t much, but I’ll take it.

Licorice Pizza (2021) + Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021)

November 22, 20212021, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Coming of Age, Directors: Paul Thomas Anderson, Drama, Romance, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

LICORICE PIZZA
*½/****
starring Alana Haim, Cooper Hoffman, Sean Penn, Tom Waits
written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

GHOSTBUSTERS: AFTERLIFE
**½/****
starring Carrie Coon, Paul Rudd, Finn Wolfhard, Mckenna Grace
written by Gil Kenan & Jason Reitman
directed by Jason Reitman

by Walter Chaw In Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza, John Michael Higgins plays real-life restaurateur Jerry Frick, proprietor of “The Mikado.” Frick is married to a severe and disapproving Japanese woman (Yumi Mizui) who apparently doesn’t speak any English, although she seems to understand it fluently. She certainly understands her husband, who doesn’t speak Japanese but does speak English, when he’s speaking it to her, in a cartoonish Asian accent. This is perhaps a commentary on how backwards everyone was in 1973, but Licorice Pizza is not otherwise a satire, so what the fuck is going on here? Is PTA reserving the barbed edge of his keen sociological blade exclusively to excavate anti-Asian depictions in film and nowhere else? Based on Hong Chau’s brief but memorable turn in Inherent Vice as a tough hooker (oops) who tries to warn the idiot hero of danger, there’s reason to hope. Yet if Frick is meant to be a satire of how white men are racist towards Asians in general and Asian women in particular… How? Just by the fact of him? In his second scene, he shows up with a different wife (Megumi Anjo), explaining how his first wife has left him and this is the new Mrs. Frick. The joke is either that Frick is a fetishist, or that all Asians look alike.

Finch (2021)

November 5, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Sci-Fi, Streaming, UK

*½/****
starring Tom Hanks
written by Craig Luck and Ivor Powell
directed by Miguel Sapochnik

by Walter Chaw No movie with Tom Hanks can be entirely bad, especially when that movie marries Hanks favourites Apollo 13 and Cast Away–two films in which our Jimmy Stewart is asked to be ingenious when everything goes wrong. In Finch, he is Finch, an engineer in the post-apocalypse after a solar flare has shredded our ozone layer, wreaking havoc on our crops and allowing the sun to fry people instantly. Time has passed since then, it seems, and there are few signs of life left in St. Louis other than Finch and Finch’s dog, Goodyear. Like Hanks’s volleyball buddy, the dog is named for a product and, because we’ve all read I Am Legend, we know that Goodyear is vital to Finch as the last link Finch has with not just the former world, but his own humanity as well. Oh, the humanity. Finch really loves the Don McLean song “American Pie” and, testament to Tom Hanks’s titanic charisma and reservoir of goodwill, we like him anyway. We forgive him for Chet; we can forgive him for “American Pie.” As the film opens, he’s singing “American Pie” and scavenging for goods at the local dollar mart, meaning this is a Chloe Zhao movie all of a sudden though thankfully not for long.

Eternals (2021)

October 27, 20212021, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical, UK

*/****
starring Gemma Chan, Richard Madden, Kumail Nanjiani, Angelina Jolie
screenplay by Chloé Zhao and Chloe Zhao & Patrick Burleigh
directed by Chloé Zhao

by Walter Chaw Chloé Zhao’s follow-up to her Oscar-winning Nomadland is one of those movies that is more interesting to talk about than to watch–which, in the final analysis, may be the poet laureate of South Dakota’s most distinctive auteur hallmark. Despite that it’s the twenty-some-odd instalment of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Eternals is defiantly a Chloé Zhao picture, and the amount of subversion required to make it so highlights both MCU overlord Kevin Feige’s desperation to shake the diversity monkey off his back and his fatal lack of understanding of women creators at the most rudimentary level. In theory that doesn’t matter much if all these folks are asked to do is direct the parts that aren’t generic action scenes, committee-generated in the house style and dropped into the middle of whatever flaccid drama is possible under the narrative conditions like dead paratroopers into a live warzone. What you see in Eternals is a result of what feels less like a partnership with its attendant compromises than like a quiet war waged in the spaces between a boss who thinks he knows what’s happening and a hired gun who’s pretty clever about having her way no matter the amount of oversight. By the third or fourth laborious exposition dump by the least comfortable, least seasoned and natural actor in the loaded cast (that would be 14-year-old Lia McHugh), it’s pretty clear that Zhao’s empathy for unaffected performers rambling in lingering magic-hour landscapes has won the day. Good one, Zhao.

Titane (2021)

October 22, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Belgium, Drama, France, Horror, Palme d'Or Winner, Sci-Fi, Thriller

***/****
starring Vincent Lindon, Agathe Rousselle, Garance Marillier, Lais Salameh
written and directed by Julia Ducournau

by Walter Chaw In Julia Ducournau’s first film, Raw, there’s a part involving scissors wielded near a vagina that almost made me pass out. A sequence in her second film, Titane, involves another massively inappropriate object wielded near, and inside, a vagina, yet it didn’t bother me half as much. This may have something to do with Titane‘s tone and attitude towards menace: In Raw, there’s a tenderness and familiarity to it all that makes the horror invasive, whereas Titane gives off an alien, madcap, Mack Sennett vibe that announces the movie’s allegorical intentions as a barker at a carnival sideshow might. What’s constant in Ducournau’s two films is an admirably reductive drive to boil a woman’s body down to its biological functions. As Titane opens, hero Alexia (Agathe Rousselle)–badly scarred from the titanium plate behind her ear, the product of a childhood car accident she caused by wanting very badly to sing along to the car’s engine noise–is making her living as a stripper/model at an underground car show. Her body is a fetish object the way a car is to certain men, you see, and I’m thinking immediately not only of how men often assign a feminine pronoun to their cars, but also of e.e. cummings’s naughty poem “she being brand.” Here it is in full:

Needle in a Timestack (2021)

October 15, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Romance, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Time Travel, VOD

*/****
starring Leslie Odom, Jr., Freida Pinto, Cynthia Erivo, Orlando Bloom
written for the screen by John Ridley, based on the short story by Robert Silverberg
directed by John Ridley

by Walter Chaw A cautionary tale about writing something whilst in a state of forced, artificial love-drunk, John Ridley’s Needle in a Timestack is this year’s Serenity: a film so intensely invested in its adolescent feelings that it’s headed towards a specific state of camp immortality. Nick (Leslie Odom, Jr.)–because “Nick of time,” get it?–is married to Janine (Cynthia Erivo), and they’re that kind of The Notebook couple who speak to each other as though they were scripted by Nicholas Sparks, who, let’s face it, on the Stephanie Meyer scale of cultural whoopsies, can barely string three words together. “Dance like no one’s watching,” someone moans in a high state of agitation. “Love is a closed circle,” someone else declares; between that and “True Detective”‘s “time is a flat circle,” circles are doing a lot of heavy lifting in the realm of purple overwriting. In this future as imagined by a perfume commercial, time travel is a recreational lark indulged in by the hyper-rich, causing occasional “time waves” that wash over the world like the exact same visualization of the exact same concept in A Sound of Thunder, a film so terrible that your body’s autonomous defense mechanism has already largely expelled it from your memory. That film, like this one, is based on a classic science-fiction story: Ray Bradbury there, Robert Silverberg here. The concept of “based” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in this instance, too.

Telluride ’21: Encounter

September 30, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Film Festivals, Sci-Fi, Telluride, Thriller, UK

**/****
starring Riz Ahmed, Octavia Spencer, Janina Gavankar, Rory Cochrane
screenplay by Joe Barton and Michael Pearce
directed by Michael Pearce

by Walter Chaw It’s possible that Michael Pearce’s Encounter is its own worst enemy. The opening hour or so is remarkable stuff: tetchy, kinetic, terrifying–the honourable sequel in spirit to Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, where insects become the vectors of an alien virus that appears to change our DNA and, with it, our behaviour. Such a smart idea for an era in which more and more people are coming around to the idea that fully half of us at any one time are mindless animals powered by the pleasure principle and the selfish cell and little else. They would watch us die without a flicker of recognizable empathy. Nothing is real to them unless it happens directly to them–there is no evidence save that of the flesh, of their flesh, that could compel them to care about the suffering of another human being. Not even care–nothing could compel them to acknowledge that suffering was possible. They are empty of imagination, devoid of personality; they are essentially alien things neither malign nor beneficent. And there is no better explanation for their existence among us than what Encounter at first appears to be getting at: the government is aware that an unknowable influence has taken over half the population, and it’s only a matter of time before the rest of us succumb. Delicious. Pearce’s treatment of it is delicious, too, as uncomfortable and alive as William Friedkin’s Bug, paired beat-for-frantic-beat with an extraordinary performance by Riz Ahmed, who might be incapable of providing any other.

TIFF ’21: Earwig + Night Raiders

September 23, 20212021, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Belgium, Canada, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, France, New Zealand, Sci-Fi, TIFF, UK

EARWIG
***½/****
starring Paul Hilton, Romola Garai, Alex Lawther, Romane Hemelaers
written by Lucile Hadžihalilović & Geoff Cox
directed by Lucile Hadžhalilović

NIGHT RAIDERS
***/****
starring Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers, Brooklyn Letexier-Hart, Gail Maurice, Amanda Plummer
written and directed by Danis Goulet

by Angelo Muredda Parenting and being looked after are the stuff of nightmares in Lucile Hadžhalilović’s genuinely creepy curio Earwig, which is as visually and aurally arresting as it is inscrutable. A cryptic dance between a man named Albert (Paul Hilton) and his ten-year-old charge, Mia (Romane Hemelaers), the film charts their ritualistic and mostly unspoken interactions in a dingy apartment, making us tense witnesses to an unexplained paternal science experiment conducted under the all-seeing eye of a supervisor who phones in his instructions from offscreen, apparently to prepare the girl for whatever is lying in wait for her. That’s about all we know, though Hadžhalilović skillfully hangs this threadbare plot on indelible images while evoking our primitive stirrings of anxiety for the future. No small feat, given how little dialogue there is.

TIFF ’21: Dune

September 21, 2021****/****, 2021, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, Film Festivals, Sci-Fi, TIFF

Dune Part One
****/****
starring Timothée Chalamet, Rebecca Ferguson, Oscar Isaac, Javier Bardem
screenplay by Jon Spaihts and Denis Villeneuve and Eric Roth, based on the novel by Frank Herbert
directed by Denis Villeneuve

Super 8 (2011) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy|Super 8 – 4K Ultra HD + Digital

September 2, 20212011, 2021, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Coming of Age, DVD, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Spielberg, Thriller

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

***/****
BD – Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A-
4K UHD – Image B Sound A+ Extras A-
starring Elle Fanning, Kyle Chandler, Joel Courtney, Gabriel Basso
written and directed by J.J. Abrams

by Walter Chaw J.J. Abrams’s Spielberg shrine Super 8 mines the birth-of-the-blockbuster nostalgia vein so doggedly that you actually wish it was better than it is. Still, what works about it works really well, the best result of it being that it offers a vehicle for young Elle Fanning that should catapult her to the real superstardom Somewhere would have had anyone seen it. She’s stunning; every second she’s on screen, no matter whether she’s sharing the frame with a two-storey monster, it’s impossible to look away from her. She’s the natural lens-flare Abrams offsets with his trademark visual tick. Fanning’s Alice, the daughter of town drunk Louis (Ron Eldard), is enlisted by a pack of Goonies-stratified youngsters to be the female lead in their kitchen-sink zombie flick. The erstwhile director is the Stand By Me chubby one Charles (Riley Griffiths), and along for the ride are the one who pukes (Gabriel Basso) and the one who likes to blow shit up (Ryan Lee). And, yes, there’s that scene where the kids throw their stuff over a fence, gather up their bikes, and recreate an entire sequence from the Amblin Entertainment logo that opens the picture.

Fantasia Festival ’21: Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes

August 18, 2021****/****, 2021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Japan, Sci-Fi, Time Travel

Droste no hate de bokura
****/****
starring Kazunari Tosa, Riko Fujitani, Gôta Ishida, Aki Asakura
screenplay by Makota Ueda
directed by Junta Yamaguchi

by Walter Chaw Junta Yamaguchi’s directorial debut Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes is zero-budget high-concept done right, a fastball-down-the-middle of a time-travel movie landing right when the concept seemed to have been wrung dry. Logging in at a lean 70 minutes, it doesn’t have a trace of fat on it. More, it manages in that brief span to paint fully-fleshed characters, conjure and pay off a romantic-comedy subplot, and juggle a couple of sharp tonal shifts. It’s so good because it’s so…simple. A strange thing to say about a premise that’s kind of mind-breaking as a pair of connected, closed-circuit monitors accidentally creates a temporal wormhole across the span of two minutes, but there you have it. This little masterpiece proves the truism that whatever the plot might be, as long as the characters and their motivations remain legible and relatable, baby, you got a movie. Simple.

The Suicide Squad (2021)

August 8, 20212021, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Sci-Fi, Stallone, Streaming, Superhero, Theatrical

***½/****
starring Margot Robbie, Idris Elba, John Cena, Viola Davis
written and directed by James Gunn

by Walter Chaw James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad is weird. It’s explosively, hilariously gory, profane, ridiculous, and, best of all, lawless. As much as I love Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, the darkness–the grittiness–he brought to the DC Universe has proven difficult to shake due to its commercial success. In contrast, The Suicide Squad looks and acts a lot like the Adam West “Batman” TV series, a piece fully embracing the elasticity of both its mediums and, though it seems silly to say, one bracingly unafraid of literal colour. I also felt this way about Gunn’s still-dour-but-colorful-by-MCU-standards Guardians of the Galaxy—but this film feels very much like something, from character and production design down to the choice of members for the titular squad, allowed to be whatever it was going to be, damn the torpedoes. Have I mentioned that it’s weird? It’s exquisitely strange, and not just because of the obvious ways in which things are strange, but because it says the bad guys are the colonial-/meddling-minded United States, the military-industrial complex is reliant on the enslavement of the carceral state, and the best test of manhood is not facility with firearms and sociopathy. A billion-dollar IP that isn’t trying to skate the middle line of absolute, frictionless equivocation? Weird, right?

Howard the Duck (1986) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

August 3, 20211980s, 2021, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Disability, Romance, Sci-Fi

**½/**** Image B- Sound A- Extras B
starring Lea Thompson, Jeffrey Jones, Tim Robbins, Ed Gale
written by Willard Huyck & Gloria Katz, based on the Marvel Comics character created by Steve Gerber
directed by Willard Huyck

by Bill Chambers If you’ll indulge me, as I recall it was at my local Sunrise Records that I first laid eyes on the egg with the hatched beak chomping on a cigar, which became as emblematic of Howard the Duck, albeit not as iconic or enduring, as the gleaming bat symbol would become of Batman three summers later. It was on the cover of a 12″ EP of the movie’s title track, performed by Dolby’s Cube featuring Cherry Bomb, a fictitious band consisting of actresses Lea Thompson, Liz Sagal, Holly Robinson, and Dominique Davalos, who did all their own singing. (Thomas “She Blinded Me with Science” Dolby wrote and produced their songs.) When I flipped the jacket, I encountered a photo spread of Thompson in rock-‘n’-roll leathers and big, crimped hair, and I reacted how any 11-year-old boy hot for Marty McFly’s mom would: I begged my dad to buy it for me.

Godzilla vs. Kong (2021) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

July 12, 20212021, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Blu-ray Disc, Sci-Fi

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

½*/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras C+
starring Godzilla, King Kong, Alexander Skarsgård, Demián Bichir
screenplay by Eric Pearson and Max Borenstein
directed by Adam Wingard

by Walter Chaw Godzilla is a reaction to America’s attack on two civilian targets with nuclear weapons in the same way the current American superhero cycle is a reaction to 9/11. King Kong is an offshoot of Edgar Wallace’s sledgehammer racist “Sanders of the River” tales, which he parlayed into early drafts of the screenplay that eventually became 1933’s King Kong. Though it’s possible to make a Godzilla or a King Kong movie without these ghosts of American war crimes, colonialism, and racism haunting it, Adam Wingard’s Godzilla vs. Kong (hereafter GvK) ain’t it. Not when these two giant metaphors for the poison of American exceptionalism destroy Hong Kong, a Chinese city the British only recently returned to the Chinese, before banding together to fight a Mexican-American’s Japanese-piloted robot dinosaur. The film is a mess, an ideological jumble and a disaster of narrative that reduces its able cast to half exposition dump, half glazed reaction shots. It doesn’t have anything to say and even in the worst of its predecessors, this was never the case. GvK isn’t interested in ecology, in arms proliferation, in sociopolitical struggles–and failing all the big things it’s not about, it’s also free of parental issues, a romantic subplot, a compelling villain, or, indeed, a compelling hero. It’s a giant nothing-burger. And that’s without mentioning this new craze of writing a perfect minority child to teach the growed-ups how to get in touch with their better natures.

The Tomorrow War (2021)

July 1, 20212021, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Streaming, Thriller, Time Travel

**½/****
starring Chris Pratt, Yvonne Strahovski, J.K. Simmons, Betty Gilpin
written by Zach Dean
directed by Chris McKay

by Walter Chaw Not to be confused with Joe Haldeman’s classic 1974 novel The Forever War, Chris McKay’s super-stupid The Tomorrow War doesn’t bear up under the slightest prodding yet demonstrates an admirable agreeability to “sciencing the shit out of” part of its solution while dealing, however rotely, with its father/son and father/daughter abandonment themes. Pratt, whose Q-meter stock has fallen because of a few public missteps, proves an affable presence as science teacher-cum-future soldier Dan Forester, enlisted by future soldiers into fighting the tomorrow war against thorn-tossing, bugbear monster things dubbed “White Spikes.” See, in 30 years or so, humans are down to their last half-million and need people from the past to bolster their ranks. But doesn’t that create some temporal anomaly problems? I’m very glad you asked. Yes, it does. That’s why they only recruit people who are going to die within a decade anyway, which is either an incredibly stupid plan in its looseness or an incredibly cynical plan that presumes none of these people will procreate again within the next 10 years–or, you know, otherwise do something that will fuck with the future in an unexpected way. Maybe they’ve accounted for all that and simply don’t share. Or maybe it’s like that Mark Hamill anecdote about how his hair should have been filthy and wet for a scene shot out of sequence but meant to follow the trash-compactor escape in Star Wars: As Harrison Ford sagely informed him, “Kid, it ain’t that kind of movie.”

Black Widow (2021)

June 29, 20212021, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disability, Scarlett Johansson, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical

**½/****
starring Scarlett Johansson, Florence Pugh, David Harbour, Rachel Weisz
screenplay by Eric Pearson
directed by Cate Shortland

by Walter Chaw You know it’s gritty because of the gritty cover song interrupting the bucolic prologue–Think Up Anger ft. Malia J‘s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” this time instead of Rose Betts’s “Song to the Siren.” Too on the nose, perhaps, although they’re both pretty on the nose, let’s be honest. Another clue is a montage under the opening credits that shows rows of little girls abducted not for sex trafficking (because Marvel is more comfortable suggesting sex trafficking than, you know, consensual adult eroticism), but for the purpose of creating a Whedon-fantasy team of Dollhouse assassins. I spent most of my childhood reading comics and have watched and reviewed almost all of the MCU films to this point. I’ve seen none of the TV/streaming shows and don’t intend to remedy that because life is incredibly short and also full to bursting with things I desperately want to see that I still won’t be able to, no matter how smart I am at managing whatever time I have left. I have no idea what’s going on in Black Widow, and I think that once you get bucked off this horse, there’s no getting back on. So here’s Cate Shortland’s Black Widow, the 24th MCU flick, if only the second centred around a female protagonist–one we know has sacrificed herself for the sake of the least interesting/worthy of her male counterparts, meaning this one takes place in either the past or an alternate timeline or something. It doesn’t matter. In the comic-book world, there are new #1s every few cycles that are reboots or speculative storylines or something. It’s how they get you to keep buying them. What matters is, the more you humanize this character you’ve already made abundantly clear you don’t really care about, the worse her already-loathsome sacrifice feels.