Sci-Fi Archives - Page 6 of 33 - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

Dark Phoenix (2019)

June 6, 20192019, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical

***½/****
starring James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence, Jessica Chastain
written and directed by Simon Kinberg

by Walter Chaw So downbeat it plays like a dirge, or a riff on Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone" (which Dylan described as ten pages of self-loathing prose "vomit" that needed to be set to music), Simon Kinberg's Dark Phoenix ain't got nothing and so's got nothing left to lose. Subject to numerous delays and a now-notorious reshoot in response to Captain Marvel beating them to the proverbial punch with a space-set finale, it is, against all odds, a tidy, thematically-succinct capper to Fox's X-Men saga–which, at its best, was always explicit about how these films were metaphors for not fitting in, not being accepted for what you were born as, and the importance of building families when your biological ones turn out to be frightened and faithless. Bryan Singer handled the first two instalments before leaving to do Superman Returns. Those three films–X-Men, X2: X-Men United, and Superman Returns–comprise a trilogy of mythologies for disaffected loners, brutalized by disappointment and betrayal, looking within themselves for value in a universe that sets them eternally, pointedly apart. There's an interesting paper to be written on why the radioactive Singer was so good at telling these kinds of stories. Or maybe not so interesting. After Brett Ratner's pitiful conclusion to the original trilogy, X-Men: The Last Stand, the series began to play with its timelines in exactly the same way reboots of the comics do–jumping ahead decades, sending series favourite Wolverine back in time to stop a mutant genocide–and consequently delivered a few gems along the way in X-Men: Days of Future Past, The Wolverine, and Logan. In the battle between continuity and quality, I guess I don't care if these characters never seem to age.

Starfish (2019)

June 1, 20192019, Authors: Alice Stoehr, Drama, Esoterica, Horror, Sci-Fi

**½/****
starring Virginia Gardner, Christina Masterson, Eric Beecroft
written and directed by A.T. White

by Alice Stoehr Leadville, Colorado is a couple hours’ drive from Denver. Ensconced among the Rockies, it has the highest elevation of any American city. The town’s forbidding winter serves as the backdrop for the apocalyptic horror of Starfish. Essentially a one-woman show, the film stars actress Virginia Gardner (of last year’s Halloween) as Aubrey, a DJ with tousled blond hair and a mustard sweater. She’s visiting for the funeral of her friend Grace, whose loss devastates her and sets a pervasively wistful tone. That night, she sneaks into Grace’s apartment, immersing herself in what are now keepsakes: her vinyl collection, her yellowing letters, her surviving pet jellyfish and turtle. Fernanda Guerrero’s production design is precise and analog, suggesting a place where dust has recently begun to settle. Aubrey peeks through an antique telescope and sees a neighbour’s window, this distant vertical block in a sea of darkness. A man and a woman strip, then climb into bed together. “Perv,” laughs Aubrey. Later, she lies on her late friend’s couch and stares up at the wooden ceiling, where she envisions that same couple superimposed as she tries to masturbate. The first quarter of the film abounds with these lonely details. A slow zoom into an old TV’s convex screen reveals Aubrey’s faint reflection as she talks to her mom on a curly-corded landline. Eventually, she falls asleep, and the plot begins in earnest.

Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019)

May 30, 20192019, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Japan, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

*/****
starring Kyle Chandler, Vera Farmiga, Millie Bobby Brown, Ziyi Zhang
screenplay by Michael Dougherty & Zach Shields
directed by Michael Dougherty

by Walter Chaw Everyone is really stressed out in Michael Dougherty's dreadful Godzilla: King of the Monsters (hereafter Godzilla 2), the crass follow-up to 2014's Godzilla, Gareth Edwards's lovely, Spielbergian reboot of the storied Toho franchise for the American market. Everyone here starts at about a 9, temple-veins popping and spittle flying–the undercard attraction to the titanic title bouts between immense CG phantoms. For his part, everyman wolf biologist Mark Russell (Kyle Chandler) starts at "Nicholson in The Shining" and ramps up to "Pacino in Heat" before settling down somewhere near status quo William Petersen for the remainder. That little muscle in Chandler's jaw gets a good, clenched workout. Mark is called onto the scene because his ex, batshit Dr. Emma (Vera Farmiga), has spirited away their high-strung daughter, Madison (Millie Bobby Brown), who's designed an electronic doohickey called "Orca," the better to talk to all the giant monsters people have discovered across the globe. Operation of said doohickey appears to involve standard smartphone skills, so the necessity of pulling Mark out of the wilderness to help track down Emma is suspect. He's certainly scream-y and agitated about the whole thing.

Avengers: Endgame (2019)

April 24, 20192019, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Scarlett Johansson, Sci-Fi, Superhero

**½/****
starring Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans, Mark Ruffalo, Josh Brolin
screenplay by Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely
directed by Anthony and Joe Russo

by Walter Chaw Marvel has a gender and diversity problem and it tries to address this, in real-time, in Avengers: Endgame, the last of their “Broadway Melody” cavalcade-of-stars studio extravaganzas (or so they say). In the end, though, it’s still a solemn pageant of white saviours and their Christ-like sacrifices. The interesting thing about this storyline is that it explores both Christ the martyr and Christ the family man; there’s enough blue-eyed soulfulness here to present both paths of the Choose Your Own Judeo-Christian Epic. By doing so, there’s something for literally everyone in the film’s target audience of men of a certain age and predilection to get emotional about. Yes, the tragedy of masculinity is to be misunderstood: we, Captain Americas (Chris Evans), all, shod in the clothes of Sisyphus and, in this iteration, literal God of Thunder Thor (Chris Hemsworth), who gets a dad bod, a bad case of alcoholism, and enough self-immolating insecurity and self-loathing to make legions of mediocre men misty-eyed in recognition. It’s true, all of it, but underneath this disgusting robe and a hundred pounds of ugly fat is a Greek Adonis who loves his mother. It would be more enlightening to spend time with T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman) on the question of loss, or with Natasha (Scarlett Johansson), or, even better, how about Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson)? Instead, here’s an extended comedy sequence where Thor drinks beer, eats pizza, and plays video games with his slovenly buddies. Bros feeling sorry for themselves, completely alone, drinking beers at the Gas-N-Sip with no women around. A recent poll told the story of how men aren’t getting laid much anymore. In its way, Avengers: Endgame is a curious commentary on why that might be–and one way of many to look at its title.

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

March 19, 2019****/****, 2018, 2019, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Coming of Age, Family, FFC Must-Own, Sci-Fi, Spider-Man, Superhero, Teen

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A-
screeplay by Phil Lord & Rodney Rothman
directed by Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, Rodney Rothman

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, and Rodney Rothman’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, hereafter Spider-Verse, is a game-changer. It’s American anime, essentially, an Akira moment for our film art that will sooner or later be identified as the definitive event where everything tilted forward. I hope sooner. More than beautiful, it’s breathtaking. More than kinetic, it’s alive. And more than just alive, it’s seething with possibilities, self-awareness, a real vision of a future in which every decision in Hugh Everett’s quantum tree produces an infinite series of branches. It’s a manifestation of optimism. There’s hope in Spider-Verse, along with a reminder that more people in these United States believe in progressive values than don’t, no matter who the President is. Empathy and compassion hold the majority; there’s a recognition we are essentially the same–the same desires, the same disappointments. When a father tells his son he’s proud of him, it makes us cry because we identify with the entire spectrum of complexity such a conversation entails. When it happens in Spider-Verse, the son is unable to respond and the father is unable to see why, and the visual representation of the distance that can grow between fathers and sons is astonishingly pure. Turgenev never conceived a more graceful image on the subject. It’s perfect.

Venom (2018) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

March 13, 20192018, 2019, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Thriller

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

**/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras C+
starring Tom Hardy, Michelle Williams, Riz Ahmed, Scott Haze
written by Jeff Pinkner & Scott Rosenberg and Kelly Marcel
directed by Ruben Fleischer

by Bryant Frazer The history of Venom, a rippled black mass of sentient alien muscle with a ‘roided-out appearance and a gnarly personality to match, is complicated even for a comic-book origin story. It goes sorta like this: Way back in the 1980s, the Marvel Comics powers-that-be were looking to juice interest in Spider-Man. As a solution, they gave him a sleek black-and-white costume to replace the familiar red-and-blue outfit. Long story short, that suit turned out to be an alien symbiote with a mind of its own; it insinuates itself into human bodies and coexists with them in an ostensibly mutually beneficial relationship. It didn’t take long for Spidey to get wise and ditch the organism, but Marvel brought Spidey’s black-and-white look back later by having Black Cat sew him a non-sentient version of the costume. By then, Marvel was wooing artist Todd McFarlane to the book. Sure, McFarlane said, he was interested in Spider-Man–old-school, red-and-blue Spider-Man. So Marvel scrambled to once again get rid of the black outfit.

12 Monkeys (1995) – Blu-ray Disc

March 6, 20191990s, 2019, Arrow Video, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Terry Gilliam, Drama, Sci-Fi, Time Travel

Twelve Monkeys
***½/**** 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.

Captain Marvel (2019)

March 5, 20192019, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical

½*/****
starring Brie Larson, Samuel L. Jackson, Ben Mendelsohn, Jude Law
screenplay by Anna Boden & Ryan Fleck & Geneva Robertson-Dworet
directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck

by Walter Chaw Brie Larson wished aloud for more diversity in the press covering Captain Marvel, and that, combined with the fact that Larson or anyone who looks remotely like her is clearly never going to sleep with them, caused any number of mediocre men to cry and bully the tedious things mediocre men cry and bully. When we talk about "ratios" in popular culture now, we're referring to the number of comments stupid "tweets" get in relation to the number of "likes" they receive–the dumber you are, the more comments you get telling you so. The other "ratio" germane to this conversation is the one provided by cultural anthropology, particularly Dr. Donald Symons, who proposes that the ratio between the most reproductively-successful woman and the least reproductively-successful woman is, you know, in the teens, while the ratio between the most reproductively-successful man (thousands) and the least (zero) is…well, there is no percentage. Anything divided by zero is nonsense.

Alita: Battle Angel (2019)

February 4, 20192019, Action, Adventure, Argentina, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Romance, Sci-Fi, Thriller

*/****
starring Rosa Salazar, Mahershala Ali, Eiza González, Christoph Waltz
screenplay by James Cameron and Laeta Kalogridis, based on the manga series "Gunnm" by Yukito Kishiro
directed by Robert Rodriguez

by Walter Chaw There's one genuinely good thing about Alita: Battle Angel and it has to do with a cameo by Jeff Fahey as a guy who really likes dogs. It's good because it's good to like dogs, but it also reminds of Fahey's villain from Silverado, who has a pretty great line about a dog; and it's good to be reminded of Silverado. In other words, the one genuinely good thing about Alita is there's something in it that, on purpose, reminds me of a good movie. The rest of it is noisy juvenilia taking place in the Sharkboy and Lavagirl universe–a YA disaster featuring the usual mysterious girl with the secret past who turns out to be a super-soldier and yadda yadda yadda. Jesus, does it break no new ground. Scrapper-cum-cyborg-engineer-slash-bounty-hunter Ido (Christoph Waltz, desperately hoping QT picks up the phone again) discovers the "core" of Alita (voiced and mo-capped by Rosa Salazar), basically her Victorian locket-silhouette parts, in the junkyard of a floating city housing the elites of this world ("300 YEARS AFTER THE FALL") and immediately grafts it to his dead daughter's unused robot body, because in addition to the movie being structurally unambitious and curiously sexist, it's also defiantly ableist. "I made her fast little legs," Ido says, mournfully, and then we get a flashback to the dead little girl being punched out of her wheelchair by a cyborg Ido created to compete in a future-game called "Rollerball"–I mean, "Murderskates." I don't know. Who cares. It's on roller skates and cyborgs do it. Oh, and they kill a dog.

Glass (2019)

January 21, 20192019, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: M. Night Shyamalan, Drama, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical

***/****
starring James McAvoy, Bruce Willis, Samuel L. Jackson, Sarah Paulson
written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Glass is really only about two things, but they happen to be the two most urgent things we have to talk about in 2019. It’s about gaslighting–how people in positions of power lie about plain fact until the truth becomes a political theory. And it’s about a cabal of white elites interested in maintaining the status quo at any cost. Late in the picture, someone says they’re not “for” right or wrong, just ten thousand more years of same. The correlation to entrenchment Democrats who are as driven by self-interest as entrenchment Republicans is spot-on and devastating. The reaction of the Establishment Left to someone like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez–who, after all, never says anything remotely controversial to the majority of Americans–reminds that Trump would never be President if it weren’t for the complicity of an entire ossified system that is at the end also not interested in right or wrong, just same. This country is not red and blue, it’s grey.

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

January 4, 2019****/****, 1960s, 2019, 4K Ultra HD, Adventure, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Stanley Kubrick, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own, Sci-Fi

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

****/**** Image A Sound A- Extras C+
starring Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood, William Sylvester, Daniel Richter
screenplay by Arthur C. Clarke & Stanley Kubrick, based on Clarke’s short story “The Sentinel”
directed by Stanley Kubrick

by Bryant Frazer In 1965, film director Stanley Kubrick and science-fiction author Arthur C. Clarke embarked on a remarkable collaboration. Taking an old Clarke short story as their starting point, the duo rewrote it and dramatically expanded its scope, drafting the blueprint for a film to be directed by Kubrick as well as for a novel to be scripted by Clarke. In Clarke’s original story, “The Sentinel”, astronauts found an ancient artifact on the moon that functioned as a radio beacon, transmitting signals into outer space. The expanded film treatment was many times more ambitious, beginning in the deep pre-history of human evolution and climaxing with a futuristic journey to Jupiter, where one man confronts an unseen alien intelligence–and undergoes transformation and rebirth. More than a science-fiction thriller or space-bound adventure movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey is a meditation on Man’s place in the universe that mounts a convincing argument that the sum total of human knowledge gathered over the millennia is insignificant, at best, when compared to the vast mysteries of the greater universe. That sense of scale is demonstrated, vividly, in a climactic sequence that uses colour and sound to depict a wild journey into–a distant realm? Another dimension? A new plane of human existence?

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)

December 12, 2018****/****, 2018, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Coming of Age, Family, Sci-Fi, Spider-Man, Superhero, Teen, Theatrical

Spidermanintothespiderverse

****/****
screeplay by Phil Lord & Rodney Rothman
directed by Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, Rodney Rothman

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, and Rodney Rothman's Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, hereafter Spider-Verse, is a game-changer. It's American anime, essentially, an Akira moment for our film art that will sooner or later be identified as the definitive event where everything tilted forward. I hope sooner. More than beautiful, it's breathtaking. More than kinetic, it's alive. And more than just alive, it's seething with possibilities, self-awareness, a real vision of a future in which every decision in Hugh Everett's quantum tree produces an infinite series of branches. It's a manifestation of optimism. There's hope in Spider-Verse, along with a reminder that more people in these United States believe in progressive values than don't, no matter who the President is. Empathy and compassion hold the majority; there's a recognition we are essentially the same–the same desires, the same disappointments. When a father tells his son he's proud of him, it makes us cry because we identify with the entire spectrum of complexity such a conversation entails. When it happens in Spider-Verse, the son is unable to respond and the father is unable to see why, and the visual representation of the distance that can grow between fathers and sons is astonishingly pure. Turgenev never conceived a more graceful image on the subject. It's perfect.

Aquaman (2018)

December 12, 20182018, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical

Aquaman

***½/****
starring Jason Momoa, Amber Heard, Willem Dafoe, Nicole Kidman
screenplay by David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick and Will Beal
directed by James Wan

by Walter Chaw I don’t think the DCEU was done any favours by the success of Christopher Nolan’s exceptional Dark Knight trilogy, charting as it did a course of “grittiness” and topical social relevance that made the examination of its heroes’ subconscious motivations the text rather than the middle to be teased out by generations of readers. When nerd culture took the bully pulpit, in many ways it took the mantle of being a bully, too. There is literally no way to review a comic-book movie without getting death threats: woe be to you if you don’t like it–but if you do like it, you’re probably not liking it in the right way. Making lockers to be pushed into virtual didn’t, apparently, solve the problem of being a mediocre male looking to express dominance. There’s a connection here to why comic-book movies about the troubles of sad white people are less and less current, while stuff like Black Panther, Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse, and Wonder Woman are the tantalizing hope for a positive future. No accident that minority and marginalized filmmakers have found a way forward with this genre.

Rampage (2018) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital

November 27, 20182018, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Sci-Fi

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Dwayne Johnson, Naomie Harris, Malin Akerman, Jeffrey Dean Morgan
screenplay by Ryan Engle, Carlton Cuse, Ryan J. Condal and Adam Sztykiel
directed by Brad Peyton

by Walter Chaw Silent Hill is still the best video-game movie, but points awarded to Brad Peyton for taking a flyer at adapting an old side-scrolling punchfest and giving it a standard sub-genre narrative. Rampage is the same kind, if not the same quality, of adaptation as the first Pirates of the Caribbean: an idea that makes no sense on paper that’s unexpectedly decent in execution. Anyway, Rampage is the standard eco-horror conceit of evil scientists trying to engineer something evil for the military-industrial complex, which underestimates the controllability (and the evil) of the thing they’re trying to make and thus endanger a lot of people/the world with their greed/godless curiosity. On the other side, there’s beefy primatologist Davis (Dwayne Johnson, reuniting with San Andreas helmer Peyton) and a disgraced, formerly corrupt scientist named Dr. Kate (Naomie Harris), who enter into an uneasy partnership with government spook Agent Russell (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) to counteract the Frankenstein that’s been unleashed. Said Frankenstein being a growth agent or something that causes a wolf, an alligator, and Davis’s best friend, George, an albino gorilla, to grow to gargantuan proportions–and become nigh invulnerable, to boot. Fans of the arcade game will note that this is faithful casting; they will also recognize the building-punching and helicopter-biting.

Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018) [Cinematic Universe Edition] – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

November 25, 20182018, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Sci-Fi, Superhero

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

**½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B-
starring Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly, Michael Peña, Michael Douglas
written by Chris McKenna & Erik Sommers and Paul Rudd & Andrew Barrer & Gabriel Ferrari
directed by Peyton Reed

by Bryant Frazer Ant-Man and the Wasp opens, like Ant-Man before it, inside Uncanny Valley, with one of those flashback scenes haunted by creepy, de-aged CG replicas of famous actors. Less than 40 seconds into the film, Cartoon Robot Michelle Pfeiffer widens and rolls her eyes in an unsettling, overdetermined gesture that feels no less artificial even if it’s sourced from Pfeiffer’s “real” work in front of a performance-capture camera. It’s not just that CRMP’s eyeballs seem so much more active than those of every other actor in the film–that could be put down to her individual style of emoting–but more that they don’t quite sync up with the rest of her face. Sure, as crimes against nature go this one is minor; the similarly de-eldered Creepy Zombie Michael Douglas looming behind her is more distracting, with a deader face. Still, it’s an unforced error. Why go to these lengths? CRMP’s presence is barely required in the film; in most of her scenes, she’s already wearing a mask. And the scene offers no crucial information or insight.

Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018) [Ultimate Collector’s Edition] – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

November 5, 20182018, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Sci-Fi, Star Wars

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

*/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras A-
starring Alden Ehrenreich, Woody Harrelson, Emilia Clarke, Paul Bettany
written by Jonathan Kasdan & Lawrence Kasdan
directed by Ron Howard

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. In Roger Ebert’s reviews of the original Star Wars trilogy, he mentions that one of the wonders of this universe is that the droids are thinking, feeling, emotional beings, thus making their torture in Return of the Jedi a visceral thing. In Ron Howard’s expediently-extruded Solo: A Star Wars Story (hereafter Solo), a sassy robot named L3-37, voiced by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, is fused into the Millennium Falcon spacecraft after being murdered in the middle of a slave and prisoner rebellion she’s incited in another interchangeable industrial backwater. I mention this as a point of interest because L3 is the clumsy mouthpiece for broad progressive beliefs in a shockingly bad script by father-son duo Lawrence and Jonathan Kasdan. When Lando Calrissian (Donald Glover) asks if there’s anything else he can get her as he’s leaving a room, she says, “Equal rights?” It’s that kind of character. The kind usually workshopped out when the screenwriter–one of them, anyway–isn’t the most powerful person in the room. She’s Dobby the House Elf from a storyline smartly left out of the film adaptations of Harry Potter, screaming about “droid rights” during a droid Thunderdome sequence done better in everything (but particularly in A.I.), and there mainly I think so that replacement director Howard can slide his brother Clint into a self-satisfied cameo. So this character, liberating droids and releasing slaves and declaring that she’s found her calling, is fused by a grieving Lando into his spaceship to spend the next eight or nine movies getting punched and abused by her new white masters whenever she doesn’t work right away.

BHFF ’18: Empathy Inc

October 15, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Brooklyn Horror Film Festival, Drama, Film Festivals, Sci-Fi, Thriller

*½/**** written by Mark Leidnerdirected by Yedidya Gorsetman by Walter Chaw More earnest than truly clever, Yedidya Gorsetman's shoestring Empathy Inc is a competently-made (save for one dialogue sequence where the actors are clearly on different sets) and reasonably efficient take on the Vic Morrow instalment of Twilight Zone: The Movie. If it ends up resembling more the Primer version of "The Prisoner of Benda", well, so be it. The picture starts well enough, as corporate middle-manager Joel (Zack Robidas) finds himself the scapegoat of a start-up's collapse, destitute and forced to move in with wife Jessica's (Kathy Searle) demonic…

TIFF ’18: Aniara

September 20, 2018****/****, 2018, Authors: Bill Chambers, Denmark, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Romance, Sci-Fi, Sweden, TIFF

****/****
written by Pella Kågerman & Hugo Lilja, based on the poem by Harry Martinson
directed by Pella Kågerman & Hugo Lilja

by Bill Chambers The opening credits of Aniara, the debut feature from short-film hyphenates Pella Kågerman and Hugo Lilja, scroll like closing credits over images of earthly disasters, because of course they do: this is the end. Mars is the new West, and what's left of humanity–many of those faces scarred or disfigured without comment–is packed aboard a new Noah's Ark bound for the red planet. It will take three weeks, but in the meantime enjoy all the amenities and luxuries of a high-end spa, and be sure to take advantage of the Mima lounge, where a digital godhead will tap into your memories and provide a soothing mental escape to Earth as you once knew it. Unfortunately for the colonists, a rogue screw strikes the ship's hull and Aniara is forced to empty its fuel tank. The captain, Chefone (Arvin Kananian), claims they just need to catch the orbit of a celestial body to get back on course, something that will take two years, max; the captain lies. MR (Isabelle Huppert-esque Emelie Jonsson) is a "mimarobe," sort of a combination tech support/apostle for Mima, which becomes a very popular attraction over time. So much so that it gets overwhelmed by all the despair it's having to tranquilize, and self-destructs. Although MR warned him of this outcome, Chefone disciplines her for it, because Mima was the opiate for Aniara's masses. Not their god, though–he, in his unchecked power, his command of his own "planet," is God, and he's decided to be the Old Testament kind.

TIFF ’18: High Life

September 19, 20182018, Adventure, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Directors: Claire Denis, Drama, Esoterica, France, Germany, Mystery, Poland, Sci-Fi, TIFF, UK

***½/****
starring Robert Pattinson, Juliette Binoche, André Benjamin, Mia Goth
screenplay by Claire Denis, Jean-Pol Fargeau, Geoff Cox
directed by Claire Denis

by Angelo Muredda If you took Twitter's word for it after the gala premiere of Claire Denis's High Life, which was apparently conceived in an off-the-cuff conversation with Vincent Gallo about life at the end of the world and briefly tinkered-with in the earliest days of its inception by Zadie Smith, you'd think the singular French filmmaker abandoned all her instincts to make an edgy sci-fi sex farce with the dildo chair from Burn After Reading. What a relief, then, to discover that High Life is indeed a Claire Denis film. A step removed from the spoiler-saturated breathlessness of the first hot takes, one finds something every bit as rattled and mournful a late work as Paul Schrader's First Reformed, and, like Trouble Every Day, no less structurally elusive or visceral than the rest of her oeuvre for being a work of genre.

The Predator (2018)

September 15, 20182018, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

**½/****
starring Boyd Holbrook, Trevante Rhodes, Jacob Tremblay, Keegan-Michael Key
written by Fred Dekker & Shane Black
directed by Shane Black

by Walter Chaw Shane Black's The Predator is about cultures built around, predicated upon, and interested in the deification of violence and dominance. It talks about how an entire alien civilization owes its technical and biological evolution to the refinement of tools used explicitly on big game, not unlike how our own technologies owe their evolution to porn and forever war. One running joke has a scientist–an evolutionary biologist (Olivia Munn), natch–saying that the things aren't so much "predators" as they are sports trophy hunters, like bass fishermen, say, but of course calling them "predators" is "cooler." All the men in the room agree. The only ones who don't are the woman and a suicidal black soldier (Trevante Rhodes)–not coincidentally, the characters most likely to be predated upon (woman, black, mentally-ill, even veterans) by their own culture. Being in a life-and-death struggle with a predator is cool because it's a question of survival for both; being the victim of one of Donald Trump's inbred children is not cool because it's some rich douchenozzle armed to the teeth hunting you for something to mount in the den of their third mistress's second winter home. The Predator, in other words, has much on its mind, despite that its execution is a trainwreck–a trainwreck overwhelmed by an eve-of-premiere scandal whereby Munn revealed that Black had enlisted one of his buddies, a convicted pederast, to play a scene with Munn as a perv who harasses her while jogging, without informing the production of his past. The layers of irony to this thing are like unpacking an onion.